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Tag: Nexus Venture Partners

  • Ex-Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal launches spiritual wellness platform OMI

    Ex-Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal launches spiritual wellness platform OMI

    Mumbai: Prashan Agarwal, ex-CEO of Gaana and co-founder of PropTiger, has teamed up with Aniket Lila, ex-Nexus Venture Partners, to launch OMI, an online spiritual and wellness platform.

    OMI aims to combine ancient Vedic methods with a new-age lifestyle. It has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Nexus Venture and is looking to disrupt the spiritual wellness market in India that is valued at more than $ ten billion, the platform in a statement on Wednesday.

    “Today the world is faced with a multitude of changes in our life in terms of the way we live, we connect, we embrace, unprecedented things we go through and this has had an impact on the spiritual, devotional, and mental wellbeing of all of us,” Agarwal said. “Alongside, the internet and digital payment penetration amongst the Indian population is at an all-time high and growing. These dynamics make the market ripe for innovation in this category.”

    “We are disrupting what is nearly a 4000-year old market in India by bringing the best of what ancient India has to offer to millennials through a convenient, private, holistic, and personalised platform,” Lila said. “OMI will be your personal spiritual guide. Our mission is to make the world a happier place. Most Indians are spiritual and this presents us with a blue ocean opportunity.”

    “We’re excited to partner with Prashan and Aniket. This is a very deeply India-specific problem, with very large existing profit pools,”  said Nexus Venture Partners principal Pratik Poddar. “No one has addressed the market in a millennial-centric way and made a product-first, scalable and trustworthy solution. Having known the founders for many years, I am very excited to get a chance to work with them to crack this $ ten billion market!”

    Prashan is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and ISB alumnus. At Gaana, he was instrumental in growing the business and raised more than $ 200 million from Tencent to build Gaana into a household brand. Lila is a graduate of Northwestern University and was most recently part of the investment team at Nexus Venture Partners, India’s largest home-grown VC.

    On the undisclosed amount of funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Agarwal further said, “Primarily, the funding will be used to hire talent across product, technology, and operations. We are looking to onboard leaders with a passion for the stage and who want to help us build OMI from Day zero.”

    “Our aim is to improve the wellbeing of ten million people in five years and create the largest spiritual wellness community in the world. Starting out, on the OMI platform, you can consult with our ‘Astro Guides’ and get a personalised remedy plan which includes activities like meditation, chanting mantras, affirmations, and journaling. Currently, we are focusing on aggregating a fragmented supply and building a trusted brand. As OMI scales, you will see us expanding and adding many more services on the platform aimed at helping you improve your spiritual wellness,” added Lila.

    OMI is available for download in Google Playstore. 

  • Mitron raises $ 5 mn led by Nexus Venture Partners

    Mitron raises $ 5 mn led by Nexus Venture Partners

    KOLKATA: Homegrown short-form video app Mitron has announced it raised $ 5 million, led by Nexus Venture Partners. 3one4 Capital and Arun Tadanki’s private syndicate on LetsVenture also participated in the latest round.

     Mitron app is a short-form social video app that allows users to create, upload, view, and share entertaining short videos. Mitron is founded by Shivank Agarwal (alumnus of IIT Roorkee) and Anish Khandelwal (alumnus of Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology). Both the founders are Computer Science engineers and earlier worked together at MakeMyTrip. 

     The latest round of financing saw participation from stellar angels including Deep Kalra (Chairman, MakeMyTrip), Amrish Rau (CEO, Pine Labs),Jiten Gupta (Founder, Jupiter), Amarjit Batra (MD, Spotify India), Anand Chandrasekharan (Former Facebook, Snapdeal executive),Karan Bajwa (MD, Google Cloud, India),Radhika Ghai (Co-founder, Shopclues), Vikalp Sahni (Co-Founder and Ex-CTO at GoIbibo and Volunteer Architect at AarogyaSetu) and Shanti Mohan (Founder, LetsVenture).TK Kurien (Premji Invest),Manish Vij & Harish Bahl (Smile Group) also participated in their individual capacity.

     The company will use the new infusion of capital to accelerate its product development to increase user engagement and hire high quality talent. The company also plans to onboard a wide network of Indian content creators on the app and invest in building Mitron brand.

     Mitron founder and CEO Shivank Agarwal said, “We are thrilled to have Nexus Venture Partners join us in this journey, bringing in deep expertise of helping their portfolio companies build great products.  We are committed to building Mitron as a world-class product that is designed for Indian users, by reimagining digital entertainment and engagement.

    With more than 33 million downloads on Play Store and nine billion video views per month, Mitron has emerged as the popular choice among Indians for short-form video. We are thankful to our users for their love for Mitron”

    Mitron app was launched in Apr 2020 and achieved the 10 million download milestone even before the unprecedented ban on Chinese apps.     

