Bengaluru-based ecommerce startup POP has successfully raised $2.4 million in a seed funding round led by India Quotient, with participation from several angel investors. This funding will significantly accelerate POP’s initiatives, including the rollout of its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services through the POPclub app, which recently received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) as a Third-Party Application Provider (TPAP).
The POPclub app, developed in collaboration with financial partners such as Yes Bank and Juspay, enables users to make UPI transactions while earning POPcoins, a unique shopping currency. These POPcoins offer a 2 percent value back on every transaction, providing consistent and predictable rewards compared to other UPI apps. Users can redeem POPcoins to purchase a wide range of products from major direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands in categories including beauty, personal care, electronics, fashion, and home goods.
Bhargav Errangi, the founder of POP, emphasized the startup’s ambition to become the go-to platform for payments and shopping among digitally savvy young Indians. “POP aims to provide innovative app experiences tailored to the interests of our target audience, which primarily consists of Gen Z and late millennials,” said Errangi. He highlighted that the company’s goal is to make POPcoins a standard currency for new-age products and services, aligning with the evolving preferences of modern consumers.
Since its launch in May 2023, POP has rapidly expanded its network, adding over 200 brands, including notable names like mCaffeine, HUL-owned Simple Skin Care, Adil Qadri, Anveshan, Two Brothers Organic Farms, and Epigamia. The company has already engaged over four million customers with its POPcoins and expects this number to grow to over 10 million by the end of the year, with the network expanding to include 500 brands.
Madhukar Sinha, General Partner at India Quotient, expressed excitement about partnering with POP to address significant challenges in customer acquisition and retention faced by D2C and consumer brands. “POP’s innovative approach and rewarding system through POPcoins can enable thousands of consumer brands to acquire and retain customers at a fraction of the current costs,” Sinha noted.
Wahter, an innovative startup in the packaged drinking water and advertising sectors, has successfully raised Rs 5 crore in pre-seed funding at a valuation of Rs 52 crore. This significant milestone, announced on June 18, 2024, marks a pivotal step in Wahter’s mission to provide affordable bottled water while leveraging advertising revenues to subsidize costs.
The newly secured funds will enable Wahter to expand its distribution network significantly. The company plans to increase the number of its carts, strollers, and kiosks in high-traffic areas, thereby broadening its reach and providing advertisers with a more extensive demographic to target. This strategic expansion is designed to enhance both the visibility of the brands it partners with and the availability of its low-cost bottled water. In addition to expanding its network, Wahter will use the funds to optimize its production processes and invest in advanced technology. These improvements aim to streamline operations, improve logistics, and ensure the highest quality of bottled water. Furthermore, Wahter plans to strengthen its team by increasing its headcount, enabling more efficient execution of its ambitious expansion plans.
Founded in December 2023, Wahter operates with a unique business model that integrates brand advertisements onto water bottle labels. This innovative approach allows the company to offer bottled water at highly subsidized prices—just Rs 1 or Rs 2 per bottle—by generating revenue from advertisers. Amitt Nenwani, co-founder of Wahter, highlighted the effectiveness of this model, noting that the campaigns conducted for their brands have yielded surprisingly positive results. This model not only makes clean drinking water more accessible but also transforms each water bottle into a moving billboard. By billing marketers between Rs 10 and Rs 20 per bottle, based on the selected demographic, Wahter can target students, marginalized communities, and children, providing water at an 80 percent disbursement rate.
Wahter has already deployed over 100 carts, strollers, and kiosks in high-footfall areas such as metro stations, malls, and public places. It has partnered with well-known brands like boAt, Vijay Sales, and ACE Capitals to further its reach and impact. Looking ahead, Wahter aims to continue investing in technology and team expansion to maintain and improve its service quality. The company’s commitment to affordability and transparency is evident in its efforts to redefine the packaged drinking water and advertising landscape.
Ahmedabad-based venture capital firm GVFL, formerly known as Gujarat Venture Finance Limited, has announced the launch of its latest initiative, the Prarambh Fund. This seed stage fund has successfully secured its first close at Rs 100 crore, with a targeted total corpus of Rs 200 crore. The fund aims to invest in 25-30 promising startups in sectors such as B2B SaaS, Health-tech, Agritech, Climate Tech, and Deep-Tech, with individual investments ranging from Rs 1 crore to Rs 3 crore.
