tiger global

Tiger Global taps TCV partner Rohit Iragavarapu • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in tiger global, VentureNo Comments

Tiger Global is adding Rohit Iragavarapu, the partner at TCV Capital involved in deals such as Gitlab, Attentive, Toast, LegalZoom and Avetta, to its investment team, two sources familiar with the matter said. Before joining TCV in 2019, Iragavarapu worked at TPG Global and Morgan Stanley, according to his Linkedin profile. He starts his investor role at Tiger Global in the coming weeks, sources said. Tiger Global declined to comment Tuesday. Iragavarapu did not respond to a LinkedIn message. Iragavarapu’s arrival comes as the New York-headquartered hedge fund navigates one of its most challenging periods in two decades of its existence. Tiger Global’s hedge fund unit has lost more than half of its value this year. John Curtius, who oversaw many of the SaaS deals at the firm, left last month.

Apis in talks to back fintech Money View at $1 billion valuation despite market slump • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Accel, Apis Partners, Fintech, india, Startups, tiger globalNo Comments

India’s Money View is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a unicorn valuation, two sources familiar with the matter told ZebethMedia, in a boost to the local fintech community that has been rattled by the central bank’s stringent guidelines and funding crunch in recent months. Apis Partners is deliberating leading a funding round of about $125 million to $150 million in the Bengaluru-headquartered startup at a valuation of about $1 billion, the sources said. The round, a Series E, hasn’t been finalized, so terms of the deal may still change, the sources cautioned, requesting anonymity speaking about nonpublic information. Apis Partners, Money View and the startup’s founders did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening local time. The eight-year-old startup, which was valued at $615 million in a Series D funding round in March this year, offers lending to individuals who can’t avail credit from banks and other financial institutions. The startup has said in the past that the majority of its customers live in small Indian cities and towns. “India is one of the most underserved large economies when it comes to access to credit. More than 70% of the credit provided by banks is only given to the top 10% of affluent Indians,” it describes on its website. “The most underserved segments are people who earn less than 5L [$6,070] a year. Money View aims to bridge this credit gap by providing personalized loan offers for its customers through its robust data and risk assessment model. The company’s proprietary data models provide a 360-degree risk assessment, enabling credit for the underserved segments.” Money View — which counts Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and Accel among its existing backers — has been profitable for over a year, its founder Puneet Agarwal said in a press statement in May, and was on pace to clock an annualized revenue run rate of about $80 million. “In the age of cash burning businesses, we are one of the very few fintech startups to be profitable for more than a year now,” Agarwal said in a press release in May. Its new funding deliberations come at a time when the dealflow activity has slowed down dramatically in the South Asian market as investors grow cautious of writing new checks and evaluate their underwriting models after valuations of publicly listed firms take a tumble. Indian startups raised $3 billion in the quarter that ended in September, down 57% from the previous quarter and 80% year-over-year, according to market intelligence platform Tracxn.

Ambi Robotics secures $32M infusion to deploy its item-sorting robots in warehouses • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in ambi, ambi robotics, Bow Capital, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, tiger globalNo Comments

