Marketing and data analytics platform, m.Paani has today announced that it has nabbed $1.35 million in a pre-series A round led by IDG Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing investors Blume Ventures and Saha Fund. The Mumbai-based startup plans to deploy this capital for product development and scaling its tech and data science efforts.
Launched in 2014, m.Paani offers marketing services to brands and connects them directly with the target audience. Founded by a female entrepreneur, Akanksha Hazari, the company utilizes real-time data and analytics to link the clients with offline merchants and potential customers. This is done using a mobile-based ‘Consumer Loyalty Program’ extended to retailers and consumers. The consumers are awarded reward points and coupons varying on the amount spent. The data so generated is then passed on the end brands.
m.Paani’s platform gathers demographic, transactional, geospatial and psychographic data about these consumers, in addition to the business profile, transaction, customer and business territory data about channel retail partners. The solutions are offered through its SaaS-based product channel.
Speaking of m.Paani’s business model, Founder and CEO Akanksha Hazari said in a press release,
A brand manager from the largest FMCG company in the world recently said to me “there is no such thing as real-time data in the FMCG world”. This is the fundamental challenge m.Paani solves for consumer brands today. Our loyalty platform is the critical digital pipe that enables our partners to understand and target mass-market, unorganised consumers intelligently, long-term, and in real-time.
Earlier, m.Paani raised an undisclosed seed funding back in April last year. The company was then backed by angel investors including Adil Allana of The Allana Group; Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-founder TaxiForSure and fintech investor Gautam Ivatury. The present investors Blume Ventures and Saha Fund also poured capital in the seed round.
The company will further engage the funds towards investments in sales and marketing to establish its presence across India. It strives to bring big data to the informal economy, delivering intelligence to brand clients and value to the aspirational Indian consumers.
The fund raise will catapult m.Paani’s already impressive growth metrics to help the company become a household name to the value conscious Indian consumer and be at the forefront of India’s retail tech industry. Clients for the company include top brands such as Vodafone India and an Indian FMCG company.
Reasoning out the massive investment, Sanat Rao, Venture Partner, IDG Ventures India said,
70% of India’s consumers historically have been outside the formal economy, with limited information available regarding their consumption needs and purchase patterns. m.Paani’s platform brings these consumers into the digital world, and allows brands to understand and engage these customers via data science insights.