GVFL has a rich history of supporting innovation in India, having raised nine funds to date and backing over 110 companies. With a strategic focus on providing venture capital to early-stage ventures, GVFL prides itself on its meticulous market viability assessments and comprehensive support system for its portfolio companies. This support ranges from strategic guidance to governance oversight, ensuring that funded startups receive the necessary resources to thrive in competitive markets.
Kamal Bansal, Managing Director of GVFL, expressed his enthusiasm for the Prarambh Fund’s first close, emphasizing its role in fostering innovation and providing a seamless funding pathway for startups from their inception to growth stages. He highlighted GVFL’s commitment to positioning itself as a versatile venture capital firm capable of nurturing companies throughout their entire lifecycle.
Mihir Joshi, President of GVFL, underscored the firm’s dedication to nurturing early-stage startups, citing the success of their previous initiatives and the strategic partnerships they offer through platforms like a4X.fund. This co-investment platform provides startups with acceleration services and access to industry mentors, facilitating their growth and scalability.
The launch of the Prarambh Fund marks a significant milestone for GVFL in its mission to bolster the startup ecosystem in India. By targeting key sectors driving technological and societal advancements, GVFL aims to catalyze innovation and support the next generation of entrepreneurial endeavors across the country.
As GVFL prepares to deploy the Prarambh Fund into promising startups over the coming year, the firm remains committed to leveraging its expertise and network to maximize returns for investors while driving sustainable growth for the Indian startup landscape. This initiative not only reinforces GVFL’s leadership in venture finance but also underscores its proactive role in shaping the future of technology and business innovation in India.
Apoorva Kumar, Co-Founded Inspeq AI along with Ramanujam Macharla Vijayakumar . He brings a wealth of experience from esteemed roles at tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, SAP, and Informatica. With a passion for innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), Apoorva co-founded Inspeq AI to address critical challenges in AI reliability and security. His journey from leading tech corporations to pioneering AI evaluation solutions underscores his commitment to reshaping the future of AI technology. In this exclusive interview with Startup77, Apoorva Kumar shares his visionary insights on revolutionizing AI reliability and security through Inspeq AI’s cutting-edge technology.
What inspired you and your team to transition from established roles at Microsoft, AWS, SAP, and Informatica to founding Inspeq AI? Could you share the pivotal moment or vision that led to this decision?
Apoorva Kumar: I always wanted to build a globally impactful startup aligned with my passion. There is only one life, and I didn’t want to regret later that I did not try. After experiencing the issues with LLMs firsthand in companies like Microsoft and Meta, my friend Ram and I thought it was a great problem to solve. We deep dived into it and gathered proof points through customer discovery, which gave us the confidence to leave our well-paying jobs and go full-time into building Inspeq. Also, Ram and I have a lot of mutual trust, and you can only make such decisions if you have confidence in your partner.
Inspeq AI focuses on evaluating, optimizing, and monitoring LLM apps like AI Conversational Bots and Content Generation Agents. How do your proprietary metrics differentiate Inspeq AI from other platforms in the market?
Apoorva Kumar: Inspeq AI’s unique and transformative platform doesn’t use LLMs as judges. Almost 95% of our competition uses LLMs for evaluating LLMs. We have used cutting-edge research in the field of NLP and statistical modeling to develop metrics for our platform. This research has helped us achieve better, faster, and cheaper results. Our unique Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy also differentiates us from our competitors.
Your platform offers both a low-code desktop application and a pro-code SDK. What considerations went into designing these dual functionalities, and what benefits do they provide to your users?
Apoorva Kumar: The pro-code SDK was developed for technical personas like developers and data scientists. They can evaluate AI apps at scale with just a few lines of code. The low-code version of the product was built for non-technical personas like Project Managers and Marketers, as we believe that Generative AI (GenAI) is already in the hands of business users as well.
Could you walk us through a typical scenario where Inspeq AI has significantly improved the efficiency or performance of an AI application, showcasing the platform’s impact on real-world projects?
Apoorva Kumar: Inspeq AI has drastically reduced human efforts and provided consistency in LLM outputs. One of our customers used to deploy human evaluators who took 2 days to manually evaluate their AI app’s output. Now, with Inspeq, they have reduced this process from days to hours and are able to identify 90% more hallucinations.
Generative AI has been transformative across industries. Could you explain why understanding hallucinations in AI is crucial, and how Inspeq AI addresses these challenges in its evaluations?
