Bangalore – September 29, 2020 – Infilect, a Retail Visual Intelligence SaaS provider to the worldwide Retail Industry, today announced a $1.5 million pre-series A financing led by Mela Ventures and 1Crowd, with participation from The Chennai Angels (TCA).

With the investment, Infilect will expand its go-to-market programs and will continue to invest in the areas of Image Recognition (IR) for retail execution, supply-chain optimization, store personalization, and category planning.

Infilect was started by Anand Prabhu Subramanian (former Bell Labs and IBM Research) and Vijay Gabale (former IBM Research, PHD IIT Bombay), with the vision of the digital transformation of worldwide retail through Image Recognition (IR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In the past 18 months, Infilect has super-charged decision making in some of the global Retail Brands in FMCG, Consumer Electronics, Food & Beverages, Home Improvement sectors across geographies.

“Globally today, Retail Brands lack visibility into presence, placement, positioning, and performance of retail products across a large number of retail stores.

The final frontiers, the retail shelves, largely remain undigitized, resulting in out-of-stocks and overstocking; a trillion dollar inefficiency worldwide,” said Anand Prabhu Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Infilect. “InfiViz, our flagship product, leverages IR & AI to process pictures of retail shelves from thousands of retail stores in Modern Trade and General Trade markets.

InfiViz instantly generates revenue optimizing action plans, reduces stock-outs, and consequently, improves same-store sales by 2% to 5%.” “We are excited to be partnering with Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, and TCA.

The investment and mentorship will help us build cutting-edge Deep Technology products and boost our enterprise sales in global markets,” added Vijay Gabale, CTO and co-founder of Infilect.

“Infilect’s products automate traditional retail processes with speed, accuracy, and on a large scale. Thereby, Infilect empowers decision-makers in the entire organization, from associates to category owners to sales leaders, with unprecedented insights and actions.

We see great potential in ‘team Infilect’ to build a world-class Enterprise SaaS company out of India, and we are thrilled to be partnering with Anand and Vijay through our maiden investment.”, said Parthasarathy N.S, Managing Partner, Mela Ventures.

“Computer Vision technology has the potential to unlock significant value in the retail sector in the areas of retail execution, customer insights, and marketing.

We are pleased to see Infilect gain confidence in Indian as well as global consumer brands. We are excited to be supporting Anand and Vijay in their quest to digitally transform retail operations worldwide.”, said Girichandra Kuchangi, Partner, 1Crowd. “For superior delivery of retail products across multiple channels, Retail Brands need deep insights from visual data in offline stores.

Infilect’s founders have unique research and technology background to create magical experiences and extract meaningful actions from visual data captured in diverse retail environments.”, added Lakshmi Narayanan, Co-Founder, Cognizant and a Chennai Angel investor.

In conjunction with the investment round, Rostow Ravanan, an IC Member of Mela Ventures, will be joining Infilect’s board of directors. 

About Infilect‍

Infilect is an Enterprise SaaS provider for retail manufacturers, retail brands, and retailers. With innovations in Image Recognition and AI, Infilect’s products empower the retail industry with unprecedented visibility into omnichannel sales, in-store merchandising, and store operations.

Infilect is trusted by global customers and partners and is backed by Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, The Chennai Angels. Infilect is part of Nasscom Deep Tech Club, Intel India’s Maker Lab Program, IITB-SINE’s Plugin Accelerator, and NVIDIA’s Inception program. For more information, visit https://www.infilect.com.

About Mela Ventures

Mela Ventures Trust is a SEBI-approved AIF Category-2 fund for the early stage companies. With a goal to build next-gen entrepreneurs, the fund focuses on building a portfolio in areas, such as AI/ML, AR/VR, IoT, Cloud Migration and Deep Technologies. Mela Ventures was founded by Industry veterans, Krishnakumar Natarajan and Parthasarathy NS who have co-founded Mindtree and taken it from a startup to a multi-billion-dollar market cap enterprise.

About 1Crowd

1Crowd is an early-stage venture capital fund and an angel platform that offers an institutionalized approach to investing in start-ups. Over the last 5 years, 1Crowd has created a unique ecosystem that brings together accredited investors and mentors with rich experience and expertise, to support founders at various stages of their start-up journey.

1Crowd manages investments of over ₹100 crores in 31 exciting start-ups across sectors ranging from enterprise-tech and deep-tech to B2C. The targeted AUM of its maiden sector-agnostic fund from which it is currently investing is ₹75 crores. For more information, visit https://www.1crowd.co/.

About TCA

The Chennai Angels (TCA), is one of India’s most active angel investing groups. Founded in the year 2007, it is comprised of successful entrepreneurs and business leaders with a track record of starting and scaling large enterprises. Additionally, several seeds and venture capital firms hold institutional membership in the group. TCA portfolio companies benefit from the collective expertise and Rolodex of its members.

Source : Mela Ventures

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Early-stage startup fund Mela Ventures, commenced by means of Mindtree Ltd co-founders Krishnakumar Natarajan and Parthasarathy NS, has achieved a first shut of its maiden fund ‘MV Core Tech Fund – I’ with ₹130 crores in dedication from a set of Indian investors.

The Sebi-approved ‘Category-2 AIF fund’ for early-stage corporations objectives a fund dimension of ₹200 crores. The fund pursuits to make 4-5 investments in the subsequent 18 months with a ticket dimension of ₹7-10 crore each.

The announcement comes a yr after Natarajan and Parthasarathy, now managing companions with Mela Ventures, left Mindtree post-acquisition by means of enterprise conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Ltd in June final year.

Mindtree founders had then termed the acquisition as “hostile” and made tries to face up to the takeover.
The fund is backed through institutional investors, world technological know-how leaders, and professional startup investors.

“We are by using diagram limiting ourselves to Indian buyers so that the cash will remain inside u.s . and assist the India increase story,” Natarajan informed Mint in an interview.

Other India-based Mindtree cofounders – Subroto Bagchi, Rostow Ravanan, Janakiraman Srinivasan, and Kalyan Banerjee – are additionally phase of Mela Ventures in the shape of investors.

The ‘MV Core Tech Fund-I’ is aimed at B2B technological know-how startups in areas of augmented reality/virtual truth (AR/VR), synthetic intelligence/ computer getting to know (AI/ML), and quantum computing, Parthasarathy said. “The criterion is they need to be fixing a scalable hassle for the enterprise.”

The founders accept as true with their trip in constructing Mindtree to a billion-dollar agency from a VC-funded startup will be a treasured asset to the entrepreneurs. They believe, whilst the proper thought and funding are first-rate beginning factors for a startup, they do now not assurance success.

“The key is to make these modern thoughts co-exist with financially advisable models,” Natarajan said.
Mela Ventures will assist investee organizations support their go-to-market strategy, make the proper technological know-how choices, and construct excessive degrees of governance and transparency.

Founders and senior executives of IT corporations in the previous have grew to become challenge capitalists or buyers after retiring or shifting on from energetic roles in their companies.

Rajan Anandan, former India head of Microsoft and Google is now the managing director of Sequoia Capital (India).

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani invests in startups thru VC fund Fundamentum whilst Kris Gopalakrishnan and SD Shibulal have launched Axilor Ventures focussed on early-stage startups. TV Mohandas Pai, former Infosys board member invests in science startups via VC fund Aarin Capital.

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