Funding news

Beyond Appliances raises $2M in seed funding 

Beyond Appliances, a smart kitchen appliance brand, raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by Fireside Venture Investment Fund III. 

The round also saw participation from Dharana Capital and notable angel investors, including Shezan Bhojani (Founder, Design Cafe), Saurabh Jain and Ramakant Sharma (Co-founders, Livspace), and Chandru Kalro (former CEO, TTK Prestige). 

The firm, founded in 2024 by Eshwar K Vikas and Rakesh Patil, will use the capital to accelerate its technology development and manufacturing capabilities. Beyond Appliances’ products are available on major ecommerce platforms, including Amazon and Flipkart, and select retail stores across Bengaluru. 

The company in a statement said it holds multiple patents and plans to expand its product portfolio with eight innovations within existing categories before venturing into new segments.

Homegrown food brand Indic Wisdom raises $2M in pre-Series A round

Indic Wisdom, a Mumbai-based manufacturer of high-quality wood-pressed oils, raised $2 million in a pre-Series A round led by Rockstud Capital and other investors.

Founded by Prajakta Khare and Kaustubh Khare, Indic Wisdom offers a comprehensive product range, including cooking oil, multipurpose oil, and speciality oils.

Other news

Digital real estate platform AltDRX appoints new CMO, CPO 

AltDRX, a digital real estate investment platform, appointed Manisheel Gautam as the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Head of Customer-Facing and Shikhar Daydar as the Chief Product Officer (CPO).

Gautam, an IIT Bombay and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, previously worked at Ola and contributed to the company’s growth from 2014 to 2021 in marketing, category management, and international expansion. He later co-founded Investorey, a platform for alternative investments, raising $1 million in seed funding.

Daydar, also an IIT Bombay graduate, brings expertise in product development and data analytics. He also worked at Ola from 2015 to 2019, focusing on revenue management and product development, and was part of the team that launched Ola Micro.

At Mobile Premier League, he developed skill-based matching systems and optimised fantasy sports events, enhancing revenues and contest sizes.

Collective Artists Network’s Galleri5 unveils AI-powered suite 

New media conglomerate Collective Artists Network introduced the Galleri5 AI-powered suite for brand marketing. 

The platform combines advanced technology with cultural intelligence to streamline content creation, identify emerging trends, and provide real-time insights, helping brands connect with audiences more effectively, the company said in a statement.

Its core feature is its ability to generate hyper-realistic catalogue visuals from basic product images, eliminating the need for traditional photoshoots. Galleri5 also includes a social intelligence module for analysing audience sentiment and campaign performance. The trend discovery tool identifies emerging topics across social media, helping brands stay ahead. 

The company has partnered with top social platforms, including over 50 leading brands.

(This article will be updated with the latest news throughout the day.)

Tata Digital, which operates the Tata conglomerate’s ecommerce super app Neu, has rolled out quick commerce services under Neu Flash in select pin codes and cities.

While Tata’s BB Now already offers groceries and daily essentials in the quick commerce format, Neu Flash features more categories, including apparel, electronics, beauty and personal care, along with groceries.

According to a media report, the service is being powered by the company’s existing hyperlocal operations of BigBasket.

This comes just days after fashion ecommerce platform Myntra initiated pilots for its quick delivery initiative under M-Now, which delivers products from under 30 minutes to 2 hours. The selection currently features brands such as Mochi, Wrangler, Metro, Being Human, and Lavie.

With consumers looking at quick commerce for categories beyond groceries, and even for higher ticket purchases, ecommerce platforms are launching their own quick commerce initiatives.

According to a report by The Economic Times, Amazon India is keen to accelerate the launch of its quick commerce arm, under the name Tez. The ecommerce giant has already started hiring for this initiative.

Last week, quick commerce unicorn Zepto raised additional funding of $350 million in a round led by Motilal Oswal’s Private Wealth division, along with investment from Indian HNIs and family offices. The round came three months after Zepto closed its extended capital infusion of $340 million at a valuation of $5 billion. This is the company’s third round in the last six months, taking its total fundraise this year to $1.35 billion.

