NowFloats Raises $10 Mn In Series B Funding; Aims To Ramp Up Technology

NowFloats, a digital enabler of Small and Medium Businesses (SME) business presence has raised $10 Mn in its Series B round of funding from Iron Pillar Capital and IIFL, along with existing investors Blume Ventures & Omidyar Network. IIFL invested through its Seed Ventures Fund I & Cash Opportunities Fund.

The startup plans to use the proceeds for sharpening its technology stack that drives customer support which the company is aiming to be a hybrid of automated and human interaction. Also NowFloats plans to enable the larger enterprises to leverage automated SEO on top of their existing websites. Additionally, it will also intensify its services for the small and medium enterprises and expand further into the tier II and tier III cities in the country.

Neeraj Sabharwal, co-founder, NowFloats stated that SMEs need to talk about their businesses regularly (update product features, new offers, events, reviews, etc) to attract more customers online.  He said, “Our product is geared towards making it as simple as possible for business owners to interact and add updates to their online identity.”

Co-founder Jasminder Gulati tweeted that the funding was “announced a year after, but still as important”.

Announced a year after, but still as important. Thanks @Anand_IP @AramachandranR @IIFLMarkets @purviparkeria @BlumeVentures @OmidyarNetwork https://t.co/e2efUfyfeV

— Jasminder Gulati (@GulatiSinghJ) January 24, 2017

Hyderabad-based NowFloats was founded in May 2012 by Neeraj Sabharwal, Nitin Jain, Ronak Samantray, and Jasminder Gulati. Today, it claims that it has an instant presence across 2,30,000 business, out of which up to 80% are reprotedly paid customers. It also claims to have over 11 Mn unique visitors a month and has 474K unprompted SKUs in its credit.

Last year, in July, it had acquired chat-commerce platform LookUp in a cash and stock deal. A year prior to that in February 2015, the startup had earlier raised Series A funding from Omidyar Network and existing investors Mumbai Angels, Blume Ventures, and Hyderabad Angels.

[This development was first reported in ET.]