We Are's - The Weekly Dispatch

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola Cabs and Ola Electric – has now incorporated a new company with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) in the name of Krutrim Si Designs Private Limited in April. Besides Aggarwal, Krishnamurthy Venugopala Tenneti is the only other Director of the company.? The newly incorporated company is likely to operate in the AI space, as per a report.

Edtech platform Avidii has started its full-fledged operations in India in early 2023,? all the way from Switzerland. Launched in 2021, by Deepak Subbarao, Roman Buhler, Xavier Vanderhaeghe and Yannick Streicher, in Zurich, the startup aims to achieve 1 million users and downloads in India by the end of the year. It is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland and in India it operates out of Bengaluru.

Sequoia India & SEA, managing over $9.2 billion across 13 funds, will now be known as Peak XV Partners globally. There will be no changes to the India leadership, which will continue to be headed by Shailendra Singh. The other entities emerging from the split are Sequoia Capital in the US & Europe and Sequoia China which will retain its current Chinese name and will be known as HongShan in English.

2070 Health, a healthcare venture incubator, has raised $30 million from VC firm W Health Ventures to create a platform that will build healthcare companies in India. The funds will also be used to seed the newly-launched companies. W Health Ventures and 2070 Health share the same Co-founding team. W Health Ventures is a US and India-based investor, with 2070 Health acting as its incubator.

Piper Serica Angel Fund, an angel fund investing in technology-backed startups said that it has crossed its target corpus of ?100 crores and is now exercising the green-shoe option of another ?25 crores. It will stop taking subscriptions from the end of June. The fund has already made 12 investments, with an additional 4 investments currently undergoing due diligence processes.

Cash flow management platform CredFlow has acquired the Y Combinator-backed management startup TechBiz for an undisclosed amount in an all-cash deal. CredFlow helps SMEs manage their finances by providing an overview of cash flows, improving outstanding receivables and embedding contextual financial services to reduce their working capital cycles by 25-30%.

VC firm Antler has raised $285 million for its Antler Elevate fund to support growth-stage startups. Antler Elevate will participate in Series A funding and beyond to provide scale-up capital for companies having a good product-market fit and demonstrating compounding growth. Some of these companies were supported in Antler’s early-stage funds, which cover 20+ ecosystems, the VC fund said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is on a visit to India, said that the company is committed to backing Startups in the country, with conversations are already underway to facilitate this initiative. He also said that education is one of the areas that he is most excited about. He also mentioned that backing startups in India takes higher priority than opening an office in India at the moment.

PharmEasy has reportedly appointed Avendus Capital to raise equity funding. The move comes as its existing investors plan to infuse fresh capital to shore up the company. Prosus Ventures, Temasek Holdings, CDPQ and TPG are looking to invest up to ? 250 Cr into PharmEasy, Mint reported. PharmEasy is looking to raise up to $100 Mn (? 824.64 Cr) in the current round, having raised ? 550 Cr through a rights issue in 2022.