Avatar Growth Capital raises $30 million for AI company Mad Street Den
Mad Street Den (MSD), an enterprise AI business, has raised $30 million in its Series C fundraising round, which was dominated by Avatar Growth Capital. The most recent round of funding also included participation from current investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global (formerly known as Falcon Edge Capital). According to the company, the investment will allow it to diversify the industries for which it offers artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
Chennai-based MSD said it had seen strong demand for its AI platform over the past 24 months. New growth has been powered by both the retail segment (Vue.ai) as well as its foray into new verticals like finance, insurance, healthcare, pharma, and logistics (getblox.ai). The funding allows it to scale up the business across a wide range of verticals.
“We've been patiently waiting for the SaaS-first to AI-first shift and that's happening now," Ashwini Asokan, founder and chief executive of MSD, told ET. “The demand is crazy, because large enterprises don't just want people to be sitting around entering data. SaaS is basically tools that allow people to enter data. How's that even a thing? People should be making decisions not entering data and so this process of digitizing the world is broadly what we've been up to at MSD."
However, it wasn't this AI-first shift that was causing the SaaS sector pain, she added. It was because companies were being more prudent with their software spending and there weren’t enough people in organisations to run the SaaS products.
“At a time when there are no jobs and people are cutting jobs, the people who run the SaaS products are now not there anymore. Why will I need to buy the SaaS product then? So, it's not the AI first that's causing this to happen. It's the fact that there's no people to operate the SaaS products," she said.
Asokan said enterprises were buying the company’s AI stack, Blox, across these industries to solve three complex problems with a single platform. They use the platform to create clean and enriched data, power rich-personalized customer experiences and automate complex workflows dealing with a wide range of documents needing digitization and processing.
On whether it was hard for MSD to raise the money in a tough macro-economic environment, Asokan said MSD had not found it tough to raise its current round despite the ongoing ‘funding winter’. “There is absolutely no liquidity in the market. That said, companies growing at 100% year over year or north of that will always have (takers). So, it wasn't too much of a struggle to raise (money).”
According to Abhay Havaldar, the founder and managing partner of Avatar Growth Capital, businesses must not just complete tasks more rapidly, automate workflows, and make choices swiftly since rules-based automation is insufficient. "Blox is extremely differentiating in its capacity to address business issues across industries and use cases while keeping efficacy at scale and low cost.
Chennai-based MSD said it had seen strong demand for its AI platform over the past 24 months. New growth has been powered by both the retail segment (Vue.ai) as well as its foray into new verticals like finance, insurance, healthcare, pharma, and logistics (getblox.ai). The funding allows it to scale up the business across a wide range of verticals.
“We've been patiently waiting for the SaaS-first to AI-first shift and that's happening now," Ashwini Asokan, founder and chief executive of MSD, told ET. “The demand is crazy, because large enterprises don't just want people to be sitting around entering data. SaaS is basically tools that allow people to enter data. How's that even a thing? People should be making decisions not entering data and so this process of digitizing the world is broadly what we've been up to at MSD."
However, it wasn't this AI-first shift that was causing the SaaS sector pain, she added. It was because companies were being more prudent with their software spending and there weren’t enough people in organisations to run the SaaS products.
“At a time when there are no jobs and people are cutting jobs, the people who run the SaaS products are now not there anymore. Why will I need to buy the SaaS product then? So, it's not the AI first that's causing this to happen. It's the fact that there's no people to operate the SaaS products," she said.
Asokan said enterprises were buying the company’s AI stack, Blox, across these industries to solve three complex problems with a single platform. They use the platform to create clean and enriched data, power rich-personalized customer experiences and automate complex workflows dealing with a wide range of documents needing digitization and processing.
On whether it was hard for MSD to raise the money in a tough macro-economic environment, Asokan said MSD had not found it tough to raise its current round despite the ongoing ‘funding winter’. “There is absolutely no liquidity in the market. That said, companies growing at 100% year over year or north of that will always have (takers). So, it wasn't too much of a struggle to raise (money).”
According to Abhay Havaldar, the founder and managing partner of Avatar Growth Capital, businesses must not just complete tasks more rapidly, automate workflows, and make choices swiftly since rules-based automation is insufficient. "Blox is extremely differentiating in its capacity to address business issues across industries and use cases while keeping efficacy at scale and low cost.
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