RentOnGo, an online rental marketplace, has raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Rajesh Sawhney; Anand Chandrasekaran, CPO, Snapdeal; Shiva Pare, Head, Trendin; Kalpana Tatarvati, Partner, Interweave Consulting; and among few others.

“The funding is crucial for our platform when we have pivoted to fulfillment model in some of the categories and are all set to take the business model to other parts of the country as well,” says Vikash Jalan, Co-Founder, RentOnGo.

With the investment raised in the round, RentOnGo plans to go deeper into the bike category garnering more supply, expanding into more cities, and providing more value-added services to customers.

He adds that the product fulfilment for bikes has been introduced in Bengaluru, Pune, and Hyderabad. With this funding, he will introduce the model in other cities as well. It is quite challenging to find the right bike at the right price for required dates. RentOnGo’s app solves this by showing real-time availability of bikes, allowing instant booking and doorstep delivery (available in Bengaluru as of now).

RentOnGo, a Bengaluru-based startup, which started as a horizontal marketplace in lead-gen model in 2013, pivoted earlier this year to a fulfilment model with an app for rental of bikes (motorbikes, scooters, and bicycles).

When asked about the angel funding, which came after two long years, Vikash said that he didn’t pursue the funding aggressively in the beginning as he wanted to understand the market of shared economy in the country. “By 2015, we had a good traction on our platform with around 40,000 visitors per month.”

Co-Founders Nikhil Chhabra and Vikas strongly feel that shared economy is the next big revolution. Thus, renting stuff in India makes perfect sense with a large aspirational population who cannot or do not want to spend on buying everything. RentOnGo was part of GSF’s m-accelerator of 2015 batch.

In renting segment particularly, IRentShare, GrabOnRent, and Rentomojo, among others, are some of the platforms which rent out products in various categories – from furniture to electronics and appliances to many other products.

YourStory take

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the global sharing economy to be worth USD 15 billion today, a figure that is projected to hit USD 335 billion by 2025.

The concept of sharing economy is gradually catching up in the country. The collaborative consumption has been largely observed in the transportation segment. With Uber, Ola, and BlaBlaCar entering the market, the idea of sharing economy has become popular.

However, experts have varied opinion on sharing economy. With Uber and Ola reduced to taxi aggregator platforms, the idea of sharing economy seems to be defeated in the country. Airbnb, an online platform that lets individuals rent out their spare rooms to travellers, has prompted a substantial amount of listings from boutique hotels posing as private accommodations.

These developments surely give a dent to the idea of sharing economy. Nevertheless, some believe that the sharing is in the culture of the country and such sharing platforms will survive.

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It all started with a call at midnight. Sony Music South was being alerted that a movie track had been leaked. It was too late to prevent the leak, so the movie producers and Sony Music needed a new viral strategy. Jack in the Box Wordwide, the agency in charge of the strategy, decided to create an ‘official version’ of the song and released it in 24 hours.

The agency called in the complete might of their digital team and the film’s primary crew and their release of Kolaveri Di became an overnight sensation. In 45 days, it became one of the world’s most downloaded and viewed tracks for 2011.

Jack in the Box, the social media arm of The 120 media Collective, was only three months old at the time. “We did a few things smartly to take it to a particular point, but then, the rest was out of our control. If I look back, it would be impossible to do this today; we spent no money and the organic reach of Facebook was close to 20 per cent,” says Roopak Saluja, 40, Founder and CEO of The 120 media Collective.

Coming a whole circle

Today a full-fledged integrated marketing agency with a focus on the digital space, The 120 Media Collective has witnessed several pivots, changes and ups and downs in its journey. For Roopak, the son of a diplomat, the idea of building an agency or entering the space of advertising may have seemed an unusual career choice, given his limited exposure to the field when growing up.

A DJ, and an international citizen in his own right, Roopak completed his MBA at INSEAD before starting his career with advertising agencies like Young & Rubicam, Budapest and Ogilvy & Mather, Paris. Before long, he realised that he needed to do something of his own.

“2004 was a big year. India had started receiving a lot of global attention. As an Indian who had lived outside the country for most of my life, I suddenly became conscious that India was being referred to in the same breath as China,” adds Roopak.

However, it was Mumbai that really redefined Roopak’s ideas about urban India. The energy in the city was bustling and he found a particular charm in the chaos. He knew he had to return to Mumbai and begin something. In 2006, he founded Bang Bang Films, a commercial production company, with three others; his co-founders have since moved on to other ventures.

