Tag: Velocity

Velocity Co-founders Atul Khichariya, Abhiroop Medhekar, Saurav Swaroop(from L to R)
Business World

Velocity raises $10.3M led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures to build the future of business financing in India

Mar 24, 2021 by Neel Achary 0 Comments #a Founding Partner at Valar Ventures, #James Fitzgerald, #Velocity

Bengaluru, 24 March 2021: Velocity, a Bengaluru based fintech startup, today announced that it has raised a total of $10.3M in seed funding led by Valar Ventures, a US-based VC firm backed by Peter Thiel. This marks Valar Venture’s first investment in an Indian startup. The funds will be utilized by Velocity for ramping up its customer base and for building world class financing products for the businesses of tomorrow.

Velocity facilitates revenue-based financing up to INR 2 Crs ($280K) with zero equity dilution or personal guarantees. Revenue-based financing is a new, more flexible alternative to venture capital or bank debt, wherein repayments happen as a fixed percentage of future revenues. With Velocity, any business with digitally trackable revenues can just share access to their online data and get funded within a week.

Velocity is currently focused on the fast-growing segment of online marketplace merchants and direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses in India. This segment is booming as the shift from offline to online retail got accelerated post COVID. Over 300 online businesses have signed up for Velocity’s revenue-based financing. Velocity already funds crores of marketing and inventory spends for its customers every month, with no collection delays or stress in its portfolio so far.

With this funding, Velocity also announced the launch of its digital marketing focused Visa corporate credit cards in partnership with SBM Bank. Online businesses spend up to 30% of their revenues on digital marketing but primarily end up using a personal credit card for this. Velocity aims to provide the best corporate credit card for the digital marketing use case, which allows online businesses to “put their marketing on autopilot”.

Talking about Velocity and the India opportunity, James Fitzgerald, a Founding Partner at Valar Ventures, said, “As one of the fastest growing economies in the world, India’s digital ecosystem is at an inflection point. We have been impressed with Velocity’s strong customer orientation and aggressive plans to build innovative financing solutions. We believe the Velocity team will empower thousands of entrepreneurs in India and we are excited to be partners with them in that.”

“Having been a VC and a founder myself, I strongly felt the need to reimagine financing products for new age businesses. Incumbents fall short on the speed, efficiency and flexibility expected by today’s entrepreneurs. We want to change that. We are thrilled to have Valar Ventures support our audacious vision of building the future of business financing in India.” said Abhiroop Medhekar, Co-founder and CEO at Velocity.

Other investors who participated in Velocity’s seed rounds include founding investors Mato Peric and Tom Stafford (DST Global) as well as Presight Capital, Utsav Somani’s iSeed, Oliver Jung (LAO Holdings), Robert Frohwein (Kabbage), Dhruv Arora (Syfe) and Erik Podzuweit & Florian Prucker (Scalable Capital).

Business World

Natural Language Processing Boot Camp held

Nov 17, 2020 by Gouri Achary 0 Comments #Alireza Rezazadeh, #Big Data—Volume, #Dr. Ashton Sharabiani, #Ms. Parvathy Krishnan, #natural language processing, #Variety, #Velocity, #Veracity

Between the dawn of civilization and 2003, we only have created five exabytes of information, now we are creating that amount every two days quoting Eric Schmidt of Google said Dr. Ashton Sharabiani, a data science manager in the Forensic practise at Deloitte while speaking at the Virtual NLP Boot Camp today highlighted the importance of Data Science.

He along with Alireza Rezazadeh, a Ph. D student at the University of Minnesota was the speakers at a Boot Camp organized by DAV Data Solutions as part of the Indo Data Week.

The subject raised a lot of interest among the participants as Natural Language Processing (NLP) is rapidly evolving. Branch of Machine Learning has been gaining lot of prominences especially after the advent of tools like Amazon’s Alexa (Virtual Assistant) and Google Assistant (an AI-powered virtual assistant developed by Google), Cortana (Microsoft’s personal productivity assistant), Siri (virtual assistant of Apple). More and more people are exploring NLP now and are trying to build models which can understand human natural languages informed Ms. Parvathy Krishnan of DAV Data Solutions, the organiser of the Boot Camp.

Dr. Ashton Sharabiani described NLP as the field concerned with the ability of the computer to understand analyze, manipulate and potentially generate human language. He explained in detail the common tasks, how they work etc.

Organised as part of the week-long 2nd Edition of Indo Data Week for Sustainable Development Goals, Dr Ashton gave insights into to three main themes in NLP.

Setting the tone for the Boot Camp and welcoming the gathering Ms. Parvathy Krishnan of DAV Data Solutions said that the Boot Camp would equip participants with machine learning techniques to build end-to-end NLP Systems.

Dr. Ashton Sharabiani said the purpose of Data Scientists is to extract, pre-process and analyze data. By doing this will enable companies to make better business decisions. The primary goal of the Data Scientist is to make businesses grow better.

“Data is the new oil”, he reminded 50 participants of the Boot Camp what World Economic Forum once said. And added that Data is one of the keys features of organizations now. It helps corporate leaders to make informed decisions based on numbers, facts, statistical data and trends. Its scope is on the rise as years pass by it is multidisciplinary technology. This Science which is ever-growing gives actionable insights out of gigabytes of data which is the need of the hour, he pointed out.

He spoke about 5 Vs of Big Data—Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity and Value.

The Virtual Indo Data Week conference is coordinated globally from India, Hyderabad. The maiden conference held last year at Hyderabad at Hyatt Gachibowli was a huge success. The second edition is planned because of the encouragement it received last year.

On 17th November, a StartUp Masterclass will be held by Jonathan Talbott, Siddhant Agarwal and Pratap Raju. The one full day virtual program will be attended by Startups, Mentors, Investors, Accelerators, Incubators.

On 18th, Jayesh Ranjan to inaugurate a 2-day conference as part of the week-long event.

The conference will feature keynotes and panel discussions by delegates from governmental and public sector organizations such as World Bank, Pulse Lab Jakarta, Emerging Technologies Wing — Government of Telangana, National Health Authority — Government of India, startups and innovation hubs, Impact Scientist, Knowledge Exchange Innovation Center Thailand, FluxGen Technologies, IroIro, and Khetee.

There will also be speakers from research and academia such as Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, Research and Innovation Circle of Hyderabad, and Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. The industry will also be well-represented with speakers from Microsoft Research India, OMRON Asia Pacific, Burnmark, APAC Prysm Group, and EnexisGroep.