Smart appliance brand Upliance.ai has announced that it has raised Rs 34 crore at a valuation of Rs 143 crore, in a seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm that has invested in AI based start-ups like OpenAI, Sarvam.
The start-up plans to utilise the fresh funding towards scaling the production capacity to 20,000 in the next six months by leveraging on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) features, the company chief executive officer and co-founder Mahek Mody told Outlook Start-Up, in an exclusive interaction. It also wants to deploy funds towards brand marketing and visibility and to grow their operations team.
Mody also shared that the company aims to achieve a revenue of more than Rs 125 crore by FY2024 and plans to expand to 24 cities by FY2025, from eight cities currently, and is working on its offline presence as it looks to increase its service network and sell through retail markets, too.
The fundraise comes just about a week after the founders reportedly turned down an investment opportunity at Shark Tank India 3. During the Indian reality show, angel investor and Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal offered them Rs 10 lakhs at 0.5 per cent equity and Rs 90 lakhs debt at 14 per cent interest for two years, valuing the company at Rs 20 crore. However, the co-founders declined the offer staying firm on their 100-crore valuation.
“With all the traction that we are receiving from Shark Tank and with our fund raise, a lot of brands have noticed us, but we believe we are just at the beginning of our journey and right now our focus is to grow as a company,” Mahek stated on speculations of acquisitions after the episode aired.
He added that the in the coming time, the company would also look to partner and run collaborations with brands and companies on the distribution, supply chain and technology side.
Founded in 2021 by Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma, Upliance.ai claims to have built India’s first AI-powered home appliance company. The company had closed its pre-seed round of Rs 11 crore in 2023 with investments from Zerodha’s funding arm Rainmatter, Rukam Capital, Draper Associates, co-founders of Ather Energy and Unacademy.