Avendus, India’s top venture adviser, confirms it’s looking to raise a $350M fund

Avendus, the top investment bank for venture deals in India, confirmed on Wednesday it is looking to raise up to $350 million for its new private equity fund. 
The new fund, called Future Leaders Fund III, will enable the Mumbai-headquartered firm to write larger checks and maintain a meaningful position in the startups it backs. 

A regular fixture in most growth-stage deals in India, Avendus has established itself as the largest venture adviser for startups in the country. It provided services in over 30 deals last year, including merger-and-acquisition transactions, according to Venture Intelligence, a private market insight platform. The growing size of its private equity unit underscores the firm’s ambitions to extend its tentacles even more deeply into the ecosystem and see more upside from the winnings.

The firm’s rise to prominence was aided by the fact that many of its well-established global rivals, such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan, initially paid less attention to the Indian market, allowing Avendus to gain a foothold and build relationships with the country’s burgeoning tech entrepreneurs. 

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MARS doubles down on India’s Infra.Market with new $50M investment

Infra.Market, an Indian startup that helps constructions and real estate firms procure materials, has raised $50 million from MARS Unicorn Fund as it looks to expand operations overseas. 

MARS Unicorn Fund, a joint venture between AI-driven fund Liquidity Group and Japanese bank MUFG, is an existing backer of the Mumbai-headquartered startup, having invested $50 million in it in 2022. The new investment, a primary fundraise (structured with both debt and equity) by Infra.Market’s Singapore unit, values the startup at $2.5 billion — retaining the 2021 Series C’s valuation.

Infra.Market is attempting to transform the way small businesses in India’s manufacturing sector operate. By installing its load cells in manufacturing facilities, for instance, Infra.Market helps companies have a better grip on quality control and assists them source better raw materials. It also helps customers work with other businesses that can provide them with better raw material and provide guidance on pricing.

This is a major problem in India, where the construction industry is highly fragmented and dominated by small players that lack the resources and expertise to optimize their operations. The startup says its tech has helped small manufacturers attract larger clients and expand their reach beyond India, attracting clients in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore and Dubai. 

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Former Priceline execs debut Plannin, a booking platform that uses travel influencers to help plan trips

Andrew Loewen and Randy Schartner, co-founders of Hotelsbycity.com and former Priceline executives, just announced their latest project: Plannin, a global travel booking platform that empowers creators to monetize their hotel recommendations and share travel-focused content.

As the creator economy continues to ramp up in value, estimated to generate $250 billion in revenue, Plannin wants to put a twist on travel booking by using influencers as an alternative to travel agents. 

With Plannin, creators can tell their audience about their latest trip, which hotels they liked and post photos of their travels. To earn income, they share an affiliate link across social platforms for their followers to sign up on Plannin. Meanwhile, travelers can access thousands of creator recommendations and can directly book hotels through the platform.

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OneScreen.ai brings startup ads to billboards and NYC’s subway

When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window. Now, as the CEO of OneScreen.ai, he’s helping startups like fintech Ramp and technical recruiter Karat advertise on billboards and beyond.

“I think billboards are cool and help bring creativity back into marketing. They are like canvases for marketers in a way a digital screen isn’t.”

Ewing joined Boston-based OneScreen last year. The company acts as a software-enabled middleman in between startups and out-of-home (OOH) advertising slots like billboards, subway ads and others. OneScreen helps startups find the right placement for their ads based on the potential customers companies want to reach paired with the demographic and historical data on the platform. The company also uses anonymized location data to help companies track how successful their campaigns are, too.

OneScreen has raised $4.7 million from investors including Asymmetric Capital Partners, Techstars and Impellent Ventures, among others. The company is currently profitable and tripled its revenue last year.

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General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce. Engineering and product design were among the departments impacted by the cuts, according to posts on LinkedIn from impacted employees.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Adam Pellegrini, didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. TechCrunch’s attempts to reach Jasper Health’s chief operating officer, chief growth officer, and head of marketing via email were unsuccessful, with messages bouncing back.