Ambi Robotics, a startup developing supply chain automation hardware, today announced that it raised $32 million in additional funding led by Tiger Global and Bow Capital, with participation from Ahren and logistics firm Pitney Bowes. Pitney Bowes is a strategic investor in Ambi, having recently inked a $23 million deal with the company to deploy Ambi’s hardware in U.S.-based Pitney Bowes fulfillment centers. The new capital came in the form of a SAFE, or simple agreement for future equity, which grants investors the right to purchase equity in the company at a future date, allowing Ambi to delay negotiations around valuation and terms of investment. CEO Jim Liefer says that it’ll be put toward continuing deployments and installations of Ambi’s tech, expanding the company’s product portfolio and growing engineering, customer support and operations teams headcount. “This additional funding round came together very quickly, spawning from a ‘normal’ company update to our existing investors and partners,” Liefer told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “It sparked interest to further fuel manufacturing and deployments of our current and future categories of AI-powered parcel sorting systems … Just this year, our team has more than doubled and we will continue to add engineering and customer success talent and other areas to keep pace with customer demand for our robotic solutions across their operations.” The co-founders of Ambi — including Ken Goldberg, the chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley — years ago discovered clever techniques to train robots in simulation and transfer those learnings to the real world. After a breakthrough on a system called Dex-Net, Goldberg and Jeff Mahler, a former doctoral student, launched the company in 2019, along with other scientists and engineers from UC Berkeley. Dex-Net, short for Dexterity Network, is an AI system that trains on thousands of images of 3D models of objects. Using deep learning, the system scans the data and uses algorithms to learn the best way to pick up the objects. A row of Ambi’s autonomous item-sorting robotic arms deployed to a warehouse floor. Image Credits: Ambi Robotics Ambi’s robotics platform builds on this to automate processes primarily in logistics and fulfillment. The company claims its products, which include robotic arms and the software to run them, can be “taught” to pick and pack millions of unique items while adapting to different packaging (e.g. boxes and envelopes) on the fly. Using “end effectors” like suction cups, Ambi machines pick, scan, insert, place and pack items arranged in mail sacks on fulfillment center floors in tandem with workers. Software running in the background analyzes data on productivity, item dimensions and weights, utilization and more and identifies “pick points” on items in cluttered environments like conveyor belts, totes and bins. Customers pay upfront for Ambi’s robotics units and then pay a monthly subscription cost for use of the software. “The team at Ambi Robotics brings a new way of thinking about traditional problems,” Liefer said. “With advanced tech that can solve a wide range of real-world problems, the team [has] decided to use their expertise to drive the exploding ecommerce industry toward a sustainable supply chain, so the strain of sorting parcels doesn’t rest on the shoulders of our most valuable asset — people.” Liefer says that Ambi’s current focus is deploying the latest generation of its robotics tech, AmbiSort A-Series v3, which features a “soft-touch” end effector that can handle both deformable and rigid items. Ambi claims that warehouse associates can work alongside three to four of these systems to increase the average throughput per employee to over 1,200 items sorted per hour. Ambi competes with Covariant, Nomagic, Soft Robotics, Pickle, Hai Robotics, XYZ Robotics and RightHand, among others, in a favorable investment climate for robotics. According to Crunchbase, more than $17 billion poured into VC-backed robotic startups in 2021 — nearly triple the investment in 2020. In April, Amazon announced that it would create a new $1 billion fund to back companies working in the customer fulfillment, logistics and supply chain sectors. And in May, Walmart expanded its partnership with robotics startup Symbotic to install the latter’s machines into all of Walmart’s distribution centers in the U.S. As of 2019, the global warehouse automation market was worth about $15 billion, according to Statista. That number is expected to double within the next four years, with supply chain executives in an Accenture survey citing automation as one of their top three investment priorities — workers’ concerns about the tech aside. Leifer says that Ambi, for its part, began generating revenue through commercial deployments in October 2020, installing systems prior to the peak holiday buying season. The company is currently in the process of installing 80 parcel-sorting systems while supporting more than 80 “full-stack” sorting systems across 15 sorting hubs. Gregg Zegras, EVP and president of global e-commerce at Pitney Bowes, added in an emailed statement: “Ambi Robotics is an important part of an innovation strategy that is helping Pitney Bowes improve service to our clients and efficiently grow our global ecommerce business. In Ambi Robotics, we see the same commitment to client-led innovation that has helped Pitney Bowes evolve and win in the marketplace for over 100 years. We look forward to continuing to work together to drive innovation in our global ecommerce hubs.” Berkeley-based Ambi, which recently moved into a new HQ, has raised $67 million to date and has more than 50 employees.

