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Trupeer bags $3 Mn seed round led by RTP Global

EntrackrEntrackr · 2d ago
Trupeer bags $3 Mn seed round led by RTP Global
Medial

Trupeer, the AI video platform, has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by RTP Global, along with participation from Salesforce Ventures and a consortium of over 20 CIO and CTO angel investors. The proceeds will be used to support its aim of reinventing how teams create product videos, tutorials, and walkthroughs, Trupeer said in a press release. Co-founded in 2023 by Shivali Goyal and Pritish Gupta, Trupeer eliminates the hassles of hours of editing, painful handoffs, and bloated video tools. With a single raw screen recording, its AI engine can now produce a clean, professional video in seconds, complete with AI voiceovers, avatars, highlights, and translations in over 30 languages. Trupeer’s multi-modal AI pipeline removes filler words, generates studio-quality voiceovers, adds intelligent zooms and subtitles, tracks cursor actions, and inserts a humanlike AI avatar for more engaging delivery. Alongside the video, it automatically generates step-by-step documentation with screenshots and summaries, giving users everything they need to explain a product clearly, instantly, and at scale. The Bengaluru-based startup creates multiple versions of a single video, tailored by audience, language, or tone, and lets teams share them instantly through public links or embedded formats. Once something is recorded, it’s already usable. “Software should be easy to explain. But until now, making good product videos meant spending hours editing or thousands of dollars on production,” said Shivali Goyal, CEO and co-founder of Trupeer. “We built Trupeer so anyone—from IT leads to customer success reps—can turn a quick demo into a polished video that’s useful, searchable, and scalable.” Trupeer plans to expand beyond screen recordings. It is building new ways to generate video from documents, personalize content at scale, and integrate natively with the tools where teams already work, from CRMs to learning platforms. The platform claims that it is used by 10,000 teams globally across customer success, L&D, IT, sales, and product functions. It competes with other players in this space such as Loom, Arcade, Guidde, and Scribe.

No hurry to sell, indefinite horizon on Zomato holding: Sanjeev Bikhchandani

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
No hurry to sell, indefinite horizon on Zomato holding: Sanjeev Bikhchandani
Medial

Info Edge, India’s largest and most storied recruitment portal, has had a stellar run in the last three years with its portfolio company Zomato’s market cap surging almost 2.3X since its stock exchange debut. The firm’s bet on fintech unicorn Policybazaar is also paying off well. The company has made it clear it is in no hurry to book profits on these investments, even as it continues to nurse its own brands beyond Naukri to profitability. The firm, one of the few to survive the dotcom boom and bust cycle of 2000, has been led by founder and chairman Sanjeev Bikhchandani for a large part of this journey. And today, Bikhchandani has earned the right to be looked up to as the statesman for the sector. Entrackr caught up with Bikhchandani in his Gurugram office and he spoke on a range of topics including Naukri, Info Edge’s investments, serial entrepreneurs and corporate governance. Here are the edited excerpts. As a listed firm that carries a heavy overhang from its investment portfolio, does it worry you that it might impact the valuation of the core Naukri business? Not really. Institutional investors are smart. We give them adequate data so that they analyze Naukri thoroughly before making a conclusion about valuation. We don’t run Naukri for valuation every day or month or quarter. We look at how we create value for our shareholders in the long run. And that’s how we run our businesses. So, this hypothesis about our core or even group business doesn’t stand. Info Edge has been an investor in Zomato for over 14 years and despite the latter’s share price rising nearly 14o% from its listing price, Info Edge didn’t sell its shares. What level of return are you anticipating from Zomato? Actually, we don’t calculate Investment Return Rate (IRR). Info Edge invested in Zomato because of our conviction that it could become a great company. And if you are convinced about your conviction then it will happen. So, IRR is the happy incidental outcome of investing early behind companies that you want to help. That’s my belief. We are not in any hurry to sell and have an indefinite horizon. Every VC firm has a fund cycle and pressure to return capital to their limited partners but that’s not the case with Info Edge as you are investing from your own balance sheet. Could you elaborate on this? That pressure does not make this choice. We have a long term horizon and we call it patient capital. To be a successful early stage investor in India, you have to be quite patient because companies take anywhere between 10-15 years to go to IPO from seed stage. So if you have funds for only 6-10 years, you will not realize the full fruits of your investment. If you have a 20 year fund, you tend to perform better. However, such a horizon could be possible only when you’re investing from your own whole balance sheet. Do you believe that Blinkit could become bigger than Zomato? I think both are large but Blinkit is going to be fairly large. If we look at Zomato’s quarter-on-quarter numbers, online food ordering appears to have stagnated in top 10-15 cities. What’s your take on this? Obviously, there is the base effect. But, we don’t see stagnation. Also, you need to compare year-on-year, not quarter-on-quarter. When YoY numbers are compared, there is growth. I think full fiscal year performance is more important than quarter. We used to commonly hear about Naukri’s recruitment business that it was not the online presence, but your sales force or feet on the street that made the difference. Does that still hold true? Online sales have never been a big part of our strategy. When you want to sell more expensive products, you need face-to-face contact. At Naukri, we have clients whom we bill several crore rupees for annual subscription and such accounts need heavy offline touch. While the product will be consumed online, the stuff around it very often will be offline. Over the years, several players have tried to crack the recruitment business in the blue collar segment but most of them died. What are the challenges in the segment? Blue collar segment has broadly three challenges. First, it’s hyperlocal. The job seekers in this segment don’t move to different cities as they look for opportunities in and around their locality. Second, very often there isn’t a detailed text CV which makes the process slow and inefficient. Third, potential workforce in the segment do not search for jobs on the laptop and use vernacular languages. They are mostly on mobile. So you’ve got to adapt to all these things and still somehow get revenue and profit. We have been trying to get inroads in the blue collar segment for over two years now but we have just started monetizing it. Our future position in the segment depends on monetization. Some of the celebrated entrepreneurs are launching a second or third company without their first startup churning profit. How do you see this trend? I think this isn’t a progressive trend. As an entrepreneur, you need to focus on one thing and do really well. Once you’ve cracked that you can add on a second thing in the same company. Over the past couple of years, we have witnessed corporate governance issues with some startups. Even Info Edge saw serious lapses at 4B Networks. What’s your opinion about this? By and large, my belief is that 95-98% of Indian founders are genuine but there will be a few bad examples. Investors make sure that when something wrong happens in their portfolio, it is highlighted and actions are taken to ensure that such incidents do not repeat. Any governance issue isn’t good for anyone including limited partners, investors, founders and the startup ecosystem. What factors contributed to the lack of success with Info Edge’s e-commerce investments 99labels, MyDala, and Happily Unmarried? Limitation of raising foreign direct investment (FDI) and heavy investment into competition were two major reasons for failure of 99labels while MyDala had a product market fit (PMF) issue. Happily Unmarried is now a part of VLCC and we are still a shareholder there.

