Data platform m.Paani raises $1.35M from IDG Ventures, Blume Ventures, Saha Fund

Mass market data and loyalty startup m.Paani has raised $1.35 million in a pre-­Series A round led by IDG Ventures, Blume Ventures and Saha Fund. m.Paani’s investors from its previous seed round also include Adil Allana of The Allana Group, Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-founder of Taxiforsure, and Gautam Ivatury, a serial mobile and fintech investor.

The new entrant investor Saha Fund is an early-stage investment fund focused on investing in tech-enabled companies led by women entrepreneurs or majority women employees or women consumer-focused firms. Blume Ventures, which focuses on seed and pre-Series A stage venture funds, is currently investing out of its $60 million Fund 2.

A press release from the company has said that m.Paani plans to invest in product development and scaling its tech and data science. The capital will also be used to expand m.Paani’s footprint through investments in sales and marketing.

Uniquely focused on the data-­sparse unorganised economy, m.Paani’s platform gathers demographic, transactional, geospatial and psychographic data about these consumers, in addition to business profile, transaction, customer and business territory data about channel retail partners.

In the press release, Akanksha Hazari, founder and CEO of m.Paani, has said, “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. Through continuous innovation we aim to bring big data to the informal economy, delivering intelligence to brand clients and life-­changing value to the aspirational Indian consumer.”

Launched in 2014, m.Paani designs and implements mobile-based loyalty programmes. Users of m.Paani earn points for their mobile phone usage or expenditure on select FMCG products that can be monetised for products and services.

Sanat Rao, Venture Partner, IDG Ventures: “Seventy percent 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.”