Applyifi Closes Its Maiden Funding With OGES, All Set To Seal Two More Soon

A private platform for startups and early-stage companies to raise funds, Applyifi.com has announced that OGES, an online Q&A and best practices platform for the Oil & Gas industry has received firm commitments for funding from a group of senior professionals and HNIs.

This is one of the early investment commitments Applyifi has secured from its first batch of 4-curated startups. Two other startups from the first batch – one raising around $39K (INR 25 lakh) and the other raising around $79K (INR 50 lakh), are in active talks with accelerators and investors from the Applyifi network.

Speaking on this development, Prajakt Raut, Co-Founder and CEO, Applyifi said, “We are very happy to have been able to help OGES to secure funding from leading industry experts, which is totally in line with our mission to help successful professionals become investors in India’s startup ecosystem.”

While OGES has received commitments for the minimum amount of subscription they planned for, the round is still open for 2 more weeks to raise an additional $50K.

Founded by Saurabh Srivastav, OGES is a crowd sourced knowledge management platform for oil and gas industry. It focuses on both tacit and explicit knowledge and thus apart from its quality knowledge database. The startup has a network of senior and very experienced experts spread all over the world.

OGES connects highly experienced and talented professionals to other oil and gas users and helps them to learn and do their job with expertise level of an expert. Through Oges, oil professionals can get their decision and program verified by experts before they make million dollar decision.

Besides, the enterprise version of OGES helps small to medium oil and gas companies to improve their planning, operations and research. Such companies can use Oges knowledge bank and its expert’s network to bring an exponential jump in organisation’s quality and efficiency.

“We are grateful to the Applyifi team for believing in the idea of OGES; helping us in structuring the transaction; and mentoring us to do it in a professional way. They have guided us by helping us improve our business plan, connect with investors, and even structure the actual deal itself,” said OGES Founder & CEO – Saurabh Srivastav.

“I am very excited about our investment in OGES which shall transform the way oil and gas professionals share knowledge and best practices via a modern, and easy-to-use online platform,” said Feroze Haidary, who is leading the investment round.

Applyifi is an online platform that converts startup applications into an elegant pitch deck, and provides investors with an in-depth, independent analysis and expert scorecard of the investment-worthiness of each business, based on key metrics.

Its goal is to enable more startups to raise capital, including those seeking investments between $50K and  $250K through co-investments by senior professionals, alumni groups, HNIs and experienced entrepreneurs who are currently not part of the startup investing ecosystem.

The platform helps investors to shortlist the startups in a simple manner:

• Investors can filter deals using the Applyifi 36-point scorecard
• Elegant, comprehensive pitch deck will give investors all the information that they seek without the information they do not need
• They just need to Select the shortlisted deals that are vetted by experts, including in-person or Skype interviews for a detailed assessment of the investment worthiness of the venture
• Investors, accelerators and incubators can use customers filters to shortlist as per individual investment thesis.

In India, Bangalore-based LetsVenture is another crowdfunding platform which is trying to bridge this investor and startup gap. So far, it has helped few startups including iTraveller, Aureus Analytics, Testbook.com, flipClass, ShepHertz, Cardback, Bluegape Lifestyle to raise funds.