Ottonomy.IO has announced the close of their seed funding round of $3.3 million bringing its total funding to date to $4.9M; supporting the scale of Ottobots for fully autonomous airport, retail and restaurant deliveries. The funding round is led by Pi Ventures who back deep tech startups. Connetic Ventures and Branded Hospitality Ventures and the Founder & CEO of Addverb Technologies, Sangeet Kumar, also joined this round; making the group a dynamic mix from retail, food and robotics industry investors for Ottonomy's seed round. "Last mile delivery is the least productive, yet the most expensive part of the delivery chain. There is a strong need for automation, which Ottonomy fulfills with Ottobots," says Roopan Aulakh, Managing Director from pi Ventures.

Round led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from Pi Ventures and angel investors. LimeChat, a chatbot startup for D2C brands, has raised $4.2 million in Seed funding led by Stellaris Venture Partners, with participation from Pi Ventures, Titan Capital and marquee angel investors. LimeChat's assistant lets the brand instantly respond to customer queries throughout the buying journey, from product discovery to checkout to returns. LimeChat's WhatsApp Retention Campaigns help brands engage customers on WhatsApp at critical points in their buying journey, from abandoned checkout to feedback to win-back of existing users. This allows brands to increase campaign conversions by 3x, reduce support workloads by 70%, and improve customer satisfaction.

In the past six months, the world as we know it has been upended. Remote is the new local The shift to remote will have a transformative impact on all aspects of life including travel, hospitality, work, buying behaviour, manufacturing and the shared economy. All forms of automation will see massive tail winds. Digital everywhere The digital economy will create exponentially more data. As the world goes remote, more people will collaborate and transact online, leading to an exponential increase in the amount of data generated.

Indian health care startup Niramai Health Analytix is in talks with Asian hospitals for its noninvasive, artificial intelligence-enabled technology to screen for early signs of breast cancer. The startup has raised about $7 million from Japan's Dream Incubator and local investors Pi Ventures, Axilor and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, among others. It is now preparing pretrials in South and Southeast Asian countries with a high incidence of breast cancer. According to the World Health Organization, Asia accounted for 43.6% of the 2.09 million breast cancer cases globally in 2018. The organization also noted that breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, both in developed and less developed nations.

Geeta Manjunath turned entrepreneur in the backdrop of a tragedy. In 2017, a cousin she was really close to succumbed to breast cancer at a relatively young age. Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer in women and the second most common worldwide. Gopinath, who has a PhD in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science, applied her scientific mind to the issue. Ubiquitous screening and early detection vastly reduces fatality from cancer. Gopinath had been part of the team that built India's first supercomputer, and most recently headed data analytics at Bengaluru's Xerox Research Centre and worked in various roles at Hewlett Packard Labs for 16 years.

India is witnessing a surge in deep technology investments, as specialist VCs are seeking out high-quality product and enterprise tech startups to bankroll and mentor. The startup story in India has, in the past, been defined by consumer-driven ventures like Flipkart and Snapdeal, which eventually became e-commerce giants, drawing billions in funding. Lately, however, there has been a gradual shift in that ecosystem as India's startups begin to focus on technology and product innovation, moving away from the consumer. This has led to the creation of specialist early stage funds, focused on grooming product innovation startups and headed by venture capitalists with domain expertise as well as entrepreneurial and operational experience. These specialist funds are playing a key role in co-creating scalable businesses, while bridging the funding gap between angel and series A investments in the venture capital spectrum of India.

When Mukundhan Srinivasan ran a startup a few years ago, he could not find enough people to discuss machine- #chAI hosts one session almost every month with two speakers -- one from the startup world and the other from academia. It was still a nascent concept in India. So he began a small community, Deep Learning Bangalore (DLBLR), that in a couple of years has drawn in more than 2,250 enthusiasts. Srinivasan's startup failed to take off but his passion to grow the community has stayed. "It might be hard to relate to this but in 2013-14, it was very lonely to be doing machine-learning in India, let alone Bengaluru. The problem was to find people who were in the same community at the same level -- developer to developer, data scientist to data scientist," said Srinivasan, now a solutions architect for machine learning at chipmaker Nvidia, which lets him run the community's sessions at its Bengaluru premises on weekends.

Manish Singhal has two video technology patents to his name and helped build products at companies such as Motorola and Sling Media before becoming an entrepreneur and investor. No wonder, then, that the venture capital fund Singhal co-launched last year--pi Ventures--focuses on tech startups, particularly those working on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The VC fund aims to raise $30 million; it has already attracted investors such as International Finance Corporation, Accel Partners, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and prominent angel investor TV Mohandas Pai. The fund has backed four startups and will invest in a total of 18-20 startups. In an interaction with VCCircle, Singhal speaks about AI startups in India and the fund's strategy.

BENGALURU: International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investment arm of the World Bank Group, is investing $3 million in pi Ventures' maiden fund. An early-stage investment firm, pi Ventures is focused on startups in the area of applied artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things (IoT). The amount will be used for investing in companies leveraging technologies such as applied artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and IoT across a range of sectors. "Getting IFC to back us in our journey is very meaningful to us," said Manish Singhal, founding partner of pi Ventures. "Not only do they bring a wealth of knowledge but also a worldwide network, which can be very useful for our investee companies."

International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investment arm of the World Bank Group, is investing $3 million in pi Ventures' maiden fund. An early-stage investment firm, pi Ventures is focused on startups in the area of applied artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things (IoT). The amount will be used for investing in companies leveraging technologies such as applied artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and IoT across a range of sectors. "Getting IFC to back us in our journey is very meaningful to us," said Manish Singhal, founding partner of pi Ventures. "Not only do they bring a wealth of knowledge but also a worldwide network, which can be very useful for our investee companies." It has backed four projects so far -medical diagnostic startup SigTuple, heart monitoring startup ten3T Health (Cicer), energy management firm Zenatix and health analytics startup Niramai.