Ring in the weekend by reading about these startups! A cloud storage firm with security as its selling point, another of India’s on-demand chauffeur apps, and an e-publisher all make our list.
ParaBlu
Photo credit: lifehacker.com
ParaBlu, a startup that deals in secure cloud storage for corporates, has raised US$500,000 in seed funding from Kstart, Kalaari Capital’s seed program.
Kstart, announced in February, offers a combination of capital and mentoring to help startups it has identified as next generation companies that have disruptive potential in their respective industries.
Founded by Anand Prahlad and Ananda Rao Ladi in 2012, ParaBlu offers a number of cloud management features that can help enterprises store large amounts of data and keep information confidential.
ParaBlu is the fourth company in Kstart’s portfolio. Other companies, announced in May, include Active.ai, AffordPlan, and Indee.
Drivify
Photo credit: Autocar India
India’s chauffeur space has been doing some serious shaping up. Over the past three months, we’ve seen Driverskart make an acquisition on the heels of a pre-series A round. Zuver gotfunded around the same time, while DriveU made its own acquisition.
Mumbai-based Drivify joined that club today, raising US$50,000 in seed funding from Citrus Pay founder Jitendra Gupta and Pankaj Tripathi, a high net worth individual.
Drivify was founded in May last year by Prasad Shriyan and Jatin Kamdar. The app scans for drivers in a 10 km radius of the ride booker. It has 700 registered drivers with 70 active drivers. The startup pays drivers a fixed amount for logging in and remaining active for a certain number of hours.
Pratilipi
Photo Credit: thenextweb.com
Bangalore-based Pratilipi, an online self-publishing platform, has raised around US$925,000 in seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners, as well as other investors.
Contrarian Opportunities Fund I, Times Internet Equity Crest founders Deepak Gupta and Amit Wadhwa, and Voler Car director Amit Banka also contributed to the investment.
Founded in March last year by Ranjeet Pratap Singh, Sankaranarayanan Devarajan, Rahul Ranjan, Prashant Gupta, and Sahradayi Modi, Pratilipi is run by Nasadiya Technologies. It allows writers to publish their work on its platform, where readers can check it out for free. It covers eight Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and Kannada – and claims to have 3,700 writers with 1.5 million readers.
Earlier this month, Ahmedabad-based e-book publisher Matrubharti raised seed funding.
Image Credit: winwinusa.com
This article was originally published in techniasia.com