India's start-up landscape has surged with entrepreneurs, backed by government initiatives like Start-up India offering tax benefits. Incubators and accelerators have also bolstered the ecosystem. Sectors like e-commerce, fintech, health tech, and edtech have flourished. This growth fosters innovation, job creation, and economic expansion. Challenges remain, including funding and regulations, yet India's start-up prowess is globally acknowledged, reflecting its potential for transformative innovation. The ecosystem's trajectory showcases a nation embracing entrepreneurship and innovation, poised to shape its future through technology and ingenuity.

This week, we observed Chakr Innovation, a pioneering startup specializing in pollution reduction solutions, has secured substantial funding of INR 18 crores from the Export-Import Bank of India; and Enterprise skilling company Disprz has raised $30 million in its Series C funding round led by Lumos Capital Group and 360 ONE Asset. These are just two examples of the top ten startups that raised million-dollar funds this week.

Chakr Innovation

In a significant development for India's environmental sustainability and technology sector, Chakr Innovation, a pioneering startup specializing in pollution reduction solutions, has secured substantial funding of INR 18 crores from the Export-Import Bank of India. The funds were sanctioned under EXIM Bank's Ubharte Sitare Programme (USP), reflecting the institution's commitment to fostering domestic growth and addressing international demands.

Chakr Innovation is an Indian technology startup that places a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability and the reduction of pollution. The company specializes in the production of certified emission control devices for stationary diesel generators, with the goal of mitigating air pollution and its adverse effects on the environment and public health. Chakr Innovation's initiatives are in line with India's increasing concerns regarding air quality and challenges related to pollution. By offering practical and sustainable solutions, the company aims to create a positive impact on the environment and for the entire country.

Shaktimaan.ai

Shaktimaan.ai, has secured $2 million in its recent seed funding round. The fundraising is backed by prominent investors such as YCombinator, Fundersclub, GoodWater Capital, Misbah and Nishchay (Founders of Jar), along with other angel investors. The company is co-founded by Vimal Singh Rathore, a top educator and serial entrepreneur, and Aseem Gupta, who brings technological innovation to the platform as the tech co-founder.

A significant percentage of the funds will be allocated to building an LLM (Language Model) trained for diverse educational use cases, thus enhancing the platform's capabilities and adaptability. The AI-backed learning platform aims to reach the milestone of serving the first 100,000 students by December 2023.

Bluwheelz

The funding will also enable Bluwheelz to invest in advanced technology and innovations, enhance its service offerings, and further strengthen its partnerships with various stakeholders in the electric mobility ecosystem. EV fleet-as-a-service company, Bluwheelz, has raised $500,000 in Seed funding from early-stage fund Faad Network. The funding round also saw strong participation from Lets Venture, as well as from a group of High-Net-Worth Individuals (HNIs), a family office, and marquee angel investors from both India and the United States.

According to an official statement, with this new capital infusion, Bluwheelz is poised to continue its expansion into other parts of the country over the next six months. It added this funding will also enable Bluwheelz to invest in advanced technology and innovations, enhance its service offerings, and further strengthen its partnerships with various stakeholders in the electric mobility ecosystem.

MetaShot

Bangalore-based gaming startup, MetaShot has secured $400,000 in a pre-seed funding round. The participation for this round included Inflection Point Ventures, an early-stage gaming-focused fund, and prominent angel investors, such as the founders of Dineout: Ankit Mehrotra, Sahil Jain, and Khalid Qazi, among others. The funds are earmarked for various key areas of MetaShot's business. This includes expanding the team, investing towards growth and marketing, and allocating resources for research and development (R&D) efforts.

MetaShot is a startup on a mission to bring the joy of physical sports to every living room. Founded by Prince Thomas, Ranjit Behera, and Ajith Sunny, the founding team has extensive experience in senior leadership positions across Soonicorns and Unicorns. Through their immersive gameplay, MetaShot aims to revolutionise the world of interactive entertainment. “MetaShot is bringing a near real life cricketing experience to the gamers. Cricket is loved in India in all seasons and for all reasons,” says Vikram Ramasubramanian, Partner, Inflection Point Ventures.

Credgenics

SaaS-based debt collections and resolution technology platform Credgenics said it has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Westbridge Capital, Accel, Tanglin Ventures, Beams Fintech Fund and other strategic investors.

