Early-stage startups Ulipsu, Thena, others secure funding

By K Amoghavarsha

  • 24 May 2023
Anirudh Swarnkar and Rohit Jain, co-founders of uFaber

Edtech startups Ulipsu and uFaber, along with software-as-a-service platforms Thena and Ticket 9 have secured early-stage funding, the companies said on Wednesday. 

Kidvento Education and Research Pvt Ltd, which operates edtech platform Ulipsu, has closed its pre-Series A funding round at $5.7 million (Rs 47.13 crore).  

The startup raised $2.5 million and $3.2 million in the first and second tranches, respectively. The latest round saw participation from undisclosed existing investors, with a host of HNIs. 

The fresh capital will be used to expand geographical footprint and hiring. 

Founded in 2022, Ulipsu offers structured skill-based learning opportunities for all children from ages 6 to 16.  

“With the national education plan advocating the importance of skill development, schools are finding value in Ulipsu, and we see a market opportunity both within India and overseas,” said Sumanth Prabhu, co-founder and CEO, Ulipsu.

SaaS startup Thena has raised seed funding of $5 million (Rs 41.3 crore) co-led by Lightspeed and First Round Capital. 

The fresh funding for product development, market expansion as well as expanding team. 

Founded by Ankit Saxena, Govind Kavaturi, Mike Molinet and Unmukt Raizada in 2022, Thena’s product enables Slack and other messaging platforms to be used at scale for B2B customer communications. It helps customer-facing teams manage customers in tools like Slack by detecting, tracking and measuring customer requests along with providing analytics and insights into how customers are engaging with a company.  

The company counts organisations like Branch, Embrace, Mixpanel, WorkRamp, and Spotdraft as its client portfolio.  

Last year, Thena raised $2.2 million in a pre-seed funding round from Pear VC and Tenacity Venture Capital.

uFaber 
 
Edtech startup uFaber has secured $3.02 million (Rs 25 crore) in a Series A funding round from Mastermind JPIN Capital Partners and Gray Matters Capital.

The fresh proceeds will be deployed in expanding operations, developing technology stack as well as hiring talent.

Founded in 2015 by Rohit Jain and Anirudh Swarnkar, uFaber offers training programs to its students across verticals on English communication and soft skills, international English language testing system (IELTS), union public service commission (UPSC) along with its individual focused offering real school. 
 
The ed-tech firm had earlier raised Rs 2.5 crore from undisclosed angel investors.

In 2021, uFaber launched an accelerator program of Rs 10 crore for early-stage startups in the edtech space to extend financial and operational support to the selected startups.

SaaS startup Ticket 9 has raised $120,000 (Rs 0.9 crore) in a pre-seed funding round from a host of angel investors including Prabhu Rangarajan (M2P), Vijay Pravin Maharajan and Ashok Vardharajan (bitsCrunch), Mohan K (Ippopay) and others. 

The Coimbatore-based startup will use the funds for product development, hiring, developing its technology stack and market expansion. 

Founded by Yazhini Shanmugam and Santhos Premraj, Ticket 9 provides a suite of tools to create, manage, promote, and monetize events of any type and size. The platform helps event organizers to streamline event management to drive revenue growth and users to discover more personalized events.  

The platform is currently onboarding events across Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore and Tamilnadu.