Funding Rundown: Zetwerk turns unicorn, Vedantu to turn unicorn with $100 million funding, Prime Venture Partners raises $75 million as first close of Fund IV

General insurance provider Digit Insurance has raised Rs 121 crore from TVS Growth Fund and high net worth individuals, Entrackr reported. Existing investor TVS Shriram Growth Fund has led the round with an investment of Rs 56 crore.

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Notable individuals include Kunal Shah, Saujanya Shrivastava ( CBO, MMT), Susheel Tejuja (owner Landmark Insurance brokers), Sachin Pillai (MD & CEO Hinduja Leyland Finance), Anil Arora (CEO Ace Insurance Brokers) also participated in the round. About 110 other individual investors have also put in money this round, the report added. The company may receive more funds in this round.

Venture capital fund A91 Partners has closed its second fund to the tune of $525 million. The said amount is almost double the size compared to its maiden round which was closed at $350 million in 2019. According to a report by The Economic Times, A91 has deployed $250 million and has made 11 investments. It will to investing its remaining $30 million but may look to fund startups that are technology-backed. Since its inception, A91 Partners has backed startups such as Paperboat, Aye, Atomberg, and Sugar Cosmetics among others. The venture capital also has a unicorn – Digit Insurance under its list of portfolios.

Early-stage venture capital fund Prime Venture Partners said on August 25 that it has closed $75 million of its fourth fund of $100 million. In addition to existing focus areas of fintech, edtech, healthtech, consumer internet, and global SaaS, the firm expects to expand into new areas, including Decentralised Finance (DeFi)/crypto, electric vehicles, and gaming infrastructure platforms. Prime also announced that it was actively looking to expand its leadership team by adding a fourth partner. International Finance Corporation and part of the World Bank Group, joined in as a limited partner.

Digital bookkeeping platform Khatabook plans to start offering full-fledged financial services to small merchants following its $100 million Series C fundraise. The funding round led by Tribe Capital and Moore Strategic Ventures values the startup at $600 million. Alkeon Capital came on as a new investor.

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The Series C round, which was oversubscribed, saw the participation of existing investors B Capital Group, Sequoia Capital, Tencent, RTP Ventures, Unilever Ventures, and Better Capital. In addition, Balaji Srinivasan and Sriram Krishnan were among the independent investors. To reward employees, ex-employees, and early investors, Khatabook is buying back $10 million worth of ESOPs. The startup has also expanded its ESOP pool to $50 million, according to the company statement.

Social platform Hike, founded by Kavin Bharti Mittal, has raised an undisclosed amount from a clutch of global and Indian investors. This fundraiser was led by Justin Mateen, co-founder Tinder. It saw participation from Rajeev Misara, CEO Softbank Vision Fund, Sean Rad (co-founder, Tinder), Arjun Sethi (co-Founder & partner, Tribe Capital), Bhavin Turakhia (co-founder, Zeta & Titan), Kunal Shah (founder, Cred), Binny Bansal (co-founder, Flipkart), Aditya Agarwal (partner in residence, South Park Commons), Kunal Bahl (co-founder & CEO, Snapdeal) and Rohit Kumar Bansal (co-founder, Snapdeal). This latest round of funding will be deployed to expand Hike’s product strategy along with enabling high-quality hiring across functions.

E-commerce rollup platform Mensa Brands has closed another $33 million from four existing investors, according to Entrackr. Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) and Norwest co-led this new round with $11 million each whereas Accel has put in $10 million. Singapore-based late-stage investment firm Gablehorn Investments has invested $1 million in the six-month-old venture. Bergwelt, which represents the co-founders along with a few others’ stake in Mensa Brands, has also participated in this round with $580K. The fresh money has come at a time when Mensa Brands is in late-stage conversations to raise a large round from Tiger Global.

Taiwan-based blockchain startup XREX has raised $17 million in pre-Series A funding led by CDIB Capital Group, as per TechCrunch. The round also saw participation from SBI Investment (a subsidiary of SBI Holdings), Global Founders Capital, ThreeD Capital, E.Sun Venture Capital, Systex Corporation, MetaPlanet Holdings, AppWorks, BlackMarble, New Economy Ventures and Seraph Group. Part of the new round will be used to apply for financial licenses in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa, and partner with banks and financial institutions, like payment gateways, the report adds.

Curefoods, which operates the cloud kitchen brand Eat.Fit has raised $13 million (about Rs 96.4 crore) in funding, led by Iron Pillar. The series A round also saw participation from Nordstar and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal.

Leading angel investors Adil Allana, Rashmi Kwatra, Lydia Jett, and Kunal Shah also participated in the round. Curefoods has raised $20 million between seed and a Series A funding.

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The company is also looking at closing a $10 million debt raise in the coming weeks, the firm said in a statement. The fresh funds will be used to acquire many more digital food brands across geographies, the statement said. Curefoods also will look at expanding its cloud kitchen footprint across multiple cities and build backend technology to manage its multi-brand, multi-city kitchens footprint.

