NowFloats raises $10 million to accelerate Digital Desh Drive initiatives

NEW DELHI: NowFloats, a discovery platform which helps businesses get online and find more customers using an auto-SEO technology, has closed a Series B funding of $10 million via Iron Pillar and IIFL (Seed Ventures Fund I & Cash Opportunities Fund), along with Blume Ventures & Omidyar Network, who had invested in Series A.

The company plans to invest this capital primarily on Customer Support & Engagement and on increasing the value proposition of the technology provided to SMEs.

NowFloats will invest the capital to further improve the new technology stack that drives customer support, it would now be a hybrid of automated and human interaction support system. Also, NowFloats plans to enable the larger enterprises to leverage automated SEO on top of their existing websites.

With respect to SMEs, NowFloats aims to go beyond discovery by simplifying online and offline transactions. The company plans to continue to invest in Digital Desh Drive which has been in instrumental in understanding the market, especially the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India.

Commenting on the announcement, Neeraj Sabharwal, co-Founder, NowFloats said, “At NowFloats, we have always believed that an SME needs to talk about their business regularly (talk about product features, new offers/events, reviews, etc.) to attract more customers online. Our product is geared towards making it as simple as possible for business owners to interact and add updates to their online identity. This is what primarily fuels the automated SEO engine of NowFloats. We started with simple SMS as the tool to manage website, and today 95% of our merchants prefer using Boost (a smartphone app) to manage their online business. We at NowFloats want to re-define the market for business websites, where the business owners only have to worry about the content on the website, and the technology takes care of other aspects like design, performance, discovery, marketing, enabling transactions (payment gateway) and customer/lead management, etc. We are investing in creating a product that would be one day used by all the SMEs across the globe, and built out of India.”

NowFloats believes that the USP of the company lies in its frictionless mobile technology that can connect online consumers to local offline businesses. Every three months, NowFloats travels across India to uncover new tech behaviors and smartphone adoption, via its Digital Desh initiative.