Applabs Technologies provides computer software testing services. The Company offers software quality assurance, third-party validation, consulting, outsourcing, and mobile application testing services. Applabs serves the health care, manufacturing, chemical, energy, and travel industries worldwide. Based in Philadelphia, the company’s presence spanned the US, UK, and India. Applabs was one of the first successful outsourcing plays, leveraging India’s cost advantage and vast pool of technical talent. It was acquired by Computer Sciences Corporation (NYSE: CSC) in 2011 and today is the world’s largest software testing and quality management company.

AutoNxt is a Mumbai-based deep-tech startup building India’s first electric tractor with off-road autonomous driving capabilities. Its high torque-capable EV tractors deliver the same degree of operational performance for heavy-duty applications as conventional ICE-based (diesel) tractors.

While India has taken several steps to reduce (on-road) transport emissions – with the transition to BS VI emission & fuels standards and the push for EVs – the off-road transport sector, which primarily comprises tractors (in agri and industrial use cases), has lagged.

The outdated emission control technology for India’s tractors, coupled with the expected rise in the stock of tractors in use as agri mechanization continues apace, makes the segment ripe for electrification. As the only Indian company with electric tractors ready for commercial deployment towards large-scale B2B industrial use cases (e.g., solar panel cleaning and hauling biomass fuel for energy generation), AutoNxt is perfectly positioned to be the category leader in this space.

Beans.ai is a California-based early-stage company building a complete last-mile logistics platform offering hyper-accurate mapping and location data, route planning and optimization, and fleet management services. Its AI-powered platform provides unmatched visibility at every step of the package delivery journey – from address verification and geocoding to route creation, sorting, scanning, and sequencing to dispatch, delivery, and reconciliation.

The platform collects and processes data from multiple sources and provides delivery partners with proprietary geocodes to simplify parking, access, and delivery. Beans.ai seeks to resolve issues in the last-mile delivery market, such as undelivered packages and re-delivery attempts which exacerbate the operational and cash burden logistics players face.

Saama invested in the Company at a pre-product, pre-revenue stage based on our conviction in the founding team, which had deep technical expertise in on-demand delivery logistics. The CEO had previously led the on-demand delivery and 3rd party integrations group at Google and had an exceptional understanding of the problem faced by enterprises and delivery companies.

Dasera is a California-based company building a SaaS cybersecurity platform to tackle data lifecycle security for cloud data stores. The core idea is to address internal threats presented by employee negligence and malfeasance. The Company aims to build an end-to-end solution for visibility, security, compliance, and privacy.

By analyzing database queries from employees (e.g., engineers and analysts), flagging suspicious queries (for anomalous usage patterns indicating data exfiltration or privacy violations), and rewriting them in real-time, Dasera operationalizes data protection and governance. Their vision is to democratize enterprise data security operations through an automated solution deployed at scale by a single engineer and easily accessible by executive stakeholders, data owners, security operations, and compliance teams.

Digiaccel is an early-stage venture building a digital skills academy and marketplace for white-collar workers and organizations to build employability for non-programming job roles in India through a tech-first skilling engine combined with human coaching.

Through a nearly 14-year stint at HUL, the founder realized that India’s traditional degree/certification-based curriculum did not focus enough on building skills for the workplace. There was an increasingly large gap in the demand for and availability of digital employment – across fields such as data analytics, digital marketing, tech operations, and product management.

As such, organizations end up with a formally educated workforce that lacks skill-based knowledge and industry context. This leads to a longer ramp-up time for new employees, which decreases efficiency.

To preclude this problem, Digiaccel offers 12–20-week focused skilling courses with pre-recorded theory/demonstrations/simulations supplemented by live mentorship. The proprietary skilling engine then provides customized pathways for different candidates with assessments to constantly identify and correct skill gaps. After this, Digiaccel connects skilled personnel with the right digital employers.

As an early and differentiated player in India’s otherwise crowded EdTech space, we believe the Company is well poised to solve a significant problem endemic in the Indian job market.