Breaking the barriers

Roopak, who noticed that advertising and production worked in a very closed circuit in the country, says that founding Bang Bang Films was the perfect Segway into media and entertainment for someone like him who had an advertising background.

The market was and still is dominated by director-centric production companies, which meant that the filmmaker was not just the filmmaker but a de-facto production guy who made business decisions. Roopak says that although there was no dearth of creativity, there was no transparency.

Citing an example, he says that if someone asked for a quote from a production company, they got a consolidated number like Rs 72, 00,000; there was no break up or justification. What was even more surprising, he adds, was that agencies would accept this as the norm.

 Creating different wings

Roopak decided to do things differently. “We started providing enormous amounts of details that nobody else was providing; clients began lapping this up. We operated with a heightened level of professionalism and brought in international talent. This was by default as we did not know any good Indian directors who would sign up with us,” he says.

In four years, Bang Bang Films became one of the largest production houses in the country. But first, they had to build credibility as an agency. Their first breakthrough was the Nokia ad they did with Priyanka Chopra in late 2009 and early 2010. Soon, clients they had been chasing were approaching them. “It was not easy. We were outsiders, but once we built credibility, it couldn’t be taken away,” adds Roopak.

Not content with focussing on only one aspect of production, Roopak decided to ride the digital wave that was beginning in 2008, and diversify into the content space. “We realised that for optimal results in digital media, we needed to have strategy, creation, and production under one roof. We had to evolve from just an execution-based company to a thinking and doing company,” he says.

The team also realised that it wasn’t enough to just create the content, they needed to be focussed on disseminating and distributing it and creating engagement. Their first integrated marketing campaign was for Puma. Soon, other clients came on board and then the Kolaveri video happened.

 Chaffing off the unnecessary

However, the team realised that even this wasn’t proving a lucrative enough business model. Roopak says that they were being bled financially. “We weren’t a bunch of 20-year -olds running the show. The company was larger with overheads and cost structures, “he says. The team realised that retainers of Rs one or two lakh didn’t work.

They decided to add media buying capabilities for the digital space, in addition to tech development to ensure that they could build strong digital brands with the aid of technology. Roopak says that today Jack in the Box is one of the leading integrated digital agencies in the country. The team claims they now make a revenue of 60 crores every year.

An unusual decision they made was downsizing their client base to seven from 27. The reason was to ensure that those who remained understood the relevance of digital media and were willing to partner with them in the long run. He says that there are many companies in the digital space whose roots are in social media that evolve into digital agencies.

“However, there is a gap in understanding. There needs to be a strong understanding of brands and their offerings as well,” says Roopak. He adds that building an integrated digital media space means understanding the core dynamics of the business and evolving content marketing plans.

Adding verticals and more stars to the badge

By 2013, the team had realised that content was their key differentiator. However, they wanted to be considered a credible content player and not fall into the agency trap by restricting themselves to brands.

They began co-producing Tara Sharma Saluja’s show, and started building content teams that generated non-brand focussed stories. Today, Roopak’s company has multiple verticals that function under the parent company – The 120 Media Collective that focusses on content for television, print, online and mobile for brands or their own IP.

These include Bang Bang Films, which is into production, Jack-in-the Box that focusses on integrated marketing and Sniper and Sooperfly that were created in 2015. The 120 Media Collective got in an external investment from Calista Capital. This helped expand and building processes in place

Killing to make way for the new

Roopak says, “Today, Bang Bang Films has grown into a premium production brand, which unfortunately can be viewed as expensive and also sometimes inflexible. As brands start to produce 100s of video content other than TV commercials, there has to be a different production approach. I felt that Bang Bang would soon lose its value. This gave birth to Sniper.”

They fused the big budget TV commercials and the smaller budget video content to make something lean, agile and amplified. It meant making something across platforms, which was lean and could be amplified beyond the regular paid media channels.

“We haven’t killed Bang Bang; it’s become a brand for international production services shooting in India,” says Roopak. With Sniper, the team talks to the brands directly and opens the horizon for the team.

In 2015, they created another brand Sooperfly to help cope with the exolving scope of distribution. It works as a multi-channel network, which works with people and creators to manage their content on digital video platforms. Since April, the team managed 75 channels, which they hope to expand to 200 by the end of March 2016.

Roopak and his team also work for brands and publishers to build audiences for them on digital video platforms. “We are also creating original content. We view this as building content brands, thereby creating and building audiences. In nine years, we have managed to create engagement through content, without disrupting it. Now, instead of distributing on third-party platforms, we will be distributing our own content on our own platforms,” says Roopak.

