In a bid to extend its strategic business model, Viveck Goenka-owned The Indian Express Group has invested in four technology startups for an undisclosed amount. The startups are Envoged, PayMango, Mr. Homecare Services and Spiral Content Solutions.
Envoged
Founded in 2014 by Anandita Singh and Manisha Barnwal, Envoged is a social marketplace for purchase and sale of pre-owned branded fashion products. It offers a curated social community that helps users to sell and shop clothes and accessories from their personal closets.
Essentially, it’s a ‘re-commerce’ platform which enables users to renew their closet regularly with a colossal marketplace to shop from and sell into, and be in vogue with the latest trends.
In September, Envoged raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by entrepreneurs Alok Mittal, Ankush Nijhawan, Manish Dhingra, Gaurav Bhatnagar (AMV Investments) and a few others.
PayMango
Founded by former CTOs of PayU and Zomato, PayMango, raised around $234K in its angel funding round. It is a horizontal mobile marketplace, matching demand with local supply. The brainchild of former IIT-D students Gajinder and Ram Singla, it allows the consumers to discover, engage and transact products from local stores, gives access to merchandise, deals, promotions and events across all categories through its gateway platform. It acts as a hyper-local sales and customer acquisition platform for its merchants.
Mr. Homecare Services
An on-demand maintenance services platform, Mr. Homecare Services, aims to become ‘an extension of your home’. Currently functional in Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore, the startup wants to expand to Delhi and other markets in the country. Its offerings include AC and car services with cleaning, handyman, bike care, painting and pest control services. Till now, the company claims to have provided its services to 3000 homes and 250 businesses.
Spiral Content Solutions
Known for its flagship product ‘Scatter’ (launched by Rajan Srinivasan in February this year), which provides personalised content for advertisers and helps them to plan content, Spiral Content boasts of clients like eBay, Club Mahindra, Gionee, Samsung, Snapdeal and Maruti Suzuki among others. It enables publishers to integrate, access to a wider audience, rediscover content and discover several avenues for monetisation. Its publisher network includes LifeHacker India, Lonely Planet, NDTV Auto, NDTV Gadgets, Tech2 and the Times Group.
It is speculated that the Indian Express might enter a content sharing agreement with Spiral Content Solutions which will see the latter provide social media content to the publishing group.
The digital division of the Indian Express Group claims to have a reach of over 50 Mn unique users. It has 32 national editions of its publications, 13 publication centres and 4 language dailies which reach 19 Mn plus people on a daily basis.
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