Nexus Venture Partners Leads $4M Series A Funding In GENWI

Cloud-based Tablet and smartphone publishing platform GENWI of the USA has received $4 million or Rs 20 crore in series A funding, led by Nexus Venture Partners.

GENWI had earlier raised seed funding of $1.1 million or Rs 5.5 crore from Inventus Capital Partners and Quest Venture Partners, who also participated in this round of funding. With the additional funds, the company has raised a total of $5.1 million or Rs 25.5 crore till date.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners will be joining GENWI's board of directors.

Co-founded by PJ Gurumohan, Rahul Patel and Raju Sagiraju in 2010, GENWI enables publishers to create and manage interactive, social, and live media apps on various platforms.

"The proceeds of the fund will be mainly utilised to scale up the infrastructure, as we need to have a system tailoring the specifications of smartphone and Tablet market," co-founder PJ Gurumohan told VCCircle on the investment.

The company is also planning to build its own apps network for distribution of apps and cross-pollination of the apps. Finally, the firm wants to tap the growing Tablet and smartphone market in India, he further added.

The funding "will be used to build out the infrastructure and an extensive app network to offer more advanced monetisation and distribution features for publishers, global expansion and the development of multilingual functionality," the company said.

The firm's angel investors include Inventus Capital's Manu Rekhi and John Dougery Sr., besides Manish Chandra, chief executive and co-founder of Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst in 2007).

GENWI enables businesses to build apps for multiple devices in one place. With iSites, users can design an app once and see it seamlessly replicated across iPhone, Android platform, iPad and Chrome (native & HTML5/Web apps) with no coding. The company has more than 1,400 iPhone & Android apps which are always kept up-to-date.

Nexus Venture Partners, a venture capital fund, invests in early and early-growth-stage companies across sectors. The firm has $320 million under management across two funds and has funded companies like DimDim (recently acquired by Salesforce.com) and Komli Media.