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Beco raises $3M led by Rukum Capital in Series A 

Sustainable home and personal care brand Beco raised $3 million in a Series A round led by Rukum Capital, Priyavrata Mafatlal, Better Capital, Prashant Pittie, and Titan Capital.

Other investors, including Bimal Parekh, Sweta Amrish Rau, Arjun Purkayastha, Harish Narayanan, Rehan Shaikh, Shantanu Deshpande, Kolte-Patil Family Ventures, Gaurav Arora, Avinash Badaia, and Exceed Entertainment, also participated in the round.

The startup will use the funds for R&D (product innovation, development in sustainability), marketing, supply chain functions, and talent acquisition across verticals to boost growth. 

Founded in 2019 by Aditya Ruia, Akshay Varma, and Anuj Ruia, Mumbai-based startup Beco aims to make sustainable living convenient by providing easily accessible and affordable products for Indian consumers.

The startup aims to expand into 10,000 offline retail stores across India and will also widen its product range to include a new set of cleaner products and an all-new personal hygiene care category, including a multipurpose spray, bathroom cleaner, and laundry detergent sheets. 

hBits raises Rs 20 Cr in angel round

Commercial real estate startup hBits, which offers fractional ownership (FA) to investors in Grade A properties, raised Rs 20 crore in an angel funding round.  

Investors participating in the round include Nirmal Jain (Chairman and Founder of IIFL), Incred Capital (Part of The Incred Group), Jayesh Parekh (ex-Managing Partner, Jungle Ventures); Awdhesh Krishna (ex-Managing Director, Snow Leopard (Kirloskar Family Office) and Global Head of HR, Wholesale Corporate Banking at Nomura Services Limited).  

The company will use the capital to acquire new assets under management (AUM), customer acquisition, and expansion of the business to newer cities.

hBits uses machine learning to gather historical sale and rental data, also available on its platform for everybody to access. The company will further strengthen its technology to bring more transparency to information sharing and increase the ease and security of transactions.

The startup has an AUM of Rs 150 crore from its eight assets. It aims to bring in 40 new Grade A properties and achieve investments under management at Rs 1,000 crore within a year. The company has 30,000 investors on its platform.

hBits plans to use blockchain technology to make all transactions paperless. All the contracts are digitally signed, and investors can buy and sell transactions themselves through its platform, thereby cutting the need for intermediaries.

Presently, hBits has almost 1.50 lakh square feet of area under management in eight assets that it manages in Mumbai.

EVeez raises fresh funds from Ev2 Ventures and ah! Ventures’ angel platform

Gurugram-based e-mobility-as-a-service startup EVeez has raised an undisclosed amount led by Ev2 Ventures (Ev2) as part of its seed round to build deeper tech capabilities and geographical expansion. The funding round also saw participation from ah! Ventures’ angel platform.

Founded in 2020 by Gaurav Rathore and Abhishek Dwivedi, EVeez says it clocks a monthly growth of over 15%. It has a presence across Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Bengaluru and plans to expand to 12 more cities soon.

In the past year, the startup has grown 5X to over 1,500 e-bikes, with an enviable customer acquisition cost (CAC) close to zero. It aims to expand to deploy more than 10,000 e-bikes within the next year (each e-bike adds a net lifetime value of over Rs 1.2 lakh).

Equipped with advanced IoT devices that provide rich usage data and valuable insights to subscribers, EVeez has partnered with ecommerce, 3PL, transportation, and last-mile delivery giants like Swiggy, Xpressbees, Uber Moto, Zomato, Zepto, and Shadowfax. Moreover, it also services over 100 SMB clients, covering a range of sectors.

Fuel aggregator Nawgati raises funding from MapMyIndia

Fuel aggregator Nawgati has raised an undisclosed sum at a valuation of $4 million from MapMyIndia. 

The B2B2C congestion management and compliance monitoring startup builds state-of-the-art systems for fuel stations. It is incubated and supported by BITS Pilani’s incubator PIED Society and the Ministry of Electronics and IT.

The startup will use the investment to strengthen the core team to scale Aaveg pan-India with all major fuel companies.

Nawgati’s offering—Aaveg—is live at Indraprastha Gas Limited’s CNG outlets in the Delhi region. The company has undertaken pilots with Indian Oil and Mahanagar Gas and has deployments in the pipeline with Gujarat Gas, Sabarmati Gas, and Adani Total. Product rollouts are also discussed with Think Gas, Torrent Gas, Indian Oil CGD, IRM Energy, HPCL, Green Gas, CUGL, and AG&P.

Vaibhav Kaushik, CEO and Co-founder said,

“The recent funding from MapMyIndia provides Nawgati with the necessary fuel (pun intended) to onboard all major fuel providers in the country. MapMyIndia’s experience in building excellent products for both large scale organisations and end-consumers will come in handy during Nawgati’s journey.”