Xpresslane, a payments checkout platform for online shopping, has raised Rs3 crore in a pre-seed funding round from Point One Capital, Yatra Angel Network, Opus Consulting and Manipal Technologies.
The round also saw participation from Rohit Chanana, managing partner at Sarcha Advisors. Karan Chowdhary and Manish Chowdhary, founders of WOW Skin Science, also took part in this round.
The fresh round of funds will be used to grow the merchant network and for hiring staff to expand features in the product. The startup aims to be available on 1,000 websites by the end of 2021.
“There's phenomenal growth in the D2C space with amazing new brands changing the consumer economy in India. We are enabling these new-age internet-first companies to gain a technological edge over larger and mature e-commerce players. With transaction times less than five seconds, Xpresslane checkout will be the only login one needs to finish their purchases anywhere online,” said Ashwin Koorakula, founder and CEO of Xpresslane.
BatteryPool, a startup focused on EV battery charging, said it has raised an undisclosed amount in a new financing round led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Pune-based Venture Center under the NIDHI-Seed Support Scheme.
The round also saw participation from investors Arjun Seth and Harshavardhan Chitale. The firm had previously raised grants from the department of science and technology and an angel round along with early-stage investor 100X VC.
The capital will be used for scaling up BatteryPool’s business development and adding new fleet of charging products to its portfolio.
“We identified that while EVs (electric vehicles) made sense commercially, challenges around battery charging can lead to downtime of commercial and fleet electric vehicles. Battery swapping can serve as a viable option to eliminate this downtime”, said Ashwin Shankar, founder of BatteryPool.
He added, “However, existing battery swapping services require fleet operators and drivers to conform to a certain battery standard and this can be expensive and significantly restrict the fleet operations to where these services are being offered. Therefore, we built hardware that is agnostic to the battery type and can be used by fleet operators regardless of the battery standards being used in their fleets. Our key focus is to cater to EV fleet operators and commercial electric vehicles via partnerships with OEMs and battery pack manufacturers.”
HR-tech startup Hiration has raised Rs 21 crore ($3 million) from Prime Venture Partners, Venture Highway, and Y Combinator.
The fresh funds will be used towards product development, scaling of India and US operations, and hiring staff across functions.
Founded by Anish Raj Sikka and Aditya Sharma, Hiration aims to help qualified candidates write a resume.
“When we were hiring for roles at our last startup, we saw how today’s hiring technology is tilted in favour of the companies hiring. While people invest time and money learning the skills for their jobs, they aren’t taught how to excel at the hiring process,” said Raj Sikka, CEO and co-founder of Hiration.
He added: “We want to offer the same technology to job candidates and offer tools to those who may otherwise have been overlooked because they didn’t have access to the same resources or training.”
Gyde, a software assistance platform, has raised Rs 1.8 crore ($250,000) in a seed funding round from Better Capital and Ashish Achrekar, CEO of Rica Analytics Inc.
The fresh capital will be used towards product development and customer acquisition.
Founded by Prasanna Vaidya and Shubham Deshmukh in 2019, Gyde primarily helps software users within an organisation create guides in a code-free manner.
“Gyde is a re-imagining of the Microsoft Paperclip for the modern world where digitisation is at an all-time high and companies struggle to help their users keep pace with new applications and workflows. With Gyde, B2B as well as B2C companies can deliver rich step-by-step voice assistance, byte-sized training videos and how-tos at the point of trouble,” said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital.
Multi-game platform Games24x7 said it has made a strategic investment in cricket network CricHeroes.
Ahmedabad-based CricHeroes digitises cricket at the state and district level using statistics. It has over nine million registered users, the company said in a statement.
“We already have a strong moat and built-in vitality. With this funding, we aim to create a highly engaged community and bring some interesting technology solutions for grassroots cricket in coming years,” said Kuntal Shah, co-founder of CricHeroes.
Grainpad Pvt Ltd, which runs multilingual virtual physician Zini.ai, said it has received a seed grant from the government of Punjab.
The company was shortlisted from a cohort of 15 startups that were further shortlisted from more than 150 companies from across the country.
Founded by Dr Rohit Sharma in 2017, Zini.ai provides medical advice.
The company said the app can evaluate over 950 health symptoms, 300 plus diseases, provide a detailed report, recommend the best course of action and share details of nearby medical facilities that a patient can reach out to.
Previously, in March 2021, the startup won a Rs 25 lakh grant under the Startup India-Next Generation Incubation Scheme which was started by the Software Technology Park of India.