Brands today directly approach content creators like the AIBs of the world to create content and help engage with their audiences. Roopak believes that Sooperfly is working towards that model. But digital media is not growing at the expense of the traditional forms of media, it is about what audiences you’re choosing to speak to. The team claims they now make a revenue of 60 crores every year.

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With the foodtech industry already being saturated with novel concepts, it is easy to assume there isn’t room for more innovation.  FoodbyMood,a food discovery app, aims to change that by letting usersfind the dish they are in the mood for. It’s a dish/food recommendation service that tells them which delicious dishes to order in a particular restaurant.

Based in Nagpur, FoodbyMood is a startup with a location-aware application and website that doesn’t offer the usual restaurant-based reviews, but gives suggestions of must-try dishes with dish reviews.  So, instead of ‘restaurants near you’, the app and website informs users of ‘dishes near you’. This solves the problem of selection of the right dishes in any given restaurant or hotel. But why would users need dish reviews instead of restaurant reviews?

Sangharakshak Neel, Co-founder, FoodMood, explains, “Despite going to a recommended restaurant, most people don’t know what’s best in that place. A restaurant may be good but if you ended up ordering a dish it is not best at, you will regret it.”

Back in 2013, IIT Bombay-alumnus Sangharakshak (27) felt his inner calling of entrepreneurship reigniting after he had completed one year at his job at Imagination Technologies. At that time, he also had an IIM admission call in his hand. He decided to seek the advice of his brother Dhammachintak—another IIT Bombay alumnus and IIM Ahmedabad graduate —who was then heading the product management team of CommonFloor Groups in Bengaluru. He reflected Sangharakshak’s interest in starting up.

Dhammachintak says, “We went to a widely recommended seafood joint in Bengaluru and, as fate had it, ordered two really terrible dishes. We realised that if you could go so wrong at Bengaluru’s best seafood joint, you could go wrong everywhere else. And FoodbyMood was born.”

The two brothers decided to launch FoodbyMood from their hometown Nagpur. They shared the idea with two of their close friends Dheeraj Maurya and Meenal Hatmode,both B.Tech graduates from Nagpur’s Pallotti and Priyadarshini College, respectively. The four founders launched FoodbyMood on World Food Day (October 16)in 2014, and launched the Android app a year later.

“In a year, we received over 3,000 genuine reviews with over 2,000 photos from more than 500 foodies. We have close to 700 restaurants and street-food joints from Nagpur.  Within two months of our app launch on the Google Play store, we received close to 400 downloads with great reviews,” says Dheeraj.

What makes FoodbyMood disruptive?

“Current solutions like Zomato, Burrp, Food Panda etc., are popular restaurant discovery/delivery products but do not address the problem. People eat food, not restaurants. So they should be rating dishes and not restaurants. Dish reviews is our core,” says Meenal.

FoodbyMood thus encourages actual foodies to write authentic reviews. “We focus on the foodies first to ensure that FoodbyMood is fun for them to review. We have a ‘Foodie of the Week’ award on our Facebook page. They earn ‘Brownie Bites’ points by rating, reviewing, and adding photos of the dishes they love,” adds Dheeraj.

“For users, we realised that the location-aware mobile app would empower them, something that none of the hyperlocal players can boast of. We made an intuitive Android app with sleek user experience. It’s state-of-the-art technology that can handle all complexities of menus idiosyncrasies and dish names with a super-fast data addition capability for extreme scalability,” adds Sangharakshak.

While foodies love the ‘foodie levels’ and free treats they receive every week, restaurants get marketing while the best dishes of the city become famous.

Food app and revenues

FoodbyMood founders currently are focussing on making their product robust. Their revenue models have several levels: as a hyper-local, targeted marketing platform for restaurant owners and food event organisers or as an ordering partner for food delivery apps like FoodPanda or as a data enhancement service for restaurant recommendation players like Zomato or location players like Google Maps.

“The Indian food services market is huge as it would touch about $70 billion in the next three years. Restaurant recommendation services are targeting only five per cent of it, namely the licensed units. The eating-out culture in India is slowly catching up. Globally, this market would be 50-60 times more at close to $4 trillion,” adds Dhammachintak.

After a successful one year at Nagpur, FoodbyMood is in the process of coming to Pune, Mumbai, and Bengaluru by March.

“We have learnt that for a great user experience, visual experiences and critical mass of data matter. We didn’t want to be another food delivery app, given the food tech wave last year. We stuck to creating value for our users.  We have been proven right by the market,” says Sangharakshak.

