The seed funding round saw participation from fintech-focussed VC firm Cedar-IBSi Capital and more than 25 Indian angel investors
The capital will be deployed to further scale up technology development, expand use cases and team
Founded in 2022, Cogniquest claims to have built a context-aware AI platform that can capture key data points and generate actionable insights from information repositories
Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cogniquest has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from fintech-focussed venture capital firm Cedar-IBSi Capital and angel investors.
The round saw participation from more than 25 Indian angel investors, including QuantGro cofounder Dhiraj Sinha, ex-Infosys executives Umashankar Malapaka and Visveswara Gupta, former Accenture India managing director Rajesh Bhat, Anup Naik and Santosh Rao of Zeliot, ReadyAssist’s Vimal Singh, Srinivas Majji, among others, Cedar-IBSi said in a statement.
Founded in 2022 by Satish Grampurohit and Girish Kerodi, Cogniquest claims to have built a context-aware AI platform that can capture key data points and generate actionable insights from documents and information repositories.
It claims to offer 200X faster document processing and caters to names such as IT giants Infosys and Tech Mahindra so far.
Cogniquest cofounder and chief business officer (CBO) Kerodi told Inc42 that the fresh capital will be deployed to further scale up technology development, expand use cases, and “build a strong team”.
He added that the investment from Cedar-IBSi will help it leverage the VC firm’s expertise to build “deep-domain vertical” solutions catering to finance and banking sectors.
However, Kerodi didn’t disclose the funding amount and the post-money valuation of the startup.
Commenting on the fundraise, Cogniquest cofounder and CEO Grampurohit said, “Securing seed funding from Cedar-IBSi Capital and esteemed angel investors marks a significant milestone in our journey… Fuelled by enthusiastic responses from clients and partners, we are excited about the opportunity to build a globally renowned enterprise tech SaaS platform from India”.
The investment comes within months of Cedar-IBSI marking the first close of its INR 240 Cr fintech fund in March this year by raising capital in the range of INR 50 to 75 Cr. It plans to invest INR 10-15 Cr each in 15 early stage fintech startups in B2B fintech and banktech space
“… We are excited to partner with Cogniquest, which is building a disruptive AI- enabled platform to extract relevant, refined, classified and validated data from complex and unstructured documents. All of this is guided by the able leadership of Satish, Girish and their diverse team,” Cedar-IBSi associate partner Subit Saurav said.
The development comes at a time when AI mania has gripped the Indian startup ecosystem. From customer service to fintech, the emerging technology has found use cases across the board, resulting in renewed investor interest.
Last month, Inc42 reported that GenAI startup Gnani.ai raised $4 Mn as part of a Series A round from Info Edge. Prior to that, IIFL Fintech Fund invested an undisclosed amount of funding to pick up a 10% stake in Gen AI startup Vitra.ai.
Last month, AI sales development platform Pintel.ai also bagged $1 Mn as part of its seed funding round led by IvyCap Ventures.