Exclusive: Amazon shuts down refurbished platform Renewed

EntrackrEntrackr · 4m ago
Exclusive: Amazon shuts down refurbished platform Renewed
Medial

Exclusive: Amazon shuts down refurbished platform Renewed Amazon has decided to shut down its refurbished platform, Renewed, citing increasing challenges. The e-commerce giant has informed sellers of the immediate discontinuation of the service via email. Entrackr has reviewed the copy of the email. “We have made the decision to discontinue selling external refurbished products on Renewed due to high returns/rejects and the Contacts per unit impacting customer experience. Please stop inbounding any inventory to FCs and scheduling pickups from your SF location starting 7th March 2025. We understand this may be disappointing and would like to thank you for your partnership,” Amazon said in a note to sellers. Launched in 2017, Amazon Renewed is a platform where customers can buy refurbished, pre-owned, and open-box products that have been thoroughly inspected and tested to ensure they function and look like new. It offers a variety of items, including smartphones, laptops, tablets, cameras, and home appliances. Meanwhile, Newjaisa, a publicly listed company that used to sell on Amazon, has written to the NSE stating that the shutdown will impact them in the short term. However, Newjaisa is actively collaborating with other retailers to mitigate the effects. According to sources, over 50% of Newjaisa’s revenue came from Amazon Renewed. Entrackr has reached out to Amazon for comments. Amazon Renewed was a direct competitor to Yaantra, which was acquired by its arch-rival Flipkart for an undisclosed sum in January 2022. It’s worth noting that Amazon has also tied up and invested in Cashify, a prominent Indian re-commerce platform specializing in the buying and selling of used electronic devices. With the shutdown of Amazon Renewed, the refurbished space is left with these two prominent players.

