Updates – Ankur Shrivastava's Blog

05Aug 2020 by ankur No Comments

Tags: Announcements, Edtech, Fundraising, Portfolio

Springboard, one of our portfolio startups, today announced their $31M Series B funding led by Telstra. With this, Springboard has raised over $50 million till date.

Started in 2013 by our long-time friends, Parul Gupta and Gautam Tambay, Springboard is building a new-age university with a focus on upskilling professionals. It matches each student 1:1 with a personalized mentor, alongside a core curriculum and project work. They’ve witnessed 330% student enrollment growth from June 2019 to June 2020. It’s a rocket ship!

02Jul 2020 by ankur No Comments

News: Flintobox raises $7.2M pre-Series B round

Tags: Announcements, Edtech, Fundraising, Portfolio

Flintobox, another portfolio firm of ours, today announced the closure of its $7.2M (INR 50 Cr) pre-Series B round led by Lightbox.

We first backed Flintobox by leading their pre-seed round when they were fresh out of the GSF accelerator. As users of their products, we had high conviction that this team would create a large company in the early learning space. Since then, we’ve led or participated in three of their funding rounds, while they’ve grown their top line 100x!

01Jul 2020 by ankur No Comments

News: Globevestor leads Forbidden Foods’ $1M seed round

Tags: Announcements, CPG, Investing, Portfolio

We’ve announced today about our investment in Forbidden Foods, which owns the BRB brand of popped chips. We led the $1M round which was joined by Secocha Ventures, First Cheque and prominent angels.

The founders, Anuj and Abhishek, are long-time friends and form an incredible team. Anuj previously was a founding team member of Bira and led their operations & distribution. Abhishek is a long timer at Schlumberger, and brings immense operational expertise.

18Mar 2020 by ankur No Comments

News: Agnikul raises pre-Series A round led by Pi Ventures

Tags: Announcements, Investing, Portfolio, Spacetech

We recently invested in the pre-Series A round of Agnikul, an India-based small rockets company. The round was led by Pi Ventures and participated in by Speciale Invest, Artha Venture Fund and others, alongside us.

Agnikul is one of those moonshot, big vision startups. They’re building small rockets to launch nano-satellites to low earth orbits in space. Srinath and Moin, the founders, are innovating by making innovations in design to be able to make a single-piece 3D printed engine.

21Jan 2020 by ankur No Comments

News: Zoomcar raises $30M from Sony and others

Tags: Announcements, Fundraising, Portfolio, Sharing Economy

Our portfolio company, Zoomcar, announced today that it has raised a $30M round led by Sony.

Zoomcar has a special place in my heart as it was my first angel investment and the first deal we did on Globevestor. We invested first in their seed round when they were just present in Bangalore. And today they’re present in nearly 50 cities in India!

14Aug 2019 by ankur No Comments

News: Doxper raises $4M as part of Series A led by Alkemi Venture Partners

Tags: Announcements, Funding, Portfolio

Today, a Globevestor portfolio company, Doxper, has announced its Series A round. Doxper aims to be one of the largest healthcare informatics company in India & SE Asia, and helps hospitals & doctors digitize prescriptions.

There’s no question that the current practice of writing prescriptions by hand on a paper, followed by doctors in India, is archaic and will be replaced in the future with more tech solutions. This practice is also the reason why digitizing prescriptions has been such a tough problem to solve till now. However, it also makes for a classic case study in change management. How do you make an industry move to a new-age solution, when the current habits are well-entrenched and honestly, are more efficient for the practitioners?

06Jun 2019 by ankur No Comments

News: IAN Fund leads a Rs 19 crore round in Chakr Innovation

Tags: Announcements, Funding, Portfolio

This morning, woke up to the announcement by one of Globevestor portfolio companies, Chakr Innovation, about its Series A fundraise. Chakr is on a mission to reduce air pollution, an evil of our times and an increasingly alarming problem in India.

Living in Delhi NCR since 2004, both me and my wife develop small respiratory issues for 3-4 months in winter, when the air quality drops significantly in the metropolis. With two little children, we only wonder what the air could do to their lungs. It’s a problem that has literally hit home.

15Aug 2016 by ankur No Comments

Beta Launch

Tags: Announcements, Globevestor, Updates

In startup parlance, I’m doing a beta launch for this personal blog. It doesn’t quite feel ready for primetime, but as is said that if it doesn’t feel broken then you’ve waited too long to launch. So here goes. To begin with, have ported here two posts on startups that I wrote a few months ago, as they are quite relevant.

At Globevestor, we’ve been actively investing in India for about two years now, and it’s been a great ride so far.