Financepeer, SquadStack, Etrio and StayQrious raise fresh capital

San Francisco and New Delhi headquartered Squadrun.inc, which operates SaaS-based sales acceleration solutions provider SquadStack, said it has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round.

Venture capital firm Chiratae Ventures led the round, with participation from returning investor Blume Ventures, according to a statement. 

The company said that it will use the fresh funds to accelerate product growth, and hire product, engineering and data science talent in the US and India.

Six-year-old Squadstack was founded by Apurv Agrawal, Kanika Jain, Rishabh Ladha, and Vikas Gulati. It currently offers three products -- a business management platform for real estate developers called Auctm, personalised sales solution SquadIQ for converting leads to customers, and content classification and workforce automation platform Classifyit.

“Sales tech innovation that’s happened on the B2B side is just as important in the B2C world but hasn’t quite reached there yet. SquadIQ wants to be the tech platform of choice for sales and fulfilment teams,” Saswata Shankar De, general manager of SquadIQ business, said.   

Fintech platform Financepeer scoops up capital

Mumbai headquartered Gajju Technologies, which runs fintech platform Financepeer, said it has raised $3 million from a group of investors, including Jaipur-based NBFC MS Fincap, UAE conglomerate Danube and Mumbai-based Aar Em Ventures, along with Angelbay Holdings, JITO Angel Networks and HEM Angels.

The Google-incubated startup will utilise the funds to improve its product offerings, for marketing and sales purposes, and to form strategic associations, a statement said. 

The company previously raised $1 million in a seed funding round in 2019 from multiple investors, including PitchRight Ventures and Lotus Educational Services.  

Founded in 2017 by Rohit Gajbhiye, Sunit Gajbhiye, Naveesh Reddy and Debi Prasad Baral, the startup provides zero interest rate loans to parents for payment of school fees. The company makes majority of its revenues from the discounts offered by schools on payment of the annual amount in a B2B2C model. The company acts as a loan originator and works with partner NBFCs in the backend to fund the loans.

Read: School fee financing startup FinancePeer raises angel round 

“Over the next nine to 12 months, we want to ride on the uptick Covid-19 has brought into the space. Previously it would take us close to four weeks to get a school to partner with us in the best case scenario but with the digital acceptance, it has accelerated to five days,” Rohit Gajbhiye, CEO of Financepeer, said. He added that the platform was looking to partner with 5,000 institutions over the next year - it currently has 1,800 schools on board. 

Etrio raises $3 mn to develop EV product lines

Hyderabad-based electric vehicle startup Etrio has raised $3 million in a Series A funding round from Singapore-based serial investor Janardhan Rao, also the founder of trading house Triumph Global Group and other anonymous high profile investors.

The company said that the investment would fuel the company’s foray into three wheelers and bicycle product lines, and scale up deployments through a mix of sales and leasing options.

Its three wheeler electric brand Touro will be launched in October 2020, it said, adding that the launch of e-bikes named Ashva and iSwitch are in the works too. 

StayQrious raises $2 mn seed capital

Bengaluru based StayQrious, which runs an eponymous edtech startup, has raised $2 million in a seed funding round from Learn Capital’s seed venture capital fund Learn Start, Draper Associates, Y Combinator, Lavni Ventures, Japan’s Dream Incubator and First Principles founder Nitin Sharma.

The startup, founded by Shankar Ram A, Avinash Anand and Aanand Srinivas focuses on teaching core STEM subjects -- science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- through coding.