Blume Ventures backs rewards app m.Paani

Loyalty rewards platform m.Paani has raised an undisclosed amount in funding in its pre-Series A round of funding led by Blume Ventures.

Adil Allana of The Allana Group, Aprameya Radhakrishna, founder of TaxiForSure, and Gautam Ivatury, co-founder of Meradoctor and Signal Point Partners also participated in this round.

The new capital will be used for expanding its operations in and outside Mumbai, besides product development and talent acquisition in technology, product and sales departments.

Mumbai-based mPaani Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs the platform, was founded in March 2014 by Akanksha Hazari, a Princeton University and Cambridge University alumnus.

m.Paani is a mass-market loyalty platform that brings primarily offline consumers and unorganised retailers online. Customers can redeem the m.Paani points they earn when shopping at m.Paani retail partners for discounts, talk-time and other offers.

"The bundled offering provided by the company has attracted large brand partnerships and a large number of offline merchants on board to help deliver an easy-to-use and relevant loyalty programme for its mass-market consumer base," said Sajid Fazalbhoy, principal at Blume Ventures, in a statement. "At scale, the company would own large amounts of data across the retail value chain which was until now a data dark segment."

In the deals segment, Ahmedabad-based TECHRECO Solutions Pvt Ltd, which operates an analytics driven marketing platform for food retail vendors called Jolly Food Fellow, has raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A funding from Janak Parikh, managing director of Malibu Group, last month.

Prior to that, CashKaro, an online platform for cashback and digital coupons, raised $4 million (Rs 25 crore) in Series A funding from venture capital firm Kalaari Capital and existing investors, in November 2015.

In May 2015, Gurgaon-based GoldVIP Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs a mobile-based marketing and customer rewards management platform Crown-it, raised $5.5 million (Rs 34 crore) in Series A round of funding from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners.