The round also saw participation from existing investors Elevation Capital and the startup’s founders to push housing finance availability in the country, as per the company’s statement. 

With the fresh proceeds, Vridhi Home Finance is targeting expansion in the existing markets ensuring strong technology infrastructure. 

The statement also underlined the company’s investment approach towards customer centricity, right risk management practices and strong distribution network.

The company claims to offer home loans ranging from INR 3 Lakh to INR 45 Lakh with primary focus on smaller towns with populations between 3,000 and 500,000. It further says that it aims to serve underserved markets by expanding its physical network.

Sunku Ram Naresh, founder, MD and CEO of Vridhi Home Finance, said, “By establishing an omnichannel presence and ensuring exceptional service delivery through our phygital model, we are making home ownership accessible to traditionally underserved segments. The strong backing from Norwest and continued support from Elevation Capital validates our approach of combining deep market understanding with technology-led innovation.”

Launched in 2022 by Sunku Ram Naresh and co-founders Sandeep Arora and Sunil Mehta, Vridhi Home Finance uses technology, sales, and credit tools to facilitate housing financing distribution.

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Portuguese startup Infraspeak has set out to address that with an all-in-one platform that gives facility managers and associated service providers insights and operational control over everything that goes on in a given location.

Founded in 2015, Infraspeak has hitherto raised around $20 million in funding, and secured big-name customers such as KFC, Intercontinental and Primark. And to drive its next phase of growth, the Porto-based startup on Monday said it has raised a further €18 million ($19.5 million) in Series B funding.

Many moving parts

Consider a healthcare firm with myriad departments, equipment and contractors spanning various disciplines such as maintenance and cleaning — a lot needs to be coordinated and managed.

“Managing all these moving parts is challenging, and the stakes are quite high,” Infraspeak’s co-founder and CEO, Felipe Ávila da Costa, told TechCrunch. “They [facility managers] must track everything from preventive maintenance schedules to work orders, cleaning tasks, contractor communication, air quality management, service level agreements, room preparation, and performance reporting — all while ensuring compliance with health and safety standards.”

Of course, companies have managed all this for a long time before the digital era, but the task still required significant manual processes and disjointed systems that were prone to human error. Even in more recent times, companies could combine spreadsheets and disparate software designed for specific tasks.

This gets to the crux of what Infraspeak is building: a centralized conduit that joins the dots between systems and processes, allowing all stakeholders to collaborate in one place.

This is made possible with a shared workspace, dubbed Infraspeak Network. In addition to letting facility managers manage internal work such as building operations and connecting teams, the workspace also links directly to external service providers — letting managers request quotes from suppliers, on-board them, assign work orders, and track progress. Service providers, meanwhile, can use Infraspeak to send quotes, communicate with clients, share operational data and more.

“As a collaborative facilities management platform, Infraspeak enables facilities teams to manage the entire operation cohesively — it allows facilities managers, staff, and contractors to collaborate in a shared digital workspace,” da Costa said. “Whether sharing real-time data, managing work orders, or tracking job execution, every stakeholder is connected, reducing miscommunication and bottlenecks.”

With the rise of remote work, it would be easy to assume that demand for technology to help manage commercial buildings might not be as high as it used to be. Ignoring the fact that many companies are demanding that workers return to their in-office desks, the truth is there are countless facilities that need management apart from office buildings — from shopping malls and hospitals to airports and factories.

“The remote work trend hasn’t significantly impacted our business,” da Costa said. “If anything, remote work has made cloud-based facilities management software more essential — it enables operational managers to control multiple facilities without being constantly on-site. And if we consider one of the main factors that drove the remote work trend in the first place, i.e. the pandemic, then the importance of this kind of software becomes even clearer, as it enables managing building occupancy, enforcing health and safety protocols, or adjusting cleaning schedules based on space usage.”

Complexities

Infraspeak competes with other startups such as MaintainX, Upkeep, and Facilio, which have all raised significant venture investment in recent years — indicating growing demand for better facilities management tooling. Da Costa also pointed to a number of factors that could be driving this demand, including the increasing complexity of managing buildings due to the fact that they now have more devices and data pouring through them than ever before.