The company, valued at $340 million, will use the funds for product innovation and enrichment, international business expansion, and capturing other BFSI industry segments. “With these resources, we can extend our innovative debt recovery solutions to new markets, empowering individuals and businesses worldwide to regain control of their loan collections,” said Rishabh Goel, Co-founder and CEO, Credgenics.

Bidso

Bidso, a B2B sourcing platform for manufacturers said it has raised a cumulative funding of $1.5 Mn as part of its pre-seed and seed round. While PeerCapital invested $1.2 Mn in the seed round, the pre-seed round saw participation from DeVC and angel investors like The Mom’s Co’s Mohit Sadaani, Partner- RTP Global’s Nishit Garg, and Livspace’s Saurabh Jain.

In a statement, Bidso said it will use the funds to expand its presence, enhance its curated network of manufacturers, and build a technology stack, including a quality adherence module for manufacturers and a product configuration engine for buyers. Founded in 2023 by Rahul Agarwal, Ashwin Jain, Aditya Krishnakumar and Vivek Singhal, Bidso offers a full-stack solution for brand sourcing, from product discovery to supplier discovery to value discovery and fulfilment. In simple words, the platform enables manufacturers to find suppliers and source products from them.

Datamotive

Datamotive, a company that provides cloud workload portability for worldwide organizations, announced that it has raised $3.8 million in a Pre-Series A funding round led by the Dubai-based VC firm Morphosis with contributions from 3one4 Capital, YourNest Venture Capital, and Patni Group. The new funding round will accelerate the delivery of Datamotive’s products that enable organizations to seamlessly and securely scale, migrate, and recover data and workloads across public and private clouds with a guaranteed recovery service level agreement (SLA) regardless of cloud and workload size.

Datamotive allows organizations to build a hybrid cloud blueprint that supports freedom of choice for any cloud service provider and offers them the ability to run workloads anywhere on any cloud. Its patented replication and recovery engine enables online, agentless replication of entire workloads (OS, platform, application, and its data), while the recovery engine provides a flat-line recovery time (RTO/CTO) with zero impact on workload performance. The RTO/CTO applies irrespective of the application, its size, or the cloud platform. The company’s strengths lie in enabling cross-hypervisor replication and recovering the workloads using the target native infrastructure.

Avesthagen

Bengaluru-based life sciences company Avesthagen is aiming to raise $50 million to fund the global commercialisation of its product portfolio and hire senior executives, its founder, Villoo Morawala-Patell, told. "I have been playing out of sheer drive and on thin cash, but people have been good to us and we have made it through that. But we need the $50 million to take this global," Morawala-Patell, who is also the company's managing director, said.

She said she is open to offering stakes to those who may be interested in individual domains or an upfront licensing royalty model. Morawala-Patell said the company has scaled down its manufacturing operations, cut staff strength, reduced debt and settled disputes. "We have been taking care of our working capital for the last 3-4 years," said Morawala-Patell. "We are more or less break-even for this year because we are spending on product development and launch, but in the previous three years we have been break-even and profitable."

Disprz

Enterprise skilling company Disprz stated it has raised $30 million in its Series C funding round led by Lumos Capital Group and 360 ONE Asset (IIFL). The round also saw participation from Kae Capital, KOIS and Dallas Venture Capital. The funds, stated the firm, will be utilized for global market expansion and product development, including the integration of Generative AI across the learning and skilling cycle.

“We have built one of the world’s early skill-based learning platforms, and over the last 8 years have innovated in several aspects, like proving tangible performance improvements through data-led learning,” said Subbu Viswanathan, Co-founder, and CEO of Disprz. With the world ready to be disrupted by generative AI, “we are ready to steer towards becoming India's first centaur (profitable $100 million company) in our platform category in the next 4-5 years,” he added.

Lula

Lula, often referred to as the “Stripe for insurance,” has secured $35.5 million in a Series B funding round following a surge in customer demand. Initially focused on developing an insurance API to eliminate the need for businesses to build their own insurance infrastructure, Lula’s services have expanded to offer a comprehensive range of insurance tools. These tools encompass risk management, claims management, policy management, and access to insurance coverage, with the aim of helping companies reduce insurance premiums and related expenses.

Lula’s strategic evolution has proven successful, as its customer base has grown significantly, from 99 businesses in February 2022 to nearly 4,000. While specific revenue figures remain undisclosed, the company’s co-founder and president, Michael Vega-Sanz, highlighted a 20-fold increase in monthly revenue since February 2022. This growth trajectory has propelled Lula’s valuation to five times its 2021 level.