Homestudio.com receives USD5mn in seed funding and other top Startup news

Round up of the major headlines that dominated the Startup sector, nationally and internationally.

In what is perhaps the first sign of new age Indian companies waking up to the potential of patents, Snapdeal-owned digital payments firm FreeCharge has indigenously developed an alternative to the SMS based one-time-password and has already filed a patent for the technology.

Homestudio.com, an online startup offering branded home solutions in the furniture and kitchen category to customers, today said it has received USD 5 million in seed funding from Bren Corporation. 

Infosys Ltd made its fifth investment from its $500 million innovation fund when it paid $4 million to pick a minority stake in Cloud Endure Ltd, an Israeli-based start up which offers solutions to help large companies move applications to cloud and cloud-based Disaster Recovery software. 

Singapore-based big data startupCrayon Data is setting up India operationsin association with WPP's media agency conglomerate GroupM. Mindshare, one of the GroupM agencies, is all set to bring its global alliance with Crayon Data to the Indian market. 

Flexeye, an UK-based privately-held software and solutions provider, on Wednesday opened HyperCat, an accelerator and incubation centre in Hyderabad, to nurture Indian startups in the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities space. 

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma has agreed to sponsor 1,000 Right to Information requests for onlineRTI.com, a Bengaluru-based platform that helps people file these applications online.

Taxi app company Uber launched today in Sri Lanka, a country dominated by three-wheeler auto rickshaws, as part of the US start-up’s growing push into Asia. 

BlackBuck, an online freight-booking service, has raised Rs 155 crore, or $25 million, in funding led by New York-based Tiger Global Management and the partner's fund of DST Global, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's investment firm. 

The department of lectronics and information technology(DeitY) in association with the Indian electronics and semiconductor association and STPI is planning to expand its 'Electropreneur Park' program to help more startups in the electronics and semiconductor space reach some maturity.

Delhi-based growX ventures has led a $500,000 (Rs 3.34-crore) seed round for i2e1, a smart network layer platform, which aims to provide low-cost internet to consumers and actionable analytics to providers, reports J Vignesh. 

Four out of the 16 Internet of Things (IoT) startups mentored over the past few months by India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) and The Indus Entreprenuers (TiE), Bangalore, have received funding. The organizations said it was a promising start for IoT startups, ventures that create solutions that allow devices to talk to each other.