MDI Ventures Turns towards SaaS and E-Commerce Invests equity in Anchanto to enable smarter SaaS solutions for Southeast Asia

With all things smart, and technology-harnessing, being the buzzwords in the entrepreneurial community, the number of investors mentoring smart ventures has also grown exponentially. Now, in a related development, MDI Ventures has pumped-in USD 4 Million into e-commerce SaaS platform Anchanto.

Now, the latest fundraising by Anchanto is testimony to the fact that investors today have actually turned smarter and are looking at investing (and mentoring) quality startups offering solutions which could actually contribute to a cause. With this investment, the potential of harnessing SaaS has also seemingly got a required boost when it comes to making solutions smarter.

Decoding Anchanto's funding journey

Headquartered in Singapore and founded in 2011 by Abhimanyu Kashikar, Shafique Muhammad, and Vaibhav Dabhade; Anchanto helps e-commerce businesses develop and scale. SaaS is at the center of Anchanto's products as it helps partners with inventory management, e-commerce business operations, cataloguing, cross border e-commerce, and more.

As far as its equity fundraising is concerned, Anchanto has so far raised venture capital in excess of USD 11 Million; encompassing Series A, multiple Series B rounds, apart from the latest Series C fundraising. The recent Series C was led by MDI Ventures who were the only investors to participate; equity raised in this round amounts to USD 4 Million.

E-commerce and logistics reaping "smart" rewards

With business models today having turned smart, it only becomes imminent that sectors like e-commerce and logistics derive maximum benefit out of these models. With technology viz the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning, and more being increasingly adopted by startups, we should hopefully get to see newer mechanisms in multiple aspects.

These aspects could range from smart delivery mechanisms, order-taking ones, to supply-chain and inventory management as well; thereby opening up the possibility to achieve an interconnect between logistics and e-commerce.

Also, the recent Walmart taking over majority stakes in Flipkart in India also potentially signifies robust e-commerce models for the country. This could lead to smarter inventory management as a result of which relatively error-free product deliveries could be achieved.

In related developments, healthcare startup SigTuple raised USD 19 Million from the likes of Accel and IDG. This investment takes SigTuple's overall equity fundraise to USD 25 Million. The startup has been associated with investors such as Pi Ventures, Axilor, Binny Bansal, Endiya Partners, Venture Highway, and Trifecta Capital.

This fund assumes significance considering the fact that healthcare represents a big opportunity to cater to the vast majority through enabling smart solutions driven by disruptive technology viz. Internet-of-Things (IoT), AI, ML, BlockChain, Deep Learning, and more; hence, the imminent future is all set to turn smarter.