Pine Labs, Lido Learning raise capital; Infosys divests part of Whoop stake

Digital payments and merchant commerce platform Pine Labs on Monday announced it has raised a fresh round of funding from Greenwich, US-based hedge fund Lone Pine Capital.

With this undisclosed investment, Pine Labs is now valued at over $2 billion, according to a statement from the company.

Lone Pine’s investment follows the strategic investment made by Mastercard in January 2020, when Pine Labs attained unicorn status.

Earlier this month, Noida-based  Pine Labs and Mastercard jointly announced that they will expand their integrated ‘pay later’ solution to five South East Asian markets early next year.

Pine Labs claims to serve more than 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities across Asia and the Middle East.

Lido Learning

Mumbai-based Quality Tutorials, which runs edtech startup Lido Learning, is looking to raise Rs 10.93 crore (about $1.3 million) funding from six investors, including Oracle Insurance Services, Inc 42 reported citing company’s regulatory filings.

The company has already raised Rs 3.37 crore from these investors. According to the filings, Germany-based Mackler’s Felix Jahn has invested Rs 1.09 crore, Oracle Insurance Services has infused Rs 99.98 lakh, US-based early-stage edtech platform GoStudent’s founder Felix Ohswald has invested Rs 59 lakh in Lido Learning.

Prior to this, Lido Learning closed its Series B funding round of $7.5 million led by BAce Capital.

Infosys

Information Technology (IT) major Infosys has divested one-third of its holdings for around $10 million in Boston-based startup Whoop, the company said in an exchange filing on Friday.

In 2015, Infosys had made a minority investment of $3 million in Whoop. The investment was part of Infosys' $500 million Innovation Fund that aimed to support startups around the world.

Founded in 2012 by Will Ahmed, John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicole, Whoop offers performance optimisation solutions for professional athletes and sports teams.

EWar scoops up funding

GHack Technologies, which runs Bengaluru-headquartered gaming and e-sports startup EWar Games, on Monday said it has raised capital in a new funding round led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV).  

JITO Angel Network, Hyderabad Angels and Pearl Agarwal -- founder and director of Eximius Ventures also participated in the round. Agarwal participated in her personal capacity.

The funds, from the pre-Series A round, will be used to drive further penetration into the Indian e-sports segment, the company said in a statement.

This is the second round of funding raised by EWar during the current year. The company had earlier raised an angel round of $200,000 from House of Jindals, the angel investment arm of Bengaluru-based Jindal Steel, and Jeet Banerjee, founder of sports management firm Gameplan.  

EWar was set up in 2018 by Parth Chadha and Rahul Singh. The company claims that it has acquired a user base of 1 million users. The startup aims to have 5 million users by the end of the next year.

Restaurant brand Voosh gets funding

Bengaluru-based virtual restaurant brands company, Voosh has raised an undisclosed amount in an early stage of funding led by Better Capital.

The round, pre-seed, also saw participation from Vivekananda Hallekere founder of Bounce; Hitesh Ahuja --founder of Yumlane; Anuj Rathi, VP of Product at Swiggy; Ashish Chatterjee, VP-Product at Swiggy; Vivek Sekar, CBO at FreightTiger and Sundeep Teki, ex- AI & ML Head at Swiggy.

The fresh funds will be utilised to build Voosh’s OS product that optimises kitchen operations and to expand to 50 plus kitchens, the company said in a statement.

Founded in July this year by Priyam Saraswat and Kshitiz Sanghi, Voosh partners with existing independent restaurants as its cloud kitchens and delivers food via Voosh OS. 

With Voosh OS, the company enforces a strict compliance and certification process for all its kitchens to ensure quality and hygiene, the company said. It also ensures streamlined operations at every kitchen from order management to supply chain and pricing and discounts. 

Voosh is currently live at eight locations in Bengaluru and is expanding its locations across the city every month.