Loyalty And Marketing Startup m.Paani Secures $1.35 Mn In Funding From Blume Ventures, Others

Mumbai-based loyalty and marketing startup m.Paani has secured $1.35 Mn (about INR 9 Cr) in its Pre-Series A round of funding led by IDG Ventures, Blume Ventures, and Saha Fund.

The company plans to deploy the funds towards product development, sales, and marketing functions.

Launched in 2014 by Akanksha Hazari, m.Paani is a marketing and data analytics startup that enables local retailers to attract customers with a mobile-based loyalty programme. It develops impact-focussed loyalty programmes that leverage mobile technology as a platform to provide key products and services to the local retailers and businesses, by connecting their spends with important loyalty points.

It has tied up with hundreds of retail partners in Mumbai to award m.Paani loyalty points to users, based on their spending patterns at m.Paani’s retail partners. These points can be redeemed for rewards in areas such as education, healthcare, safe water, and energy.

Commenting on the development, Akanksha Hazari, CEO, m.Paani said, “Our loyalty platform is the critical digital pipe that enables our partners to understand and target mass-market, unorganised consumers intelligently, long-term, and in real-time. Through continuous innovation we aim to bring big data to the informal economy, delivering intelligence to brand clients.”

m.Paani offers its retail partners a fully integrated loyalty and marketing platform, which includes a business website and personalised mobile app, and are able to market their business and products, and push offers via multiple digital channels, including app, web and SMS.

The startup had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by Blume Ventures. The round also saw participation from angel investors including Adil Allana of The Allana Group, Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder of TaxiForSure; Gautam Ivatury, co-founder of Meradoctor; and Signal Point Partners.

In April 2016, Gurugram-based mobile marketing and rewards platform, Skrilo raised $1.5 Mn (about INR 10 Cr) Seed funding from angel investors. In July 2016, digital marketing startup MintM raised funding from Mumbai Angels & Times Internet. Following that, US- and Indian-based, AI-driven B2B marketing startup MarianaIQ secured $2 Mn in a Seed financing round from Exfinity Venture Partners.

Other startups in the similar space include CrownIt, InLoyal, SmartPocket, Codemojo etc.

[The development was reported by ET.]