Sachin Dev Duggal Engineer.ai is Expanding
AI assembly line platform Engineer.ai has raised $29.5 million in a funding round led by Lakestar and Jungle Ventures with participation from Softbank’s DeepCore.
The startup with global presence including offices in Los Angeles, London, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, and Tokyo will use the capital to go deeper in engineering operations and drive customer acquisition.
Besides, the Sachin Dev Duggal led company is also planning to expand its operations in the Asia Pacific region, especially India, South East Asia including China.
Touted as the low code no code AI platform, Sachin Dev Duggal Engineer.ai enables budding entrepreneurs to order their own app at a low price from a network of 50 software firms and 10,000 developers.
Engineer.ai ‘Builder’ solution allows companies to get customised apps built for Android, iOS and other platforms. Its customers include Eros Now, Videocon, HSBC, SF Giants, Deutsche Bank as well as a slew of startups and entrepreneurs in India.
Engineer.ai, is one of the top brokers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in India. By reselling AWS to more than 500 customers, the startup makes money through arbitrage.
It buys future capacity from AWS in bulk and then, using AI algorithms to manage the flow, parcels out blocks to clients for higher rates.
Founded by Sachin Duggal and Saurabh Dhoot in 2012 as SD 2 Labs, the startup was rechristened Engineer.ai and then launched in June 2018. It has over 150 employees spread across India, US and the UK. By June next year, the startup aims to double its headcount to 300.
Engineer.ai claims to have bootstrapped to $24 million in revenue. Further, it is eyeing to cross the $100 million revenue mark by 2020.
Jungle Ventures closes $240 Mn worth Fund III from Temasek, IFC and others
Singapore based early-stage venture capital (VC) firm Jungle Ventures has made the final close of its third fund at $240 million including $40 million in separately managed account commitments.
Cisco Investments, German development finance institution DEGDeutsche Investitions, Temasek, Bualuang Ventures, and World Bank’s private market investment arm IFC, among others, are the major investors in the latest funding round. The new fund, third in a row, will have a sharp focus to invest in innovative technology and digital-driven consumer businesses across Southeast Asia.
Launched in 2012 by Anurag Srivastava and Amit Anand, Jungle Ventures had made the first close of Fund III at $175 million from the investors mentioned above in April, this year. Unlike the majority of the venture firms, it focuses on limited startups to build regional or globally category-leading businesses.
With over 30 investment in startups, Jungle Ventures bets comprise of various startups including RedDoorz, Moglix, human-assisted artificial intelligence platform Engineer.ai, fintech startup PaySense, Vayana Network, and LivSpace, among others.
Its latest investment was worth $6 million in POS software solution startup KiotViet in August 2019.
At present, Jungle Ventures manages assets a shade above $350 million across its three funds and claims to be the latest among early-stage funds that have closed their latest investment vehicles.
Jungle Ventures had closed its first fund in 2012 at $12 million, while its second fund worth $100 million was closed in 2016.
Over the past year, several India focused VC firms have been raising new corpus. Earlier this month, Inventus Capital Partners had made the final close of its third fund Inventus-III at Rs 369 crore. DSG Consumer Partners had also made the final close of its third flagship fund at $65 million in August this year.
Source : https://entrackr.com/2019/10/jungle-ventures-closes-fundiii-at-240-mn/