Windrose Capital, 1Crowd lead funding in content marketing firm Text Mercato

By Narinder Kapur

  • 11 Dec 2020
Credit: VCCircle

Text Mercato Solutions Pvt Ltd, which operates an eponymous cataloguing and content marketing firm, has raised more than Rs 5 crore (approximately $678,708 at current exchange rates) in a pre-Series A fundraise.

The round in Bengaluru-based Text Mercato has been led by Windrose Capital and 1Crowd, it said in a statement.

Windrose Capital is a Pune-based venture firm that focusses on making investments in early and mid-stage companies. Other firms in Windrose’s portfolio include business process automation company Precily and Invento Robotics.

1Crowd is a crowdfunding-focussed investment platform that connects investors and startups. Portfolio companies for 1Crowd include software-as-a-service firm Infilect and preschool and day-care aggregator ProEves.

The investment in Text Mercato comes after reports in August said that the startup had raised Rs 4.85 crore (around $646,000) in funding.

The company was set up by Kiran Ramakrishna and Subhajit Mukherjee. It says its platform helps brands to scale their content and cataloguing needs such as product listings and blogs. It also leverages technology to deliver targeted content.

Text Mercato’s flagship product, Catloging.Ai, is a suite of machine learning-based products that help to create structured digital catalogues for online resources. Services include image and text recognition, text generation, online data processing, and character recognition.

It will use the capital it has raised to enhance its technological infrastructure, as well as to focus on customer acquisition and operations. It is also experimenting with its model to make an outreach to clients in several international and local markets.

“Our aim is to disrupt the multi-department and multi-role problem of listing and marketing a product into one single seamless process. The company will focus on the end-to-end stack, single sign-on, central management, and scale across languages,” Ramakrishna said.

Windrose Capital managing partner Rohit Goyal said the firm was confident in its investment owing to Text Mercato’s founding team and the strength of its product.

Per its website, companies that Text Mercato says it has worked with include Myntra, Urban Ladder, Amazon, and Cleartrip. According to VCCEdge, the data research arm of Mosaic Digital, the startup raised $192,113 (around Rs 1.4 crore) in funding in 2018 from a clutch of angel investors.