My Funding Picks for last week (W43)

Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. From that list, I pick out three companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things. Click here to know about my rationale behind this weekly exercise.

13 early-stage startups raised over $20 million last week, with the overall funding boosting up to $172 million, according to the YourStory article. I am optimistic that we will see a surge in deal-making as this calendar year ends.

This week, 13 deals were in the early-stage rounds (compared to 5 last week), which made the cut for my weekly analysis. After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I pick these three as my favorite funding news from last week!

Name: Tango Eye

Amount Raised: Undisclosed amount from Lenskart, RiSo Capital, and angel investor Gaurav Gulati

What does Tango Eye do?

Edited from Tracxn: Tango Eye provides AI-based video analytics solutions. It analyzes video surveillance using artificial intelligence technologies and captures actionable insights from the data. Other solutions include customer intelligence, customer data trends and patterns, data security, and cloud-based analytics solutions.

Why do I like Tango Eye?

We have looked at similar models to Tango Eye in the past that analyze footage from CCTVs to provide actionable insights. As teams get increasingly mobile and owners cannot visit every site, these platforms help them to manage from a distance. I believe that such platforms will be the need of the hour moving forward– my only concern would be on the invasion of privacy.

That is another conversation altogether!

Name: Dukaan

Amount Raised: $6 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India, Venture Catalysts, Appyhigh, Weekend Fund, and angels Kunal Shah & Haresh Chawla.

What does Dukaan do?

Edited from Tracxn: Dukaan is a provider of eCommerce solutions to create an online store. Its tools offerings include product listing, order management, multi-language, customer chat support, managing delivery fees, social media sharing, and more.

Why do I like Dukaan?

I have written about the massive growth spurt in the digital economy. Therefore, any platform that helps people get online will do well – in the short term.

Whether they sustain these COVID time revenues and add incremental products or services to increase per store revenues will be a key to long term success. How they maintain these COVID time revenues and whether they could offer a viable Shopify.

Name: Renewate

Amount Raised: ₹2 crores from Better Capital

What does Renewate do?

Edited from Tracxn: Renewate is a platform to find services to renovate houses and offices. Users can work out the estimate and choose among listed service providers. Services include electricals, ceiling, windows, plumbing, painting, etc. They also provide Renewate AR (based on Google Tango) to visualize the planned renovation.

Why do I like Renewate?

Since we are considering renovating our offices, I was surprised to find out that there was no single platform for that what Renewate promises to do. We have not used the service yet, but it looks promising. Many offices would also be looking to redo their spaces for the post-COVID world, and Renewate aims to make it more seamless!

Special Mention:

I have purposefully excluded Kredily’s investment round led by Artha India Ventures, with other co-investors like The Collective I, Fosun RZ Capital, Rainmatter, LendenClub founder, Bhavin Patel, and other angels.

You can find out about; why we invested in Kredily?