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An expert in the domains of talent acquisition, executive search, and recruiting, Arpit Prakash Mathur eventually developed a desire to start an end-to-end HR services company. His dream turned into reality when he started Talific Consulting in June 2014.

The startup offers customised solutions to the clients on the basis of short-term and long-term assignments to address their recruitment, payroll, training, and outsourcing needs. FMCG/retail, automobile, manufacturing or building material, infrastructure/power, and FMCD are some of the target sectors of Talific.

Arpit says,

With an in-house team of around 50 employees and 3,000 off-roll employees across India, Talific is all set to make recruitment more efficient and feasible. We have a network of around 500 recruiters who are experienced, capable, and well equipped in the recruitment and post-recruitment activities.

Arpit, 32 years old, has seven years of experience in handling P&L roles in various organisations. Prior to starting Talific, he worked in reputed enterprises like Outreach, Adecco, Ikya, and Spectrum. He gained the experience that helped him became an expert in strategic management, key account management, and sales and operations.

Services offered

Talific offers services such as temporary staffing, permanent staffing, and executive search. The startup also specialises in recruiting executive personnel for client companies ranging from large to medium-sized businesses, family-owned companies, non-profit organisations, and startups.

Temporary staffing: Temporary staffing fulfills the short-term needs of clients where candidates are outsourced on a vendor payroll. Once Talifi receives a recruitment request, it sends a standard contract containing the job description to the client and gets it finalised.. For bulk hiring, an initial screening is done following which the candidate is send directly to the client. Once the candidate gets selected, Talific will receive a confirmation mail with a replacement support as per the contract term. Talific takes care of the onboarding process, which includes offer letter, documentation, bank accounting, and joining. At the end of every month, they get an attendance number from the client and based on that they share the invoice (including service fee to manage the payroll) with the client.

Permanent staffing: The candidates are hired as full-time employees. The process up to job description and other relevant information is similar to temporary staffing.

Arpit avers,

The current market scenario is extremely competitive on the pricing front. However, on the services front there are very few players in the market who are able to achieve 75–80 per cent on service levels. According to statistics, in temporary staffing only 20–25 per cent of market is been explored till now.

Talific has more than 100 clients from diversified industry. Although startup these days are making headlines with mass firing, Talific ensures that the workers who are laid off get jobs in other organisation (the existing clients of Talific).

Spreading wings

 In August 2014, Talific expanded its operation in California, US, considering the growth potential of the market. The startup has raised an angel fund of $1,50,000 from a US-based angel investor. Arpit says that 25 employees have been hired to look after the business operation in California.

Talific has its presence in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Nagpur. The startup claims to offer customised HR solutions based on user requirements by providing value-added services like mobile application to monitor or track attendance, one-stop grievance resolution system, and active participation in the infrastructural support to the clients.

As a part of growth and expansion plans, Talific wants to embark on training and development model to impart corporate trainings on soft skills and technical skills, payroll outsourcing model, which means taking care of entire payroll process of corporate, and managed services model to offer a mobile software which can help clients analyse the prospective customer data base and evaluate sales report.

In terms of revenue, Noida-based Talific has been growing at a rate of 8–10 per cent, and in the entire recruiting process it gains an average margin of 12 per cent. In the next two to three years, the startup is likely to spread wings in Singapore and Dubai. However, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Pune, Bihar, and Chhattisgarh will be the target for Indian market.

YourStory take

Hiring today is not only about sourcing, interviewing candidates, and getting the vacancy filled; it is about making the right match of the required job role to a candidate’s capability and vice versa. Organisations look for a quality talent pool for their open positions. The surge in technology adaptability has expanded employers’ reach to tier two and tier three cities to meet their hiring needs.

A slew of startups in the last few years have dramatically changed the business intelligence in the domain of recruitment by leveraging social media, digital media, data analytics, and big data. Hireee.com, GrownOut, HackerEarth, myrefers, Talview, Belong.co, and Venturesity are some of them.

Tarun Davda, Director of Matrix Partners, who has invested in GrownOut and Belong.co, says, “India’s search and recruitment market is USD 1 billion and it is growing at 20 per cent CAGR. The key opportunities in online hiring are sourcing and matching of high quality, passive candidates to companies.”

Speaking on the same, Venkatesh Peddi, VP of IDG Ventures, who has invested in Hiree.com, adds, “Online hiring space in India has not seen much innovation or disruption in the last eight to 10 years. But in the last couple of years, the industry has witnessed the entry of several startups which are working on different aspects of recruitment function, to bring in more efficiencies using technology and disruptive ideas. We estimate that the overall spend on technology around recruitment in India should be about $1–1.5 billion in annual revenues and is expected to grow to $4–5 billion by 2020.”

