ITV

Tag: 9Unicorns

  • Lightbulb.ai raises $1.5 mn in pre-seed funding round from investors

    Lightbulb.ai raises $1.5 mn in pre-seed funding round from investors

    MUMBAI: Lightbulb.ai, an emotion AI and engagement analytics platform has raised a pre-seed funding round of $1.5 million from investors Chiratae Ventures and 9Unicorns. The other investors participating include Anthill Ventures and AI-led video-editing company, VideoVerse. The funds raised by this early-stage start-up will be deployed to deepen the datasets for their machine-learning technology & expand the product offering of emotion and engagement insights gathered from a user’s video, audio and speech inputs for a variety of industries. 

    Lightbulb is the brainchild of second-time entrepreneurial trio – Ritu Srivastava, Yogesh Sachdeva and Vishal Soni – who have earlier built and exited Obino, a digital health & weight-loss coaching start-up, that offered health-management solutions across a variety of health conditions. Their successful exit to US-based health conglomerate Roundglass Partners in 2017, paved the way for their next venture. With a minimum viable product (MVP) launch in late 2021, Lightbulb has had an opportunity to validate its product and market hypotheses before zeroing in on its go-to-market (GTM) plans.

    With four patents already in the pipeline and datasets spanning millions of faces across geographies and ethnicities, Lightbulb aims to help businesses that offer remote user experiences, to solve for higher engagement by mapping user emotion & engagement in real-time! From analysing user engagement during live meetings/calls to researching the emotional impact of pre-recorded content and asynchronous user experiences on consumers, Lightbulb offers nuanced solutions that are relevant to industries such as online learning, sales enablement and consumer research. 

    With insights from early customers pouring in, Lightbulb is fast-tracking growth on its multi-modal product & this early-stage capital infusion will help accelerate Lightbulb.ai in building its product & engineering teams, particularly in the fields of data science, machine learning and consumer insights and prepare itself for an early launch in the US market. The company was exclusively advised on this transaction by PepperTree, an advisory firm run by ex-bankers Akshi Mehta & Ankur Goyal.

    Lightbulb.ai co-founder and CEO Ritu Srivastava said, “We are privileged to be supported by some of India’s most prestigious early-stage institutional investors, with vast experience in helping deep-tech B2B SAAS companies build & scale global products in international markets. And are deeply grateful for the trust that they have placed in us at this early stage!” 

    Co-founder & CPO Vishal Soni said, “Customer decisions are emotional & not rational! Since current feedback modes are post-facto, by the time actionable intelligence reaches decision makers, opportunities are lost. Lightbulb enables businesses to measure emotion data & transmit actionable insights to decision-makers in real-time, helping them acquire and retain better.”

    Co-founder & CTO Yogesh Sachdeva said, “Our focus is now on developing a powerful platform that can power significant value-adding emotion ai products with high accuracy levels across ethnicities and age groups & applicability across multiple industries.”

    “Leveraging an intelligent emotion recognition platform through video interaction, Lightbulb is leading the next wave of innovation in this space. We are excited to partner with the founding team at Lightbulb, as they disrupt leading industries like education, banking, mental wellness etc,” said Chiratae Ventures India Advisors founder & chairman Sudhir Sethi.

    9Unicorns Accelerator Fund co-founder & managing director Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma said, “While emotion ai is at a nascent stage, it is an exponentially growing technology with a wide variety of use-cases across multiple industries. Lightbubl.ai holds the potential to be relevant across multiple market verticals and that is a strong indicator of how valuable the company will be in the future. As the world becomes more chaotic, the importance of emotion AI will only grow. We are excited to support the team as they enhance the accessibility and utility of emotion AI.”

    “We are excited to support Lightbubl.ai at this stage of its growth trajectory. They have shown great promise so far and we are deeply interested in the solutions that they are building for media and consumer research markets. Media tech is an explosively growing field and we are sure that Lightbulb will be able to make a clear space for itself in this market and scale with speed!”, said Anthill ventures CEO Prasad Vanga.

    “As a company that also harnesses the power of AI, we recognise the potential that emotion AI has as a technology. We are thrilled to be a part of this journey and are confident the team will build a long-term product solution with strong fundamentals,” said Videoverse strategy lead Siddhant Bhandari.

  • Celebrity-fan engagement start-up Gonuts raises seed round from Sweta Rau, Archana Priyadarshini, 9Unicorns and others

    Celebrity-fan engagement start-up Gonuts raises seed round from Sweta Rau, Archana Priyadarshini, 9Unicorns and others

    Gonuts, Asia’s largest and most influential celebrity commerce platform has raised 3.5 Crore in seed funding led by marquee investors Sweta Rau and Archana Priyadarshini. 9Unicorns, AngelList, Lets Venture, Pankaj Chaddah( Co-Founder, Mindhouse & Zomato), Ramakant Sharma, (Co-Founder, LivSpace), IIM Indore Alumni Fund, Harshal Morde, (Morde Foods Pvt. Ltd.) and other marquee angels and founders also participated in this round.

    Founded by serial entrepreneurs Vinamra Pandiya and Mayank Gupta along with Media & Entertainment veteran Joji George in March 2020, GoNuts aims to bridge the gap between celebrities and their millions of fans, and democratise talent to the Indian and expatriate Indian diaspora. Gonuts has a long term vision of creating India's largest celebrity experience e-commerce platform.

    GoNuts has a portfolio of over 700 of the leading celebrities, most of them exclusive on Gonuts, across categories like films, television, sports and music, amongst others, available on its platform. This gives users a diverse range of celebrities to choose from to convey personalized messages to their loved ones. The platform has leading celebrities exclusive on the platform which includes Shankar Mahadevan, Hans Raj Hans, Shaan, Kailash Kher, Sukhbir, Talat Aziz, Shibani Kashyap, Hariharan, Sivamani, Shivin Narang, Jonty Rhodes, Sumeet Verma, Ranveer Brar Ashish Vidyarthi and Vicky Ratnani.

    Vinamra Pandiya, Founder, Gonuts said that “Our plan is to strengthen our market leadership and follow through on our vision to be Asia’s largest and most influential celebrity commerce platform. We feel that investments in the right team, technology and other levers of growth is very important and will be our immediate priority. We aim to on-board 5000+ of the most influential and inspirational celebrities by the next financial year and be the unicorn out of India in this category for the rest of the world.”

    Sweta Rau, Angel and Venture Investor, White Ventures said that “Experiences are so much more valuable than anything else. Gonuts is creating category in by building marketplace that help create experiences of joy, excitement and fun.  It is making it easy for fans and influencers/celebrities connect in a deeper way through personalised videos to begin with.”

    Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, MD & Co-founder – 9Unicorns, said, “Indians are quite passionate about the celebrities that they follow. And yet, the influence that they hold over the masses has largely been untapped by brands. The team at GoNuts is creating a disruption in this field by delivering curated celebrity experiences. We are confident in its potential to achieve rapid scale. As brands look to bounce back from the pandemic by using newer ways of engaging with their audiences, we are confident that GoNut’s array of offerings will achieve greater traction in the market.”

    The uniqueness of the platform is its ability to connect the Indian and global Indian diaspora to talent across genres that are multi- lingual and also at multi segmented price points.