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NowFloats, an enabler of Small and Medium Businesses (SME) business presence has raised Series A funding from Omidyar Network and existing investors Mumbai Angels, Blume Ventures and Hyderabad Angels.
The startup plans to use the funds raised in technology and expanding customer footprint globally.
NowFloats aims to cater more than 125 Mn of small and medium businesses to be present online and get noticed. The company currently, has over 33,000 customers and its app is downloaded in 50 countries.
Jasminder Singh Gulati, co-founder and CEO, Now-Floats, said, “The company plans to hire more sales people to enable local businesses get an online presence by creating, managing and updating local content through an innovative, cost effective and customer-centric technology interface.”
The technology based startup is working with a team of 86, of which 55 are in direct sales catering to SME segment. Its flagship products Now-Floats Lighthouse and Now-Floats Wildfire help in automating organic and inorganic discovery across customer segments.
Anuradha Ramachandran, director Omidyar Network showed interest in enabling online play. She emphasized, “There are a lot of issues small merchants face in terms of creating an online presence specifically around resources and technology. I am sure NowFloats will bridge these two worlds by enabling them to go online in a very simple way.”
Now-Floats has been scaling with strategic partnerships, including with AskMe in India and Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative, which enables a million small businesses in Africa to come online.
Chennai and Mumbai will be new focus cities for NowFloats in India, where it plans to hire sales staff, along with Nairobi in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Hyderabad based NowFloats is co-founded by ex-Microsoft and ex-Saatchi & Saatchi team Jasminder Singh Gulati and Nitin Jain in 2012. It has its office presence in Delhi, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad. The company enables SME’s to get online presence by simply using SMS. Besides the NowFloats algorithm ensures highest discoverability through intelligent Search Engine Optimization (SEO). NowFloats believe that with 900M+ mobile phones and SMS being the pervasive technology SMS (or Apps) is a scalable and sustainable business.
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