Whether it is students studying away from home or techies working at software hubs, anyone who goes without ghar ka khaana for too long invariably starts missing it. Looking at the problem most of the people staying away from home face, friends Aayush Anand, Pankaj Bhatla and Vishrut Gawri founded EasyKhaana in Delhi and Gurgaon.

It started with the concept of providing easily available, homely food to all. “We came up with the idea of serving homely food after seeing the unorganised sector of dabbawalas and corporate canteens. The market is huge but fragmented. We want to organise the market for ghar ka khaana,” says 22-year-old Aayush.

Beginning full stack

Starting in September this year from a one-room office, the trio built the idea and plan and roped in their friend Shubank Srivastava to help them with the technology. EasyKhaana operates on a centralised kitchen model and has a fleet of riders who work on logistics and delivery.

Being a tech product, all orders are placed on the website. Aayush says that the average ordering time on their website is 30 seconds.

Following the changing menu strategy, the team makes revenue on the sale of meal boxes. Customers can go online to order the meal they prefer for the day and it’s delivered to their location.

“For the first 20 days, we just got a total of four orders. The start was tough. But now, after three months, we are proud to say that we are catering to over 150 clients daily. We are seeing daily growth with repeat orders contibuting to at least 50 per cent,” adds Aayush.

Funding and future

He adds that believing in food-for-all concept, the team donates all the unsold food to the needy by three pm. The team has raised $100,000 from a private angel investor. The funding will be used for market expansions, product developments, technological advancements and improved delivery infrastructure.

Aayush says that the food delivery sector is $2-billion market that is growing at 30-40 per cent annually. However, he believes that their target customer is anybody who eats home cooked food. Aayush says their team is working towards changing the way people eat.

Speaking of the other players in the space, Aayush believes that their competitive edge is in the fact that they delivery hygienic, good quality food that is prepared in a centralised kitchen. “As we have a kitchen that is centralised and follows a hub-and-spoke model, we have control over the quality of the food,” he adds.

Also read: Is this the end of the honeymoon period for foodtech startups

YourStory take

It is a little early to say whether EasyKhaana falls under the me-too space or can actually create a differentiator. Many believe that with lesser entry barriers foodtech is a space most people want to enter into.

One of the others following a similar model is FreshMenu. However, the last few months haven’t been easy on the business of foodtech and food delivery with Dazo, Spoonjoy and Eatlo shutting down.

Even startups with deeper pockets like Tinyowl saw a rough patch this year and had to shut operations in few of the cities.

If you look at the amount of funding made in the foodtech space in the month of April alone, it was a whopping $74 million on a total of seven deals. In August, this dipped to $19 million with a total five deals. In September, this number further dropped to a total of two deals.

Seedfund Venture Partner and accomplished investor/mentor Sanjay Anandaram says that most of the technology-enabled food businesses are operations-intensive.

“Most of these app-based food businesses gain the initial traction in certain pockets of a city, but the same cannot be expected from all parts of the country,” he adds.

Many believe that food brings initial traction easily; the first 300 orders a day are easy to get. The trouble begins when the numbers go beyond 300 orders in a day.

The angel investment, Anand Lunia, Founder IndiaQuotient says, comes on the first 300 orders, but the remaining rounds of investment come from stability and sustainability as the number of orders increase.

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​Hybrid on-demand home cleaning and laundry player SBricks has acquired Melway, a Hyderabad-based facility management and hands-on services player for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will bring in 200 home cleaning professionals to the SBricks fold, along with enhancing brand equity and clientele portfolio.

Nithin Reddy, Founder and CEO, Sbricks, said, “Melway adds tremendous synergy to our growth plans in home cleaning services business that is growing at a rapid pace. This acquisition will surely help SBricks boost its presence in home cleaning space and fast-forward customer base.”

He adds that a hybrid model is the way forward in the sector and that he wanted to take the lead by consolidating his business through acquisitions and building the platform’s brand in the market.  The home cleaning services will grow rapidly in the coming years and the best way to go forward is to leverage this potential and join forces rather than having a turf war. “To consolidate our market strength and to accelerate our customer penetration, we will continue to seek out such deals, with future acquisitions,” he added.

