Miko gets Rs 23 cr funding from Stride Ventures, Chiratae Ventures, others

Stride Ventures on Monday said it has led an investment round of Rs 23 crore in Miko, an India-born robotics firm.

All existing investors including Chiratae Ventures, YourNest Venture Capital and a group of angels led by former Nasscom Chairman Keshav Murugesh participated in the round, a statement said.

After the US expansion of Miko, it has now scaled its user base in more than 90 countries, it added.

The company saw over 20 per cent month-on-month growth in engagement during the pandemic surpassing 70 million interactions on its platform and also witnessed an immediate increase in demand as parents are hunting for an alternative to screens for their kids, the statement said.

Founded in 2015, Miko was set up by Sneh R Vaswani, Prashant Iyengar and Chintan Raikar. The company's Miko 2 is a robot that can see, hear, sense, express, talk, recognise faces, remember names, identify moods, initiate a conversation and learn from its own environment to intuitively develop a bond with a child, the statement said.

Miko 2 addresses a complex need-gap of education, technology, entertainment and hence an enabler in effective parenting, it added.

"We are on track to surpass the 100,000 user mark in the coming quarters with Miko 2 hosting hundreds of applications and use cases. It is very encouraging for the entire Miko team to build a global consumer technology brand out of India. In our journey, we are very pleased to partner with Stride Ventures and are looking forward towards a long term relationship," Sneh R Vaswani, co-founder and CEO, Miko said.

Ishpreet Gandhi, Founder and Managing Partner of Stride Ventures said the investment in Miko represents Stride's commitment to enabling frontier technologies that have the potential to disrupt the status quo.