    Commenting on their decision to invest in Mitron, Pratik Poddar, Principal at Nexus Venture Partners said "Shivank and Anish are product-first, deep-tech and very iterative entrepreneurs. We have been tracking them for 3 months and loved the way they have evolved their thinking around content creation, community management and video delivery. We love backing ‘product and tech-first’ entrepreneurs. We believe eventually the best product with long term thinking will win. Focus is to create a high engagement and high retention community. Then only you can be long term partners for creators."

    Anish Khandelwal, Founder & CTO, said "We have been rapidly improving our product experience and with this funding round, we plan to invest further in hiring top notch product & engineering talent that will help us build a world-class platform that can scale seamlessly”.

    Anurag Ramdasan, Head of Investments at 3one4 Capital, said, “Shivank and Anish have built an impressive product together that we decided to back when they had just launched on the Play Store. Since then, the growth of the product as well as the team has been inspiring. The differentiated, long term thinking demonstrated by the founding team has led us to continue believing in them. We are excited to continue our work with the company to help build the next evolution of video engagement out of India”

    Arun Tadanki said, “Mitron has been making rapid progress in establishing itself as the primary choice in the short-form video space and therefore, we are doubling down on our investment”

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  • ShopClues raises Series E at a valuation of $1.1 billion

    ShopClues raises Series E at a valuation of $1.1 billion

    MUMBAI: Online retailer ShopClues.com that led the adoption of the marketplace model in India received an undisclosed amount of funding in its Series E round. With this deal, ShopClues’ valuation stands at more than $1.1 billion. The round of capital infusion is being led by GIC, the largest sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. Existing investors, including Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners, have also participated in this round of funding.

     

    GIC’s head of Asia Equities research Ravi Balasubramanian said, “As a long-term investor, GIC believes in the strong growth potential of India’s e-commerce industry. We are confident that ShopClues’ merchant-first mind-set and solid management team will enable the company to expand its reach, especially in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, bringing its unique value proposition to even more consumers and merchants.”

     

    ShopClues CEO and co-founder Sanjay Sethi added, “ShopClues has consistently demonstrated that hyper-growth and strong business fundamentals are not mutually exclusive. The recent addition of GIC and the continued strong support from our existing investors is a validation of our capital efficiency with a clear path to profitability. This investment will enable us to double our focus on digitising our merchants’ businesses so that they scale to fully leverage the opportunity online commerce provides them.”

     

    The capital raised will be used to focus on building and rolling out new products to enable the SME merchants to digitise their business and to further entrench itself as the e-commerce operating system on the cloud.

     

    ShopClues co-founder and chief business officer Radhika Aggarwal said, “Today, we are the dominant player in low price-point & unstructured categories like lifestyle, home, kitchen, electronic & automotive accessories etc. Our focus on selection, value and trusted shopping for Indian middle class consumers has given us tremendous scale with a rapidly growing buyer & merchant network. We are confident that our capital efficiency & execution will make this our last fund raise before we become profitable with the eventual IPO in 2017.”

  • Komli Media raises $30 million to strengthen leadership position in Asia Pacific

    Komli Media raises $30 million to strengthen leadership position in Asia Pacific

    NEW DELHI: Komli Media, a digital media technology platform, recently announced that it has raised $30 million from new investor Peepul Capital.  

     

    Existing investors, Norwest Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated in the funding. The company has raised funds to further invest in its key technology platforms and to strengthen its presence through integrated go to market solutions across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

     

    “As digital advertising grows in a fast and fragmented manner, it has become critical for the industry to focus on delivering integrated solutions across social, mobile, display and video,” said Komli Media CEO Prashant Mehta. “We have already seen strong adoption of our integrated solution along with algorithmic trading. With the increased funding, we plan to deepen our focus on innovative technologies, such as real time bidding (RTB), to deliver significantly greater value to our customers.”  

     

    Komli Media has built market-leading technologies such as Remarketing on its proprietary ATOM platform that has scaled across regions by delivering strong ROI metrics in display, social and mobile. The company recently integrated ATOM into Facebook’s RTB (Real-Time-bidding) platform – Facebook Exchange (FBX), making it one of the first adoptees in the region.

     

    “We believe that India and southeast Asia are at an inflection point in embracing digital advertising. Komli is a leading player in these key markets and with its technology platform, wide product suite and exceptional leadership team, the company should consolidate its current position even further,” said Peepul Capital investment director Venkat Shankar.

     

    “Komli’s success story is demonstrated by a CAGR of 200 per cent achieved over the past three years driven by innovative platforms coupled with aggressive organic and inorganic investments.  With this round of funding, we expect to further capitalise on the massive market opportunity and also accelerate our growth,” said Komli Media CFO Rakesh Malani.

     

    Avendus Capital was the leading financial advisor to Komli Media on this transaction.