Funding Rundown: Beams Fintech Fund's first close at $36 mn, Vested Finance bags Series-A, Speciale Invest & growX Ventures back CynLr

Also Read: Dailyhunt parent VerSe Innovation raises $805 million at a valuation of $5 billion

Beams has already begun investing. Last month, it invested in millennial-focused neo-bank - Niyo Solutions - alongside Accel and Lightrock India. The fund is founded by Sagar Agarvwal, Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Anuj Golecha, Anil Jain, Gaurav Jain, and Venture Catalysts.

Vested Finance, a California-headquartered online investment platform that enables Indian investors to invest in the US stock market, has raised $12 million in Series A funding.

Ayon Capital led the round with new investors including 9Unicorns, Ankur Warikoo (ex-CEO of Groupon India), Dhruvil Sanghvi (CEO at Loginext), and Saumil Parekh (VP of Marketing at PharmEasy).

Content creators like Akshat Shrivastava, Mukul Malik (Asset Yogi), Sharan Hedge (Finance with Sharan), Dhruv Rathee, Shashank Udupa, and others have also invested. Existing investors Tenoneten, Ovo Fund, Wedbush Ventures, IPV, and Upscale too participated.

Vested Finance is a zero-commission investment platform that helps Indian investors easily diversify their portfolios by investing in the US stock market. It claims to have processed more than $250 million in transactions in 2021 while tripling deposits.

The company’s global team is based across India, USA, and Canada. To facilitate Indian investors to invest in U.S. markets, Vested has partnered with more than 35 partners including brokers, fintechs, and wealth management firms in India like Axis Securities, Kuvera, Angel Broking, and 5Paisa.

CynLr raises $4.5 million in pre-series A funding round was led by Speciale Invest and growX Ventures. Institutional investors including Anicut Capital, Infoedge, Java Capital, Venture Catalysts, and Arali Ventures also participated in this round.

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Launched by Nikhil Ramaswamy and Gokul NA in 2019, CynLr seeks to simplify and eliminate this need for tailored machines to handle objects in manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, industrial kitchens, and more.

The startup claims that its visual robots can instantaneously pick any object of any size, shape, weight, or material regardless of orientation and place with limited to no pre-training.

With this round of funding, CynLr will be establishing its business presence in the US, scaling the team to more than 50 members, and building capacity to address the current pipeline of customers and deliver 100 robots annually.

Gaming and sports media firm Nazara Technologies plans to invest $2.5 million in Bitkraft Ventures, a US-based early-stage investment firm that backs startups in gaming, Web3, and immersive technology. As part of this deal, Nazara's Singapore subsidiary will invest $0.875 million upfront and the remaining $1.625 million over three years.

This comes after Nazara announced a similar partnership with gaming-focused venture capital fund Griffin Gaming Partners on March 11. As part of this, the company had committed Rs 30 crore ($4 million) to Griffin that recently raised $750 million in its second fund.

The diversified gaming and sports media firm said the investment will enable them to leverage the network of Bitkraft for partnerships/investments into Nazara and its subsidiaries, co-investments into "highly sought-after founders/companies" and secure deals flow for mergers and acquisitions from the current portfolio of funds.

PlayVerse, a tech-enabled entertainment company, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Japanese gaming company Akatsuki Inc. Founder of PlayVerse, Jaineel Aga is a serial entrepreneur who recently sold his first venture, Planet Superheroes to Nodwin Gaming, an esports company, and a subsidiary of NSE-listed Nazara Technologies.

PlayVerse offers content, toys, games and digital merchandise enabled by Web 3.0 technology. It aims at localizing global anime content into regional Indian languages to access the vernacular Indian audience.

To maximize monetization potential for its IP owners, it looks to provide full-stack solutions with a 360-degree approach to content and merchandise. It also plans to launch its own D2C brand which will be focused on an interconnected universe of content and play.

Futwork, a sales-as-a-service platform that enables companies to deploy gig workers as work-from-home tele-callers for sales, has raised $1 million in funding led by Blume Ventures and Simile Venture Partners.

