It's barely been forty days since the new year 2022 kickstarted, and we already have not just one or two but six?unicorns in our country.?
Continuing the momentum from last year, which was a big year with lots of companies going for IPOs and startups turning unicorns, 2022 certainly seems to have started on a high note.
The first entrant on 2022¡¯s list of unicorns was Honasa Consumer, which is the parent company of personal care brands including Mamaearth and The Derma Co. It had announced on January 1 2022 that it has raised $52 million in a round led by Sequoia at a valuation of $1.2 billion.
The Co-Founder and CEO of Honasa Consumer stated that the company aims to deploy the funds towards brand launches, expanding distribution, inorganic growth, and expanding the current portfolio across borders.
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The most recent addition to this unicorn list of 2022 is Livspace, which is a home interiors and renovation startup. It recently raised $180 million in a Series F round led by KKR, a global investment firm. The round also witnessed participation from existing investors including Ingka Group Investments (holding company of IKEA), Jungle Ventures, Venturi Partners, and Peugeot Investments etc.??
Livspace aims to focus on an omnichannel approach with a sizable online and offline presence, especially to penetrate the highly untapped Tier 2 towns of India and beyond.???
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Another company that joined the unicorn list in 2022, is Fractal Analytics. Although it was founded in Mumbai in the year 2000, Fractal is currently a US-based artificial intelligence firm that helps global Fortune 100 companies power every human decision in the enterprise by bringing together analytics and AI to the decision.
With the latest funding of $360 million from the private equity firm TPG Capital Asia, Fractal¡¯s valuation hit the $1 billion mark, hence becoming the second firm in India¡¯s pure-play analytics space (after Mu Sigma), to reach the unicorn status.?
LEAD School, an edtech firm, had raised $100 million last month from investors, led by GSV Ventures and WestBridge Capital, which resulted in doubling its valuation in less than a year, to $1.1 billion.
Established in 2021, the Mumbai-based company provides tech-enabled solutions to schools, with a focus on digital learning through an online or hybrid model (of physical and digital) of classrooms.
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Social commerce grocery startup Dealshare entered the unicorn club by raising $165 million from investors led by Tiger Global and Alpha Wave Global in January 2022.? The company¡¯s valuation is stated to be more than $1.6 billion.
New investors in the company include Dragoneer Investments Group, Kora Capital and Unilever Ventures.
The funds raised in this funding round are expected to be utilized as investment in technology and data science, besides a ten-fold expansion in Dealshare¡¯s logistics infrastructure and increase in geographic reach.?
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Software as a service (SaaS)-based HR Tech platform Darwinbox had managed to raise $72 million funding in series D round last month, thus making it the first unicorn in the SaaS sector in 2022. The funding was led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) along with existing investors Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Endiya Partners, 3One4Capital, JGDEV and SCB 10X.
Founded in 2015, Darwinbox competes with global leaders like SAP, Oracle and Workday. It aims to utilize this funding for global expansion.
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