Funding rundown: Dukaan raises $11 mn, Geniemode gets $2.25 mn in seed funding, GoodMylk secures $1 mn & SaaS startup NeuroPixel.AI raises $825K

Online retail platform Dukaan, on Monday, said it has raised $11 million as part of its pre-Series A round of funding, led by 640 Oxford Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing investors Snow Leopard Ventures, Lightspeed Partners, and Matrix Partners India. Venture Catalyst and new venture firms HOF Capital, Old Well Ventures, LetsVenture, 9Unicorns along with prominent angels, including OYO’s Ritesh Agarwal, and Nothing’s Carl Pei also participated in the round. Dukaan’s current funding comes within a year of it raising $6 million as a part of its seed funding round last October.

According to the company, it will use the funds to accelerate growth and bolster technology play by making new additions to its team. "This new investment allows us to aggressively expand our operations while building our team of highly skilled designers and developers. Additionally, this capital accelerates our ability to establish key strategic partnerships to grow our paying merchant base," said Suumit Shah, chief executive officer and co-founder, Dukaan.

Founded in June last year, Dukaan is a no-code platform that allows local stores and entrepreneurs to launch an e-commerce website and scale it on the internet. The company claims over 2000 merchants have enrolled in our Dukaan premium subscription plan so far. "Suumit and team have demonstrated a unique ability to understand what SMBs need to be successful digitally and then ship product at incredible velocity to solve those pain points. This round of funding will further enable Dukaan to build meaningful products," said 640 Oxford Ventures in a statement.

Coss-border sourcing and supply chain technology company Geniemode, has raised its seed round of $2.25 million led by Info Edge Ventures. Angel investors including Deepinder Goyal, Kunal Shah, Prashant Malik, Pankaj Gupta and others also participated in the round. Geniemode’s platform allows catalogue creation and discovery, enables access to the suppliers and ensures that the entire process, starting from getting the samples developed & approved to shipping, is streamlined.

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The company claims it is building an end-to-end e-commerce platform to make global sourcing more efficient and convenient across fragmented and tech-strapped supply chains in furniture, home furnishing, hard goods & fashion. The company also said it is on track to scale to 1,000 suppliers from India and South East Asia doing over $50million in annualized topline in the next 6 to 12 months.

"The hesitation of large and small global buyers to source from India is mainly due to lack of access to reliable suppliers, poor transparency with respect to process and timelines, lack of standardization of quality and unavailability of financing to the supplier,” said Amit Sharma, co-founder of Geniemode.

Gaming startup GetMega has secured $15 million in its Series B round from Nexus Ventures, Accel India and Hashed Venture Fund, Entrackr reports.

The firm has raised fresh funds at a valuation of Rs 550 crore or close to $75 million. This is a three-fold jump in GetMega’s valuation which was valued at around $25 million during its Series A, the report added.

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The startup had earlier raised $9 million from Nexus Ventures and Accel India in its angel and Series A round. GetMega offers skill-based games across cards, casual and trivia categories. As a social gaming platform, GetMega counts on other social and messaging platforms like YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram for distribution.

Foodtech startup GoodMylk has raised $1 million in a seed round extension from a clutch of domestic and international angel investors. Investors Jinisha Sharma, Aditya Agarwal (AIprime Nutritions), Victoria and Abhishek Shroff, Sustainable Food Ventures, Ice Breakers Technologies Syndicate via Angellist, and Bento Box join existing investors Sid Kothari, and VegInvest Trust who also participated in this round. To date, the plant-based food startup has raised $1.8 million, according to a release from the company. Funds raised from this round will be used for expanding the product portfolio and distribution for more accessibility across India, the company said in a statement.

Healthcare logistics platform Biddano on Monday said it has raised Rs 17 crore in a funding round led by Coinbase and social media firm Pinterest''s board member Gokul Rajaram. New investors JPIN, Venture Catalysts UK, Anuj Srivastava and Ramakant Sharma, and existing investors Venture Catalysts and AngelList also participated in the pre-series A1 funding round. "The new funding will enable Biddano to fulfil strong market demand for its supply chain platform by investing in the product, engineering and go-to-market teams to offer more value-added services, improve customer experience, develop new products, and strengthen its leadership in the market," the company said in a statement.

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The company provides technology to pharma distribution networks to manage supply chain gaps between distributors and chemists. Biddano is hiring across various roles and verticals and plans to grow its headcount over the next ten months to 100 from the current 30, as per the company. "Biddano wants to be a one-stop supply-chain solution for all healthcare products in the country, and improve the quality of healthcare by building India''s largest healthcare supply chain platform,” said Ashok Yadav, co-founder of Biddano. Biddano claims to serve more than 20,000 pharmacies at present and plans to scale it to over 100,000 in the next 12 months.

Fieldproxy, a no-code SaaS platform, has raised Rs 2 crore in its seed round led by LetsVenture, 2am VC and magic.fund. Other marquee angel investors like KRS Jamwal, Executive Director, Tata Industries; Ajit Deshpande, Vice President of Demand Generation at Marqeta Inc; Kushal Khandwala, Director at KIFS Housing Finance Limited; Asad Daud, Director, SAT Industries; Nilesh Patel, Principal, Cisco Systems; Ketan Kothari, Managing Director, Sigma Byte; Shreya Rao, Partner, AZB & Partners, and others also participated in the round.

Earlier in March 2021, Fieldproxy had raised Rs 25 lakh as part of its seed round led by 100x.vc. The startup has raised Rs 2.25 crore to date.

Fieldproxy provides a web-based no-code builder that lets business teams build custom templates to streamline their interactions with field teams. The platform claims to have built a track record of efficiently catering to industry requirements with its clients such as ITC, BIC and Royal Haskoning DHV leveraging the company’s software to manage their field force.

Deeptech SaaS startup NeuroPixel.AI has raised $825K in a seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures. Other investors in the round include Entrepreneur First, Huddle, Dexter Angels, and Rishaad Currimjee. The startup said that it will use the fresh capital for scaling up its R&D team to accelerate the transition of its product from beta to production, and for expanding its ‘training set’, a crucial piece of the puzzle for every machine learning algorithm.

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NeuroPixel.AI helps aspiring entrepreneurs find co-founders and supports them to build technology companies. It aims to solve challenging problems at the intersection of AI and e-Commerce which promises to be an action-packed space over the next few years. "As e-commerce will expand, so will the need to put up quality and realistic product pictures online. In fashion commerce, it is a big part of the buyer’s purchase decision. However, it is not a seamless process and is both time-consuming and expensive, especially for SMEs and social sellers, two segments that are growing exponentially.

NeuroPixel is trying to solve this problem by building a product that can transform online fashion storefronts through catalogue image-based personalisation and virtual try-ons, helping the average consumer make a far more informed purchase decision," Ankur Mittal, co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures said. NeuroPixel.AI was also among the six startups selected for investment by the ISB D-Labs incubator, under their Seed support program in collaboration with The Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. The startup has also been selected into the Huddle accelerator, which will commence from the closure of this round of funding.