SMEpost

SaaS start-up Squad raises $2.1 mn from Blume Ventures, others

San Francisco- and Delhi-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Squad, earlier known as SquadRun, has raised $2.1 million in a fresh funding round led by early-stage investor Blume Ventures, a company statement said.

Contrarian Capital, 91springboard, Emergent Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Anthill Ventures, Axilor Ventures and some angel investors also took part in the round.

The company said it will use the funds to scale its platform by expanding the technology, product and data teams in India and the sales team in the US.

SquadRun Inc was founded in 2014 by engineers Apurv Agrawal and Vikas Gulati, and commerce graduate Kanika Jain. Agrawal and Jain previously worked at 91springboard while Gulati worked as a software developer at Josh Technology.

Accelerated by Delhi-based incubator 91springboard, the startup’s main product, Squad, is a workflow automation platform that is used by firms such as Uber, Sephora, Tata Group, Flipkart and Rocket Internet, among others.

“Over the last year and a half, we have achieved product-market fit and turned into a profitable SaaS business. However, we wanted to invest ahead of revenue to scale the platform and get strategic investors on board,” Agrawal said.

In February 2015, Squad had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding. The angel investors included Amit Ranjan of SlideShare, Deepinder Goyal of Zomato, Girish Khera of Scientific Animations, and Zishaan Hayath of ed-tech startup Toppr.

A few SaaS-based startups have recently secured funding.

On April 11, California- and Bangalore-based SaaS platform Omnify Inc raised seed funding worth $150,000 (around Rs 96 lakh) from Google India Managing Director Rajan Anandan, Shoogloo Group chief executive L D Sharma and Airwoot co-founder Saurabh Arora.

Last week, Bangalore-based Quicko TechnoSoft Labs Pvt. Ltd, which runs SaaS platform Whatfix, raised $3.6 million (Rs 24 crore) in a Series A round led by Stellaris Venture Partners.

Last month, SaaS-based payment services startup Airpay secured Rs 24 crore ($3.6 million) as part of a Series A round led by Kalaari Capital and existing investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala.

Source: vccircle