Upliance.ai raises $4 Mn led by Khosla Ventures

Home appliance firm Upliance.ai has raised Rs 34 crore (approximately $4 million) in its seed round at a valuation of Rs 143 crore ($17 million). The round is led by Khosla Ventures, which has invested in multiple AI-focused startups like OpenAI, Rabbit and Sarvam.

With this round, upliance.ai plans to grow its revenue to Rs 150 crore in 2024 and to scale production to 20,000 units per annum in the next 6 months.

Founded by Mahek Mody and Mohit Sharma, upliance.ai builds home appliances that integrate both machine learning and artificial intelligence to level up Indian homes. 

The brand’s  flagship device, upliance, an AI cooking assistant uses a proprietary model, Up AI, to comprehend the nuances of food, cooking and kitchen tasks and execute them autonomously. Upliance was launched in January 2023 and is available across nearly 1,000 homes in India.

Last year, the startup closed its pre-seed round of Rs 11 crore from Draper Associates, Rukam Capital, Rainmatter (a Zerodha Fund), and angel investors including the co-founders of Ather Energy and Unacademy. 

VC firm Khosla Ventures’ portfolio includes Doordash, Block, Instacart, Gitlab and Stripe. Khosla Ventures was the first venture fund investor in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. With over $15 billion of assets under management, the fund invests across a range of sectors including AI, sustainability, enterprise, consumer, health and frontier technologies.