Invest4Edu makes education planning easy for parents

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Invest4Edu makes education planning easy for parents
Medial

Not everyone can afford to pay for high-quality education for their children. Whether it’s about studying in a premier institution in India or colleges abroad, it’s expensive. The complexities of accessing education loans have also been a significant pain point for parents. Of late, quite a few startups have begun working in this space. For instance, GradRight helps make higher education abroad accessible and affordable. Other notable names are Leap Finance and Propelled. Another startup trying to tap into this space is Invest4edu. Based in Mumbai, Invest4Edu aims to address common anxieties around the rising cost of education, college planning, and long-term payment. We spoke to the company co-founder and CEO Peeyush Agrawal to learn more about the ‘ed-fintech’ startup, how it operates, and more. Here are the edited excerpts: What are the key challenges in the industry that have not been addressed yet? And how do you plan to address them? There has been a surge of edtech and fintech companies, and all of them are doing a great job in their respective horizons, but we have found that India still lacks tech platforms offering comprehensive education financial solutions. Only partial solutions are being offered by existing Edtech and Fintech companies. There is a lack of focused unified solutions in the market, and an absence of education goal-based planning leading to insufficient funds for education. Less than 30% of parents use money for their child’s education from dedicated education savings. Inadequate planning leads to insufficient funds for education, restricting a child’s ability to achieve their real potential. Two out of three Indian parents cannot plan for retirement due to the higher education financing needs of their children. With smart AI-based tools, we want to empower parents and students to discover and plan their education goals. Early planning with mandate-based early savings and great career-building services will help Indians manage education inflation and fulfill their commitment to quality education. We are offering an array of education services to help students and parents discover ideal career paths in the increasingly changing environment. What are the key highlights of your platform? We at Invest4Edu offer an AI-based education journey, essentially a digital toolkit aiding parents in crafting career-centric education goals from nursery to university. The toolkit is aimed to simplify learning requirements, skill development, assessments, and counseling with precise expense details. There is also a free planner that ensures holistic education. Subscription plans offer services like career counseling, skill-building, and financial investment guidance for achieving goals. We also have a College cost calculator, EduAbacus, which helps deliver informed decisions on future education costs. Subscriptions or standalone services from this tech-driven platform streamline education planning for parents and students. How do you generate revenues? Invest4Ed offers a unique blend of educational and financial services to B2C and B2B2C markets. We have an annuity-based revenue model with high customer retention. The revenue is generated from commission on financial products like MF, FD, Insurance along with fees from educational solutions and subscription plans. What are your short-term and long-term goals in terms of product and business expansion and diversification? Over the next two years, our company aims to spearhead a transformative initiative in education planning that prioritizes and enhances while ensuring accessibility for a diverse student population of more than 2 Lakh students. Our long-term goal is to create 1.5 Million User Base and 0.5 Million Families Empowered In this endeavour. We will be building a $250 Million Mutual Fund AUM & Monthly SIP Book of $60 Million. We have recently expanded our core team aimed at launching our global business.

Here is how Skydo addressing challenges in B2B cross-border payments

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Here is how Skydo addressing challenges in B2B cross-border payments
Medial

Bengaluru-based fintech firm Skydo aspires to make cross-border B2B payments much more hassle-free and address common challenges such as steep forex charges. Founded in 2022 by former Ola executives Movin Jain and Srivatsan Sridhar, the company aims to tap into the massive market of cross-border payments, which is dominated by global players like PayPal and Stripe. We spoke to cofounder and CEO Sridhar to learn more about Skydo, how it works, and what is the roadmap ahead. Here are the edited excerpts: How did you come up with the idea of Skydo? My co-founder Movin Jain and I used to work together at Ola. This was about six years back and we’ve been good friends since then. I’ve been mostly doing business roles throughout my career. First year at McKinsey, then for several years in startups and in between for about six years I ran my family-owned business. Movin has been an engineering and product guy and most recently before we started up he was actually at Phonepe, leading the payments platform. So given I have been a manufacturing exporter myself, somehow you know making life simple for exports, figuring out the problems that exporters have in terms of the complicated foreign exchange and other things that they have to deal with has been on my mind. But I never kind of thought about it consciously until we started brainstorming about which space we have to build in. Given Movin’s recent stint in payments, he was very excited about payments and the value of technology in improving payments. So since we were brainstorming about payments, some of my experiences studying the payments and wanting to solve for them came to our thinking and then we kind of started deeply digging into whether these problems are real, how can we solve them as a small company, what kind of actual issues do exporters face on a ground level, let’s talk to a few people and understand. And as we did the initial research, we realized that this is actually a real problem and it’s worth solving and this is a large enough market for us to solve it in. So this was largely the genesis of Skydo. What are the key challenges in payments and exports, cross-border payments that have not been addressed yet and how do you plan to address this? Up until 20-30 years ago, inter-entity payments were slow and cumbersome, often involving manual processes like cheque writing. International wire transfers were particularly sluggish and document-heavy. However, the likes of PayPal, business and international payments have transitioned to facilitate online transactions globally. Conventional banking systems have also significantly improved their infrastructure, with the inclusion of faster payment systems within domestic countries. This robust infrastructure, coupled with various payment options, enables companies like us with the right tools to address unsolved customer challenges. Moreover, consumers now expect instant payments, regardless of geography. Though things like compliance pose another hurdle, with varying regulations across countries causing confusion and complexity. Simplifying and standardizing compliance procedures can enable seamless international payments and business transactions. While companies like Skydo are lowering costs, there still remains room to tackle margins through technological solutions. While issues like Forex hedging and treasury management exist, addressing these concerns should be the next frontier in the payment landscape. Can you take us through how Skydo has performed since inception. So we started the company exactly two years back in March of 2022. It took us about seven months to launch the product after our first set of partnerships and approvals came. We launched in November 2022 with a small pilot batch and since January of 2023, we have been gradually and systematically scaling the business. Today, we have onboarded close to 2,500 businesses and currently our rate of acquiring new businesses is almost 500 to 600 businesses every month. So, this number is doubled, the customer base is doubled at the end of March from what it was at the end of December 2023. And I think at this pace of growth, it looks like it is going to sustain for quite a bit of time now. From onboarding, then if I look at the total payments processed, we are currently processing about $50 million of payments. This again is growing quite strongly and I think by the end of next year, that is the March of 2025, we hope to be processing over $750 million of payments annually. That is the kind of scale that we are looking at. What are your goals in terms of product and business expansion? So in the short term, obviously we want to really scale and hold a very large market share for Indian small businesses. I think that will keep us busy for the next couple of years at least. Although we will also follow this with multiple product features that will be required to make this happen from creating more countries where we can have local collections, enabling credit card payments, enabling two-way payments both from India to outward and along with the export payments that today exist and so on. So there’s an entire product roadmap that will support this growth in India. We also have to be looking for multiple licenses throughout the world. We have already applied and are waiting for approval for the payment aggregator license that RBI gives for cross-border companies. But in addition, we will be looking for multiple licensing in other geographies that will allow us to slowly and steadily expand to more corridors beyond India, which is slightly on the longer term plan. Apart from payments, the diversification is primarily into software to start with. Over time, when we have a very large scale, we might diversify into commerce as well as working capital. But that is very long term.

