Funding Rundown: Good Glamm Group turns Unicorn, Zoomcar raises $92M & Battery Smart secures $7M

With this fundraise the Good Glamm Group now has a valuation of $1.2 billion and the venture claims it is India’s first DTC beauty and personal care company to reach unicorn status.

The Good Glamm Group will utilize the funds to invest in product development, support data science and technology research, increase offline expansion, fund working capital requirements while also expanding the content creation capabilities and digital reach of POPxo, Plixxo, BabyChakra and ScoopWhoop.

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The Group will also continue to make investments in more beauty and personal care brands.

Car-sharing marketplace Zoomcar has completed a $92 million private placement led by New York City-based SternAegis Ventures with participation from international family offices and institutional investors.

SternAegis acted as the exclusive placement agent for this offering and ThinkEquity acted as special advisor, the company said.

Zoomcar intends to use the proceeds from this financing to grow its car-sharing marketplace in India and various select markets across Asia and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, it added. The startup said it will continue to invest in its advanced engineering and data science platform, enabling it to strengthen its market leadership in global car sharing.

The company expects to increase investments across IoT (Internet of Things), machine learning, and computer vision-related applications to further transform its user experience.

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The firm had launched India's first car sharing platform in 2013, and has approximately 10,000 cars on its platform. The platform allows individuals to rent from a diverse pool of cars by the hour or by the day.

Cloud kitchen company Curefoods, which operates ‘EatFit’, is in talks to raise $30 million in an equity funding round led by Accel and Chiratae, the Economic Times reported.

The company will use the funds to acquire almost half a dozen smaller brands in the space and for other inorganic growth opportunities.

Curefoods is also raising $10 million in debt from venture debt funds, the report added.

EV battery swapping network Battery Smart has raised $7 million (around Rs 52 crore) in a pre-Series A round from a clutch of investors of Blume Ventures and Orios Ventures.

The other investors who participated in the pre-Series A round include Green Frontier Capital, Baring Private Equity India, and angel investors such as Srinivas Anumolu (Founder - Elance, TutorVista, Bigbasket, Bluestone), K Ganesh (Serial Entrepreneur & Partner - GrowthStory.in), Niraj Singh, (Founder and CEO - Spinny), and Amit Bhasin (Co-Founder - GoMechanic), it said.

Besides, alternative debt platform TradeCred, India's leading alternative debt also participated as a debt partner with Rs 24 crore investment, the startup said in a release.

The fresh capital will be deployed for strengthening the startup's battery assignment technology, scale its operations to service 10,000 electric vehicles daily, and expand to three new states by this fiscal, the company said.

Battery Smart has over 100 swap stations operational in the Delhi-NCR region. The company currently has 1,200 active vehicles on its platform and completes 5,000 swaps daily.

D2C babycare brand SuperBottoms has raised Rs 3.5 crore in venture debt funding from Alteria Capital.

As per the company, the funding will be used to expand its product portfolio to meet the growing demand for innovative and sustainable products for babies and kids.

Superbottoms recently ventured into the kids’ segment with modal underwear for kids besides sustainable sheet detergent. Till date, the company has raised $2.7 million from DSG Consumer Partners and Saama Capital over and above the seed funding from Titan Capital and Venture Catalysts.

The D2C brand claims to be trusted by over 2 lakh parents and has an active Facebook community of 50,000.

SaaS startup CloudFiles raised Rs 2.36 Crores in pre-seed round of funding led by Titan Capital.

The funding also saw participation from marquee group of angel investors including Ashish Garg - Founder & CEO at Eltropy and Renil Komitla - CEO at Terralogic Software.

The company will use the funds to expand the team, and for product & business development, it said in a statement. Within 6 months the company claims to have partnered with over 30 businesses having over 2,500 file uploads and 12,000+ views.

CloudFiles is a SaaS application for sharing files securely and tracking viewer's engagement.