Marketing automation startup Betaout raises investment from East Ventures, others

Betaout Inc, a customer intelligence and marketing automation platform for e-commerce companies, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from East Ventures and other South East Asia-based angel investors.

The company will use the new capital to strengthen its operations in Indonesia and other parts of South East Asia, expand clientele, and for product development, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) company is also working towards enhancing its mobile offerings and introducing features such as machine learning and live chat plug-ins.

"Indonesia is an important market for us and having the support and domain expertise of East Ventures will help us in executing our vision of enabling e-commerce marketers across South East Asia to retain their customers and drive better return on investment (ROI)," said Ankit Maheshwari, chief executive and co-founder of Betaout, in the statement.

East Ventures, founded in 2010, is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in consumer internet and mobile startups based in Indonesia, Singapore and Tokyo.

Founded in October 2014 by Maheshwari, Raghubir Thakur, Arjun Maheshwari, Nandini Rathi and Mayank Dhingra, Betaout allows customers to build user intelligence databases and provides tools to engage with users through email, live chat and SMS, among other channels.

In April 2016, Betaout raised $1.5 million (around Rs 9.9 crore) in a pre-Series A round of funding from Stanford Angels, LetsVenture, Chennai Angels, Hyderabad Angels and Mumbai Angels. The round also saw participation from Freshdesk founder and chief executive Girish Mathrubootham, Match Group chief executive Sam Yagan and former chief people officer of Flipkart Mekin Maheshwari.

Prior to that, Betaout raised $500,000 (Rs 3.2 crore) in seed funding from Paytm founder and chief executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Snapdeal co-founder and chief executive Kunal Bahl, People Group founder and chief executive Anupam Mittal, Ibibo Group founder and chief executive Ashish Kashyap, Redbus co-founder Phanindra Sama and others.

Betaout was accelerated at the TechStars Chicago 2015 programme, which is run by mentorship-driven startup accelerator TechStars. It was the second Indian company to be selected by the accelerator, the first being MartMobi, which was acquired by Snapdeal in 2015.

Other SaaS startups that received funding recently are Oi Media, a unit of OurInitiative Media Pvt Ltd, which last week secured seed investment from early stage VC firm Quarizon.

Earlier this month, cloud-based solutions provider SecurAX secured funding from early stage investor Axilor Ventures, Parampara Early Stage Opportunities Fund and a clutch of angel investors. Prior to that, TempoGO, an IoT and SaaS-based solutions provider for commercial transportation, raised seed funding from a clutch of investors and Chennai-based Learntron, which offers training programmes to K-12 schools and corporates on a SaaS platform, secured funding from venture capital firm Kae Capital.