AI Startup Mad Street Den Secures $30 Mn Funding To Widen Offerings

SUMMARY

The round also saw participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global

The California-headquartered AI startup will use the fresh capital to achieve further revenue growth, improve logistics, insurance and expand retail categories

What we needed at this stage of the company was partners that would help us bring discipline to the scaling: Ashwini Asokan, CEO & founder Mad Street Den

Artificial intelligence (AI) focussed startup Mad Street Den has raised $30 Mn in its Series C funding round led by Avatar Growth Capital.

The round also saw participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global (formerly Falcon Edge Capital).

The California-headquartered AI startup will use the fresh capital to achieve further revenue growth, improve logistics, insurance and expand retail categories across the US, UK, India, the Middle East, and Latin America. It will also use a part of the fund to expand its offerings across industries.

“At MSD, we’ve gone step by step in this vision we’ve had from day zero, of building a truly general AI platform, taking a vertical-first approach into Retail and then scaling that horizontally across several industries,” Ashwini Asokan, CEO and founder of Mad Street Den, said.

“What we needed at this stage of the company was partners that would help us bring discipline to the scaling and a very strong understanding of the GTM levers that get unlocked with building a horizontal AI platform for large scale enterprises,” she added.

Mad Street Den was founded in 2013 by Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran and was registered in the US in 2016 as Mad Street Den Inc.

The startup also recently acquired INTURN, a New York-based enterprise solution that helps retailers monetise slow-moving and excess inventory, faster.

Mad Street Den has claimed to have witnessed strong demand for its AI platform over the past 24 months. It also added that a fresh wave of growth has been powered by both its retail segment (Vue.ai) as well as its foray into new verticals such as finance, insurance, healthcare, pharma, and logistics (getblox.ai).

In 2019, Mad Street Den had raised $17 Mn in a Series B funding round for its retail automation product Vue.ai. The funding round was led by Falcon Edge Capital.

With the growing adoption of AI across various industries, AI-focussed startups have grabbed investors’ attention. For example, industrial AI startup Detect Technologies, AI startup Rephrase.ai, are some of the startups that raised funds last year.

According to a report, the global AI market was valued at $93.5 Bn in 2021, which was projected to soar to $1,811.8 Bn by 2030, expanding at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.1% between 2022 and 2030.