Design and engineering firm Illumine-i, artificial intelligence (AI) startup Segwise and sweets maker Scandalous Foods have secured early-stage funding, the companies said on Wednesday.
Illumine Industries Pvt Ltd, which operates the sustainable design and engineering firm Illumine-I, has raised around $2 million (Rs 17 crore) in a Series A funding round from Anicut Capital.
The startup will use the funds to expand into new markets and focus on automation and digitization.
Founded in 2015 by Nithish Sairam and Sudarsan Krishnan, Illumine-i started with a focus on designing low-voltage power plants. The company provides structural and electrical engineering expertise for power plants, energy storage systems, and distribution components.
Illumine-i also extends digital modeling, engineering and project management expertise to the architecture, engineering and construction sector.
“In the next 12 months, our goal is to introduce tech-based solutions, which would directly translate into reduced risk, reduced cost and improved quality of assets for our customers," said Sairam, co-founder and chief executive officer, Illumine-i.
AI startup Segwise has raised $1.6 million (Rs 13.3 crore) in a pre-seed funding round led by Powerhouse Ventures. The round also saw participation from Antler India, Blume Ventures, Everywhere Ventures, Saka Ventures, and Untitled Ventures.
The round also saw participation from Kunal Shah (Cred) and undisclosed executives from Microsoft, Amazon, SAP, Gojek, Flipkart, PhonePe and Groww, amongst others.
Founded by former FamPay executives Brijesh Bharadwaj and Shobhit Gupta, Segwise is building AI agents that can operate across all the layers of the product growth stack starting with monitoring data for opportunities and issues to eventually running growth experiments.
The platform allows for integrations across multiple data sources and tools and fine-tunes AI models tailored to tasks in the mobile product growth universe.
Powerhouse Ventures (PV) is an early-stage venture capital fund focusing on technology companies from India and the US.
Scandalous Foods has closed its pre-seed funding round at $361,209 (Rs 3 crore). The startup raised the funds in two tranches. In the most recent tranche, the startup raised Rs 1.4 crore from the Indian Angel Network (IAN), along with angel investors Arjun Vaidya of V3 Ventures, Ajay Mariwala, the managing director of VKL and FSIPL, and Sushma Gupta.
In December, the startup had raised Rs 1.6 crore from a host of investors including early-stage firms like Anthill Angel Fund, EvolveX, Value360 and Sapphireink Ventures along with angel investors Sagar Daryani, the founder of Wow! Momo, We Founder Circle’s Vikas Aggarwal, celebrity chef Harpal Singh Sokhi and Kamnaa Aggrawal.
Founded in 2022, Scandalous Foods offers preservative-free sweets with a six-month shelf life in single-serve sizes. Currently a business-to-business (B2B) firm, it operates with a focus on cloud kitchens and plans to expand to various food service segments. In the short term, the brand is set to introduce mithai bars and sachets.
