As usual, we will cover the unicorns and the mega deals first.
And the next unicorn is
Lead School became the third unicorn for the year, with a 740 cr funding from WestBridge and GSV at a valuation of 8135 cr.
Mega deals this week
WayCool raised a 870 cr series D round including a 163 cr debt, from LightRock, LightBox, FMO, Lightsmith, IFC, Gawa, and Redwood to build tech for its food and agri platform. Curefoods raised 458 cr from Iron Pillar, Chiratae, Sixteenth Street Capital, Accel and Binny Bansal to continue buying food brands. Curefoods already has 20 brands in its portfolio. This comes at a time when Thrasio enters India with 3750 cr funding into Lifelong for acquiring and scaling sellers/brands across D2C and ecommerce platforms.
Electric Vehicle sector deals
Deals of the week were in the EV space. Rare and first time we saw EV deals in 2 wheeler, 4W/OEM and aircraft segments in the same week. Hero pumps another 420 cr into Ather, as Ola Electric seems to be upping its production game. EV 4W/OEM startup EVage raised 208 cr from RedBlue as seed round (yes you read that right a seed round of 208 cr) for building its factory near Delhi this year. EV aircraft startup The ePlane company raised 37 cr led by Speciale invest and Micelio with participation from 3one4, Anicut and Java capital. The ePlane company is looking to build options in the low-flying, multi-hop intra-city travel.
Other deals
We saw 2 significant deals in the gaming/video segment. The first one is Rooter raising 185 cr in Series A from Lightbox, March Gaming, and others to develop its user-generated live sports content platform. The other is Turnip which raised 92 cr in Series A from Greenoaks and Elevation Capital for building its gaming community platform.
One-off large deal in the environment sector happened with Recykal raising 162 cr from Morgan Stanley and Circulate Capital to expand its hyperlocal waste processing infra.
We are seeing a number of smaller deals in the neobank, lending platform, and the diversified financial services sector. Kaleidofin raised 74 cr in series B, Muvin raised 20 cr in equity/venture debt, Arthan finance raised 18 cr from Dell foundation and Ippopay raised 15 cr. Uniquely Grip Invest raised 7 cr from its customers who were early adopters in its asset financing platform.
Early/seed stage deals dominated volume this week, and for once Chennai and Bangalore had an equal number of deals, with Delhi closely following in volume.