Enterprise

Apple alum’s finance operations startup raises funds to expand globally

Comment

Business analysis stock graph backtest in crisis covid-19 for investment in stockmarket and finance business planning selective stock for Stockmarket crash and Financial crisis
Image Credits: TERADAT SANTIVIVUT / Getty Images

Bluecopa, an Indian startup building a finance operations automation platform for high-volume companies, has raised $2.3 million to expand its offering in the global market.

The seed funding round was led by Mumbai-headquartered Blume Ventures, with participation from Titan Capital, T-Fund, Speciale Invest, Bharat Founders Fund, T2D3, Amplify and Force Ventures.

It was also joined by Chargebee founders Krish Subramanian and Rajaraman Santhanam, Rohit Chennamaneni of HR management platform Darwinbox and Asad Khan and Jay Singh of cross-browser testing tool LambdaTest.

“Just to take an analogy, say Salesforce for sales, Marketo for marketing, GitHub for developers, there is a large whitespace in the finance space,” said Nilotpal Chanda, co-founder and chief business officer of Bluecopa, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Bluecopa was founded in 2021 by Chanda and his fellow entrepreneurial teammates Raghavendra Reddy and Satya Prakash Buddhavarapu. The trio previously worked together at tax management platform Optotax, which was acquired by neobanking platform Open in February last year. Tuplejump, another startup Buddhavarapu founded, was acquired by Apple in 2016.

Bluecopa
Bluecopa co-founders Raghavendra Reddy, Satya Prakash Buddhavarapu and Nilotpal Chanda (from left to right). Image Credits: Bluecopa

Unlike a traditional platform that requires specific expertise to operate, Bluecopa’s offering is touted to work with no special knowledge requirements. It also claims to work with all the existing SaaS tools as well as Excel, Google Sheets and all other platforms that finance teams use.

“It’s a layer that connects to all these tools in the organization, fetches data, cleans, consolidates, normalizes and then provides all that information in a very human consumable format,” Chanda explained.

The tool offers an Excel-like interface that finance experts can easily use to understand their companies’ accounts, he said. “Fundamentally, the tools available today are not very user-friendly. It also takes a lot of time to implement them,” he said.

Anaplan and Google Ventures-backed Vareto are amongst some of the competitors of Bluecopa. However, Chanda told TechCrunch that the gestation period with his platform is much smaller as it takes just four to six weeks to get it deployed at an organization. The solution also claims to have a cost advantage over other similar platforms available in the market.

“If you look at build versus buy proportion, the TCO [total cost of ownership] is much, much lower — almost 85 to 90% cost savings,” Chanda stated.

Bluecopa is targeting its platform at high-transaction, high-volume businesses, including e-commerce companies. “We are already speaking to very large, key logos in the region,” Chanda said, adding, “we are also onboarding a lot of early adopters in the U.S. and North American markets.”

The Hyderabad-based startup refrained from revealing any of its clients.

“We are at an implementation stage,” the executive said. “It’s deployed for a smaller sub-department in a large e-commerce company. Unless and until we go live full bang, we — both parties — are not very comfortable in disclosing,” he said.

Anirvan Chowdhury, vice president at Blume Ventures, told TechCrunch that Apple’s acquisition of Buddhavarapu’s startup played an essential role in the venture fund’s investment decision in Bluecopa.

“The GTM and business model was the biggest factor,” Chowdhury said. “But the fact that someone has built a product, which was Tuplejump that Satya built, was essentially a product that could have competed with Snowflake. And the top software company in the world has seen enough value that this is the product I want to acquire… that’s a huge validation.”

Details on valuation were not announced, though Chowdhury told TechCrunch that it is “upwards of $10 million.”

“This is a hair-on-fire problem, particularly in high transaction volume industries such as e-commerce, logistics, financial services etc. Solving these aspects can increase sales by 20% and profitability by 30%,” said Buddhavarapu, in a prepared statement.

The startup has a team of 17 people. With the new investment, it is planning to hire additional talent and grow its consumer base — alongside enhancing the platform.

More TechCrunch

Zen Educate, an online marketplace that connects schools with teachers, has raised $37 million in a Series B round of funding. The raise comes amid a growing teacher shortage crisis…

Zen Educate raises $37M and acquires Aquinas Education as it tries to address the teacher shortage

“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.”

Scarlett Johansson says that OpenAI approached her to use her voice

A new self-driving truck — manufactured by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle tech developed by Aurora Innovation — could be on public highways as early as this summer.  The…

Aurora and Volvo unveil self-driving truck designed for a driverless future

The European venture capital firm raised its fourth fund as fund as climate tech “comes of age.”

