4 rising startups you can't ignore in India

Tech in Asia puts the spotlight on start-ups that have been in the news

Creo

Bangalore-based Creo wants to make smartphones and also an operating system to power them. And to get there, it has the backing of Sequoia India, Beenext Ventures, and India Quotient, who invested $3 million as seed money.

“The idea of building an Android-based OS for a smartphone stemmed from the realization that in the current market, while hardware is getting better very fast, there is not enough differentiation on the software front. We want to be the ones bridging that gap,” says Sai Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Creo.

Housing

Just when most of India was ready to write-off Housing as a lost cause, its biggest backer SoftBank has injected $14.7 million in funding into this real estate portal.

A year ago, Housing was one of India’s hottest startups. But it has cooled off dramatically since then. Its co-founder and CEO Rahul Yadav dominated startup news for a long time, picking fight with investors, quitting, giving up shares, and finally getting the sack. 

Firstcry

Indian biz tycoon Ratan Tata has made his fourth startup investment already this year. This one’s an undisclosed amount in babycare ecommerce site FirstCry, according to a statement from the company. Brainbees, which owns the FirstCry brand, has raised $69 million in multiple rounds from IDG Ventures India, Saif Partners, Vertex Ventures, Valiant Capital, and New Enterprise Associates.

Fisdom

Bangalore-based fintech startup Fisdom has raised $500,000 in seed funding, led by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Rob Chandra. This personal finance app has also got the backing of CommonFloor co-founder Sumit Jain and TaxiForSure co-founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Raghunandan G. CommonFloor recently merged with Quikr, while TaxiForSure got acquired by Ola.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here