Apoorva Kumar: We’ve seen cases like DPD in the UK, where a bot started cursing consumers, causing reputational damage to DPD as a brand. Snapchat’s bot provided inappropriate recommendations to minors on booze and sex. These incidents underscore the urgent need for reliable AI.
Inspeq AI’s evaluation framework can catch up to 90% of hallucinations and improve model accuracy by up to 80%. Before deployment, customers can identify inaccuracies and inconsistencies in their outputs. Moreover, real-time guardrailing can deflect any malicious outputs.
Security is a critical concern in AI applications. What are some best practices Inspeq AI recommends for safeguarding AI systems, especially in terms of data privacy and integrity?
Apoorva Kumar: Inspeq’s evaluation framework provides security metrics for detecting prompt injection attacks, jailbreaking, and other OWASP attacks. Moreover, Inspeq can evaluate customer data without extracting it from their on-premise systems, ensuring data privacy and integrity.
In the evolving field of Generative AI, how does Inspeq AI position itself against competitors? What unique advantages or capabilities does your platform offer compared to other solutions in the market?
Apoorva Kumar: Our unique framework provides more accurate, faster, and cheaper results because we don’t use LLMs as judges. Additionally, our GTM strategy, focused on enterprises, provides a significant competitive advantage.
As you expand Inspeq AI’s reach, what are your strategies for maintaining innovation and staying ahead of technological advancements in AI evaluation and optimization?
Apoorva Kumar: We partner closely with academia such as NUI Galway, University of Liverpool, etc., to stay updated with academic advancements in this field. We also hire researchers passionate about applied AI principles. Additionally, we stay informed about emerging startups in the Gen AI sector.
Auxano Capital, a prominent early-stage venture capital firm, has announced the launch of its second fund aimed at raising approximately $100 million. \
Founded by Brijesh Damodaran Nair and Ashish Padiyar in 2016, Auxano Capital currently manages a $25 million fund that has been strategically invested in various early-stage startups.
Nair highlighted the firm’s strategic shift to capitalize on the expected surge in IPOs within India’s startup ecosystem over the next 18 months. Nair emphasized the competitive nature of the current investment landscape, where swift decision-making is crucial to securing promising opportunities.
Nair pointed out the evolving economic dynamics in India, including rising consumption patterns, infrastructure expansion, the growth of online communities, and the burgeoning entrepreneurial activity in Tier II and III cities.
Nair noted, “The current funding environment, characterized by a slowdown, underscores the importance of governance and sustainable growth as top priorities for startups and venture capitalists alike.” This ethos aligns with Auxano Capital’s commitment to responsible investment practices.
With a diverse portfolio that includes companies like MProfit, Polymates, Superpro.ai, and Expertrons, Auxano Capital has achieved notable exits, including full divestment from MilkBasket and partial divestment from Wiom. Having invested in 28 startups to date, the firm has demonstrated a strong capability in identifying and nurturing promising ventures.
Celesta Capital, a venture capital firm, has reportedly sold 3.57 lakh shares of drone manufacturer IdeaForge in a bulk deal on June 18, 2024, fetching Rs 27.46 crore. The shares were transacted at Rs 768.08 each, with buyers including Graviton Research, QE Securities, and HRTI, according to media reports.
Founded in 2007 by Ankit Mehta, Ashish Bhat, Rahul Singh, and Vipul Joshi, IdeaForge specializes in UAV systems for inspection, surveillance, and mapping. Having gone public in June 2023, the company recently disclosed a 30% sequential decline in net profit to Rs 10.3 crore for Q4 FY24.
Following the transaction, IdeaForge’s stock surged 6.7% to close at Rs 830.85 on the BSE, reflecting investor confidence amidst the bulk deals executed, including those by Aakraya Research and NK Securities totaling Rs 136.3 crore.
Maxim AI, a platform focused on enterprise-grade evaluation and observability for AI applications, has announced a $3 million funding round led by Elevation Capital.
The funding also included participation from prominent angel investors, including founders from Postman, Chargebee, Groww, Razorpay, and Media.net. With this investment, Maxim AI has launched the General Availability (GA) of its platform.
Founded in 2023 by Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo, previously of Google and Postman, Maxim AI aims to bring robust software development practices to streamline AI development workflows.
Their platform sits between the foundational model and application layers of the AI stack, providing end-to-end evaluation across the AI development lifecycle. This includes prompt engineering, pre-release and post-release testing, data management, and fine-tuning.
