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Investment round also saw participation from angel investors like PubMatic’s Amar Goel, FarEye’s Gautam Kumar and Kushal Nahata along with ChargeBee’s Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam/

Funds to be used to ramp up hiring across verticals and scale up startup’s global operations.

Early investors in the startup include actor Ashton Kutcher, Y Combinator, SV Angel, and Soma

Workflow automation startup, Nanonets, has raised $10 Mn in its Series A funding round led by Elevation Capital.

The round also saw participation from angel investors like PubMatic cofounder Amar Goel, FarEye cofounders Gautam Kumar and Kushal Nahata, ChargeBee cofounders Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam, among others.

The funds will be used to ramp up hiring across engineering, artificial intelligence and machine learning verticals. The investment will also be used to scale up the startup’s operations and expand teams in new geographies.

Nanonets CEO and cofounder, Sarthak Jain, said, “The Series A funding is a critical next step in bringing Nanonets’ world-class document workflow solutions to customers across the Globe. We are constantly asking ourselves how to make the experience of document management easier for our customers and their end-users.”

Founded in 2017 by Sarthak Jain and Prathamesh Juvatkar, Nanonets helps businesses leverage AI to make workflow automation easier. The startup allows enterprises to digitise documents, validate information, update databases and execute decisions based on business rules, without any human intervention. 

Early investors in the startup include actor Ashton Kutcher, Y Combinator, SV Angel, and Soma Capital.

The startup claims to have grown its revenue by 10X in the past 18 months. The demand has mostly been fueled by pandemic and clients which include Global Fortune 500 companies.

Elevation Capital co-managing partner, Mukul Arora, said, “We were impressed to see that despite being at the cutting edge of AI/ML, Nanonets’ product is no-code and super intuitive — which makes it extremely easy for their clients to adopt. With very little capital, Sarthak and Prathamesh have built a stellar team and super impressive scale, and we are really excited to partner with them on this journey to build a large global tech company.”

Elevation Capital is a big name in the VC space that provides seed and early-stage capital for emerging startups in India. Founded in 2002, Elevation Capital has over $2 Bn under management and has a portfolio of over 100 companies.

A report by Bain estimates that hyper-automation platforms have an addressable market of $65 Bn. The shift, the report says, has been fueled by pandemic-induced work from home and is expected to favour market growth in the coming years.

Another report pegged the global optical character recognition market at $7.46 Bn in 2020. The market size is expected to expand at a CAGR of 16.7% between 2021-2028.

COVID-19 pandemic marked a major pivot as offices moved online and work from home became the norm. This shift has been catalysed by a slew of services that intend to automate workload and streamline efficiency.

In line with this, a slew of Indian startups have made headway in the automation sector. Earlier this month, infosec startup, Scrut Automation, raised $3 Mn in seed funding from Lightspeed and Endiya Partners. This was followed by compliance automation startup, Sprinto, raising $10 Mn in Series A funding led by Elevation Capital and a clutch of other institutional investors.

In January, professional services automation startup, SuperOps, raised $14 Mn in Series A round led by Addition and Tanglin Venture Partners. In October last year, cognitive process automation startup, E42, raised $5.4 Mn in a Series A round led by Pavestone ventures.

The startup mostly competes with global players in the intensely competitive industry. It faces stiff competition from companies like ABBYY, Docparser, among others.

Nanonets has proved its worth with innovative solutions and the funding is a testament to that. But with major players with deep pockets occupying pole positions in the industry, the journey won’t be easy for the startup.