In its seed round, home appliance startup Upliance.ai raised Rs 34 crore, or roughly $4 million, at a valuation of Rs 143 crore ($17 million). Khosla Ventures, which has backed several AI-focused startups including OpenAI, Rabbit, and Sarvam, is leading the round.
Upliance.ai hopes to use this round to increase its revenue to Rs 150 crore by 2024 and increase production to 20,000 units annually within the next six months.
Upliance.ai, a company founded by Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma, creates smart home appliances that elevate Indian homes by fusing artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Utilizing a proprietary model called Up AI, the company’s flagship product, Upliance, is an AI cooking assistant that can understand the subtleties of food, cooking, and kitchen tasks and carry them out on its own. Upliance is accessible in almost 1,000 Indian homes and was introduced in January 2023.
Draper Associates, Rukam Capital, Rainmatter (a Zerodha Fund), and angel investors, including the co-founders of Ather Energy and Unacademy, closed the startup’s Rs 11 crore pre-seed round last year.
The holdings of Doordash, Block, Instacart, Gitlab, and Stripe are held by venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. Initially investing in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, was Khosla Ventures. The fund, which has over $15 billion in assets under management, makes investments in a variety of industries, such as consumer goods, AI, sustainability, enterprise, health, and frontier technologies.
