Iron Pillar places second bet from new fund on automation firm

Mid-stage venture capital firm Iron Pillar on Tuesday said that it has invested in US-based no-code automation company Ushur Inc that makes products in Bengaluru.

Iron Pillar said in a statement that this is its second investment from the new fund.

Last year, the firm said it had made its debut bet from the fund in CoreStack, a cloud governance and compliance software-as-a-software (SaaS) startup.   

In the latest statement, Iron Pillar said that the investment in Ushur is part of the startup’s extended Series B funding round. Ushur’s Series B was led by Third Point Ventures with participation from existing investor 8VC.

Ushur was founded by Simha Sadasiva (CEO) and Henry Peter (chief technology officer). It seeks to eliminate friction between enterprises and customers with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and intuitive workflows. It says that companies such as HealthSpire, Irish Life and Unum use Ushur.

Iron Pillar had topped up its debut fund with $45 million in May last year to help portfolio firms tide over the coronavirus crisis.

With the top-up, Iron Pillar had added three global institutions as investors. These included alternative assets investor 57 Stars LLC and a large European family office, the VC firm said.

Iron Pillar, one of the few mid-stage technology investors in India, had marked the final close of its debut fund at $90 million in October 2018.

It was floated in 2015 by Anand Prasanna, who quit as head of Asia for international investment advisory firm Morgan Creek to start the firm. Its founding team has five more people apart from Prasanna: Sameer Nath, Mohanjit Jolly, Harish Hulyalkar, Ashok Ananthakrishnan and Ashish Shah.