ETtech Deals Digest: No festive cheer for startup funding in October; investments down over half to $538 million

With no signs of a let-up in the funding winter, Indian technology startups logged a total funding corpus of just $538.4 million in October, about 53% of the corresponding figure a year ago.

A majority of the investment was seed-stage funding, across 92 rounds. In October last year, startups had raised a total of $1.14 billion across 149 rounds, as per Tracxn data. Signs of a funding winter had begun to emerge from September 2022.

Sequentially, the month of October saw a 38% dip, from $870 million. In terms of volume, it was a 21% dip from 76 funding rounds.

In terms of stages, seed and early deals commanded the highest pieshare, with $393 million, or 73%, out of the total funding tally. The top three most active investors during the month were Gruhas, Inflection Point Ventures and Peak XV Partners.

Here are top five startups that got funded this week:

InsuranceDekho: The insurance marketplace raised $60 million in an ongoing Series B funding round from Japanese financial services major Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and BNP Paribas Cardif.

Bizongo: The business-to-business vendor-digitisation platform raised about $50 million from its existing investors in a Series-E funding round led by Schroder Adveq, a Zurich-based private equity firm.

Neo: The wealth and asset management firm raised $35 million as part of its latest round of funding from Peak XV Partners.

Fingerprint: The startup that helps developers to build security solutions through device intelligence application programming interfaces (APIs) raised $33 million in a Series C funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners.

PMI Electro Mobility Solutions: The electric bus manufacturer received about $30.1 million from Piramal Alternatives, the fund management business of Piramal Group.