m.Paani: Raises $1.35m in Round led by IDG Ventures, Blume Ventures & Saha Fund

m.Paani, India’s first mass market data and loyalty company has raised USD 1.35m in a pre-­series. A investment round led by IDG Ventures, Blume Ventures and Saha Fund. m.Paani’s investors from its previous seed round also include Adil Allana of The Allana Group, a leading FMCG group (brands include London Dairy, among many others) in India and the MENA region, Aprameya Radhakrishna, Co-­Founder of Taxiforsure, and Gautam Ivatury, a serial mobile and fintech investor.

In world where data is the lifeblood of consumer retail, m.Paani connects brands and companies directly to mass market consumers and offline merchants with real-­time data and analytics. m.Paani achieves this through its mobile-­based Consumer Loyalty Program which rewards consumers for spend with retail and brand partners, and its Retailer Loyalty SaaS Solution that modernizes small retailers who are a core channel to reaching mass-­market Indian consumers.

Uniquely focused on the data-­sparse unorganized economy, m.Paani’s platform gathers demographic, transactional, geospatial and psychographic data about these consumers, in addition to business profile, transaction, customer and business territory data about channel retail partners. m.Paani is the only company building this depth of intelligence about mass-­ market consumers in India, and is powering brands to target, market and build loyalty in this segment using real-­time data, for the first time. Launched in March 2014, m.Paani has successfully delivered significant and measurable top-­line growth to brand clients that include Vodafone India and a top 10 Indian FMCG company.

m.Paani plans to invest in product development and scaling its tech and data science to serve its quickly growing brand clientele. The capital will also be used to expand m.Paani’s footprint pan-­India through investments in sales and marketing.

Akanksha Hazari, CEO and Founder of m.Paani, shares, “A brand manager from the largest FMCG company in the world recently said to me “there is no such thing as real-­time data in the FMCG world”. This is the fundamental challenge m.Paani solves for consumer brands today. Our loyalty platform is the critical digital pipe that enables our partners to understand and target mass-­market, unorganised consumers intelligently, long-­term, and in real-­time. Through continuous innovation we aim to bring big data to the informal economy, delivering intelligence to brand clients and life-­changing value to the aspirational Indian consumer.” A successful second time entrepreneur, Akanksha is a Princeton University and Cambridge University alumnus.