5 rising startups in India

Interior decoration? Private jets? Robots that may save the world? It’s been a busy past few days for startups in India. Check out the seven that made our funding list:

CapriCoast

Bangalore-based modular furnishing startup CapriCoast raised US$3.5 million today in a series A round of funding led by Accel Partners India and Singapore-based RB Investments. The startup plans to use the funds to continue with product development and increase sales, marketing, and hiring efforts.

Founded by Jawad Ayaz and Vinod Chandran, CapriCoast previously raised US$1.25 million in a seed round just this April. Accel Partners India also led that round. The startup works with 50 showrooms across 15 cities in India and plans to increase that number to more than 200 showrooms in over 50 cities by early 2016.

“Our online-to-offline marketplace model addresses the problems that customers face today while buying modular furnishing – obfuscated pricing, delayed delivery, limited choice, and lack of transparency,” said Jawad in a statement.

Modular furnishing, or modular design, is a type of design that splits an unfurnished space into smaller parts. Each part is designed separately, ideally resulting in a scalable and reusable space. It can also save money and time. The startup made one of our watch lists in April.

OpenAI

Non-profit artificial intelligence firm OpenAI received a US$1 billion dollar pledge in investment on Saturday from Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka. Amazon Web Services and Silicon Valley firms, including Tesla’s Elon Musk and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, also joined Vishal.

Artificial intelligence has been around for several years but so far it has mostly found use in recreational activities such as video games. Vishal expressed his hope that the service would push AI further ahead, addressing what he called a “lack of fundamental progress in the field.”

OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman, AI expert Ilya Sutskever, and the OpenAI team posted their first blog post on the OpenAI website on Friday. “Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.” They added that human-level AI could greatly benefit human society but also damage it if built or used improperly.

JetSetGo

JetSetGo, a Bangalore-based online marketplace for private helicopters and charter airplanes, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Puneet Dalmia, managing director of Dalmia Bharat.

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