Looking back at 2022
2022 - has been a year of growth, success, and fine challenges for us at Huddle and our portfolio companies. Our approach to being hands-on and active early backers to great founders has not only enabled us to back promising businesses through investment but also accelerate them through guidance, infrastructure, and the right networking support (thanks to many of you reading this). Most importantly, we've been able to build upon a strong everlasting relationship with our founders, investors, and peers, that goes beyond office hours, and we're excited to see how this continues to evolve.
Despite the macroeconomic conditions this year, we have seen and backed some great ventures and will continue to support sustainable and scalable businesses. Moreover, we've launched certain initiatives in order to further collaborate with the ecosystem and will continue striving to innovate ways to further building the foundation for early-stage ventures in India.
As an accelerator-backed VC, we’ve constantly been bullish in backing sectors that are yet to be proven and those disrupting industries, whilst forming newer ones. Read more about our latest ClimAct accelerator program below:
ClimAct: Merak x Huddle
With over $40Bn invested in 600+ companies worldwide, the fight against Climate change is underway. We're excited to contribute our bit by launching ClimAct - A Climate Tech accelerator program by Huddle and Merak Ventures.
With this initiative, we're thrilled to bring India the newest and finest of ClimateTech from which we expect some massive innovations solving global challenges as the key outcome!
Climate Tech requires a concerted effort from the VC/PE ecosystem to build scalable, venture-backed companies. Given its evolution, Climate Tech is approaching its inflection point, proving a fit for early-stage capital infusion.
In the spirit of bringing together, the Indian Climate-tech ecosystem, Huddle and Merak in association with Inc42 conducted “The Climate Tech VC Opportunity”: a 1-hour virtual event dedicated to conducting relevant discussions around Climate Tech in India, including demystifying VC funding for Climate Tech startups and decoding operator challenges for Climate Tech startups.
Young Founders Forum
As early-stage enablers and backers, we are always on the lookout for great founders solving for some of the key challenges across industries. In an effort to not miss out on young entrepreneurs and student innovators, we’ve established strong ties with universities across the country and launched the first-ever edition of the Young Founders Forum (YFF), a platform to support the next generation of student entrepreneurs and help them ideate towards building a venture backable business.
The forum hosted five multi-speaker panels touching upon aspects of early-stage entrepreneurship. The panel discussions covered a wide range of topics including founder learnings, team-building challenges and techniques, creating an effective GTM strategy, investment guidance from VCs, and MVP building and scaling.
Latest Investments
Mykare
MyKare - MyKare is an asset-light healthcare network focused on standardized surgical care and preventive post-care for medical tourism patients. More here.
Sector: Health Tech
Funding Status: Seed
Notable investors - Huddle, ODX, Ellkay Family Office, Stanford Angels, Avanna Seed, and a few others
Efeed
eFeed - eFeed is an animal nutrition-centric platform empowering farmers with quality feed and data, bringing traceability to the animal nutrition value chain. More here.
Sector: Agri Tech
Funding Status: Seed + Deal
Notable investors - Huddle, Omnivore, Better Capital
Swageazy
Swageazy - Swageazy is a B2B SaaS platform for corporate gifting and employee benefits. More here.
Sector: Supply Chain/commerce enablers
Funding Status: Pre-seed
Notable investors - names yet to be announced
Portfolio Milestones
Huddle-backed D2C Health and Wellness startup, The Healthy Company has raised a pre-Series A round led by Inflection Point Ventures. Read more.
D2C Oral Care startup Perfora has raised a $1mn Seed round from Shiprocket, Huddle, Sauce.vc, Lotus Herbals Pvt Ltd, Sara International Private Limited (Sara Group), and others. More here.
Huddle-accelerated cloud gaming startup The Gaming Project has raised a seed round from Faad Network Pvt. Ltd Upsparks Blackkite InvestmentsSucSEED Ventures MaGEHold and HEM Angels. More here.
Gladful was recently showcased under CNBC-TV18 and WhatsApp's #SMBSaathi - Local Udyog, Digital Sahyog campaign. Learn more about Gladful's journey into tackling India's protein deficiency problem. Read more.
Huddle-backed Deep tech startup, NeuroPixel.AI has announced a new partnership this month with the Intel Startup Program. Read more.
Note from the founders
“At Huddle we’re confident there will be a paradigm shift in the way businesses are built and how investors will validate early-stage companies. This is an era when strong ventures will emerge across sectors. Therefore, now is the right time to be active and aggressive in connecting and supporting promising founders.”
“Despite the macroeconomic conditions impacting several ecosystems, we still continue to witness startup founders aiming to concentrate around building sustainable long-lasting ventures. Large ventures growing through these times have become almost a definitive occurrence reassuring everyone of the grit, determination, and innovation within the startup ecosystem. At Huddle, we focus on backing such founders and minds.”
Finally our “Decode”
One of the initiatives we took this year was to launch Decode, an open forum for founders, experts, and mentors from the startup community to share their thoughts with the Huddle community on critical topics in the ecosystem. We will continue penning down perspectives, thoughts, and everything that’s happening at Huddle with a fresh outlook from the first week of 2023!
PS: We at Decode, are taking an early break and we will be off for the next two weeks. See you folks, next year!
