SUPERTATKAL developer in Jail;BASIC Home Loan,TechSee,InVideo,FreshToHome raises awesome funds;InsurTech BimaPe Out from stealth mode....continue.

Nov 01, 2020

Hi , Shubham Shekhar here,

Welcome all to the weekly compilation of wonderful tech and related news.

Also Including the best tweet/thread of the week. Do read and engage.

Here is Your weekly dose,

$500k Seed fund for BASIC Home Loan from Picus Capital.

The Gurugram-based startup is developing a platform for automating home loans for middle and low-income households in India.
Picus Capital is a Germany-based early-stage technology investment firm.
The startup has been Co-founded by Atul Monga, Kalyan Josyula and Pranav Khattar.
Atul Monga, Co-founder and CEO, Basic Home Loan said,
“During a home loan process especially affordable housing, a customer has to go through multiple touch points, which is a pain. We are working to ensure that our tech enabled agent handholds them through this process of fulfillment from 'documentation' to 'disbursement' as their single point of contact.”
As per the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) estimates, the current size of home loans market is about $250 billion and is increasing at 20 percent year-on-year. The government's vision is to provide 'housing for all by 2022’.
This translates to 20 million additional homes for LIG and EWS households to be built by 2022.
In its first month of operations, BASIC Home Loan has sourced $6 million loans for Indian borrowers, and sanctioned $3 million so far.
It aims to cross $60 million loan disbursals in the first year of operations. Currently, it is setting up distribution and sourcing applications for lenders, but wants to create its own book for affordable housing loans, in the long run.

TechSee , an intelligent visual assistance startup raises $30million Series C Funding.

A Tel Aviv, Israel-based company, founded in 2014-15 by Eitan Cohen, Amir Yoffe, and Gabby Sarusi. Cohen conceptualized the idea after struggling to walk his parents through an issue they were having with their cable service.
The round was co-led by OurCrowd, Salesforce Ventures, and TELUS Ventures with participation from Scale Venture Partners and Planven Entrepreneur Ventures.
TechSee has developed Visual Assistance technology which allows customers and technicians to receive real-time AR guidance on their smartphone or tablet screens in assisted service or self-service mode.
The company is also innovating in the field of Computer Vision AI with technology that can provide visual guidance to users installing, operating, or troubleshooting networking devices, smart home products, home appliances, and more.
The augmented reality market is estimated to grow from $10.7 billion in 2019 to $72.7 billion by 2024, according to a recent Markets and Markets report.
Earlier this year, TechSee was named among Fast Company’s list of “most innovative” firms in 2020. Fourteen Israeli companies made the list.

InVideo , a mumbai based startup raises $15 million in a Series A financing round was led by Sequoia Capital India and others.

The video creation and editing platform, offers a freemium web-based editing tool that allows users to create videos that are fit to be published on popular social media platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube).
The startup claims to have more than 800,000 users who have created videos in over 75 languages.
“With their stellar product, design and tech capabilities, InVideo is well-placed to become the platform of choice for video creation in a potentially $10 billion market,” Prateek Sharma, VP at Sequoia Capital India said.

FreshToHome, a Bengaluru-based online fresh fish and meat retailer, raises $121million for expansion.

This is touted as the largest Series C funding in the history of Indian tech space.
The funding was led by Investment Corporation of Dubai (ICD), the principal investment arm of the Government of Dubai.
“We are just beginning to scratch the surface of a very large market and the current capital raise will help us realize our full potential through rapid expansion in India and the Middle East," said Shan Kadavil, Co-Founder and CEO of FreshToHome.
It currently has 1500 fishermen on its platform and sells across Mumbai, Delhi/NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and in the UAE.
FreshToHome currently processes 15 Lakh orders per month on its website and app, up from 420,000 monthly orders last year and has an annualised run rate of ₹600 crore.
Recently, its competitor Licious raises $30M to grow its meat and seafood e-commerce platform in India.

InsurTech, BimaPe out of stealth mode.(Here)

The startup helps you to discover free insurances on your debit and credit cards.
The first day signup exceeds 1000+ members discovering insurances in their cards in crore.

Another edtech funding alert: Teachmint raises $3.5 million

An India-based online teaching platform, announced that it has raised US$3.5 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed India and existing investors Better Capital and Titan Capital.
Teachmint enables offline tutors to digitize their classrooms, engage online with existing students as well as reach out to more users. The company said its platform allows content delivery, engagement and evaluation, as well as business workflow tools.
Teachmint said it has had more than 120,000 tutors across 1,000 cities and towns in India.
The company was founded by Mihir Gupta and Payoj Jain, former executives of hospitality startup Oyo, Divyansh Bordia, who previously worked at food delivery platform Swiggy, and Anshuman Kumar from video-sharing service Roposo.
Teachmint said its platform is focused on regional customization and is already available in 10 Indian languages other than English.
“Teachers are at the centre of a great education experience, and this is what will truly unleash the power of edtech. Our mission is to enable millions of outstanding tutors in India to take their classes online by leveraging Teachmint as their tech backbone. We are thrilled to partner with Lightspeed and our existing investors to continue to ramp up access for tutors across the country and beyond”, the ceo said.

A technovator developed 'Super Tatkal' that works faster than IRCTC owned tatkal , jailed.

S Yuvaraja, IIT Kharagpur graduate, Tripur native, is now in jail for creating a faster and more efficient solution to book tickets than IRCTC.
was charged under section 143 (2) of the Railway Act for bypassing the railway system and making money illegally.
After this incident, a Twitter user who claims to be Yuvaraja's friend made it a point to note that all the payments were directly made to IRCTC. He said that he was falsely accused.

Thread of the week-

Gagan Biyani’s 15 Rules on Co-founder Relationships

Past: co-founder @udemy, @sprig // growth advisor @lyft

Click on the image to continue.

That’s all for this week. Will now be hitting your inbox next week.

Your Weekly Dose