In tandem, companies have come under increasing pressure to optimize operations to meet strict sustainability and ESG targets.

“Overall, buildings now tend to have more advanced systems, stricter regulations, large supplier networks, growing sustainability concerns, and pressure to be cost-efficient and transparent to building users,” da Costa said.

Infraspeak counts around 182 employees (or “Infraspeakers,” as it calls them…) across offices in Porto, London, Barcelona, and Florianópolis, and some staff are based remotely elsewhere in South America and Europe. With the fresh $19.5 million in the bank, the company is planning to expand its headcount by a further 100 people in 2025, including C-level positions such as chief revenue officer.

Europe remains Infraspeak’s core focus for now, but the startup is also expanding into South America and Africa. Although the company doesn’t formally operate in the U.S. market, it does claim “a small number” of customers stateside, which could serve as the genesis for expansion later — it may well need to raise more money for that.

“We plan to raise our Series C by 2025, and entering and conquering the U.S. market will definitely be the plan by then,” da Costa said.

Infraspeak’s Series B round was led by Endeit Capital, with participation from Bright Pixel Capital, Caixa Capital, Innovation Nest, and Indico Capital Partners.

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After the downfall of ByteDance-owned TikTok app, many homegrown short-format video systems rose to prominence. The app, which was once banned alongside with fifty eight different Chinese apps in July, had the biggest and most loyal user base in India.

In fact, in accordance to TechCrunch, social media massive Facebook is additionally trying out short-form movies on its app in India. Moreover, Facebook-owned image-sharing app Instagram is reportedly trying out a TikTok-like characteristic referred to as ‘Reels’ in the country.

Apart from witnessing a collective surge in traction, these homegrown short-video structures have bagged funding from pinnacle VCs additionally submit the Indian government’s ban on Chinese apps.

In August, TikTok rival Chingari raised $1.3 million in seed funding from AngelList India, Utsav Somani’s iSeed, Village Global, LogX Ventures, and Jasminder Singh Gulati of NowFloats.
The fast-growing Indian choice to banned TikTok, with a 25 million-strong consumer base and over three million every day lively users, lately emerged as the pinnacle winner in the “social” class of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge. It is additionally witnessing substantial traction from the US, Singapore, and the Middle East, maybe due to a massive Indian immigrant populace in these countries.

Just a month after elevating Rs two crore in a seed round, homegrown short-form video app Mitron raised some other $5 million in August as phase of its Series A spherical from Nexus Venture Partners. Existing traders 3one4 Capital and Arun Tadanki’s personal syndicate LetsVenture, and different tremendous angels additionally participated in the round.

Launched in April 2020 by means of Anish Khandelwal and Shivank Agarwal, Mitron lets in customers to create, view, upload, and share brief videos. The app has over 33 million downloads on Google Play Store and claims to have over 9 billion video views per month. Mitron app received a different point out beneath the “social category” of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge concluded recently.

Lifestyle-community-commerce platform Trell raised its Series A spherical of funding of $11.4 million led by using KTB Network in August. With this, the complete funding raised by means of Trell comes to $16.95 million.

Founded in August 2017 by way of IIT Bombay alumni Arun Lodhi, Prashant Sachan, Pulkit Agrawal, and NITIE alumnus Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Trell is a mobile-based application, the place customers come collectively to share three-minute vertical videos round their pastimes and passions in the categories, and join with like-minded people in their native languages.

The Bengaluru-based app has over 20 classes on hand in eight Indian languages. Since the ban on Chinese apps, Trell claims to have witnessed five hundred percentage increase with over 15 million creators on its platform receiving greater than 5 billion month-to-month views. It has over 10 million downloads on Google Play Store

Gurugram-based user-generated content material platform Bolo Indya raised $300,000 in pre-Series A1 spherical led with the aid of Eagle10 Ventures, India Accelerator, and HNIs. With this round, the startup’s whole fund sums up to $500,000

The funding will be used to beautify personalization and advice engines, increase language evangelists and fortify the team, as properly as expand and speed up product development.

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