Tiger Global, Blume back startup bringing safety — and intelligence — to EVs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in blume ventures, electric vehicles, EV, Startups, tiger global, TransportationNo Comments

Tiger Global’s latest investment in India is Vecmocon, a startup building solutions to bring safety and reliability alongside intelligence and health monitoring to light electric vehicles (EVs), addressing concerns that are curtailing the sales of electric scooters in the South Asian market. Unlike traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles that have existed for more than 100 years, EVs are pretty new to the market. The data recently shared by the Indian government shows that the country has over 1.3 million EVs, compared to more than 278 million non-EVs. The cost of service and turnaround time of an EV in the country are also quite high compared to those of traditional combustion engine-powered counterparts. A number of EVs, especially EV scooters, that are available in the Indian market are also not meeting quality standards. Some have even caught fire in the recent past. Vecmocon, an abbreviation for vector motor control, is trying to solve all this using its core EV components and software that it sells to OEMs. The New Delhi-based startup additionally offers platforms for cloud integration to enable remote diagnostics for fleet operations. “For electric vehicles to happen, its ecosystem has to happen, and that ecosystem has to be data-driven. It has to be digitally enabled for a quick evolution,” said Peeyush Asati, co-founder and CEO of Vecmocon, in an interview with ZebethMedia. IIT Delhi alumnus Asati co-founded the startup with Shivam Wankhede and Adarshkumar B — alumni of IIT Delhi and Indian School of Business (ISB), respectively, in August 2016. Before starting their venture, the trio provided pro bono consultancy to e-rickshaw manufacturers. That helped them notice the industry’s strong reliance on China. “The Chinese component manufacturers are not cooperating because the ecosystem in China around EVs is fundamentally different from how it is in India. The geography is diverse, the use cases of how people use electric vehicles are two-wheelers, kind of in terms of culture in terms of behavior, in terms of geography, all of it was different,” Asati said. All this brought them to the conclusion that while many companies have started building the mechanical side of things for EVs locally in the market, the core tech side continues to leave a lot to be desired. Vecmocon offers battery management systems, vehicle intelligence modules, instrument clusters and chargers, among other components. It targets light EV manufacturers making two-wheelers, three-wheelers, forklifts and electric tractors at the moment, as those are the lowest hanging fruits, said Asati. He believes electric cars would still take some time to enter the Indian market due to the lack of physical infrastructure, though the solutions that Vecmocon makes are also ready for four-wheelers. The co-founder said the startup’s battery management systems comply with the Automotive Industry Standards (AIS)-156 that the Indian government introduced last month to address EV battery fire issues. The safety standards are yet to become mandatory for manufacturers, though. “We have already executed those recommendations in our previous generation and improved on them further. So, we are ahead in terms of safety and reliability,” he said. Now they secured some much-needed fuel to expand. Tiger Global co-led the pre-Series A round of $5.2 million in Vecmocon along with Blume Ventures. “We are impressed with the deep commitment and progress that Peeyush, Adarshkumar and Shivam have made to solve long-term problems in India’s EV industry, and we are excited to partner with them as they build a high-quality global automotive tech company to support the adoption of EVs,” Connie Lee, partner, Tiger Global, said in a prepared statement. The funding from the all-equity round will be used to build a business around the offerings created by Vecmocon, Asati said. He noted that the startup is planning to hire sales, HR, operations and finance people in the team, which currently has 20 engineers developing different hardware and software solutions. Vecmocon, which is currently using labs at IIT Delhi, also plans to build its in-house labs to test and develop new offerings for the market. “An electric vehicle is a technologically advanced product. For the larger number of OEMs, it is hard to develop the expertise to design and perfect the software and hardware components like a BMS (battery management system) or VIM (vehicle intelligence module). Such customers stand to win greatly by adopting Vecmocon’s platform which allows them to launch high-performance vehicles faster to the market. Over the last 5 years, Vecmocon has built a unique capability to engineer such data intensive components and deliver a highly robust and safe system,” said Arpit Agarwal, director, Blume Ventures. In this financial year, Vecmocon claims to have already orders of around $5 million to execute — giving it touch points with 30,000-40,000 odd vehicles. Asati said that the plan is to power more than 100,000 vehicles by next year and the hit the milestone of 500,000 by 2025. The startup also does not want to limit itself to India, as it has started working in a pilot phase with clients in global markets and has its initial customers in the U.S., Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Prior to the pre-Series A funding, Vecmocon had raised $300,000 in a strategic seed round in 2019 from Tessellate Tech Ventures. It also received seed support in a debt and equity mix from India’s Department of Science and Technology (DST).