Former Snapdeal CPO Invests In Buttercups Intimates And Education Technology Firm Makkajai

Snapdeal’s former chief product officer and angel investor, Anand Chandrasekaran, has invested in two startups — omnichannel lingerie retailer Buttercups Intimates and education technology firm Makkajai. Some other prominent investors, too, have participated in these funding rounds by the two companies.

With these investments, Chandrasekaran has expanded his startup portfolio to 19. “I am still scouting for deals in spaces like SaaS (software-as-aservice), artificial intelligence, gamified learning and fintech,” he said.

Chandrasekaran, who typically invests around $25,000 (Rs 16.7 lakh) in a startup, in June disclosed investment in six startups — Truce, MagicX, Lucideus, Loan-Circle, Lernr and Rupeek.

As per Makkajai, the startup has raised $200,000 in its seed round where prominent investors, besides Chandrasekaran, included Mekin Maheshwari, former chief people officer at Flipkart; Ananth Narayanan, the CEO of Myntra and fund-raising platform Lets-Venture.

While Buttercups didn’t disclose the amount raised, existing investors Kanwaljit Singh and Manoj Varghese have put in more money in the latest round.

Makkajai is building an adaptivelearning platform comprising deeply engaging educational games and learning analytics. Its Monster Math suite of games, which teaches arithmetic to kids in grades 1 to 5, has achieved 1.5 million downloads with 100,000 monthly users. “The startup has recruited some of the best gaming simulation and character folks who are raising the bar on the quality of games,” said Chandrasekaran.

“Our core team of eight consists of star artists who design game simulators for the US Air Force and prominent global edtech evangelists,” said Abhishek Awadhani, cofounder of Makkajai who claims that Monster Math is currently being used across 300 schools across the world, primarily in the US. “We have recently launched on Android and are planning a big India and US market push in the coming months to deliver many more adaptive games for children,” Awadhani said.

Buttercups, founded in 2013 by Arpita Ganesh, had earlier raised $1 million from Kanwaljit Singh, Angie Mahtaney, Sridhar Viswanathan and Manoj Varghese.