NowFloats raises Series A funding from Mumbai Angels, Blume Ventures

Technology start-up NowFloats has raised Series A funding from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures. The round saw the participation from other investors which include Bangalore Angels and a few senior industry leaders from whom NowFloats had raised a smaller round in June 2012.

NowFloats was founded by Jasminder Singh Gulati, Ronak Kumar Samantray, Nitin Jain and Neeraj Sabharwal in May 2012. Jasminder, Ronak and Nitin have all worked at Microsoft and Neeraj comes from an advertising background having worked with Euro RSCG and Saatchi & Saatchi.

"Businesses are looking to get for an easy and effective way to get their online presence. In addition, small businesses also want to attract the local internet search traffic. Even today, the average small business owner needs either access to a trusted website developer or basic internet expertise to build their own website. And this is just the start. It becomes increasingly complicated to update this site regularly, to enable search engine optimization (SEO) and to connect it to social media such as Facebook," said the press statement.

NowFloats is a simple solution to this complex problem. Using NowFloats, a business can create and update their website by just using SMS. This website is optimised for online discovery of a local business using the patent-pending Location-Based-SEO(TM) engine of NowFloats. The startup currently operates from New Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.

As per Zinnov Consulting, a technology consulting firm, marrying the simplicity of getting online with location is making the internet more relevant for businesses. Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov Consulting, says, "Our research has shown that almost 9 million businesses in India are looking for some sort of online presence. The NowFloats solution fits this need well as it provides an easy way to get online (using nothing but a basic mobile phone) and then track the effectiveness of your website updates. With almost 150 million Indians already on the internet, businesses will need to look at innovative solutions to become highly visible online."

Jasminder Singh Gulati, co-founder, NowFloats, says, "This is an important milestone for us. We have a customer base of 2000 already and need this investment to scale our customer acquisition channels, improve customer engagement and keep our product always ahead."