Startups Funded in India Last week from 14th Mar – 20 Mar
From Licious To Amagi — Over $365 Mn Raised By Indian Startups This Week

The third week of March saw a sharp drop in funding after witnessing four mega deals and a $800 Mn round in BYJU’s led by the founder Byju Raveendran himself. Between March 14 and March 19, the Indian ecosystem barely managed to raise $365 Mn across 29 deals. This is a 420% drop from $1.9 Bn the ecosystem raised last week across 40 deals.

The third week of March also marked just one mega deal, where we saw meat and seafood startup Licious raising $150 Mn. Further, the week witnessed Amagi entering the unicorn club after bagging $95 Mn in a fresh round.

The Indian Startup Funding Deals Of The Week

Licious

Licious, a Bengaluru-based startup that sells fresh meat, seafood and other fresh animal protein online and which became the nation’s first direct-to-consumer brand to become a unicorn last year, said on Tuesday. It has raised an additional $150 million from a set of late-stage investors in a move that appears to be a precursor to startup’s initial public offering.

The round was led by Singapore based Amansa Capital, Kotak PE and Axis Growth Avenues AIF – I. A number of existing investors as well as new set of angel investors including Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath of Zerodha, BoAt’s Aman Gupta and Haresh Chawla of True North also participated in the new round.

The new funding — which is an extension to the $52 million Series F disclosed last year — brings Licious’ all-time raise to $488 million, according to insight platform Tracxn.

Bluestone

Jewellery retailer Bluestone said on Tuesday that it raised more than $30 million (Rs 230 crore) from Hero Enterprises at a valuation of $410 million.

Bluestone is raising money almost after six years and the funding comes on the back of a shift in the company’s strategy from being a complete online platform to an omni-channel business model, where it will have both online and offline stores.

The Bengaluru-based omnichannel precious jewellery brand has currently expanded to 70 stores from 19 in March 2020. “The pandemic did slow down this growth but we kept opening stores as and when the lockdowns restrictions were relaxed,” says Gaurav.

Bluestone aims to open 100 more stores in the next fiscal year, aiming to have 300 stores by 2024.

“We at Hero Enterprise believe that the jewellery industry in India is poised for exponential growth due to the enhanced self-belief and people’s desire to look and present themselves better. BlueStone’s journey over the past decade has been impressive and they have cracked the code on the online-offline dynamics of the industry,” said Sunil Kant Munjal in a release shared by the company.

Started in 2011 by Gaurav, who earlier founded Chakpak.com, and Vidya Nataraj, a former consultant, Bluestone is an online jewellery seller, which also has a physical presence. The company initially raised funds from Bengaluru-based Kalaari Capital, Ratan Tata, Accel and Mumbai-based Ivy Capital, among others

Mukunda Foods

Food delivery company Zomato Ltd has acquired a 16.66% stake in Mukunda Foods Private Limited for $5 million, the company said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

In a notification filed with BSE, Zomato said it has acquired a stake in the food robotics company, which designs and manufactures smart robotic equipment to automate food preparation for restaurants.

In the filing, Zomato said Mukunda’s products help restaurants scale rapidly while maintaining consistency in food quality and customer experience across outlets.

The proposed investment is subject to fulfilment of certain customary conditions precedent and other terms and conditions agreed under the investment agreement executed between the parties, Zomato said.

Mukunda is a food robotics company that designs and manufactures small robotic equipment to automate food preparation for restaurants. It enabling them to scale up rapidly while maintaining consistency in food quality and customer experience across multiple outlets, it added.

The company also helps restaurants to become more efficient by reducing manpower cost, wastage and increasing kitchen throughput.

Ekincare

Health benefits start-up Ekincare has raised USD 15 million in Series B funding, led by HealthQuad and Sabre Partners. Existing investors Ventureast, Eight Roads Ventures, Siana Capital and Endiya Partners too participated in the round.

Ekincare aims to ramp up its growth and deliver simplified health benefits and insurance experiences to employers and employees. “We expect to grow by another 3x post this round. In a post-pandemic world, employee well-being has increasingly become the focal point of every employer’s strategy,” said Ekincare CEO and co-founder Kiran Kalakuntla.

The Hyderabad-based startup intends to use the fund to accelerate growth and deliver simplified health benefits and insurance experience to its customers, who are employers.

Founded in 2014 by Kiran Kalakuntla and Srikanth Samudrala, Ekincare is a personalized, full-stack health benefits platform. The platform is built to help employers design a health benefits package that best suits the needs of their employees and their families. The company currently serves around 1.5 million employees across 410 companies.

Ekincare is a customisable, personalised, full-stack health benefits platform built to help employes design as health bebfits package that best suits the needs of employees and their families.

Amagi

Cloud-based SaaS technology company Amagi has raised $95 million in a funding round led by Accel with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Avataar Ventures. This latest investment brings Amagi’s valuation to more than $1 billion, making it a unicorn. One of the highest-valued media tech companies worldwide.

This funding will enable the company to accelerate business expansion, both in terms of Amagi’s international footprint, as well as its product portfolio in the current media and entertainment (M&E) market.

The unicorn also aims to increase sales and marketing five-fold across the globe. Amagi will also explore allied and adjunct opportunities in the cloud and video market to deliver greater impact across the value chain, evaluating the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) opportunities that can contribute to revenue growth or add technology capabilities to product lines.

“This is a crucial juncture for our business as we look to hit a hyper growth trajectory by creating a winning combination of goals, processes, team structures and more,” CEO and co-founder Baskar Subramanian said.

This investment comes on the back of a 59% surge in new customers in 2021 that resulted in a 112% year-on-year growth in ad impressions (through its dynamic ad insertion platform) and a 108% year-on-year revenue growth, the company said.

Amagi is the 12th startup to join India’s unicorn club this year that comprises of companies such as Mamaearth, Fractal Analytics, Darwinbox, ElasticRun, Hasura, and CredAvenue.

The investment also comes nearly six months after the company raised $100 million from investors such as Accel, Avataar Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Premji Invest.

Curelink

Curelink, a health-tech platform that connects doctors to patients via Whatsapp, said it has raised $3.5 million in Seed funding led by Elevation Capital and Venture Highway. The fresh funds will be used to ramp up hiring across functions such as product, growth and wellness professionals. Also for geographical expansion and diversification of services across different medical specialisations such as dermatology, paediatrics and psychiatry, the company said.

The round also saw participation from Digital Sparrow Capital and angels such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm), Ankush Sachdeva and Farid Ahsan (Sharechat), Gaurav Agarwal, Prashant Tandon (Tata 1mg), Rajat K. Dhawan (McKinsey), Rohit M.A. (Cloudnine), Ritesh Malik (Innov8) and Harsh Mahajan (Mahajan Imaging) among others.

Founded in 2021 by Aman Singla and Divyansh Jain, Curelink is looking to reinvent chronic care management for millions of Indians in Tier II cities and beyond. Around 90% of out-of-clinic interactions in the healthcare industry happen on Whatsapp, the company claims.

Curelink is currently active in Gurgaon and Bhopal and plans to expand further in Delhi NCR, and experiment with the next tier of cities like Lucknow and Jaipur by the end of 2022.

The number of messages on the platform has seen a month on month growth of about 150%, the release said.