Jabong chief Praveen Sinha invests in wife's online art gallery, may back two other startups

Anasha Art, owned and operated by Anasha Art & Craft Llp, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Praveen Sinha, co-founder and managing director of lifestyle e-tailer Jabong. Anasha is owned by Sinha's wife Shayal Taunk.

The money will be used in sourcing inventory and promotion of the platform.

Anasha Art was founded in November 2014 by XLRI Jamshedpur grad Shayal and her mother Anahita Taunk.

It showcases works by artists such as Anjolie Ela Menon, Yusuf Arakkal, Seema Kohli, Ranadip Mukherjee, Somenath Maity, Bratin Khan among others. The site has work from almost 30 artists.

"This work is curated by us very diligently. It has been three months of our business and the response has really been good," Shayal told Techcircle.in/VCCircle declining to give specific numbers.

According to her, since the art pieces makes for a big ticket purchase, the numbers of pieces sold is not very high but then average ticket size of art pieces on the site is Rs 1 lakh.

"Our aim is to target niche audience," Shayal said.

Sinha, who is one of the top team members of Rocket Internet incubated Jabong, is also in talks with two other startups -- one in the field of robotics and machine learning and the other in the healthcare sector.

According to Sinha, some of the products of the first venture include intelligent robots with video analytics and deep learning capabilities.

These technologies are useful to create river cleaning robots, and intelligent surveillance systems that prevent thefts in warehouses and other industrial areas, he added.

The second startup has prepared an app which will allow patients to access their lab reports online, book and manage appointments using a smartphone.

The app plans to enable patients share their medical reports with the doctors and then carry on a consultation through video conference. This is expected to aide patients who are unable to visit a hospital due to medical or financial reasons.

"My investments range from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 1 crore as seed capital. Besides this, I also try to involve people within my network to raise further funding or where capital required would be more," Sinha said without giving details of the exact amount invested in any of these firms.

Last year, Mumbai-based Rejuvenate Solutions Pvt Ltd, the company behind Zimmber, an on-demand home services platform, had also received an undisclosed amount in funding from Sinha.