📺 Stream EntrepreneurTV for Free 📺

Lio Raises $5 Mn Funding Led By Lightspeed India And Sequoia Capital India The company plans to use the investment primarily to expand the engineering team and increase the number of users of the mobile app

By Prabhjeet Bhatla

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

Unsplash

Lio, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that helps its users organize their business and personal data on mobiles, announced that it has raised $5 million in Seed funding. The investment was led by Sequoia Capital India and Lightspeed India.

The company plans to use the investment primarily to expand the engineering team and increase the number of users of the mobile app.

Lio helps its users organize their data efficiently on their mobile phones. The problem the company is addressing is the lack of high-quality data creation and sharing software built for the mobile-first user. Given that in India alone over 100 million users have come online on the mobile as their first internet device over the past year, globally, there is a large gap for mobile-first data creation and management software. The company has built the product in stealth mode and has now announced the fundraise after seeing strong growth and adoption over the past 6 months.

In July 2021, the app also launched in Indonesia and has seen strong adoption. Currently, the application is available in 10 Indian languages and Bahasa Indonesia, with approximately 45 per cent usage in vernacular languages.

"The investment by Lightspeed India and Sequoia Capital India helps accelerate Lio's vision of enabling small businesses to be smarter by leveraging their business data for better decision making. We aim to achieve this by helping people organize their data using a simple yet powerful mobile app that they can customize to their needs," said Anupam Vijayvergia, co-founder and chief executive officer, Lio.

Lio users can organize their information across 60 data templates which are organized by professional and interest-based communities. These templates are available in communities that are organized by professional affiliation (such as taxi, shopkeepers, restaurant owners, insurance agents, realty brokers, etc.) and by personal interest groups (such as fitness, travel, apartment, etc).

"With this investment, we aim to scale up the engineering and product team at Lio. We are proud to be a first-of-a-kind platform that enables mobile-first users to be a smarter version of themselves leveraging the data templates created by other users in their community, which makes Lio progressively better for every successive user," shared Anurag Vijayvergia, co-founder and chief procurement officer, Lio.

"The global pandemic drove a step-function jump in digital transactions for mobile-first small businesses and prosumers. As a result, the need for an easy-to-use mobile-centric platform that enables collection, analysis, and sharing of data is more acute than ever," added Dev Khare, partner, Lightspeed. "We are proud to partner with Anupam and Anurag to scale-out Lio globally"

Lio had raised an Angel round from names in the industry including AakritVaish, Anupam Mittal, Ashish Hemrajani, Gaurav Munjal, Haresh Chawla, Kunal Bahl, Kunal Shah, Maninder Gulati, MitenSampat, Prakshit Dar, Rohit Bansal, Roman Saini, Sachin Bhatia, Siddharth Rao in March 2021.

Prabhjeet Bhatla

Former Staff

Thought Leaders

It's the End of the Entrepreneurial Era As We Know It

With the rise of advanced technologies and AI, are we losing all sense of the independent business person and entrepreneur?

Green Entrepreneur®

A Deer Invasion in Hawaii Has Turned Into an Environmental Crisis—And a Sustainable Business Opportunity

How Maui Nui Venison built a for-profit harvesting business that protects the land and helps the local community.

Business News

Spotify Removes a Key Feature From Its Free Music Listening Tier

The change is unofficial, so far, but social media users on Reddit and X have noticed a cap on using the lyrics feature.

Science & Technology

Exploring How Virtual Reality is Changing Startups

Virtual reality's immersive environment is where startup marketing is headed, and early adopters will be the ones who profit.

Growing a Business

'Marketing Happy Hour' Podcast Hosts Share the Best Way to Connect With Consumers: 'Think of Social Media Like a First Date'

Brand marketing experts and hosts of the Marketing Happy Hour podcast share tips on how to launch, grow, and make the most out of your small business's online presence.