A little over two years ago, in February 2022, Jasper Health raised a $25 million Series A led by General Catalyst, with participation from Human Capital, W Health Ventures, Redesign Health and 7wireVentures. At that time, the company said it raised a total of $31 million in venture capital.

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Iceland’s startup scene is all about making the most of the country’s resources

With fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, Iceland receives more than its fair share of tourists — and of venture capital. Both are good reasons to pay attention to what’s going on and coming out of this unique island nation.

“We need more pillars to our economy,” Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, recently told TechCrunch at Iceland Innovation Week in Reykjavík.

Some diversification is already underway, and the country’s export revenues from IP-driven industries have been rising steadily. But more than being its own pillar, Icelandic innovation ties into what’s already there: Startups are building tech to help the country make the most of its resources and economic activities — fisheries and heavy industry top that list, but they’re also marketing the local talent and culture.

However, it is hard to infer trends from meager data on the handful of startup deals that are done in Iceland each year. Here’s what you need to know about the types of startups that have taken root and are flourishing in the island nation:

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How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items

The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills in 2022 alone, according to data from return logistics software company Optoro. New York-based (Re)vive wants to help companies find a better ending for their returned items.

(Re)vive takes in products that retailers have deemed too damaged to sell and fixes them up — whether that means washing them, reattaching a button, or lint-rolling off some dog hair. The items are then sold through various channels, and (Re)vive’s data platform helps retailers monitor and manage their waste.

The underlying tech is quite interesting. The startup’s founder and CEO, Allison Lee, said the company’s software lets its employees sort, label and determine the outcome of a box of returned items in about three minutes. The software will also show retailers how much of a certain SKU — a product’s identifying number — was returned and how much money they can potentially make from saving and selling the returned items.

Refreshed items that are still in season head back to stores, while (Re)vive sells out-of-season goods on third-party channels like eBay and Poshmark on behalf of retailers and takes a cut from each sale.

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Engineer brothers found Forge to modernize hardware procurement

Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the part you eventually do select, and tracking those parts until they arrive at your HQ. It’s exactly as complex as it sounds – but it doesn’t have to be, or so say two brothers who just scored funding to update the procurement process for hardware companies.

Like so many startups, Forge was born out of frustration with outdated tools in an otherwise cutting-edge industry. CEO Emir Sahmanovic was a mechanical engineer at defense and space companies L3Harris, Blue Origin, and Stoke Space. And at each one, he ran into the same infuriating problem: actually getting the parts they needed.

“I just kept getting more and more frustrated throughout my career,” he said in a recent interview. “It really came down to the point where I felt the thing that was holding back hardware was the software tooling that everybody was using. It was making everyone way more inefficient.” 

He teamed up with his brother, former Meta software engineer Haris Sahmanovic, to found Forge in May 2023. The pair joined Y Combinator’s winter 2024 cohort, and this $2.1 million seed round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures includes participation from YC and other angel investors.

Emir characterized today’s hardware procurement process as confusing, overly complicated, and wasteful. At larger firms, engineers are typically kept out of the process — the procurement request gets put in a “black box,” he said — but they’re also generally unaware of other team members’ procurement orders, too.

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SoftBank-backed grocery startup Oda lays off 150, resets focus on Norway and Sweden

It’s not just instant-delivery startups that are struggling. Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year.

Oda, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was once valued as high as $900 million in a round led by SoftBank in its Vision Fund investment heyday, now saysits aim is to become profitable in the two countries sometime next year. 

Oda’s retreat mirrors what we’ve seen play out in the instant grocery delivery space, where a number of startups have either sold down or been acquired for pennies on each dollar raised as they have struggled to get the unit economics to work amid sluggish growth. That all appeared to come to a major head in April, when Getir, the startup out of Turkey that raised $2.3 billion, announced layoffs and a retreat to its home market in pursuit of getting out of the red.  

