Avatar Growth leads Series C for India's Mad Street Den

Sequoia Capital India and Alpha Wave Global also participated. It follows a USD 17m Series B in 2019 provided by Sequoia, Global Bain, and Alpha Wave, then known as Falcon Edge Capital. Earlier investors include the likes of Exfinity Venture Partners, GrowX Ventures, and Reservoir Investment Managers.

Mad Street Den was founded in 2013 with a view to being a diversified enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) platform. Its strategy has been to take a vertical-first approach, starting with retail and then scaling horizontally across several industries.

Its flagship product, Blox, is used by companies to create clean and enriched data, enable personalised customer interactions, and automate workflows with yet-to-be-digitalised documents. Blox is touted as data-centric rather than model-centric, which allows companies to cope with a short supply of skilled data scientists and data engineers.

The company emphasises that Blox provides customers with a rapid return on investment, facilitating growth across departments inside large organizations, as opposed to the typical enterprise deployment cycles predominant in the market. It claims the product provided a 10x improvement over competitors without specifying by which metric.

Mad Street acquired US-based inventory management company Inturn in November. The idea is to combine Inturn’s inventory workflow tools and margin optimisation capabilities with the retail AI suite to help customers to optimise supply chain processes and customer experiences while improving efficiencies across the retail value chain.

"Enterprises today need to not only do things faster, automate processes and workflows but also make decisions faster. Rule-based automation is not enough for tomorrow,” Abhay Havaldar, a co-founder and managing partner of Avatar, said in a statement.

“Blox's ability to solve business problems across industries, use cases while maintaining efficacy at scale and low cost is highly differentiated. Further, its 30-60-90 days framework ensures customers do not need to wait for months to see results.”

Avatar Growth Capital – not to be confused with fellow Indian enterprise tech investor Avatar Venture Partners – makes investments in a range of USD 10m to USD 30m in growth-stage software-as-a-service (SaaS) or intellectual property-led services companies.

Havaldar - who previously helped establish General Atlantic’s Singapore and India operations, rising to the level of head of India private equity – set up the firm in 2017 alongside Vishal Bakshi, formerly Goldman Sach’s head of India private equity. The core team also include Rajiv Gupta, a principal, and another Goldman alumnus.

“What we needed at this stage of the company was partners that would help us bring discipline to the scaling and a very strong understanding of the GTM [got-to-market] levers that get unlocked with building a horizontal AI platform for large scale enterprises,” Ashwini Asokan, CEO and co-founder of Mad Street, added.

“Abhay Havaldar and Vishal Bakshi from Avatar Growth Capital were everything Anand [Chandrasekaran, founder and chief technology officer] and I could have asked for, at this stage of the company's growth.”

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• Topics
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