Binny Bansal, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy bet on TerraView

By Narinder Kapur

  • 27 Sep 2019
Credit: VCCircle

TerraView, a software-as-a-service-based image processing startup, has raised Rs 5.8 crore (about $824,000 at current exchange rates) in a Series A funding round from a clutch of investors.

The investors included Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and chief executive officer Kalyan Krishnamurthy, multiple media reports said.

Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Curefit co-founder Ankit Nagori, Dineout chief operating officer Abhishek Sharma and Tanglin Venture Partners were the other investors, Mint reported on Friday.

Tanglin is a venture capital fund floated by former Tiger Global executives Ravi Venkatesh and Edwina Yeo.

According to TerraView’s website, the California-based company uses its technological platform and drone hardware to analyse vineyards based on factors such as weather changes, soil moisture and bacterial infection.

VCCircle has reached out to TerraView on the reported funding and will update this article accordingly.

The startup will use the capital it has received to research problems related to fungal disease, soil hydration, bacterial infection, canopy covers and weather assessment, Entrackr reported.

Company co-founder Prateek Srivastava said the startup was helping the wine and vineyard ecosystem solve problems related to optimising output for quality as well as efficiently driving up higher volumes.

The company, which was founded this year by Srivastava and Piyush Harsh, operates in Spain and is planning to begin operations in Italy and France in the next few months, according to reports.

SaaS startups in vogue

The SaaS segment across industries has been full of investor activity in recent months. The rapid progress of frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing and branches of machine learning have results in a surge in the number of startups using the SaaS model.

Earlier this week, enterprise human resources management platform Darwinbox raised $15 million in a Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Sequoia India.

Similarly, this month, multinational payments technology company Mastercard Inc. invested in digital identity solutions-focussed startup Syntizen. Last month, Zenoti, a software provider to salons and spas, raised $20 million from alternative asset management firm Steadview Capital.