Venture Capital | Page 6

This round comes not long after it raised a separate $30 million round in August last year from Bertelsmann India Investments, Accel Partners and Sequoia India.

The Mumbai-based company said the new funds would be used for consolidating its market position in the device protection market, and expanding into annual maintenance contracts, home protection and on-demand services.

The funding came from Steadview Capital, Tiger Global, Dragoneer, Westbridge, Mubadala and Microsoft's venture fund M12. The company said it plans to use the new funds to improve existing processes that digitize healthcare for providers, payers and patients by further developing its data activation platform.

The company said it would use the new funds for product development and to expand its customer base in India and the United States.

The round saw the participation of Omnivore as well as existing investors Accel and Mayfield. The Bengaluru-based start-up said it would use the new funds to grow its farm network, enter new cities, and diversify fresh produce offerings.

The two managing partners of Inflexor, Venkat Vallabhaneni and Jatin Desai, have previously co-founded Parampara Capital, another early-stage tech-focused VC firm.

Chennai-headquartered WayCool said it would use the fresh funds to automate its supply chain and build the next layer of data analytics required to strengthen supply chain efficiency.

Founded in 2018, Mumbai-based Kuku FM houses a wide range of content and has managed to garner a library of over 5,000 hours of content. With the fresh funds, it plans to increase the number of languages on its platform and enhance the production and marketing support to its creator base.

Bengaluru-based Samosa Singh said it would use the funds to scale up operations, increase production capabilities, and expand in multi-cities, while also entering households through a delivery via cloud kitchen model.

Merely 6 months old, Amit Lakhotia's Park+ offers a mobile application-based platform for smart parking solutions. The round was co-led by Sequoia India and Matrix Partners India.

Invento Makerspaces, maker of the humanoid robot Mitra, will use the new funds for research and development in building new robot variants, as well as business expansion.

Ankur Capital Fund II will be deployed in tech start-ups serving the next billion Indians

The round also saw the participation of German conglomerate Siemens' investment arm Next47 and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners.

Bengaluru-based Prime Venture Partners is focused on start-ups that make tech-led products and has invested in companies such as MyGate and NiYO.

With the world in the midst of what is being termed the fourth industrial revolution, most major corporates are concerned about keeping up and innovating fast enough to provide the kind of solutions asked for by customers, according to Arvind Vasu, senior vice president of Asia investments at ABB Technology Ventures.

Bengaluru-based Fireside Ventures focuses solely on companies in the consumer space, with some of their star investments being lifestyle electronics start-up Boat and health foods brand Yogabars.

Softbank reportedly suffered $6.5 billion in operating losses from investments in cash-burning businesses including New York-based real estate firm WeWork, and cab-hailing service Uber.

It's highly likely that the 2020 (and beyond) investment criteria will be influenced by our learnings of the recent past

Start-ups such as Kamatan and Fresh VnF are trying to bridge the gap between farmers and the larger economy with the use of technology. Funding, too, seems to have quietly followed.

The co-living market in India is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 17 per cent in the next five years to become a nearly INR 1-trillion market, research shows.

For Samir Kumar, Partner at Inventus Capital, investment in the technology sector has yielded best returns.