Open source low code platform Tooljet announced on Wednesday that it has raised $1.5 Mn in a seed funding round. VC firm Nexus Venture Partners spearheaded the round while Ratio ventures, Better capital and Alan Rutledge also participated in the round.

The seed funding round equally saw participation from several angel investors including Rohan Murty (founder of Soroco), Sony Joy (head of Enterprise at Truecaller), Vipul Amler (founder of Saeloun), Mohammed Hisamuddin (founder of Entri )and Abhi Kumar of M12 Ventures.

The company said that it plans to use the seed funding for expanding its team to accelerate the development of the core platform of ToolJet.

Tooljet’s open source low coding software essentially help companies  in building their internal tools with minimum engineering efforts. The company claims that its platform has been adopted  by scores of startups and even unicorns. The company further claims that it currently has integrations with more than 15 data sources such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Google Sheets and AWS S3.

ToolJet was founded last year (2021) by Navaneeth PK. Navaneeth has previously co-founded MobioPush, which was acqui-hired by SaaS unicorn and U.S. listed company Freshworks in 2015.

“Companies are under pressure to do more with what they have. Open-source low-code tools enable developers to deliver what the business needs quickly and securely with enough flexibility to customize and extend,” said ToolJet Founder and CEO Navaneeth PK.

Commenting on the seed funding round, “Sameer Brij Verma, Director, Nexus Venture Partners, commented, “We are thrilled to partner with ToolJet’s team on their journey to build a revolutionary open-source low-code / no-code platform with the built-in collaboration which will enable their customers to radically increase their operational clock speed and ability to launch new products.”

The global low-code development technologies market is projected to $13.8 billion in 2021 according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. Low-code adoption is boosted by the cost optimization efforts and remote development due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

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Jumbotail, a online wholesale platform for grocery & vegetable products and new age retail platform, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $85 Mn in a Series C round. Artal Asia Pte Ltd, a company affiliated to U.S. based Invus Group, spearheaded the funding round. Ajax Capital, the family office of the veteran FMGC entrepreneur Ajay Gupta, also took part in the funding round.

The company did not comment about the valuation it commanded in the latest round.

The series C round had a secondary component, with early investors Nexus Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital making partial exit. The company did not disclose any details about the ROI or profit that both VC firms have made through this partial exit. According to VCCEdge, Kalaari held a 12.97% and Nexus Venture held a 26.56% stake in the Bengaluru based company.

Following the latest funding round, the company’s total fund raising amount has now reached to $125 Mn.

Commenting on the Series C round, Ashish Jhina, Co-founder & COO, Jumbotail, said, “We nearly quadrupled our scale in 2021 and are looking to further accelerate our growth trajectory in the coming year. We will continue to invest aggressively to make Jumbotail the pre-eminent destination for food and grocery brands to reach the overwhelming majority of India’s consumers through our pan-India network of kirana partners.”

Jumbotail was founded in 2015 by S.Karthik Venkateswaran and Ashish Jhina, both of whom were Stanford classmates. The six year old firm essentially operates a marketplace platform that connects thousands of mom & pop grocery retailers with brand and staple manufactures. The company further streamlines this retail and manufacturing networking through logistics and supply solution.     

Additionally, it helps in digitizing the mom and pop stores by providing POS and other solutions to the kirana stores.   

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All these great milestones have also meant that WhiteHat’s existing investors – Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network and Owl Ventures – raked massive returns through secondary transaction. All these investors have made a complete exit from the two-year-old company. Techpluto has got information from sources how much return each of these investors earned through the secondary transaction. Please note that this information is not backed by regulatory filings but we can surely vouch that the numbers quoted below are damn accurate.

But before coming to the investment returns, check out the below chart to know how much stake did each investors owned in the company before Byju’s buyout. Notably, Nexus, Omidyar and Owl collectively pumped $11Mn in WhiteHat in September last year as part of the series A round. At that time, the Mumbai based startup did not disclose at what valuation it raised the series A funding. However, WhiteHat was recently hunting for a fresh $50 Mn funding round in the market at a valuation of $300 Mn. This was obviously well before the takeover by Byju’s.

As indicated by the above graph, founder and CEO Karan Bajaj owned the largest stake with 40% followed by Nexus Ventures with 22.06% stake for their $5 Mn investment, Omidyar with 15% stake for $3 Mn investment and OWL Ventures 10% for their $3 Mn investment. Employees through the ESOP scheme own the rest 12.50% stake in the company.

Now coming to returns, Nexus made the biggest killing by taking home $66 Mn or 35.3 crore for their $5 Mn investment, fetching almost 13x return on its investment. Omidyar will take home $45 Mn or 23.8 Cr to earn 15x return on its investment while Owl will take home $30 Mn or 21.3 Cr to earn almost 10X return.

Overall, the three investors have collectively made a return of nearly $141 Mn, as for the rest $161 Mn; the big chunk of the remaining $161Mn has obviously gone to Bajaj while the little chunk has gone to WhiteHat’s employees.

Bajaj, by the way, has made a partial exit. By this virtue, he will continue to hold stake in WhiteHat and also lead the company from the front post Byju’s acquisition. Bajaj will now oversee the WhiteHat’s international expansion especially in the U.S. market, which is the next big frontier that Byju’s want to capture to fulfill its international ambitions.

And just to wrap it up, Omidyar can make another big killing in few weeks’ time if Byju’s-Doubtnut deal goes through. Omidyar is one of the existing investors in Doubtnut, which is supposedly Byju’s next acquisition target.

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Investment firm Vertex Ventures US spearheaded the funding round. Early-stage venture arm of SAP as well as existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Strive VC also participated in the round.

Several independent angel investors including Almod Malvia (co-founder of Udaan, ex CTO Flipkart), James Tamplin (founder of Firebase) and Michael Stoppelman (ex-SVP of Engineering at Yelp) also took part in the round.

Hasura will use the latest fund proceedings to invest heavily in R&D and product development, mainly for offering seamless integration with databases and other data resources. Additionally, it will also use funds for hiring talent across marketing and sales departments.

“Hasura has an amazing fit with Postgres and the Postgres vendor ecosystem including new age distributed SQL Postgres vendors,” said Tanmai Gopal, CEO and co-founder at Hasura. “While we double down on the Postgres ecosystem, these funds will help us bring the Hasura and GraphQL experience to other databases to mobilize data in organizations by making high-performance and secure data access a reality.”

Hasura essentially provides data access and data flow tools and services to software developers through GraphQL APIs. The company claims that its GraphQL APIs makes data access immensely easy & thereby helps in accelerating final product delivery.

The company further claims that its technology is empowered by a highly concurrent just-in-time compiler and can process GraphQL queries & seamlessly map them into queries to multiple underlying systems.

The company envisions a world where data access becomes fast, secure and scalable – making data delivery just another piece of infrastructure.

The startup is founded by Tanmai Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh. It had raised seed funding of $1.6 Mn in April, 2018. Nexus Venture Partners and GREE Ventures spearheaded the seed funding round.

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