The round also saw the participation of Silicon Valley-based Riverside Ventures and key angels such as Shivakumar Ganesan (Founder, Exotel) and Phanindra Sama (Founder, RedBus). The funds will be used to build the product and grow the team while focussing on enterprise customers and large outbound calling use cases.

Also Read: Pixxel Bags $25 million in Series A funding as India’s SpaceTech startups find escape velocity

Currently, Futwork supports more than 20 customers including Khatabook, Tata, Shyplite, Growth School, Upgrad, Meesho and Cashify. The startup says callers are earning as much as Rs 20,000 per month while working remotely from home.

Blockchain startup Kandola, which offers a real-time decentralized chip-to-cloud IoT protocol and real-time NFT, has raised a pre-seed round of $450,000 from a list of investors including AlphaWave Global, Sandeep Nailwal (founder of Polygon), Harsh Rawat (EPNS) among others.

The funding round also witnessed participation from Arcanum Capital, a seed-stage VC firm focused on investments in decentralized protocols and applications for the global blockchain ecosystem. Besides team expansion, the funds from this round will be used to solidify underlying technologies through research and development.

Founded by Siddharth Banerjee along with co-founders Krithika Radhakrishnan and Sriram Padmanabhan, Kandola Aims is the de-facto platform for all Dapps/solutions that need to use real-time communication and data stores like IoT hardware and apps, messaging apps, games, real-time NFT, and metaverse apps.

XYXX, a premium men’s innerwear, and comfort wear label has roped in Indian Cricketer KL Rahul as an investor and a brand ambassador. With this partnership, XYXX wants to focus on further strengthening its online presence and expand into untapped markets with KL Rahul as the face of its top categories - innerwear and loungewear.

In June 2021, XYXX had raised Rs 30 Crore in Series-A funding from Sauce.vc, DSG Consumer Partners and Synergy Capital Partners. This April, KL Rahul joins the ranks as an investor in XYXX for an undisclosed amount.

Founded by Yogesh Kabra, XYXX says its omnichannel approach has led to success across Tier 1, 2, and 3 markets, resulting in year-on-year growth of 100% since the previous financial year.

Currently, XYXX plans to scale its physical presence to 19,000 touchpoints by September 2022. In addition to this, XYXX also retails on 14 key digital marketplaces such as Amazon, Myntra, Ajio amongst others.

Wagr, a pet care super app, has raised Rs 4.2 crore in a funding round led by Inflection Point Ventures with participation from IvyCap Ventures, Stanford Angels and Ashish Sharma (MD, Innoven Capital).

Founded by Siddharth Darbha and Advaith Mohan in 2016, Wagr offers several products and services such as veterinary video consultations within 15 minutes, an e-commerce store for pet products like food, treats, grooming, and accessories, a pet care guide, a pet parent community, and a location & fitness tracker for dogs.

The funds will be used to expand the pet products available on its e-commerce platform and scale the scope of vet consultations and healthcare offerings for pets across India. The company also looks to expand its team and scaling its customer acquisition efforts. To date, Wagr claims to have garnered more than 15,000 users and completed over 3,500 vet tele-consultations.

CultYvate, an IoT-enabled agritech platform, has raised Rs. 4.5 crore in a pre-Series A round led by Sirius One Capital Fund with participation from Sunicon, The Chennai Angels, LV Angel Fund, Prodapt Technology Holding, and others.

Founded in 2016 by Mallesh TM, Bhavana M, and Arun K R, CultYvate enables farmers to use less water for farming without compromising on the yield. "Presently, our farmers growing paddy are saving up to 80 lakh litres of water/ Hectare, every crop season, as well as, earning a 10% incremental profit," said Mallesh TM, Founder, CultYvate.

The freshly-infused funds will be used to refine the technology to make the services more accessible, affordable and simpler with talent acquisition for developing AI, ML and remote sensing.

It would also be utilized for the expansion of geographical presence in Punjab, Haryana and Maharashtra. CultYvate plans to devise solutions on monetization opportunities that can minimize the cost of ownership for the farmers.