“Grocery is the largest category in retail, but even the most capable organizations in the world have struggled to find an online model that works. Online grocery is hard — complex orders with perishable items and a multi-temperature supply chain in a highly price sensitive category,” Oda’s CEO, Chris Poad, wrote on LinkedIn last week (before the layoffs were announced). 

Poad’s very presence at the company is part of its efforts to get out of that “struggle”. 

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Greptile raises $4M to build an AI-fueled code base expert

When you look at how generative AI is being implemented across developer tools, the focus for the most part has been on generating code, as with Github Copypilot. Greptile, an early stage startup from a group of recent Georgia Tech grads, decided to take a different approach: using AI to help developers understand the code base.

And rather than solely using a chat interface, as most vendors have done, the startup provided another unique twist by building an API that developers could connect to the code base and build custom apps based on an AI-driven query. On Thursday, the company announced a $4 million seed round.

Greptile CEO and co-founder Daksh Gupta says the Greptile bot is like having a highly experienced coworker who has a deep understanding of your code. “So we’re building AI tools that understand large code bases at companies because as time goes on, and multiple programmers work on the codebase, it tends to get very difficult to understand,” Gupta told.

“The API has essentially two parameters: One is you connect the repositories that you want referenced, and it makes sure they’re indexed. Once the repositories have been indexed by the system, you add a natural language query such as, how does the authentication work in this code base,” he said.

The startup launched last July after the founders came up with the idea for the company at a hackathon. They released the product, quickly grew to around 100 customers paying $10-$20 a month and applied and got into Y Combinator for the Winter 24 batch.

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Carta’s valuation to be cut by $6.5 billion in upcoming secondary sale

Carta, a once-high-flying Silicon Valley startup that loudly backed away from one of its businesses earlier this year, is working on a secondary sale that would value the company at $2 billion, TechCrunch has learned.

Carta is working with the investment bank Jeffries on the sale and initially hoped to find demand for the offering at a valuation of $4 billion, but according to our sources, even $2 billion may prove ambitious.

That’s a massive, if not entirely unexpected, drop in valuation for Carta, which originally focused on cap table management software but began over time to evolve into a “private stock market for companies.” Its goal was to take advantage of the network of companies and investors that use its platform and into which it has insights. The big idea was to become the transfer agent, brokerage and clearinghouse for all private stock transactions in the world.

As part of that narrative, Carta launched an exchange that aimed to find buyers for shares using an auction-style system, and it later used this same system to bolster its own value in the eyes of investors. Indeed, after big leaps in valuation, from $1.7 billion in 2019 to $3.1 billion in 2020, Carta announced in the summer of 2021 that it was worth a whopping $7.4 billion after first selling $100 million worth of its shares at a $6.9 billion valuation on its own platform.

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Rippling bans former employees who work at competitors like Deel and Workday from its tender offer stock sale

Investor demand has been so strong for shares of hot HR startup Rippling – over $2 billion worth of term sheets, it says – that it is allowing former employees to also participate in its giant, tender offer sale, the company told.

But there is one big exception: it has banned former employees who work for a handful of competitors from selling their stock. A small group of ex employees has been trying to get the company to alter this policy, TechCrunch has learned, but so far, to no avail.

Rippling has also told employees who have previously sold shares, particularly if those sales were outside its previous tender offer, that they would not be authorized to sell as many shares this time around.

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Cat-sitting startup Meowtel clawed its way to profitability despite trouble raising from dog-focused VCs

Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5 million households with one, a lot of innovation in the pet category has focused exclusively on dogs. And even if the service serves both species, the focus is more prominently on dogs.

Sonya Petcavich, the founder of cat-sitting app Meowtel, thinks that cats, and cat people, deserve more.