FirstHive is a full-stack Customer Data Platform (CDP) that enables consumer marketers and brands to take control of their first-party data from all online and offline sources and enables highly personalized campaigns that drive conversions. The Company provides foundational technology for B2C enterprises to leverage 1st-party customer data with well-developed marketing use cases, enabling nuanced control over CX and accelerating marketing ROI.

FirstHive is effectively the first CDP to deliver enterprises a single source of intelligence that can build unified customer identities and streamline data usage across the enterprise’s marketing and analytics ecosystems. The platform allows consumer marketing enterprises to consolidate all their opt-in first-party consumer data. Once deployed, it becomes the single source of truth for customer identity and data within the enterprise.

As such, it acts as a central brain or system of intelligence that can be leveraged to deliver seamless cross-tool and cross-channel communication for marketing teams for downstream marketing applications. Moreover, its AI-powered out-of-the-box recommendations and assisted decision engine enhance marketing ROI and CX objectives.

GlobalFair is a B2B cross-border procurement marketplace for construction materials – starting with granite, quartz, marble, ceramics/tiles, and steel fabrications.

The construction industry, a $1.4T market worldwide, has been traditionally unorganized with limited technology penetration. GlobalFair seeks to modernize it by automating the discovery-to-delivery lifecycle of an order. The Company works directly with overseas buyers, servicing them through a network of managed suppliers. Their USP is providing overseas buyers and importers with a hassle-free, one-stop procurement solution managed end-to-end by GlobalFair.

The Company takes ownership of the entire process, from sourcing to organizing production, price negotiation, quality inspection, technical evaluation (with pattern designing), cost-effective shipping, and ensuring timely delivery. The vision is to build a technology platform that transforms the industry’s order placement paradigms by introducing supplier ratings and reviews, video-based sampling, real-time shipping alerts, and paperless supplier/buyer onboarding, delivering a bona fide digital-first experience to end-users.

Mezi, a Sunnyvale, CA-based company, was developed as a mobile-first AI chat-based app that could enable fast and bespoke discovery of online products and services. Initially built for a wide range of use cases, such as shopping and gifting, the Company pivoted to focus only on travel.

Using Mezi as their personal travel assistant, users could book flights, hotels, and restaurants and receive customized recommendations. Mezi also offered a white-label “travel-as-a-service” solution for travel management companies and agents.

Mezi was the founders’ (a twin brother duo) second rodeo, having previously cofounded the Bollywood music streaming service Dhingana, which Rdio acquired in 2014. At the time of Mezi’s launch in 2015, AI had not yet been leveraged to personalize shopping experiences.

At the end of 2016, Mezi started working with American Express on a pilot to power its AskAmex concierge service. Seeing that Mezi was instrumental in providing superior service to its clientele, Amex sought to deepen its engagement with the Company and acquired Mezi in early 2018. Just as an FYI, we have invested in the founders’ new venture, Zeni, through our fourth fund.

Oddr is a vibrant Silicon Valley startup looking to disrupt the archaic Invoice-to-Cash processes for the Professional Services industry. Founded by three seasoned veterans with a cumulative experience of 50+ years in this industry, Oddr aims to fix the broken billing, collection, and payment processes that result in significant revenue loss for firms.

Firms’ archaic billing, collection, and payment processes lead to longer invoice-to-cash cycles, higher write-offs, and unnecessary operational costs. No matter how the bills are delivered, the current methods for sending out invoices are tedious and error-prone. Further, invoices become untraceable once sent, and the entire process lacks intelligence and automation, resulting in unreliable cash flow predictions. All these fragmented processes and inefficiencies result in low customer satisfaction and loss of the firm’s time and resources.

Leveraging AI, Automation, and Data Intelligence, Oddr helps firms streamline and automate their manual and paper processes to enhance their growth strategy while lowering bottom-line costs.