Akarsh Shrivastava, Principal at Elevation Capital, highlighted Maxim AI’s critical role in addressing the evolving needs of AI developers, ensuring high-quality AI development and deployment. The funding will support Maxim AI in expanding its team, enhancing platform capabilities, and scaling operations to serve more enterprise clients globally.
8X Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, has announced the first close of its second VC fund dedicated to deeptech startups. Launched a year ago, the fund has secured Rs 60 crore and aims for a total corpus of Rs 200 crore with a greenshoe option of Rs 100 crore.
This fund targets investments in 18-20 early-stage Indian startups specializing in sectors like water sanitation and hygiene (WASH), Industry 4.0, advanced computing, biotech, and B2B enterprise SaaS.
Chirag Gupta, Managing Partner at 8X Ventures, highlighted the fund’s focus areas and investment strategy, stating, “We intend to invest between Rs 2-5 crore initially per startup, with total investments potentially reaching up to Rs 20 crore per company.”
8X Ventures’ first fund, which also explored opportunities in the Middle East and Singapore, is nearly fully deployed. It boasts investments in 14 deeptech companies including Solinas, Lightspeed Photonics, XYMA Analytics, and Zenpulsar, achieving an impressive internal rate of return (IRR) of approximately 40% and a multiple on invested capital (MoIC) of 2.1X since its deployment in 2022.
The firm’s team, comprising individuals with strong backgrounds in technology, brings both technical expertise and business acumen to support startups in overcoming technological and commercial challenges.
Rockit, a burgeoning beverage brand founded by Vedant Garg, has successfully raised Rs 6 crore in a pre-seed investment round. The funding was spearheaded by early-stage consumer investors Sauce.VC and joined by renowned television personality and entrepreneur Rannvijay Singha.
Sauce.VC, a supporter of Rockit since its inception, is actively collaborating with the brand’s management to capitalize on market opportunities and carve out a distinctive niche in the competitive beverage sector. Initially focusing on North Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, Rockit aims to establish an omnichannel presence across India.
Future plans for Rockit include a diverse lineup of products such as fruit-flavored beverages and hydration solutions, designed to meet evolving consumer preferences and enhance its market footprint.
Founder Vedant Garg commented, “Indian consumer preferences are evolving towards global standards, and we aim to offer products that blend global appeal with Indian taste and convenience, especially targeting the youth in Tier II and III cities. Leveraging our family’s five-decade legacy in the food business, we recognize the pivotal role of distribution in India. Our strategy begins with major states and expands nationwide through an omnichannel approach.”
To amplify its brand message, Rockit has launched a digital campaign featuring Rannvijay Singha in energetic scenarios that resonate with the brand’s adventurous spirit.
Rannvijay Singha expressed his enthusiasm, stating, “I’m excited to collaborate with Rockit on their dynamic new energy drink launch. The brand’s energy and flavor perfectly embody the spirit of India’s youth, and I look forward to engaging consumers through innovative campaigns.”
Yash Dholakia, partner at Sauce.VC, emphasized, “Rockit combines deep distribution expertise with a high-quality product offering at an attractive price point. We are impressed by the positive pre-launch feedback and believe in the potential to build a significant and profitable brand in the beverage sector. Partnering with Rannvijay, who resonates deeply with the consumer base, adds further value to our investment.”
Genspark, an AI-powered search startup founded by former Baidu executives, has secured $60 million in seed funding in a round led by Singapore-based Lanchi Ventures. This substantial investment values the startup at $260 million, despite currently having no revenue. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Genspark utilizes a diverse array of AI models to index and summarize information, distinguishing itself by generating customized pages for each query.
Eric Jing, CEO of Genspark and previously in charge of Baidu’s Xiaodu unit, revealed that the company’s team of 20 is split between Palo Alto and Singapore, with plans to establish an additional office in Seattle. Initially targeting the U.S. market, Genspark operates on a free-to-use model with potential future monetization through subscriptions. The platform harnesses various large language models, including Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT models, to enhance search capabilities.
The timing of Genspark’s funding round coincides with a heightened competitive landscape in the search engine market, where AI-driven innovations are reshaping how users access and consume information online. Competitors like You.com are also in the process of securing significant funding rounds, underscoring the growing interest and investment in AI-powered search technologies aimed at challenging Google’s dominance.