When Petcavich’s cat Lily died in 2015, she realized she might not have been the best cat mom. Petcavich traveled a lot for her job in sales for Philip Morris and wasn’t home as much as she thought her senior cat might have needed. She knew that pet-sitting services existed, but she didn’t think they did enough for feline friends.

“There needs to be a service for cat people specifically; they have very different needs,” Petcavich told TechCrunch. “Rover had been around for a few years, and Wag was picking up steam, but they were so dog focused. I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to be the crazy cat person who does this.’”

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Stake raises $14M to bring its fractional property investment platform to Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi

The UAE is facing a good problem: Its real estate market is booming, and there is no shortage of buyers. Dubai rents in 2024 jumped 23% year-on-year back up to pre-pandemic levels, and sales are up 18%, according to Deloitte, and this upward trend is set to continue for the coming years.

No doubt some of that demand is spilling over to neighboring Abu Dhabi, which is likely why the city’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Company, recently participated in a $14 million Series A round raised by Dubai-based Stake, which is bringing its fractional property investment platform to the UAE capital next year.

The Series A was led by Middle East Venture Partners with participation from Aramco’s Wa’ed Ventures and private investment platform Republic.

Founded by Manar Mahmassani, Rami Tabbara and Ricardo Brizido in 2020, Stake aims to use the new cash to fuel its international plans — the majority of the money will be used to enter Saudi Arabia in the next few months and to expand to Abu Dhabi next year. Some of the money will also be used to offer more options in Dubai, like investing in commercial real estate. The startup has raised a total of $26 million to date.

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Anterior grabs $20M from NEA to expedite health insurance approvals with AI

Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by NEA, according to two people familiar with the deal. Existing investors Sequoia, which led Anterior’s $3.2 million seed round last September, and Neo, an accelerator that helped the company launch in the summer of 2022, also participated in the Series A financing.

The round also included a host of angel investors, including Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind and Inflection AI co-founder who was hired by Microsoft in March to lead the tech giant’s consumer AI division.

NEA and Anterior didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anterior, formerly known as Co:Helm, was co-founded by Abdel Mahmoud, a former doctor who left medicine to pursue a master’s degree in computer science and a career in tech after he grew frustrated with the amount of time he spent on administrative functions rather than with patients.   

The company has built an LLM-powered co-pilot that helps nurses and doctors save hours on gathering medical documentation required by insurance. Anterior’s solution aims to reduce denial rates and accelerate patient access to care.

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Washington’s political class doesn’t know Y Combinator exists — yet

Washington, D.C., may be the hub for legislation and regulation that affects startups, but many people in the city don’t know anything about one of the more prominent accelerators fueling the industry: Y Combinator. Speaking at a TechCrunch Strictly VC event on Tuesday evening, YC Head of Public Policy Luther Lowe said the startup incubator is looking to raise its profile in Washington.

Lowe, who joined the accelerator last fall from Yelp, where he was SVP of Public Policy, said his role at YC is something like “YC 101” for the Washington crowd.

“So many folks in D.C. don’t actually know what it is,” he remarked.
Founded in 2005, Lowe called YC the “original accelerator.” He explained its roots in the industry to the crowd at the event, noting that the accelerator was co-founded by Paul Graham, who had successfully sold a company in the 1990s and was helping founders by writing essays to help them avoid pitfalls. When Graham put out a call for startup applications, a dozen startups got into YC’s debut class. Reddit and Twitch came from that initial cohort, and the program kept growing in the years since.

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Court halts Byju’s second rights issue as $200M fundraise falters

Byju’s is having a hard time raising the full $200 million from its rights issues that its founder had previously claimed was oversubscribed. And now India’s National Company Law Tribunal has restrained the company from proceeding with its second rights issue amid allegations of oppression and mismanagement by its shareholders.

The Tribunal on Thursday also ordered the company to maintain status quo on its existing shareholdings until a petition filed by two of its investors, General Atlantic and Sofina, had been dealt with. Rights issues allow companies to raise capital by giving shareholders the opportunity to purchase additional shares at a discount, in proportion to their current stake.

