Haptik raises USD 1 million from Kalaara Capital

Mobile consumer help messenger Haptik today said it has received its maiden funding, a USD 1 million infusion, from the venture capital fund, Kalaari Capital.
"The funds will primarily be used for scaling the app across India, building the chat operations centre, and developing new product features," it said in a statement.
Haptik is a mobile phone application that enables users to get help for products and services using messaging as a communication channel.
The company employs an in-house team of experts who have domain knowledge on 180 countries in 12 sectors like telecom, electronics, banking and e-commerce to offer advice to users.

The company statement said the average response team for a query is less than four minutes. Launched in April this year, the team has processed over 5 lakh messages till now.
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Hot trial of BOF at IISCO steel plant commences * Hot trial of the first basic oxygen furnace (BOF) at SAIL's Burnpur-based IISCO Steel Plant (ISP) undergoing a Rs 17,000 crore modernisation and expansion programme, has commenced.
The start up operation of the first BOF at ISP has commenced on September 14 in the presence of SAIL chairman C S Verma, a company press released today said.

Under the expansion programme of ISP, one of the country's oldest steel plants, many major facilities like 7m tall coke oven battery, 2x204 sqm sinter plant, power and blowing station and 0.5 mtpa wire rod mill have already commenced operations on standalone basis.
The SAIL chairman urged the employees to speed up the remaining work for integrated operations besides ramping up production from already operational units to meet the growing steel demand.
The commencement of BOF paved the way for starting up production from the new 4060 m3 blast furnace, next month.
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IFCI pays Rs 92 cr dividend to govt

* State-owned term lender IFCI today paid a dividend of Rs 92.30 crore to government for 2013-14.
This 10 per cent dividend is for the 2013-14, an official statement said.
The dividend cheque was presented by IFCI Managing Director Malay Mukherjee to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
The Government of India is holding a majority stake of 55.53 per cent equity shareholding in IFCI Ltd, it said.