Retail Aggregator F5 Closes Seed Round Led by Venture Catalysts

Venture Catalysts, India’s first, largest and pioneering integrated incubator and accelerator platform, recently invested an undisclosed amount in retail aggregator F5. The New Delhi-based startup, incubated by Gurgaon based leading Incubator, Huddle, has previously raised funding from prominent angel investors and micro-VCs including LetsVenture, Madhusudan Kela backed Singularity, Artworks Founder Mohit Satyanand, Tres Ventures, Country Delight founders and Startup Buddy to name a few. 

Founded by IIM-Lucknow alumni Raghav Arora and Lalit Kumar Aggarwal in 2018, F5 is committed to creating a unique and first-of-its-kind supply chain and retail aggregation model that specifically caters to the workplace retail segment, which is an estimated $64 billion industry. Keeping in line the government’s ‘Vocal for Local’ campaign, the company is also empowering neighborhood shops and small businesses by providing them with end-to-end support to reach more customers. 

As a workplace retail brand and an aggregator of local but high-quality refreshment stores, the startup has successfully on-boarded 4000+ paid consumers across Delhi and Lucknow, whilst enabling and optimising the revenue of these vendors. With tea as its primary offering, F5 sells more than 8000 cups of tea per day on average, recording annual revenues worth INR 150 lacs.

The USP of F5 lies in its multi-faceted, multi touchpoint approach to providing new opportunities for its partner vendors to up-sell and cross-sell their products ranging from refreshments to services, thereby creating a dynamic micro-market and increasing revenues of its partners by 40%.

Putting light on F5, Raghav Arora, Co-Founder F5, highlighted “Our consumers wanted us to have physical stores and be near them for their immediate needs. Just a couple of months back, we decided to cater this demand by partnering with already existing vendors. We have so far partnered with 20+ such vendors and have plans to partner with 5000+ vendors within NCR only. For customers, we are a brand for their workplace needs that is fresher and more authentic. For our vendors, we have become their access point for multiple partnerships that can boost their business and revenues. F5 is also becoming a unique supply chain for many tech and non-tech consumer brands,”

Speaking on the investment, Dr Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “The COVID-19 crisis has posed unprecedented challenges to India’s business ecosystem, making us realize the importance of local manufacturing and supply chains. As emphasised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it is the time to revive our local industries and businesses that struggle to cope with larger brands despite offering quality products/services. F5 is doing exactly this – upskilling as well as providing technology, delivery and management support to local vendors and SMEs while helping organize the highly fragmented workplace retail space. The startup has already exhibited a robust growth trajectory, and we are confident that the latest funding round will further add to its strengths.” 

Expressing his delight, Lalit Kumar Aggarwal, Co-Founder F5, added, “We are delighted to get Venture Catalysts on board alongside other investors. We will use the funding to optimize our supply chain operations and reach a wider audience. While we have started our journey quite recently, the investment from Venture Catalysts comes as validation of our work. We look forward to a fruitful association with them.”

“From day one, the F5 team has focussed on localisation, quality, hygiene and efficiency, as the four mantras to their business, in order to successfully provide their service to all their stakeholders. As an incubator, and their partners, their growth has also showcased a lot of discipline towards these moats, and it’s a delight to have the VCATS team joining as part of this journey”, Sanil Sachar, Founding Partner, Huddle.

Over the next year, F5 plans to expand the scope of its retail aggregation and supply chain through “workplace retail delivery service” by offering a wide range of products such as extended portfolio of refreshments, meals, beverages along with and services including delivery pickups and drop offs, micro ATMs, and mobile recharges, among others. The company also looks forward to enabling and empowering more local stores in the country that lack infrastructural support. 

About VCats

Venture Catalysts is India’s first integrated incubator. It invests $250K – $1.5 Million in early stage start-ups that has potential to create enduring value for over a long period of time. Venture Catalysts brings a lethal combination of Capital, Mentoring and Business Network to help investee companies to succeed. Their innovation provides value to start-ups through its angel network, funding, community, services and co-working facility.

Is Silicon Valley seeing shift from Chips to Bricks?

Forget microchips. Silicon Valley sees a profitable future in the humble brick thanks to a low-energy production process that illustrates the greening of the US technology capital.

Brick maker Calstar Products is backed by venture capitalists whose vision is to create buildings less expensively and in a way that saves energy. “We think it is time for a second industrial revolution,” said Paul Holland, a partner at Foundation Capital, which invested $7 million in Calstar. EnerTech Capital led another round that raised $8 million for the business.

Currently about 40% of US energy use goes toward the heating, cooling and general operation of buildings. Silicon Valley is finding high-tech ways to make ageold materials, pursuing carbon dioxide-eating concrete, windows that insulate better than walls, and wood substitutes.

The field is still new. Venture investments in green buildings have waxed and waned with the recession, but involved 45 deals worth about $350 million the past year, according to Cleantech Group LLC.

