Artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision-focused startup Mad Street Den has scooped up $30 million in a fresh round of funding. The Series C funding round was led by Avatar Growth Capital and included the participation of existing investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global.
The fresh infusion of capital will allow the California-headquartered startup to further grow its revenue and improve its logistics, insurance, and retail categories. Furthermore, the startup aims to deploy the proceeds from the latest funding round towards the expansion of its AI offerings across industries and across multiple markets, such as the US, UK, India, the Middle East, and Latin America.
“At MSD, we’ve gone step by step in this vision we’ve had from day 0, of building a truly general AI platform, taking a vertical-first approach into Retail and then scaling that horizontally across several industries. 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 levers that get unlocked with building a horizontal AI platform for large-scale enterprises,” said Ashwini Asokan, CEO, and founder, Mad Street Den.
“Abhay Havaldar & Vishal Bakshi from Avatar Growth Capital were everything Anand and I could have asked for, at this stage of the company’s growth. We’re very excited to have such veterans from the industry give us a strong guiding hand,” he added.
“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. Blox’s ability to solve business problems across industries, and use cases while maintaining efficacy at scale and low cost is highly differentiated. Further, it’s 30-60-90 days framework ensures customers do not need to wait for months to see results. We are very excited to partner with Ashwini, Anand, Costa, and the entire MSD team,” said Abhay Havaldar, Founder and Managing Partner of Avatar Growth Capital.
Today, Mad Street Den offers an automated platform that helps in the scale of operation, speed, accuracy, and significant cost savings by leveraging data. Its product Vue.ai provides automation and inventory management solutions to the retail segment, while Blox – its AI stack – helps the startup’s foray into new verticals that span across finance, insurance, healthcare, and logistics. Blox, according to Mad Street Den, helps enterprises to speed up the process of creating and managing data model drift through automated AI / ML capabilities, which thus enables real-time decision-making and enhanced consumer experience.
It claims to have seen strong demand for its AI platform over the past 24 months in the retail segment and new verticals alike. It claims to have witnessed 100% year-on-year growth and expects the same this year. The startup’s last funding round was back in 2019 when it raised $17 million in Series B funding, and since then has tripled its workforce to 275 employees across geographies.
