Funding Rundown: Vayana Network closes Series C at $52 mn, VideoVerse gets $46.8 mn in Series B round, QED & Aavishkaar lead $31 mn Series B round in Financepeer

"While we are set to do more than $10 billion (Rs 76,500 crore) of trade financing in India alone this financial year, we are focusing on creating tools and infrastructure to help small businesses manage their working capital efficiently and sourcing trade finance at the most affordable rates.

We will continue to build on our leadership role in public trade infrastructure including GST, e-Invoice and e-Way Bill and embedding credit for every business in the supply chain,” said Ram Iyer, Founder and CEO, Vayana Network.

The company will also launch Vayana ITFS (International Trade Finance Services) platform at GIFT City, Gujarat in the current financial year. The platform will enable exporters and importers to access international trade finance facilities at competitive rates, added Iyer.

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Vayana Network along with other trade financing platforms such as KredX, M1xchange, and RXIL was issued licenses last year by the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) to support exporters and importers.

Vayana Network claims to have enabled finance of over $10 billion to over 1.5 lakh MSMEs for over 1,000 supply chains in 25 different sectors. Its network spans 600 cities in India and extends to 20 countries.

VideoVerse, a video-editing SaaS platform (formerly Toch.ai) has secured $46.8 million in a Series B funding round led by A91 Partners, Alpha Wave Global and Binny Bansal. Other investors who pitched in include Stride Ventures, Innoven Capital, and Pacific Western Bank amongst others.

The capital raised will be used to strengthen its teams in India and internationally, enhance VideoVerse technology, build newer products and expand its global market share, it said in a statement.

"As we chart out the next phase of our growth journey, these funds will help us in our mission to innovate on behalf of consumer needs and industry demands,” said Vinayak Shrivastav, Co-founder and CEO, VideoVerse.

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In October 2021, the company had raised Series A funding from Moneta Ventures, Baring Private Equity India, Binny Bansal and Ventureast among others. Since then, VideoVerse claims its revenue has grown multifold while building out a strong US tech and sales team as well as setting up a data science and machine learning team in Israel.

Education-focused fintech startup Financepeer has raised $31 million in a Series B funding round led by US-based VC QED Investors and Aavishkaar Capital. Ardent Ventures, DMI Sparkle Fund, DMI, 9Unicorn, LC Nueva AIF and Maxar VC, also participated in the funding round.

As per the startup, the funds will be used to enhance its technology platform and offerings, expand and strengthen its education-institution partnerships, and deepen its reach in rural areas to enable more students, especially the girl students, to get easy access to quality education.

The firm claims to have witnessed 10x growth in the last year and has partnered with more than 10,000 educational institutions with a Pan-India footprint, to deliver affordable fee financing.

"Financepeer has processed more than $100 million of fees on its platform and helped hundreds of thousands of students get quality education. In line with the company's vision for the next phase of growth, it is very important to join hands with sector-specific and the right set of leaders, partners and investors.

Our mission is to bring revolution in the education space through neo banking and at the same time create an impact at the bottom of the pyramid, via increasing access to quality education,” said Rohit Gajbhiye, CEO, Financepeer.

Ashwin Damera, co-founder and CEO of edtech unicorn Eruditus, has invested $32 million in venture debt firm InnoVen Capital India Fund through his family office Damera ventures. The family office is co-managed by him and his wife Bhagyashree Damera. The development comes a month after Eruditus had raised $350 million in debt from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).

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"This investment is from my family office and will give us exposure to venture debt, which is a unique asset class. I have known Innoven for many years and have a strong appreciation for the strong franchise/portfolio they have built. As an entrepreneur, this investment also aligns with my goal of investing back into the venture ecosystem as the capital will eventually support many promising start-ups, as they scale up," said Damera.

Innoven Capital India Fund had announced the first close of its new fund at Rs 740 crore from anchor investor Innoven Capital, a joint venture between Seviora, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek, and United Overseas Bank in September 2021. The fund has a target corpus of Rs 1,000 crore with a greenshoe option to raise an additional Rs 1,000 crore.

"Over the last few years, the ecosystem has seen several founders generate some liquidity and many have allocated capital to venture debt, as part of their asset allocation," said Ashish Sharma, managing partner, InnoVen Capital India Fund.

Sharma further added, “We launched the India fund late last year and have already built a strong portfolio of 25 companies, including 7 unicorns. We expect to do our final close sometime next quarter.”

Sales Automation platform Everstage, has raised $13 million in its Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from the existing investor 3one4 Capital.

"With ever-increasing data on GTM motions, companies are constantly looking to design creative incentive plans to drive sales performance. Everstage elegantly allows companies to design and manage even the most complex plans, while ensuring a modern UI/UX and a consumer app-like experience. This is currently missing from the legacy vendor's value chain. Super excited to back the Everstage team as they build the RevOps platform of the future," says Akarsh Shrivastava, Principal at Elevation Capital.

The SaaS startup will utilize the funds to further expand the sales, engineering and solutions teams to serve customers worldwide. The 50-member team is expected to grow 3x by the end of the year, the firm said in a statement.

Everstage claims to have grown 5x in revenue and 6x in customer base in the last six months. The company has customers across four continents and counts several known companies like Chargebee, Postman, Nitro, Hackerrank, Clevertap as their customers.

Rigi.Club, a platform built for creators, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round which was co-led by Accel India, Sequoia Capital India and Stellaris Venture Partners.

Angel investors like Nazara CEO Nitish Mittersain, OneImpression CEO Apaksh Gupta, Shaadi.com Founder Anupam Mittal and creators like Tanmay Bhat, also participated in the funding round.

The startup enables creators to manage and monetise their communities. Influencers can also use this platform to launch courses, conduct paid webinars, and launch free and paid communities through the Rigi app. It has over 200,000 users most of them in the GenZ category.

In the next 12 months, the company aims to increase this user base by more than 10 times. The fund will be used to expand the team and enhance the product.

"Since our launch, the company has been growing at the rate of nearly 100 percent month-on-month and has crossed the 200,000 user benchmark. It has been most heartening to see that within a mere two months, we have helped our influencers more than triple their earnings," Rigi.Club co-founder and CEO Saurav said.

Fabrik, an industrial metaverse Company, which specialises in building AR supplemented Digital Twins for High Value Critical Assets across a multitude of sectors, has raised an undisclosed amount as part of its seed round from Modulor Capital.

The round also saw participation from LetsVenture, SucSEED Angel Network, Faad Network, Srishti Lakhotia of the SR Group and a few strategic individual angels. This is the first round that Fabrik has raised since its inception in 2018.

With the Metaverse market opportunity estimated to be over $1 trillion in the next 5 - 6 years and with 10% of business revenues expected to come from metaverse projects, the firm will deploy the funds to expand the team on engineering and business fronts to create product solutions across key focus sectors.