Investments made by Google in Indian Startups in 2020

Many thought that the year 2020 that has disrupted many industries would see a fall in investments. But on the contrary, 2020 saw some funding rounds involving massive amounts. If we talk about India, even though the number of funding rounds fell to its lowest in five years in 2020, the amount raised was higher than in 2016 and 2017.

In this article, we look at the investments made by Google in Indian startups. This year Google made a US$ 4.5 Billion investment in Reliance Jio through its Google for India Digitization Fund. Google will also be investing US$ 10 billion spread over 5-7 years.

Google invested in 4 startups last year, Scribble Data, Wysa, Glance and Daily Hunt.

1. Scribble Data

Scribble Data is a Machine Learning engineering company whose primary offering is a Machine Learning feature store for mid-market enterprise data teams. Scribble Data completed its first funding round on 14 May 2020 with investments from big companies like Google and Amazon, the data leaders themselves. The company raised funding to deepen its store offering and expand into the US and Europe.

Scribble Data’s feature store product – Scribble Enrich allows data scientists to develop and manage production-ready datasets to train Machine Learning models faster. As machine learning models are becoming a focal point across companies, Scribble Data aims to productionize the models more quickly and better to derive value from ML. 

Headquartered in Bangalore, India, Scribble Data was founded in 2016 by Indrayudh Ghoshal and Venkata Pingali. Venkata Pingali, Scribble Data’s CEO, said, “I’ve been a data scientist myself, and in my work, I deeply felt the need for a trusted, easily accessible, always available, and relevant source of data for all my analysis and modelling. Our customer deployments have helped grow and test the product, and prepare for tomorrow.” 

2. Wysa

Bengaluru-based Wysa is a mental health platform that leverages AI to life coach for improving emotional and mental wellness. It was confirmed on 12 December 2020 that Wysa will be raising funds from Google in its upcoming Series A round, but the amount has not been disclosed yet. According to Crunchbase, Wysa has raised US$ 3.9 M over three funding rounds to date. 

Co-founded in 2015 by Ramakant Vempati and Jo Aggarwal, the startup aims to help and support individuals dealing with chronic mental health problems such as depression. Wysa’s AI conversational bot, which is specifically made to improve the mental well-being of a person. Wysa integrates active empathetic listening with therapeutic techniques like cognitive behaviour (CBT), meditation, relaxation, and motivational interview sessions.

7 investors back the startup, Kae Capital, Pi Ventures, Co-founder and CEO of Yulu- Amit Gupta, Himanshu Agarwal- Co-founder of Aspiring Minds, Raghunandan G and Alok Mittal- Co-founder, CEO and MD of Indifi Technologies.

3. Glance

Bengaluru-based mobile ad network InMobi Group-owned Glance, a leading lock-screen platform raised US$ 145M from the famous Google and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital on 22 December 2020.

With the new financing round Glance has become the fastest company to reach unicorn status at a valuation of more than US$ 1 billion. The two-year-old startup serves news, media content and games on the lock screen of more than 100 million smartphones.

Glance will utilise the funds to deepen its artificial intelligence (AI) capability, including Roposo, a rapidly growing video-sharing social media platform owned by the firm. Glance will also expand its tech team, launch services on the platform and for expansion into global markets, including the US and South America.

“Glance is a great example of innovation solving for mobile-first and mobile-only consumption, serving content across many of India’s local languages,” said Caesar Sengupta, Vice-President, Google. Glance offers AI-driven personalised content in multiple languages such as English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Bahasa on the lock screen of Android smartphones.

Glance claims to have more than 115 million daily active users who spend 25 minutes per day. It is among the top 10 social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

4. DailyHunt

Verse Innovation backed Indian startup DailyHunt completed a round of over $100 million from Google, Microsoft and AlphaWave among other investors, at a valuation of over US$1 billion, making it a unicorn. The total amount raised stands at US$ 320, as per Crunchbase.

DailyHunt develops a mobile application software that gives updates on trending topics, offering online news, books and magazines. It was founded in 2017 by Virendra Gupta. It also owns the short-video platform Josh. DailyHunt claims to serve over 300 million users news and entertainment content in 14 Indian languages.

The funding will be used to scale Josh. After the banning of TikTok in late June the short-video platforms are fighting hard to make a space for themselves. Dailyhunt is also planning to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to scale up Josh.

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