Airblack raises $5.2 mn Series A; Intervue, Nestroots raise early rounds

Online makeup and beauty learning platform Airblack has raised $5.2 million in Series A funding round round co-led by Info Edge Ventures and Elevation Capital.  

Atelier Ventures, Teachable founder and CEI Ankur Nagpal, Cred founder Kunal Shah, Better Capital, Meesho founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Udaan founder Sujeet Kumar, Utsav Somani partner at AngelList India, and Helion Ventures managing director Ashish Gupta participated in the round, the company said in a statement. 

The company, founded in 2019, will use the Series A capital to accelerate the expansion of Beauty Club, launching new clubs and investing in product, engineering and brand. Over 75% of Airblack’s 100-member team comprises women, with 50% in leadership roles, the statement said. 

Airblack enables people to upskill and become micro-entrepreneurs in the beauty skilling market through ‘do-it-together' courses. Curated experts present these courses live in a workshop format and enable hundreds of participants to learn. The company claims more than 25,000 learners have attended these courses across more than 500 cities so far. 

“We foresee 100 million-plus people becoming digital creators and freelancers in India in the next five years. At Airblack, we are fueling this economy by empowering people to learn a practical skill in a fraction of time and cost of traditional education and launch their livelihoods on the internet,” founder and CEO Videt Jaiswal said. 

“India is already home to the second largest freelancer community in the world and COVID has only accelerated this trend. We believe that Airblack is well placed to become the learning and enablement brand for millions of internet-first entrepreneurs in the coming decade,” Elevation Capital vice president Vaas Bhaskar said. 

Airblack claims to clock over 45,000 hours of live classes every month that are supplemented by take-home assignments. Currently, it offers long-duration courses with a timeline ranging from 30 days to 120 days, while the fees start from Rs 10,000. Short-duration courses can range between one day and five days with fees starting at Rs 150. The startup claims a 80% course completion rate. 

“We have an industry-beating delight -- an NPS of 72 and over 35% of our members purchasing another course with us after completion. This round allows us to double down on launching new courses and tools to make our entrepreneurs successful,” Airblack founder and head of engineering Vaibhav Raj said. 

Intervue

SaaS-based hiring platform Intervue has raised an undisclosed sum in a seed funding led by Titan Capital, Cred founder Kunal Shah, Brendan Rogers, co-founder of Wag, and Hershel Mehta, founder of 2AM VC.  

Intervue was founded this year during the pandemic by Rahul Arora and Pushpender Singh Rautela to solve the problem of interviews in an organization. It is a SaaS-based platform that helps hire better people faster collaboratively using a live coding environment and video calling along with features such as whiteboarding, take-home assignments and question bank. It also provides instant playback generation at the end of each interview. 

"Our platform is helping growing companies to take interviews and hire the right candidate. We are also centralizing the data that is collected while hiring for an organisation and making it easily accessible and logically collated to reduce rejection count and make better hiring decisions. To further strengthen our product, we are integrating it with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Slack, VSCode, Calendly and many other tools to make it super smooth for engineers,” Rahul Arora, the company’s founder and CEO, said in a statement. 

Intervue is currently being used by companies such as InVideo, Karza Technologies and Okra. 

Nestroots

Home decor startup Nestroots has raised $100,000 in debt and equity capital as part of its seed funding round. Startup investment platform We Founder Circle participated in the round, the Gurugram based company said in a statement. 

Nestroots currently sells via multiple platforms including its own website and third-party marketplaces that cater the furniture, dining and Tableware categories. It plans to use the seed capital for digital marketing, building a better UI UX for customers, facilitating association with vendors, and building more product categories. 

Founded in 2016 by Chhavi Singh, Nestroots claims to have been able to reach 55,000 customers since inception. The brand aims to increase the number of product parent categories from the current seven to 12 by end of the current financial year.