Bricks have been made pretty much the same way for 3,000 years, until Calstar’s scientists came up with their new technique, said Chief Executive Michael Kane. Ordinary bricks are fired for 24 hours at 1,100°C as part of a process that can last a week, while Calstar bricks are baked at temperatures below 100°C and take only 10 hours from start to finish, Kane said.

Lower energy costs mean higher profit, allowing the company to pay for its research and compete against large companies that have economies of scale. The new bricks — which the Brick Industry Association says are not actually bricks — will sell for the same price as traditional claybased ones.

Agencies

Co-founder of Netscape, Andreessen now joins HP board

Two years after selling his software company to Hewlett-Packard, Marc Andreessen has joined the PC giant's board of directors.

HP announced the appointment, effective immediately, on Thursday. In a statement, HP's chairman and CEO Mark Hurd described Andreessen as "a software pioneer whose leadership has helped shape the Internet...Marc's entrepreneurial background and industry expertise will be a welcome addition to the HP board of directors."

Andreessen and HP's relationship goes back several years, culminating with HP's purchase of Opsware for $1.6 billion in 2007. Since then, Andreessen, best known as the co-founder of Netscape, has helmed social network creation service Ning, and a new venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz. He also sits on the boards of eBay and Facebook.

Agencies

Technology can pull US out of crisis, says Bill Gates

Technology can pull the United States out of recession and help the world's ailing financial markets work better, Microsoft Corp
Bill Gates Chairman Bill Gates told a high-level business summit at the company he co-founded.

"The drug companies will get back in high productivity mode. The software, IT revolution -- we're just at the start of that," said Gates at Microsoft's annual CEO Summit at the company's campus near Seattle.

"What we can do for education, communication, and what that looks like for the efficiencies of world markets, we are just at the beginning of that."

Gates, who focuses on health and education issues at his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since giving up his day-to-day role at the world's largest software company last year, made the remarks at the private event.

"The opportunities for innovation are stronger today than ever," Gates told the audience, which included billionaire investor Warren Buffett -- the world's second richest man behind Gates himself -- alongside News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Amazon.com Inc Chief Executive Jeff Bezos.

Despite the fact that Microsoft is laying off 5,000 employees, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer also struck an optimistic note, saying the business world is only "coming into halftime" of the Internet revolution.

He downplayed fears that the recession would choke off investment in technology start-ups from venture capital (VC) firms. "The VCs are pulling back," said Ballmer. "The seventh, eighth, and ninth copy of the idea won't get funded today, but most good propositions are still going to get funded. There's plenty of venture capital out there, relative to ideas."

He said research and development spending was also strong. "I don't know anybody in our industry actually who's cutting their R&D budget," said Ballmer. "I know people who are doing a lot of different things, but most people are not slashing their R&D budget."

Microsoft's research chief Craig Mundie said in February the company was not cutting back on its $9 billion R&D budget this fiscal year.

Agencies

VCs bullish on Indian IT Sector

The year 2009 is slated to be an interesting year for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (VCs) alike. Even as the global recession continues to haunt industries, many VCs are very bullish on India. A global venture capital firm has invested a sum of Rs 20 crore in Appnomic Systems, an infrastructure management services (IMS) company.

Pramod Haque, managing partner at NVP, a global venture capital fund said, I know this time the recession is different and may take longer time to recover than earlier. But we see tremendous opportunities as an outcome of the recession.

I feel is it is good time to invest in growth equity sectors as the valuations are down. I see more opportunities due to slowdown. But it is true that certain VCs are following a certain trend in the US and fewer companies are getting funded today. I see that trend to continue till end of 2009 or early 2010, he said.

The Bangalore-based Appnomic with operations in India, Middle East and Africa will use the funds to strengthen its existing market presence, expand into the US market and further build out its innovative product and service offerings.

The managed services market is already a mature industry however, the offshoring of infrastructure management services (IMS) to India is still in its infancy. The market opportunities for IMS in India is predicted to be as large as the application development and maintenance sector, said Haque.

The growing pressure on corporations to better handle the complex IT requirements demanded by internal and external regulators is accelerating the need for simplification and efficient management of IT at a low cost, and we believe that about 75% of infrastructure management opportunities can be offshored, said D Padmanabhan, MD & CEO of Appnomic Systems P Ltd. Appnomic has the next generation technology, proven customer traction and seasoned team necessary to capitalize on the growing market needs.

The company started 2.5 years ago has 390 employees and experiencing a 100% growth. The company has about 23 customers in banking, Internet portal sites, BPO and remote management.

I don t feel why the Satyam (SATYAM) incident must dampen our investment plans since even in the US, the Bernard Madoff incident has seen a $50 billion fraud case in the US recently. So incidents like these keep happening but don t affect us in any way.

NVP has made significant investments in India over the years. In fact, we have made about seven or eight direct investments and about 20 cross based operations in India.

Recently the company has invested in three companies Persistent, Adventity and Yatra.