Byju’s had launched its first rights issue in late January, but a court order directed the company to not tap the funds it had raised through that rights issue after many of its investors opposed the fundraise. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup had launched the fundraise after struggling to raise cash amid allegations of lapses in corporate governance, and that rights issue pretty much demolished its valuation to about $25 million, which is an astonishing decline from the $22 billion price tag the startup once enjoyed.

The startup recently sought to raise money again from another rights issue as it scrambled to pay employees and continue operations, but that effort has now been stalled.

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Why being the last company to launch in a category can pay off

When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway in 2019, he knew he was not the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans to millennials scrolling through Instagram. But he found that launching after his peers ended up being a blessing in disguise in all areas but one.

When Caraway launched, it joined companies like Our Place, Great Jones and Made In Cookware in an increasingly crowded category of online cookware startups. But being a little late to the party allowed Caraway to see what other brands’ products and target audiences were, Nathan said. This allowed Caraway to change its approach and try to fill the gaps these brands were leaving open.

Nathan said that Caraway initially planned to source its pans off the factory shelf, and target millennials who were looking for something nicer than what you’d find at IKEA but not quite at the wedding registry stage yet. It seemed that every other DTC cookware brand had the same idea, so Caraway shifted gears and instead focused on wedding registries and beyond, spending a little more time and effort on their product design.

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360 One acquires Times Internet’s ET Money for $44 Mn

Wealth and alternates-focused firm 360 One (formerly IIFL Wealth) has acquired Times Internet-owned wealth management platform ET Money for about Rs 365.8 crore ($44 million).

360 One has paid Rs 85.83 crore as cash consideration while the rest of the payment was done through the issue of 35,90,000 fully paid-up equity shares, the filings accessed from National Stock Exchange shows.

The proposed acquisition shall require prior approval of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, stock exchanges, and the apex banking body Reserve Bank of India, the filings further added.
360 One will take over two entities Moneygoals Solutions Limited (ET Money) and Banayantree Services Limited (ET Money Genius). While ET Money provides business advisory, product management and other business support services, ET Money Genius distributes financial products like FD, NPS, Insurance, P2P lending and advisory.

For the fiscal year ending in March 2024, ET Money and ET Money Genius had a turnover of Rs 2 crore and Rs 28.7 crore, respectively.

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Ethereal Machines raises $13 Mn led by Peak XV and Steadview

Advanced manufacturing startup Ethereal Machines has raised $13 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners and Steadview Capital. Existing investors Blume Ventures, Enam Investments, and Sandeep Singhal also participated in this round.

The funds raised will be utilized for R&D, building multi-axis CNC controllers and constructing its second smart factory in the next 12 months, Ethereal said in a press release. This new factory will span 250,000 square feet on the outskirts of Bengaluru.

Founded by Kaushik Mudda and Navin Jain, decade-old Ethereal Machines produces precision engineering components via its proprietary multi-axis CNC machines. Its machines enable precision engineering components to be produced at fast and cost-effective rates. 

Ethereal caters to customers from the USA, Europe, Israel, and India. As per the company, it has manufactured precision components for numerous emerging companies in the deep-tech sector, including space-tech, drones, medical diagnostics, and thermal imaging.

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India’s Oyo, once valued at $10B, finalizes new funding at $2.5B valuation

Oyo, the Indian budget-hotel chain startup, is finalizing a fresh fundraise of about $100 million to $125 million that slashes its valuation to $2.5 billion, two people familiar with the matter. 

That’s a steep decline in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s value, which was worth $10 billion in 2019. The startup, struggling to raise from institutional investors, has been aggressively pitching high-net-worth individuals in recent months.

“We genuinely feel that this asset makes a lot of sense today. Being profitable and @70% discount to the previous valuation. Listing expected in 18-24 months,” a representative of InCred, a financial firm working with Oyo, pitched in a message to a startup founder.

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