ShopClues and CarTrade drive up the deal value in 2nd week of January

The government might have only now realised the importance of startups, but those who back them by providing funding continue doing what they do best--writing cheques for them. In the second week of January, VC and angels pumped in over $259 million in 29 Indian startups.

In the second week of January 20 startups received pre-series A funding. There were three Series A deals, two Series B, one Series D and one Series E deal. CarTrade and ShopClue raised their Series D and Series E round respectively. With the latest $100 million raise ShopClues has joined the Unicorn club (Unicorns are companies with paper valuation of over $1 billion) as the ninth Indian member. Flipkart, Sanpdeal, Ola, InMobi, Mu Sigma, Quikr, Paytm, Zomato have been unicorn members for quite sometime.

Hot sectors and cities

Nine startups in Delhi-NCR region have received funding; followed by eight Bengaluru-based startups and seven in Mumbai. Two startups from Pune and Hyderabad each announced funding during the same week.

Twenty of the deals were made in mobile space, five in e-commerce and four in healthcare. One agri startup got funded—Pune-based potato supply chain company Siddhi VinayakAgri Processing (SV Agri) raised its Series B round led by Lok Capital and existing investor Aspada.

Top five deals

#StartupIndia funding highlights

The second week of January was especially significant for startups due to PM NarendraModi’s Startup Action Plan. The announcements included setting up of 35 new incubators in institution and funding support of 40%(subject to a maximum of Rs 10 crore) to be provided by central government for establishment of new incubators in existing institutions for which 40 per cent funding by the respective state government and 20 per cent funding by the private sector has been committed.

Funding support through fund of funds with a corpus of Rs 10,000 crore—to provide funding support for development and growth of innovation-driven enterprises—was also announced. The government will set up a fund with an initial corpus of Rs 2,500 crore and a total corpus of Rs 10,000 crore over a period of four years.