Founded in 2015, SBricks offers 40 services with its list of pre-approved, carefully screened service providers for home maintenance, and will soon launch its facility management services. It clocks 125 orders per day and expects to touch the 300-orders-per-day mark in the next few months. Now, it also has access to 6,000 service touch points that Melway brings to its table. The platform will retain the four-year-old Melway trade name and its existing team structure will remain intact. Sbricks will support the Melway and Sbricks joint operations through strategic investments and inducing consumer-relevant newer cleaning services.

The bootstrapped startup is upbeat about its consumer services growth as well. Currently, SBricks boasts a client roster of over 5,000and is expecting to touch 10,000 in the next six months. Clients include Big Cinemas, Asian Movies chain besides large gated communities, individual homes and small apartment blocks in the Hyderabad region.

The immediate focus of the company is to grow with its current territories in Hyderabad and then move on to newer cities across south India and then rest of the country. The company has expanded to five cities: Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Vishakhapatnam, Kochi and Tirupati, since going live in April 2015 in Hyderabad.

Sbricks, through its investment banker Consark, a boutique advisory services firm, is in early stages of discussions with two international venture capital firms for investment to build its footprint in India in the near term.

​​Yourstory take

According to a rough estimate, the Indian home services space is estimated to be around $ seven to eight billion. According to KPMG reports, unorganised laundry in India is a Rs 2.2-lakh crore opportunity and is set to grow even bigger as the pool of 12 million online consumers from metro cities will continue to increase at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20 per cent.

This acquisition is the harbinger of impending consolidation in the on-demand home service segment.

In the last month, home service and laundry service was under the limelight with similar kind of acquisitions in the sector. In November, laundry service app Wassup acquired Mumbai-based Chamak, while Taskbob acquired Bengaluru-based Zepper.

With Amazon investing in home services provider Housejoy and companies like Naspers set to enter the segment, the market will be controlled by just a few.

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Begaluru-based B2B e-commerce marketplace  Shotang has raised $ five million in Series A funding from venture capital Exfinity Venture Partners and Unitus Impact Livelihoods Fund. The company plans to invest it on expanding its team, spreading its reach in the top 10 cities in the country and strengthening its core technology infrastructure over the next one year.

Anterpreet Singh, Co-founder & Megamind, Shotang, said, “Shotang is transforming the way the traditional retail distribution channels have operated thus far in emerging economies. We believe we are poised to lend disruptive growth and efficiency to the traditional distribution channels, which comprises 15 million retailers, over 1,00,000 distributors and nearly 20,000 manufacturers. This will lead to the creation of a truly omni-channel ecosystem.”

Rebranded in May 2013, Shotang is an online marketplace for retailers, distributors and manufacturers to discover, transact and manage their businesses. It aims to enable millions of small and medium retailers to order and pay online for the entire inventory that they sell from their offline stores.

Anterpreet added that the distributors are able to grow their business significantly and manage their business with higher productivity. Manufacturers also stand to benefit from the dramatically higher visibility for their sales data on Shotang and faster time-to-market.

The company currently has presence in two metros with nearly 3,000 retailers transacting every week. In the last six months, Shotang has sold goods worth over $ six million and raised its seed round a year ago from Bitchemy Ventures.

On the funding, Jayaroopa Jeyabarathi, Principal, Unitus Impact Livelihoods Fund, said, “Shotang is empowering unorganised Indian retailers by changing the way retailers purchase goods and manage their systems.”

YourStory take

The Indian retail distribution market is estimated at about $630 billion and comprises over 15 million retailers. These retailers sell products across several categories such as FMCG, mobile handsets, apparel, consumer durables and pharmaceuticals and so on.

In the past few months, many platforms like Amazon, Snapdeal and Flipkart have aggressively tried to exploit the B2B segment. However, every platform has been trying to approach the segment differently.

In the B2B segment, there are many platforms but Shotang denies facing direct challenge from any one of them as it claims to solve the issue in a different way from others.

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We have all suffered the random pop-up ads that take over our screens when we would rather be reading the news, watching videos or playing our favourite game on our phones. To make matters worse, we end up bearing the data costs for ads we did not want to see or hear in the first place. Divya Pratap Singh wants to change the way advertisers’ messages are packaged and propagated. What’s more, he wants the advertiser to bear the related expenses; but that’s not all…he wants the consumer to benefit in some way.

