Here’s the lowdown of the top deals from the startup space this week.
Travel tech startup Spotnana raises $75 million in Series B Funding
Spotnana, a Travel-as-a-Service provider, raised $75 million in Series B funding led by Durable Capital Partners.
Existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Blank Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, and Mubadala Capital participated in the round.
The new funding enables Spotnana to accelerate hiring and drive faster adoption of its Travel-as-a-Service Platform, which provides a single cloud-based technology stack to corporations, travel management companies, suppliers, and technology providers, the company said in a statement.
Rural fintech platform Jai Kisan bags $50 million in ongoing Series B round
Rural fintech startup Jai Kisan has raised $50 million in a combination of equity and debt in the first close of its ongoing Series B round which was led by new investors GMO Venture Partners, Yara Growth Ventures and DG Daiwa Ventures.
Existing investors Blume Ventures, Arkam Ventures, Mirae Asset, Snow Leopard Ventures, and others, also participated in the funding round. The debt round was led by Northern Arc, Alteria and MAS Financial.
The startup intends to use the fresh capital to expand its product suite and enhance customer journey. The funding will also help accelerate the growth of existing products, strengthen talent, and boost data science and engineering capabilities, it said.
PriceLabs raises $30 million from Summit Partners
PriceLabs, a provider of dynamic pricing and revenue management solutions for the short-term rental industry, has raised $30 million minority growth investment from Summit Partners.
This funding will support PriceLabs in building leading revenue management solutions and fuel global team growth, a statement said.
Atato secures $6 million in Series A funding round
Atato, a licensed digital asset custodian offering MPC custodial solutions aimed at corporates and institutions, has raised $6 million in its Series A funding round led by AlphaLab Capital and FEBE Ventures.
Babel Finance, NGC Metaverse Ventures, NFT1, Huashan Capital, Tom Trowbridge, Wing Vasiksiri, January Capital, SOSV, and angel investors such as Dan Bertoli and others in the gaming and financial services industry, also pitched in.
The firm plans to use the fresh funds raised to further expand its product offerings and completion of existing beta-development products, including retail development, user growth, geographic expansion, and talent acquisition.
ChattyBao raises over $5M seed round from Info Edge Ventures and Vertex Ventures
ChattyBao, a shopping platform built on WhatsApp, has raised over $5 million as part of its seed funding round co-led by Vertex Ventures South East Asia & India and Info Edge Ventures.
The round also saw participation from 7Square Ventures and other marquee angel investors.
Shilpa Shetty invests in Fast&Up and Chicnutrix
Actress Shilpa Shetty has made an undisclosed investment in two DC2 startups — Fast&Up and Chicnutrix, part of Fullife Healthcare.
As part of the deal, Shetty has also joined these brands as a brand ambassador and will work towards strengthening and promoting health and self-care in India.
Web3 startup Artfi raises $3.26 million at a $100 million valuation
Artfi, a Web3 fine art fintech startup, raised $3.26 million at a valuation of $100 million in a funding round led by Sheikha Hend Al Qassemi (member of the ruling family of Sharjah), Raza Beig (Director, Landmark Group, UAE) and several angel investors.
Founded by Asif Kamal, Artfi is building an NFT platform for purchasing and selling fractionalized pieces of artworks by Picasso, VS Gaitonde, MF Husain, Sacha Jafri and Banksy among others. Rather than selling one painting to one individual, Artfi seeks to use a blockchain network such as Polygon to fractionalize an artwork into 5,000 to 10,000 pieces.
People can now invest in fine art with a very nominal investment and can liquidate it whenever they need to by using the secondary marketplace, the company said in a statement.
Crypto investing platform Crypso raises $3 million in seed funding
Crypso, a community-led investing platform for cryptocurrencies, raised $ 3 million in seed funding from Hashed Emergent, Athera Venture Partners (formerly Inventus), Better Capital, Whiteboard Capital, Polygon's Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani, CRED's Kunal Shah of CRED and other angel investors.
The platform claims to have over 50,000 actively engaged users and more than 100 crypto influencers, creators and experts, who are using the app for daily crypto trends with more than 25 percent of the userbase trading via social signals.
Zipteams raises $700,000 in seed funding led by IndiaQuotient
Zipteams, a conversational intelligence platform for inside sales and customer support teams, raised $700,000 in seed funding round led by IndiaQuotient with participation from angel investors.
With fresh capital, the company seeks to strengthen its engineering and machine learning teams to enhance product offerings and achieve user growth in India and the US markets within the next 12-15 months.
Spare8 raises $770K in pre-Seed funding
Spare8, a micro investment app, has raised $770,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by 2am VC. The round also saw the participation of Broom Ventures, Incisive Ventures, Varanium Capital and Magic Fund.
Several marquee investors such as Ajay Adjseshan (founder, Paymate), Anoop Mathur (founder, Core Media), Jaydeep Deshpande (head of marketing, Google Cloud), Yagnesh Sanghrajka (founder and CFO, 100xVC) and Sachin Seth (CEO, BSE EBIX Insurance), also invested.
The fund raised will be used to strengthen the marketing, growth initiatives and to build a lean but qualitatively strong team to scale quickly, the startup said.
Web3 startup Strive raises $500,000 in Pre-Seed funding round
Strive, a web3 startup in the NFT space, has raised $500,000 in its Pre-Seed funding round led by
100X.VC, LetsVenture, GrowX ventures and several angel investors.
The funding will be used by the startup to launch its marketplace and exchange for fractionalizing blue-chip NFTs for retail investors.
Peaceful Progress announces first close of maiden fund with Rs 50 Cr corpus for early-stage startups
Peaceful Progress, an early-stage focused Angel Fund, has announced the first close of its maiden fund with a corpus of Rs 50 Crore and will invest up to Rs 3 crore in each startup.
The SEBI registered Category-I Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) has built its initial corpus from over 15 angel investors and HNIs. The Fund has made four investments since it obtained SEBI approval in February including Expertrons, an edtech startup, Kredily, an SME HR & Payroll platform, Sheru, a new generation energy storage company and Infilect, an image recognition AI platform.
Peaceful Progress is sectors like Fintech, Healthtech, Edtech, Foodtech, Consumertech, D2C, Electric Vehicles as well as other new-age disruptors and looking to invest in 15 to 20 early-stage businesses over the next 3 to 4 years.
