Kerala Angel Network an initiative of TiE Kerala has announce investment in 2 South of India based startups – talent-hiring venture, ZappyHire and Chennai-based digital home-cooking firm Cookd, have raised funding from the Kerala Angel Network (KAN), an initiative of TiE Kerala.
The Kochi-based Zappyhire, founded in 2018, is an intelligent recruitment platform that helps enterprises screen, engage, and hire the best talent faster, using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Founded in 2020, the digital-first cooking brand Cookd focuses on making cooking at home easy, efficient, and fun.
Further to the funding, TiE Kerala has also nominated Zappyhire to present as a ‘TiEtan’ at the TiE Global Summit (TGS) in Dubai on the 15th and 16th of December. TGS offers a great networking opportunity for startups for next-level fundraising as well as market access.
KAN is an initiative of TiE Kerala. KAN is a group of angel investors from Kerala, who share a passion for nurturing and investing in startups and early-stage businesses, which have the potential to scale and create exponential value. We focus on providing entrepreneurs with capital, mentoring and market access.
Cookd has raised Rs 4.40 crore, from KAN, Konglo Ventures, and their existing investors, meanwhile, Zappyhire has raised Rs 3.71 crore from KAN, Hedge Finance and other angel investors, KAN said in a release.
Ajit A Moopan, the lead investor and president of Kerala Angel Network said, India does not have many brands that go beyond posting recipes online to increase their following.
Kerala Angel Network says both the new south based startups show a lot of promise
“Cookd shows a lot of promise in terms of integrating content, technology, and e-commerce to build an end-to-end solution,” Moopan said.
Aathitiyan, Founder and CEO of Cookd, said the company aims to build one of the largest home-cooking brands, based on insights gathered from the fast-growing community of home cooks.
“Our new range of Cookd products will help our users have their favourite dishes faster and more accurately,” Aathitiyan said.
Meanwhile, the Zappyhire platform auto pre-screen and rank the candidates from a large application pool using semantic resume parser and AI-enabled video interview.
“The platform helps eliminate the human effort on scheduling/ rescheduling interviews and post-offer-engagement to reduce the offer-drop-out ratio using conversation AI. It also acts as ‘SIRI-for-recruiter’ by suggesting the right recommendations for recruitment activities based on the historical data of the organization,” the release said.
Zappyhire has recently been associated with many government-sponsored digital hiring initiatives. The co-founders of Zappyhire, Jyothis KS and Deepu Xavier, said the investment will boost their plan to grow as a global leader in automated recruitment.
“We are super excited to close the investment round and look forward to working with marquee investors and exploring all possible synergies. We are on a mission to revolutionize talent acquisition for business through our SaaS platform,” they said.
