Amagi among Unicorn
- Covering unicorns first, we saw Amagi entering the unicorn club with a 725 cr funding from Accel and others as it aims to scale its suite of video and media solutions. While existing unicorn Licious raised more than 1100 cr from Amansa Capital, along with Kotak PE and Axis Growth Avenues AIF-I and a few angel investors including Nithin Kamath and Nikhil Kamath of Zerodha, Aman Gupta of BoAt, and Haresh Chawla, Partner at True North. It is going to get tougher for the next in line Captain Fresh and Freshtohome to compete against Licious.
- Zomato committed more than 1100 cr as a loan to Blinkit (formerly Grofers) at a 12% interest in a show of confidence in the quick commerce category. Zomato during the week also closed on taking a 16.6% stake in food robotics startup Mukunda for 38 cr.
Other deals
- Another Accel-backed startup Bluestone raised 225 cr from Hero Enterprises to scale its offline jewelry business to 300 stores from its current 70 across the country.
- UpScalio is into D2C / ‘house of brands’ play, raised 114 cr in a pre-Series B round led by Gulf Islamic Investments to scale its brands and teams.
- White Oak, IIFL, and others pumped in an additional 130 cr in a pre-IPO round into Aether which is into specialty chemicals and contract manufacturing services.
- Health benefits startup Ekincare raised 113 cr led by HealthQuad, and Sabre Partners to experiment and scale other treatment categories including Lasik and infertility treatments.
- EV sector deals are now a regular in our column, this week, EV financing startup Revfin raised 100 cr in debt led by Northern Arc and others to make financing convenient and accessible. Also in the EV sector, Trouve motors which are into EV solutions and have a concept EV superbike raised 23 cr in seed funding.
- Gaming startup LILA Games raised 76 cr for further product development.
- Curelink secured a 27 cr seed round from Elevation Capital and Venture Highway and other angels including Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
- B2B supply chain startup Shipskart raised 20 cr as Series A from Trail Mix Ventures (TMV) and Hermes Offshore to further develop its India operations in the maritime supply chain.
- On the content and marketing side we saw marketing automation startup Xeno raise 12 cr from Vinyl Capital, Java Capital and others to further its growth for B2C companies.
- While Cosmofeed raised 11 cr in seed from Growx ventures, Waveform Ventures, & 9 Unicorns with participation from Singapore-based investment holding company Silk Bridge Partners (SBP) and a bunch of angels to scale its content creators platform.
There were about 37 deals last week, and it was equally split between seed/early stage and late/growth stage companies. There were 4 IPOs in a diverse set of companies including KN Agri, Bhatia Color (specialty chemicals), Coolcaps (also in chemicals) and Swarajya suiting. Bangalore and NCT dominated the deal volumes last week.
