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 that are doing similar things. Click here to know about my rationale behind this weekly exercise.
Last week, the ecosystem bounced back with over 3 equity deals/day average, with 19 startups raising $70 million. It is a big week for early-stage deals after a two-week lull. With the significant growth in the digital economy, I expect that this momentum should magnify further.
This week 18 deals were in the early-stage rounds (compared to 7 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: Able Jobs
Amount Raised: $1.8 million from Saif Partners, Y Combinator, Neeraj Arora, Titan Capital, and First Cheque.
What does Able Jobs do?
Edited from Tracxn: Able Jobs provides enterprise recruitment services. They are a Bengaluru-based hiring platform for entry-level talent, with BigBasket, Zeta, NoBroker, and more as their clients.
Why do I like Able Jobs?
I love the straightforward product offering available on Able’s website:
- We will find you a candidate in 5 days
- We will charge you 1 month’s salary on a successful hire
- If the candidate leaves within 3 months, we will find you a free replacement
There are many other recruiting websites; therefore, Able’s offering is in no way unique. But many of them sell on complex algorithms to identify or curate candidates. As an employer, I don’t care about the algos. What I care about is my time, cost, result, and the quality assurance of the recruiter – Able answered all of it on their website. Brilliant!
Name: Pixxel
Amount Raised: $5 million led by Blume Ventures, growX Ventures, and Lightspeed Ventures.
What does Pixxel do?
Edited from Tracxn: Pixxel provides satellite-based imaging solutions. The company is developing a constellation of Earth-imaging small satellites to provide real-time insights to monitor agriculture, oil & gas, climate, etc.
Why do I like Pixxel?
As investors in Agnikul, we are continually looking into space (pun not intended). Jokes apart, the ambitions of India’s space tech startups were thrown open when the government opened ISRO’s launch sites for private players. Watch out – Agnikul and Pixxel may be the beginning of the race to space!
Name: OneScore
What does OneScore do?
Edited from Inc42: Onescore is a credit score management platform. Users can check their credit score on the platform and their loan and credit card history. It offers tips & suggestions to improve the credit score.
Why do I like OneScore?
I have had over 10 credit or debit cards for more than 15 years. I have tried all sorts of wallets to hold my cards, but barring a slick Segrid twin wallet gifted to me, I haven’t found a single wallet to keep my cards together.
I have been so obsessed with solving this problem that I backed an Indiegogo project, the Fuze Card, that promised to combine a range of my cards into a single card. My excitement died down when the Fuze card refused to work with an of my EMV chip cards. I was extremely disappointed.
However, it seems like OneScore has the answer with its OneCard offering. I love this startup just for this – everything else (for me) is a plus-plus!
I have purposefully not included Daalchini’s raise of $712k in this list as we (re)invested in the startup through Artha Venture Fund, with angels Ajay Kaul, Ashutosh Valani, Priyank Shah, Vaibhav Karnavat, Amit Lakhotia.
