Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE-IIITH) Avishkar accelerator program startup Instoried raises 1 million from pre-series A round of investment, with Mumbai Angels leading the round, and follow-on investments from Venture Catalysts’ 9 Unicorns Fund London-based JPIN and others. The AI-driven content startup has created a tool that helps brands to strategize, execute, and deliver content using predictive analysis to increase customer engagement. The B2B SaaS-based startup helps brands to boost engagement and increase content productivity in real time. Instoried’s AI tool helps large companies build personal connections with their audiences by using technology to measure the effectiveness of content and rewrite their communication. The company’s approach is data-driven, scalable and measurable with long-lasting, visible results. Instoried was part of Avishkar’s 5th cohort where CIE-IIITH was instrumental in supporting Instoried with a seed fund of INR 10 lakhs provided strategy and business mentoring. Avishkar is an intensive six-month mentor and research-led program of CIE-IIIT Hyderabad currently running its 11th cohort. A total of Rs 10 lakh is invested in each startup who are part of the cohort. Through the program, Instoried gained access to IIITH’s research labs and received various customer development and mentoring support from CIE’s partners and ecosystem associates.
Commenting on Instoried’s successful funding, Prof. Ramesh Loganathan, CIE-IIITH said, “All our programs target early stage deep-tech startups with potential or need to work with our research. Instoried is one such startup leveraging NLP for a very interesting usecase around stories. We are very excited to see yet another of our Avishkar accelerator startups gaining good traction and momentum.” According to Instoried founder Sharmin Ali, “Instoried has grown over 3X in the last 10 months. We found a huge opportunity in this adversity and have scaled at a 60 per cent MOM rate. Brands globally now understand and acknowledge the importance of having a strong online engagement as an absolute mandate with the new normal. This is the best time for marketing tech companies. With the pre-series A raise, we want to hire a larger team and initiate marketing activities globally with a focus on global expansion and increasing our product offerings.” About CIE-IIITH: Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, also known as CIE-IIITH is a DST approved incubator operational since 2008. CIE-IIITH has so far supported around 200+ startups and has seed- funded 30 startups. CIE-IIITH was also instrumental being the kiln of the initiatives that culminated into the foundation of T-Hub. Along with developments in AVISHKAR, CIE-IIITH is also focusing on turning a new leaf in terms of infrastructure facilities, programs and startup engagements focusing towards building a deep tech startup ecosystem. New working spaces are launched, seed funding programmes, structured workshops and mentoring opportunities and technology transfer facilitation are also being deployed now.
About IIIT-Hyderabad: The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) is an autonomous research university founded in 1998 that focuses on the core areas of Information Technology, such as Computer Science, Electronics and Communications, and their applications in other domains through inter-disciplinary research that has a greater social impact. Some of its research domains include Visual Information Technologies, Human Language Technologies, Data Engineering, VLSI and Embedded Systems, Computer Architecture, Wireless Communications, Algorithms and Information Security, Robotics, Building Science, Earthquake Engineering, Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, Education Technologies, Power Systems, IT in Agriculture and e-Governance.