Praman seeks to build the world’s largest global exchange for horticulture commodities. Powered by its proprietary AI-based image recognition technology for product quality assaying and grading, Praman envisions making horticulture trade accessible and trustworthy.

The Company originally developed AI/ML-powered hardware and software solutions that utilized machine vision technology to enable rapid and custom sorting and grading of horticulture produce. In late 2020, post a change in agriculture trading regulations, the Company pivoted to building a B2B horticulture exchange using its aforementioned core technology – real-time, highly accurate quality assaying solutions.

Praman seeks to solve the inherent information asymmetry that persists in the horticulture trade due to the highly perishable nature of the commodity, lack of objective quality standardization, and high fragmentation on the supply side, making it incredibly tough to aggregate and assess quality manually. To help seamlessly execute orders, Praman’s exchange facilitates trade discovery through a digital bidding platform, quality assurance powered by its grading software, and trade settlement services like payments, credit, and logistics.

Scalenut is a unified content intelligence SaaS platform that helps companies manage their entire content lifecycle from content planning, creation, and collaboration to distribution and analytics. With Scalenut, one can get unlimited content ideas for blogs, product descriptions, ad copies, email headers, blog intros, and more at the click of a button. Their innovative AI tool produces long-form content pieces in a matter of seconds!

Today, only a handful of end-to-end content marketing solutions are available, primarily targeted at large enterprises. SMEs rely on a fragmented set of disparate tools, open marketplaces, and marketing agencies, ultimately misallocating resources with poor return on investment (ROI).

To capitalize on this opportunity, Scalenut leverages AI and deep learning to offer a one-stop shop that empowers SEO and content teams by supercharging their organic marketing efforts and helping them grow sustainably. The Company aims to become the de facto content lifecycle management solution for SMBs and mid-market enterprises.

SCIO Health Analytics provides healthcare analytics solutions and services globally. It provides care optimization, network optimization, reimbursement optimization, risk adjustment, quality measurement, and integrated data management and insights platforms. SCIO was recognized as a leader in health insurance analytics, assisting insurance companies in the US with claims processing, and was acquired by EXL Health in 2018.

Shriram EPC (SEPC) is an end-to-end solutions provider for engineering projects in India, offering multi-disciplinary design, engineering, procurement, construction, and project management services. Backed by the highly regarded Chennai-based conglomerate Shriram Group, SEPC provides turnkey solutions in business segments such as infrastructure, mining & mineral processing, power, process & metallurgy, and water. Saama successfully exited its investment at the time of SEPC’s IPO.

Wellthy is an early-stage digital therapeutics company focused on improving patient health through the intersection of technology and clinical outcomes. The Company has developed a product that improves patient outcomes for individuals with chronic diseases through a lifestyle management platform deployed as a mobile application.

The Company is pioneering Digital Therapeutics as an entirely new category of medicine to address the chronic health epidemic in South Asia and other Asia-Pacific (APAC) countries at scale. The Company has developed a product that improves patient outcomes by advancing the delivery of proven interventions from the clinic to mobile devices and into patients’ daily lives without changing the standard of care.

Zeni Inc. is a California-based company building a “CFO-as-a-service” platform. The Company aims to be an AI-powered finance team for startups and mid-sized enterprises with intelligent bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services.

While the enterprise landscape is crowded with vertically focused accounting and bookkeeping applications, Zeni is one of the first to provide an AI-based full-service finance solution that offers visibility and control over myriad finance functions. Using a seamless blend of artificial intelligence and a dedicated team of certified finance experts, Zeni’s full-service finance concierge performs daily bookkeeping and manages all finance functions in real-time with integrations to bookkeeping, banking, payroll management, HR, and related software (e.g., QuickBooks, Gusto, Expensify, Stripe, Bill.com, SVB Financial Group, and Brex).

Saama has invested in the founders for the second time, following the acquisition of their last venture, Mezi, by American Express. We seeded the Company from the pre-product, pre-revenue stage.