Exclusive: Hugefly gets angel funding from Temasek exec, others

Hugefly, a machine learning startup that provides online search and recommendation services for e-commerce firms, has raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Temasek Holdings' associate director Mayank Singhal and others.

Mohit Gulati (co-founder of Oliphans Capital) and Raj Iyer (CEO and CMD of icustommadeit.com) also put money in this round, according to Amit Chaudhari, Hugefly's co-founder.

Pune-based Hugefly, which is run by Hugefly Technologies Pvt Ltd, will deploy the capital to hire more employees and for upgrading systems and operations. Hugefly also aims to attract more e-commerce platforms as clients globally over the next six months.

"For me, this was a game-changer as I have used Hugefly's product for icustommadeit.com. Its features of image search, personalisation and real time search and recommendations compelled me to invest in it," Iyer said.

Hugefly was founded by brothers Dhruv and Amit Chaudhari in January 2015. Both brothers worked at Inyo Ventures before starting Hugefly. Earlier, Dhruv served as CTO of icustommadeit, an online platform for customised personal and home-related merchandise.

Hugefly claims that its search and recommendation technology helps e-commerce firms with improved customer engagement while increasing buyer conversion. Hugefly uses data analytics and pattern recognition techniques to reduce search time. This enables e-commerce firms to develop targeted and customised recommendations on a real-time basis for users, the company said.

"As e-commerce has grown at an unprecedented pace over the last two years, more and more online commerce businesses are looking to create market leadership and customer loyalty through deeper customer engagement at a very personal level. That's the need we help address at Hugefly," Amit said.

Hugefly would compete with the likes of SLI Systems, Nosto and Swiftype. It would also count players such as Endeca (acquired by Oracle) and Autonomy, among others, as rivals.