Investors pump $160.8 million in Indian startups across 33 deals in the third week of January
Thirty three startups raised funding in the third week of January. 19 startups have disclosed the amount they have raised and the amount stood at $160.8 million. 16 startups raised Pre-Series A round of funding, while four raised Series A. There were two deals each in the Series C and D categories.
Weekly highlights
Swiggy announced its latest fund raise of $35 million. Softbank has given Housing.com about $14.5 million runway in the latest round of funding.
Local Language has been a focus area—Indus OS and ShabdaNagari have raised funding. Formerly known as FirstTouch, Indus OS raised $5 million from Omidyar Network. Indus OS is an android based mobile operating system and supports 12 regional Indian languages. ShabdaNagari is a Kanpur-based Hindi social networking platform. CREO, a player in Android space has raised $3 million from Sequoia Capital, Beenext Ventures and India Quotient. TinyStep and PlexusMD are the other social network firms to raise funding in the week under consideration.
There were six mobile focused and e-commerce investments. Mobile investments included SnapBizz, Swiggy, Indus OS, DailyObjects, Fisdom and CREO. E-commerce investments included FirstCry, Just Buy Live, SnapBizz, IMbesharam, IndustryBuying and DailyObjects. There were three healthcare deals.
Top deals
Top investment destinations last week
Delhi-NCR witnessed nine investments. While eight Bengaluru startups received funding, Mumbai saw seven deals. Ahmadabad, Kanpur, Chennai and Pune had one deal each.
Government trying to be proactive in harnessing the investment environment
After the unveiling of the Startup India initiative, the government is going all out to woo not just entrepreneurs but also the investor community. Last week Avnish Bajaj, MD of Matrix Partners tweet stormed his thoughts on the state of venture capital in India. One of the issues he raised was “we need to solve pooling and tax reasons for companies and funds to be structured overseas - loss for India” for which State minister of Finance, Jayant Sinha replied. “We are working on all these matter. Have intensive consultations with Indian venture capital association”
This level of responsiveness is most appreciated; hopefully the government will be swift in implementation and execution of policies that will ensure startups do not need to set up complex corporate structures.