ETF Partners raises €284M for climate startups that will be effective quickly — not 20 years down the road

Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system, launches Copilot+ PCs

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. For those who haven’t heard, the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has been pushed back yet again to no earlier than…

TechCrunch Space: Star(side)liner

When I attended Automate in Chicago a few weeks back, multiple people thanked me for TechCrunch’s semi-regular robotics job report. It’s always edifying to get that feedback in person. While…

These 81 robotics companies are hiring

The top vehicle safety regulator in the U.S. has launched a formal probe into an April crash involving the all-electric VinFast VF8 SUV that claimed the lives of a family…

VinFast crash that killed family of four now under federal investigation

When putting a video portal in a public park in the middle of New York City, some inappropriate behavior will likely occur. The Portal, the vision of Lithuanian artist and…

NYC-Dublin real-time video portal reopens with some fixes to prevent inappropriate behavior

Longtime New York-based seed investor, Contour Venture Partners, is making progress on its latest flagship fund after lowering its target. The firm closed on $42 million, raised from 64 backers,…

Contour Venture Partners, an early investor in Datadog and Movable Ink, lowers the target for its fifth fund

Meta’s Oversight Board has now extended its scope to include the company’s newest platform, Instagram Threads, and has begun hearing cases from Threads.

Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case

The company says it’s refocusing and prioritizing fewer initiatives that will have the biggest impact on customers and add value to the business.

SeekOut, a recruiting startup last valued at $1.2 billion, lays off 30% of its workforce

The U.K.’s self-proclaimed “world-leading” regulations for self-driving cars are now official, after the Automated Vehicles (AV) Act received royal assent — the final rubber stamp any legislation must go through…

UK’s autonomous vehicle legislation becomes law, paving the way for first driverless cars by 2026

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

SoLo Funds CEO Travis Holoway: “Regulators seem driven by press releases when they should be motivated by true consumer protection and empowering equitable solutions.”

Fintech lender SoLo Funds is being sued again by the government over its lending practices

Hard tech startups generate a lot of buzz, but there’s a growing cohort of companies building digital tools squarely focused on making hard tech development faster, more efficient and —…

Rollup wants to be the hardware engineer’s workhorse

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is not just about groundbreaking innovations, insightful panels, and visionary speakers — it’s also about listening to YOU, the audience, and what you feel is top of…

Disrupt Audience Choice vote closes Friday

Google says the new SDK would help Google expand on its core mission of connecting the right audience to the right content at the right time.

Google is launching a new Android feature to drive users back into their installed apps

Jolla has taken the official wraps off the first version of its personal server-based AI assistant in the making. The reborn startup is building a privacy-focused AI device — aka…

Jolla debuts privacy-focused AI hardware

The ChatGPT mobile app’s net revenue first jumped 22% on the day of the GPT-4o launch and continued to grow in the following days.

ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw its biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch

Dating app maker Bumble has acquired Geneva, an online platform built around forming real-world groups and clubs. The company said that the deal is designed to help it expand its…

Bumble buys community building app Geneva to expand further into friendships

CyberArk — one of the army of larger security companies founded out of Israel — is acquiring Venafi, a specialist in machine identity, for $1.54 billion. 

CyberArk snaps up Venafi for $1.54B to ramp up in machine-to-machine security

Founder-market fit is one of the most crucial factors in a startup’s success, and operators (someone involved in the day-to-day operations of a startup) turned founders have an almost unfair advantage…

OpenseedVC, which backs operators in Africa and Europe starting their companies, reaches first close of $10M fund

A Singapore High Court has effectively approved Pine Labs’ request to shift its operations to India.

Pine Labs gets Singapore court approval to shift base to India

The AI Safety Institute, a U.K. body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, has said it will open a second location in San Francisco. 

UK opens office in San Francisco to tackle AI risk

Companies are always looking for an edge, and searching for ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do that is by running an internal hackathon around a…

Why companies are turning to internal hackathons

Featured Article

I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Women in tech still face a shocking level of mistreatment at work. Melinda French Gates is one of the few working to change that.

2 days ago
I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s  broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Blue Origin has successfully completed its NS-25 mission, resuming crewed flights for the first time in nearly two years. The mission brought six tourist crew members to the edge of…

Blue Origin successfully launches its first crewed mission since 2022

Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top entertainment and sports talent agencies, is hoping to be at the forefront of AI protection services for celebrities in Hollywood. With many…

Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’