A serial entrepreneur, Divya, a software engineer from IIT Delhi, is no stranger to the perils of running a startup in a cut-throat environment. His previous venture 365hops.com – a market place for offbeat travellers and activity seekers – failed to really take off. However, the idea for his next startup was already brewing. He, along with a classmate Rakesh Sehgal and his business partner Gaurav Tiwari, with whom he was running a startup Publify – a digital signage advertising platform– were all operating out of a co-working space when the idea struck. “Somehow both our startups didn’t do well and we wrapped them up at almost the same time. I had started to work from Rakesh and Gaurav’s office as I had to close my own. In June 2015, during a discussion we were having, we realised that everybody was trying to reach mobile consumers, but there were only limited options to do so. It was just a co-incidence that one of us got a call on the mobile and as the bell rang, the inspiration to start PayTunes struck us,” says Divya.

PayTunes is a mobile advertising platform where advertisers can selectively target mobile consumers using a ringtone. PayTunes is the first platform that is bringing audio-advertisements to mobile phones on such a scale. Currently, most mobile advertising is via banner ads on mobile apps. YouTube and some other platforms provide video ads but these are skipped by mobile consumers due to high data consumption. “With our innovative ad delivery approach, we are trying to overcome these limitations using the very ‘natural,'” he laughs, inserting air quotes, “phenomenon of incoming calls with minimal data usage, while providing the advertiser with options to target the consumers based on their profile.”

The PayTunes Android app replaces a user’s ringtone with ad jingles and rewards users with points on each incoming call. Users can later redeem these points through mobile recharges and bill payments. Advertisers can selectively choose the users they want to target and push their ads from the PayTunes platform’s backend.

From a user’s perspective, PayTunes is an app that rewards them for just receiving calls. The whole system is automatic; an ad is delivered through the platform and users don’t have to download any ringtones or do anything at all to get these rewards. “We are coming up with more options for users, like giving them the option to dislike or discontinue certain ads as well,’ says Divya.

For advertisers, PayTunes provides enough targeting mechanisms to deliver ads to their desired target audience. The advertiser can select users based on gender, age, location, profession and other criteria with data on exact ad exposure per user as well, making it different than existing platforms in this domain. “There are several mobile ad media that brands are using to reach mobile consumers, but they all have their limitations (in terms of type of ad content they can deliver) and issues of wastage and user retention.

“Our aim is to create a targeted and precise mobile ad delivery platform without any ad wastage,” says Divya. “Sure, there have been uninstalls of the app. Generally, apps in this segment witness an uninstall rate of around 30-35 per cent; we are also in a similar category. Some people who are not interested in listening to ad-jingles in place of ringtones tend to uninstall the app. Some people find it refreshing, though, to hear new ad-jingles in place of their boring ringtones. They intend to keep the app for the added advantage of earning from it on every incoming call.”

Every user gets a reward point on each incoming call, when the jingle is played on the ‘ringing mode’ of the phone successfully. Currently, they can redeem these accumulated points by doing a free prepaid recharge or making payment on post-paid bills.

Since its inception, feedback has been pouring in that users want more control over the
ringtones, like wanting to have the ringtone category feature within the app where they can select or deselect the type of ad-jingles they receive – a sign of building interest. The advertiser, on the other hand, is interested in more user analytics for current users and user profiling on the platform

PayTunes’s approach has never been tried before in India. “We had our concerns over how users would react to the product as their mobile ringtone would change daily. We ran a pilot with our alpha version on around 200 users. When we saw that people were grabbing it with both hands, our doubts were cleared and we decided to proceed with the product,” he says. The only issue was creating a system that users could not misuse as they were distributing digital money. “We had to plan and research before we could finalise our approach and achieve the same with minimal loopholes,” says Divya.

However, finances were a concern as their debut startups had not succeeded; hence, raising a round of funding was critical. They successfully raised $100,000 in funding from CIO Angel Network at the end of September 2015.

“We have got huge traction and word-of-mouth around the product; we reached 25,000 downloads within a month of launching without any major spend on advertisements. We want to build on this good start. We are actively looking to raise the next round of funding as this is a going to be critical in spreading our wings to different parts of the country.

The beta version of the PayTunes app was launched in mid-October in 2015. Since then, the app has been downloaded more than 50,000 times. Most of the users are college-school students and people with jobs in the under-33-years’ age group. “Although we have not penetrated the older user segments as much, we are witnessing even greater retention rates in the lower-age segments. We are currently experiencing a growth rate of 15-20 per cent per week, and are expecting to hit the 100,000 download mark in the first week of January, and 1 million users within the next six months. We aim to sign up 100 advertisers to our platform within the next quarter. We are running exciting campus programmes in more than 100 colleges across India as we are trying to first target the youth. We are majorly depending on referrals and word of mouth publicity to reach other segments,” says Divya.

