MeetUniv, a college search portal for studying abroad, has raised funding from Peesh Ventures, reports VCCircle. The amount of funding is conflicted since VCCircle reports MeetUniv to have raised $9.5 million while Business Standard reports the amount to be $1 million. MeetUniv was founded by Nitin Kapoor and Keshav Munjal in September 2012. It allows users to search, shortlist and apply for over 3,000 colleges and universities outside India and claims to list over 40,000 undergraduate and graduate courses from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Singapore among others. The company had previously raised $50,000 in funding as a part of Times Internet’s TLabs startup accelerator in March this year. The portal also allows students to chat with universities directly.
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Bangalore based Messaging app Lookup has raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Stone will also join the Lookup team as an investor and advisor. Lookup will be using the funds to expand its merchant base and availability across geographies. In January this year, Lookup raised $382,000 in seed funding from Japanese investors Teruhide Sato and DeNA Co. The company had previously raised $160,000 from Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and $100,000 from MKS Switzerland in December last year. Lookup was founded by Deepak Ravindran and claims to have answered over 3 million queries by its customers.
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Ahmedabad based Awaaz De, a voice solutions startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from a group of angel investors led by Samir Shah, reports Business Standard. The funds will go towards expansion and hiring. The company had previously raised seed funding from Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), IIM Ahmedabad. Awaaz De was founded by Neil Patel and Tapan Parikh in 2010. It claims to have clients in Teach For India, Development Support Centre, Adani Foundation and CDDRL Stanford among others. Awaaz De offers voice solutions in education, agriculture, health and finance through short educational modules for students and parents, gather data through its VoiceSurvey engine, take touchtone or spoken input, ask health questions to field experts, conduct interactive quizzes, set out repayment reminders, get data on crops and selling price etc. It claims to have made over 4 million phone calls to more than 400,000 recipients across the world.
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Crown it, a local business and discovery marketplace has raised $5.5 million Series A funding from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners, reports Mint. The company will use the funds to expand its services (to other cities as well), categories and technology. Crown it lets users discover restaurants and outlets which offer cashback schemes while shopping on its platform. Users can click on the picture of the bill to redeem their cashbacks. It lets merchants run marketing programs, out of which it takes a marketing fee for the sales the merchants generate. The Mint report adds that a part of this fee goes to the consumer in their cashbacks. Currently, it lists places like The Lalit, Khaaja Chowk, Vanakkam, Hooters club and dine among others. Crown it was founded by Sameer Grover in October 2013.
