(By Vivek & Riddhi Mukherjee)
OnlinePrasad.com raises funding from Hyderabad Angels and others
Bangalore-based Sumiran Spiritual Services that operates OnlinePrasad.com, has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-series A round of funding led by Hyderabad Angels, reports Livemint.
Other participating investors includes Chennai Angels, former Microsoft India MD Srini Koppolu, Sify founder R Ramraj and Magna Infotech co-founder Niraj Mittal. The startup plans to use the funds raised to scale its services like astrology and marketing of its private label brand Zevotion.
Prior to this, OnlinePrasad had raised funds from K Ganesh’s GrowthStory in June last year. It was also part of The Morpheus’s eighth batch that graduated in December 2012.
Founded in January 2012, OnlinePrasad essentially lets users offer ‘prasad’ to temples of their choice. The website currently lists various temples across the country including Vaishno Devi, Kalighat temple, Siddhi Vinayak temple and Tirupati among others. Customers can decide the quantity they want to offer, post which the company will make the offering at the temple on their behalf and deliver the prasad by courier within five to six working days.
ShieldSquare raises Rs 2 crore in angel funding
Bangalore-based ShieldSquare has raised Rs 2 crore in angel funding from 15 angel investors & entrepreneurs from India, US and Singapore, reports the Economic Times. The investors included FreshDesk founder Girish Mathrubootham, redBus founders Phanindra Sama, Charan Padmaraju & Sudhakar Pasupunuri and BharatMatrimony founder Murugavel Janakiraman among others.
ShieldSquare currently provides a cloud-based security solution that claims to protect client content from unauthorized third parties, by preventing bots from scraping the data, and providing detailed analytics about incoming traffic. It counts social networking sites, content websites, e-commerce portals and listing sites as its customers including IndiaProperty, SlideRule and Kobster among others. The service is currently available to users via a quarterly subscription plan with usage based pricing plans. ShieldSquare was also part of Microsoft Ventures Accelerator’s third startup batch that graduated in November last year.
MyRefers raises Series A funding from Bedrock Ventures
Referral recruitment portal MyRefers.com has raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Bedrock Ventures, reports TechCircle. MyRefers’ founder and CEO Lalit Bhagia told the publication that the funds will be used to further build a Big Data intelligence engine to power the referrals.
The startup was founded in April 2013 and works on a subscription model, wherein the firms hiring through the platform pay a fee. MyRefers claims to have 35 clients onboard at present, including Yepme, Mahindra & Mahindra, Star TV, and Dentsu among others.
The portal also claims to be facilitating around 1,200 referrals every month across cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune and Indore.
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s PE firm to invest in India
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s Los Angeles and Singapore-based PE firm Velos Partners plans to start investing in Indian companies soon, reports TechCircle. Velos will focus on the companies in the retail innovation, health and wellness, and luxury and entertainment segments.
Velos has appointed former CEO & managing partner of the venture capital arm of SREI Infrastructure Finance, Samrat Ganguly as its head of Asia-Pacific including India. Ganguly told the publication that about 30% of the firm’s investment would be in the APAC region, with India and Southeast Asia as the main focus.
Velos’s current portfolio include airport car rental service Silvercar, provider of custom online ordering tools to restaurants ChowNow, mobile photography marketplace Twenty20, and tour & activity booking service Peek.com, among others.