Indiagold, a fintech startup that offers gold loans, has raised $12 million in a Series A round led by financial services platform PayU and Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI). Better Tomorrow Ventures, 3one4 Capital, Rainmatter Capital and existing investor Leo Capital also participated in the round.

Indiagold will use the $12 million funding to scale its business and roll out operations nationally.

Edtech startup Camp K12 has raised $12 million as a part of its Series A funding round co-led by Matrix Partners India and Elevation Capital. The company plans to use funds to hire leaders across functions, hyper-scale operations, marketing, and to build engineering and product teams. The startup claims that its US business has grown two times month-on-month over the past three months. In the Middle East, Camp K12 claims to have registered three times month-on-month growth.

US-based early-stage venture capital firm 2am VC is gearing up to invest $10 million in more than 50 Indian startups by the end of next year. According to the firm, 2am VC has already made ten investments in the first four months of this financial year. Moreover, it has also made commitments to complete five more investments by the end of this quarter. Its list of portfolio companies includes – Bimaplan, Karbon Card and BurnCal. In addition, 2am VC has co-invested with Titan Capital, 3one4 Ventures, Inflexor VC, 100X.VC, LSIP, Y-Combinator, India Quotient, Orios Ventures, and iSeed.

Indian startups received about $6.5 billion in funding in the April-June 2021 quarter, while 11 of them entered the coveted unicorn club, a report by Nasscom-PGA Labs said. During the second quarter, 160 funding deals were closed — up 2 percent from the January-March period. Funding raised in the June quarter was at $6.5 billion, up by 71 percent quarter-on-quarter. The biggest deal during the quarter was the $800 million fund raised by food delivery platform Swiggy, followed by ShareChat ($502 million), Byju's ($340 million), PharmEasy ($323 million) and Meesho ($300 million), the report said.

Online consumer sampling platform in the premium lifestyle space, Smytten has raised $6 million in Series A led by Fireside Ventures, which funds digital-first consumer brands and has invested in D2C startups like Mamaearth, boAt & Bombay Shaving Company among others.

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The round saw participation from Sharrp Ventures (Mariwala family office), Survam Partners (Suman Kant Munjal family office), and Waao Partners (Pratul Shroff family office). Existing investor Roots Ventures also participated in the round. The new investment will primarily be used for building many industry-first tech and data solutions to optimise the marketing funnel for D2C brands, the company said.

Digital therapeutics startup Breathe Well-being has raised $5.5 million in a Series A round of funding led by Accel Partners, with participation from General Catalyst and Scott Shleifer, Global MD, Tiger Global. According to the startup, the funding also witnessed the exit of angel investors where they saw 30x returns along with an ESOP plan for the employees. Breathe Well-being will use this capital for product development and team expansion. In May, the company said it had raised $1 million in a pre-Series A round, led by 3one4 Capital.

Agritech robotics startup TartanSense has raised $5 million in Series A funding in a round led by FMC Ventures and Omnivore, with participation from existing investor Blume Ventures. This brings the total funds raised by the company to $7 million, after it raised $2 million in a seed round in March 2019.

Jaisimha Rao, founder, TartanSense, said that they are aiming to have the world’s largest fleet of agriculture robots in the next 18 months.

Social gaming platform SuperGaming has raised $5.5 million in Series A round led by Skycatcher, AET Fund (the venture arm of Akatsuki), BAce Capital, Dream Incubator, 1Up Ventures, and Monish Darda. The startup will use the new corpus for talent expansion from a team of 120 at present to over 200 within a year to scale up the development of technologically advanced projects, build out the publishing division of the company, and market existing titles. The company is working on a large battle royale game that is expected to launch in early 2022, it said.

D2C fashion brand Bewakoof has raised Rs 60 crore in its latest round of funding led by InvestCorp, along with IvyCap and Spring MArketing Capital. The company is planning to launch new categories like activewear and innerwear. It is also scaling up its newly launched beauty brand Cosmos.

While speaking to CNBC-TV-18, founder and CEO Prabhkiran Singh said, "We are very bullish on social commerce. We see that in future, close to 20 percent of our sales might come from this channel."

Ice cream brand NOTO has secured Rs 4 crore in a pre-series A funding round. The round saw participation from a group of investors, including Titan Capital, Rockstud Capital, actor-producer John Abraham, WEH Ventures, and a few more angel investors. Founded by Varun Sheth and Ashni Sheth in 2018. NOTO brings healthy, low-calorie ice creams and real fruit pops with zero added sugar for those with an incurable sweet tooth.

Synth, an AI-based knowledge platform, has raised $125,000 from Y-Combinator. The startup raised this round as part of Y-Combinator's Summer 21 batch and will use it to expand their team and develop the product further. Synth is also actively hiring deep learning engineers and full-stack developers, it said in a statement.