The Sleep Company revenue soars 2.5X to Rs 312 Cr in FY24

EntrackrEntrackr · 8m ago
The Sleep Company revenue soars 2.5X to Rs 312 Cr in FY24
Medial

Direct to consumer (D2C) mattress and sleep solution companies have been growing at a rapid clip over the past five-six years and Premji Invest-backed The Sleep Company is no exception. Keeping the momentum from FY23, its operating scale spiked 2.5X in FY24. The Sleep Company’s revenue from operations jumped to Rs 312.33 crore in FY24 from Rs 127.14 crore in FY23, its consolidated financial statement filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows. The Sleep Company offers mattresses, pillows, cushions, bedding, and office chairs. Apart from its own website, the firm sells its products across e-commerce platforms including Amazon and Flipkart. The company’s growth was primarily driven by its flagship mattress segment which contributed 65% in the revenue and surged by 89% to Rs 203.69 crore in FY24. It is worth noting that mattresses are the only finished goods sold by the company. The rest are traded goods which includes chairs, pillows and beds soared 5.6X to Rs 108.6 crore in FY24. The five-year-old company made another Rs 7.7 crore from interest income which took its total revenue to Rs 320 crore in the last fiscal year. On the expense side, a key contributor was the cost of materials, which grew 2.4X to Rs 144.74 crore in the fiscal year ending March 2024. Advertising expenses surged by 89.7% to Rs 101.43 crore, while employee benefits increased 3X to Rs 35.94 crore during the fiscal year. Rent, finance, and other expenses further drove the total costs up 2.2X, reaching Rs 378.68 crore in FY24 compared to Rs 166.7 crore in FY23. Unlike its revenue, The Sleep Company’s losses increased by 58% to Rs 58.69 crore in FY24 from Rs 37.06 crore in FY23. Its ROCE and EBITDA margin stood at -26% and -15.92% respectively. On a unit basis, it spent Rs 1.21 to earn a rupee of operating revenue in FY24. The Mumbai based company reported cash and bank balances of Rs 4.15 crore and current assets of Rs 289 crore in FY24. After a period of disruption, when mattress and related firms enjoyed some serious love from investors, it’s attrition time for the segment. The legacy firms have pulled their socks, going for acquisitions, online plays, and interestingly for this writer, offline activations like never before to protect their turf. All this has meant that the consumer ‘education’ that was driving up prices for specific needs is set to moderate, as consumers graduate with the learning as well. Questions can be seen being raised on the justification of premiums for features, and expect that to translate to more margin pressure as well. For the Sleep Company and most of the others, if not sleepless nights, some long nights await as investors wait and watch now.

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