California-headquartered enterprise AI company raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by Avatar Growth Capital. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global (formerly Falcon Edge Capital) also participated in the round.
The startup will use the capital to invest in the growth of its finance, logistics, insurance, and retail categories across its geographies, including the US, UK, India, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Further, Mad Street Den will utilise the funds to expand its artificial intelligence offerings across industries and double down on scaling its business across a wide range of verticals.
The company claims to have had a strong demand for its AI platform over the past 24 months. It added that it has witnessed 100% year-on-year growth and expects the same in 2023.
According to Mad Street Den, this growth was powered by both the retail segment (Vue.ai), and its foray into new verticals like finance, insurance, healthcare, pharma, and logistics (getblox.ai).
Since its last funding round in 2019, Mad Street Den has tripled its headcount to 275 employees across the US, Middle East, Europe, and Asia.
“At Mad Street Den, we’ve gone step by step… in building a truly general AI platform, taking a vertical-first approach into retail, and then scaling that horizontally across several industries and use cases,” CEO and Founder Ashwini Asokan said.
“What we needed at this stage of the company was partners that would help us bring discipline to the scaling and a very strong understanding of the GTM levers that get unlocked with building a horizontal AI platform for large-scale enterprises,” she added.
Last year, the company acquired INTURN, a New York-based inventory management company that helps retailers monetise slow-moving and excess inventory faster.
“INTURN helped fill the last piece of our retail puzzle by helping manage the excess inventory part of the vertical workflow. INTURN is a wonderful value addition to Vue.ai’s offerings for the retail industry,” Ashwini told YourStory.
Speaking on the funding, Abhay Havaldar, Founder and Managing Partner, Avatar Growth Capital, said, “Blox’s ability to solve business problems across industries and use cases while maintaining efficacy at scale and low cost is highly differentiated. Further, its 30-60-90 days framework ensures customers do not need to wait for months to see results. We are very excited to partner with Ashwini, Anand, Costa, and the entire MSD team.”