About 60% of Indian enterprises’ revenue is expected to come from digital business models in the next three years, according to International Data Corporation’s India Digital Business Survey, 2023 – whether it is in terms of cost, performance, security, or ability to scale.

Cloud computing is projected to see a major upsurge with the multicloud strategy, which is revolutionising how businesses use the cloud. Oracle and YourStory brought together technology leaders to understand each of their respective company’s current status on the cloud journey.

The round-table discussion titled ‘Cloud Infrastructure for Scalable Performance and Cost Efficiency’ featured Shivam Maheshwari, Cofounder and CTO, Goals101; Aman Gupta, Director-Engineering, INDmoney; Sushan Rungta, CTO, Absolute; Hemant Mongia, Vice President – Technology, BharatPe; Divas Sharma, Head – Technology, Fashinza; and Vipul Jain, AVP- Technology, BluSmart Mobility.

While one of the participants cited the use of Kubernetes to manage costs and optimise resources, and the significance of automation in cost management, another talked about the use of cloud cost explorers and tagging resources for cost attribution and budget allocation.

The challenges of managing compute, network, and storage in the cloud and the importance of aligning with industry best practices were also brought to the fore.

Security and compliance in cloud adoption

Highlighting the importance of having a centralised security solution, technology heads from various startups focused on using private subnets, unified firewalls, and prevention of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. They also exchanged views on data encryption, using tokenisation for personally identifiable information (PII) data, using serverless architecture, and having a disaster recovery plan.

Serverless architectures, for example, allow businesses to operate without the need to manage physical servers, reducing the total cost of ownership. While eliminating the need to manage infrastructure, serverless computing can expose organisations to security risks if the infrastructure is not properly configured. Misconfigured serverless environments can lead to data breaches, unauthorised access or service disruptions.

Speaking about automation in cost management and the benefits of using cloud-native services, the participants concurred that it is crucial to be cloud-agnostic and be compatible with different clouds to avoid vendor lock-in. Through multicloud, businesses may move their workloads between platforms without being restricted by a single contract or pricing plan.

With Generative AI coming into mainstay, cloud costs are again going to soar. Experts agreed that it’s best to optimise their cloud costs while running a workload. As cost has to be measured in unit economics, it’s crucial to have a great deal of automation in order to save on costs. Gen AI can be used in two segments – one is to serve end customers with prompt engineering to summarise data for the end user and secondly, to use it as a checker or as a reactive pipeline for various automations across use cases.

Cost optimisation and multicloud strategies

While the hybrid cloud integrates both public and private clouds, multicloud accesses many public cloud providers. This strategy lowers risk, reduces expenses, and increases flexibility by preventing businesses from depending just on one supplier. Experts agreed that multicloud is not just technology play but also cost play. Therefore, the need of the hour is to understand the pricing philosophy of every cloud.

“You can only improve what you can measure and if you have good metrics, you can start optimising not just the application, but also your deployments,” said one of the speakers.

If a company is scaling and policies are not optimised, it will incur a lot of extra cost without even being aware of it. Thus, it is important to experiment and fine-tune refinements in deployments and architecture applications.

Companies must formulate a strategy for managing egress and ingress costs and use a lakehouse architecture to enjoy its benefits. Businesses should build their code in a way that it can be deployed into multiple clouds. The core must remain the same because there would be less operating expenses to worry about when migrating.

The roundtable covered a range of important topics, including optimising cloud costs by implementing better monitoring, automation and cloud-native services. They also evaluated the role of GenAI in automating various business processes, such as summarising customer reviews and extracting insights from documents.

Panellists agreed that there is a need to investigate solutions to improve security and compliance in a multi-cloud environment, such as a centralised security framework. The discussion wrapped with a deep dive into GenAI capabilities, and how they need to be integrated into payment processing workflows to quickly analyse problems and provide summaries to banks.