Space startup SatSure announced on Monday that it has concluded pre-series A round of $5 Mn. For Bengaluru based startup this latest funding is continuation of the  November 2021 fundraise, when it raised undisclosed amount of funding from Baring Private Equity India.

The latest tranche has brought of plethora of investors on the startup’s cap table. This includes ADB Ventures, Flowstate VC, Force Ventures, Indigo Edge Advisors, LunchBox Ventures and xto 10x Technologies.

The company will use the fresh proceedings for ramping up its presence across Southeast Asia market and  fast-track its product development. The startup also plans to speed up the launch of its propriety payloads to the lower earth orbit.

SatSure essentially aims to leverage the satellite data to help companies across the sectors in taking data driven and intelligent decisions. To put it in more simple words, its mission is to commoditize and commercialize space data to address macro-economic challenges faced by various companies across the world.

The startup was founded in 2017 by Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani and Abhishek Raju. Currently, SatSure offers satellite data services to industries catering to agriculture, BFSI, infrastructure, utilities and construction.

While the phrase ‘data is the new oil’ has become ubiquitous but the term ‘space data’ is very rarely used.

“Our vision is to create a full-stack space tech firm out of India that owns the data source, the data engine and software that shall offer simple plug and play solutions to end consumers,” the company said in the press release.

Although space startup usually struggle to get much traction from the VC industry, quite a few space startups managed to hog limelight over the years. This includes startups like Agnikul Cosmos, Pixxel, Dhruva Space and Bellatrix Aerospace.

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Licensed NFT Marketplace Colexion announced on Saturday that it has raised $5 Mn. The company said that it will use the funds for expanding its Metaverse infrastructure. Earlier the Delhi-NCR based startup had raised $1.8 Mn in seed round and $3.2 Mn from a private round. Several prominent VC firms had participated in this funding round.

Founded last year (2021), Colexion is a NFT marketplace that operates on polygon network and allows users to trade in digital collectables related to cricket and entertainment. Currently, the company boosts more than 1200 NFTS from 100+ celebrities and more than 10 countries.

Former star batsman Yuvraj Singh and actor Sunil Shetty are among other celebrities who are on Colexion. The startup has become quite famous for its ‘Trump Card NFTs.’

Apart from building the metaverse, the company has ambitious plans to start its state-of-the-art digital museum, virtual games and allow NFTs to trade categories like art, lifestyle, sports and celebrities.

Commenting about the latest funding, Abhay Aggarwal, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Colexion, “We at Colexion aim to increase NFT adoption via seamless, affordable and easy to understand NFT ecosystem and partnering with these industry giants will help in strengthening our long-term objective and expand our metaverse.”

“As a company, we will continue to focus on building a more robust economy and innovate our product portfolio to leverage brand partnerships in a much efficient manner.”

Since last year NFT, which stands for Non-fungible token, has been growing in popularity. Artists from India as well as the world have lapping up the cryptographic tokens for selling their arts and enhance their revenue avenue.

For all those who are not aware, NFT is a non-interchangeable digital unit that can be traded and sold using blockchain technology.

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Tech Upskilling platform Scaler announced on Tuesday that it has raised $55 Mn in series B round. New investor Lightrock India spearheaded the round while existing investor Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global also participated in the round.

The Bengaluru based startup was valued around $750 Mn in this new funding round, propelling it to the soonicorn club.

The company said that the fresh capital infusion will be used for expanding international footprint, launching new products and services, ramping up acquisition and increasing the customer base in the domestic market.

Scaler claims that students enrolling in its intensive course are able to fetch 4.5X ROI. The startup further claims that today its ex-students are working in some of the biggest tech companies including Google, Amazon, Paypal, Uber, Adobe and many other companies. Many of its ex-students are also working in unicorn startups, the company further added.

Scaler was founded in the year 2019 with an aim to help engineer students and tech professionals in upskilling their skills. The company conducts a six month intensive computer science course through live classes. This course is conducted by industry and subject matter experts who are currently employed in big tech companies.

Scaler believes that the legacy institutions in India’s higher education has failed to churn out quality professionals, especially in the IT space. The Bengaluru headquartered startup is seeking to fill this void through its six month intensive course.

Scaler was part of the Sequoia Capital’s accelerator program Surge’s first batch. Edtech startups have been receiving huge amount of investment from the investor community ever since the inception of Covid-19.

Today India’s most valued startup is Byju’s, which hails from the edtech space. Other edtech startups like Upgrad, Unacademy and Vedantu are already part of the coveted unicorn club.

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Ola Electric, the electric unit of ride-hailing company ola, announced on Monday that it has raised $200 in a new funding round. Tekne Private Ventures, Alpine Opportunity Fund, Edelweiss and others participated in the round. Ola’s sister company raised the new funding round at a valuation of $5 Bn. The company had raised a similar amount of funding at a valuation of $3 Bn.          

The company is expected to use the funds to increase the production of its recently launched two-wheeler bikes. After much delay, the company had finally launched its bikes Ola S1 and Ola S1 Pro last year in August.

Since last few weeks Ola’s newly launched electric bikes have been getting lot of media attention, albeit for all wrong reasons. Several customers took to social media platform to complain that their Ola bikes were shipped in damaged conditions while other customers companied about the faulty spare parts.

Unperturbed by these criticisms, Bhavesh Agrawal’s company is confident that it will be able to make a dent in India’s highly nascent electric vehicle market. Ola’s Electric’s primary competitor is Ather Energy, which recently announced that it will be soon raising around $57 Mn from Hero Motor Corp.

Both companies are heavily funded but Ola Electric is certainly way ahead in the fundraise. It counts Tiger Global, SoftBank and Matrix among other high-profile investors.

After clocking $5 Bn valuation, Ola Electric will joins the likes of PharmEasy, Postman, Dream 11, Razorpay and Swiggy.  

Although electric vehicles have created lot of buzz in the Indian market but it continues to face lot of infrastructure problem. The main challenge being the sheer dearth of charging stations  across the country.

Keeping aside these challenges, Ola and Ather Energy are aggressively pursuing their goals. Besides, over the years Indian government has announced slew of measures to encourage electric vehicle industry in the country.

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