BimaPe, Kazam, Pathfndr.io, others raise early stage capital

Mumbai based insurance technology startup BimaPe said on Wedneday it had raised $545,000 (Rs4.04 crore) in a pre-seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.  

Titan Capital, iSeed and Gemba Capital participated in the round. 

BimaPe, founded in October last year by Rahul Mathur under the legal name Engaged InsurTech, plans to further develop its product and expand its team with the funding. The solution works by deconstructing insurance papers through an AI algorithm and converts 50-plus insurance policy documents into a jargon-free interface that can be easily understood by the common man.  

The company said that over the past seven months it has onboarded 12,000 users. 

BigLeap

Hyderabad-based human resources (HR), staffing and payroll solutions startup BigLeap has raised Rs 5 crore in a debt round led by skating athlete Anup Kumar Yama.  

The HR product, still in stealth mode, will utilize the capital to boost the BigLeap artificial intelligence-based application. Called the ‘Bigleap.ai’, the web and mobile application will help job seekers find jobs through AI that will work to congregate jobs across sectors and host a registry for the job seeker, according to a statement.  

The app is currently deployed in the alpha stage (first stage) of testing with BigLeap’s clientele. Next stages are the beta stage and then the final release to the public. 

BigLeap Technologies, founded in 2015 by Vinay Kotra, James Johnson, Manoj Yadav Thummala, and Sainath Goud Malkapuram currently has operations and a presence in 22 states and 18 ESI(Employee's State Insurance Corporation) compliant territories, including Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi NCR, and Mumbai. 

Pathfndr.io

Pathfndr.io, owned and operated by Bengaluru based MeTripping Technologies, has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-series A round led by Arali Ventures. 

The no-code SaaS (software as a service) platform is an artificial intelligence powered travel operating system founded in 2015 by Arun Gupta. 

The round saw participation from SEA Fund, Wayfare Ventures, KPB Family Trust, Acsys Investments and Capital A. Angel investor  JAZFund LLC and founders of Chargebee and Freshworks, whose names were not disclosed, also participated in the round. 

The company had previously raised capital from Haresh Chawla, Krishnakumar Natarajan, Manchanda Capital and Oliphans Capital, among others. The new round will be used to ramp up product innovation and increase the strength of the global sales team, the company said in a statement. 

MicroDegree

Mangalore based education-technology startup MicroDegree has raised an undisclosed amount in a funding round led by founder and CEO of beauty product chain Organic Riot, Sidharth H Somaiya; and Mumbai based incubator, Research Innovation Incubation Design Labs.   

MicroDegree, founded in 2019 by Gaurav Kamath, Rakesh Kothari, and Manikanta Nair aims to democratize technology for all by offering coding classes in local languages.   

Earlier this year, the edtech startup raised an undisclosed amount from Mumbai based venture capital company 100X.VC as part of the latter’s ‘Class-03’ portfolio. MicroDegree said in a statement it has managed to rake in more than 2,100 users in the first 2.5 months of its launch and is now planning to enter new language markets apart from Kannada.  

Kazam

New Delhi based IoT based charging station provider Kazam has raised $945,000 (Rs 7 crore) in a seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV). 

Founded in 2020 by Akshay Shekar and Vaibhav Tyagi, the company will utilise the capital for product development, ramping up sales, operations and marketing, it said in a statement. 

The startup currently has 30 charging stations in the country across the states of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi/NCR, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. The IoT device of Kazam enables provide better connectivity, analytics, a building management system (BMS) and the ability to bill and meter usage of power through a mobile application.  

Over the past five months, Kazam has built an open architecture to be able to collaborate with other charging hardware manufactures, through the use of application program interfaces (APIs). 

Saarthi Pedagogy

Ahmedabad-based education technology startup Saarthi Pedagogy has raised $1 million in a funding round led by Jito Angel Network, LetsVenture, Ecosystem Ventures and other angels.  

Saarthi Pedagogy, founded in 2016 by Sushil Agarwal, is a business-to-business edtech startup that offers a platform with a combination of school curriculum training, teacher training and pedagogy (theory and practice of learning). The platform said that it currently serves over 2.5 lakh students.  

The capital will be utilised in the areas of product innovation and expansion.  The company said it will target the $25 billion market of mid-sized schools in India, which approximately numbers close to 10 lakh schools. The platform houses academic content and a learning management system, its pedagogy is not based on rote learning (repetition methods), the company said.