The PayTunes team is in the final stages of talks for ads on their platform with ICICI, Pidilite, Pepsi, Easy Cabs, Mahindra and others. They have already engaged with media agencies like MadHouse, OMG and PHD media groups for campaigns.

The Indian digital advertising industry is valued at $0.8 billion right now. It is expected to become a $ 1.8 billion industry by 2018, considering that the digital ad spend is growing at 32 per cent a year with increasing focus on mobile devices.

YourStory’s Take:

Innovation and creativity are really all an advertiser’s got. As a lot of articles have rightly pointed out, smartphone penetration in India is over 60 per cent, yet, companies’ ad-spend on mobile advertising does not reflect this immense popularity. and is only hovering at somewhere around 2 per cent of their total advertising budget. Even within the segment, banner ads are the only form of multimedia advertising that companies have tapped into.

In this space, monotony acts like a cancer. Thus, by virtue of using a unique medium and space to advertise, and in turn even incentivising a user for listening to an ad, the company has managed to create quite a buzz. However, more aggressive marketing, and more and more perks being awarded to users would definitely enable them to widen their net.

The slot machine that is the concept of hyperlocal grocery delivery in India flashed triple 7s to its consumers almost immediately after being introduced. But suggesting that its operations and logistics function like clockwork would be saying too much too soon. This is true for tier 2 and 3 cities. The specifications that might be conducive for a savvier and more affluent consumer class in tier 1 cities may not necessarily pander to the needs of a consumer from a smaller city. Everything from your system language, to the products and prices, to how complicated the process of punching an order is, might be a deal-breaker for your clients. The key to hyperlocal is juxtaposing your mainstream B-plan with the unique local flavours of its areas of operation, which is what Aniruddh Sharma tries to achieve with Orbuy – a two-month-old Jaipur-based hyperlocal grocery delivery startup.

“Recently, I returned to my hometown Jaipur from one of the busiest cities in India – Mumbai. Back there, I was used to the comforts of calling up the local kirana store and having the groceries delivered at my doorstep. They charged an additional Rs. 20forhome delivery, but I considered it a cost to my convenience as I did not have to waste my time in traffic. In Jaipur, we looked for a similar arrangement, out of habits developed in Mumbai, and discovered that there were very few options here. That led us to our “problem statement” and we started looking for solutions for tier 2 cities like Jaipur,” says 28-year-old Aniruddh, who, until that point of enlightenment, was a Derivatives Research and Trading professional with five years of undergoing the grind.

“We talked to potential customers and found all the gaping holes in the service delivery, pricing, and products of these stores – like very huge minimum order amount, etc.”

Apart from getting its fundamentals right by providing competitive prices and offers, and a large network of stores, Orbuy strives to make customer’s life easier by employing easyprocedures to browse and place orders. They are the only player in India, which has bilingual–that is English and their local tongue –language support, thus making it easily understandable to a large number of customers.

Taking into account the popularity of WhatsApp and people’s nimbleness with the messaging app, not to mention age-old phone antics like missed calls and text messages, Orbuy provides its customers options such as calling,missed calls, sendingWhatsApps, messages, as well as punching orders on their website, so they may order at ease. “Grocery shopping is not meant to be complicated, it must be as easy as going down to the corner shop. And aren’t advancements in technology and digitisation supposed to make life simpler?”

According to a study by advisory firm Technopak,the food and grocery industry in India is now worth $383 billionand is expected to touch $1 trillion by 2020.In this cut-throat market, the hyperlocal players can only hope to have an edge by battling it out on the grounds of offers, prices, quality, and service.

In thisregard, Orbuy is eyeing a fat piece of the pie through introducing a host of differentiators. The minimum order amount has been capped atRs. 200 for free delivery, which is lesser than other major players like PinkcityKirana, PepperTap, and Grofers – that happen to be their biggest competitors. Other larger players like ZopNow, Big Basket, LocalBanya have their eyes set on the Pink City, but are yet to enter the race. Another value offering, possibly to build goodwill, is providing free delivery services of medicines to senior citizen when an order is placed.

“We are also targeting institutional clients like restaurants, hotels, PGs, and hostels for bulk orders. Our deals will help them budget their month better and more cost-effectivelywhile bulk sales will also be good for us to get higher profit margins and consistency,” says Aniruddh, of their roadmap for expansion.

One of the most important differentiations is that they are not sourcing fruits and vegetables from the inventories of nearby vendors like Grofers and PepperTap do, but rather, getting them from actual farmers in and around the city.

Since starting out in October 2015, average revenues per month havebeenupwards of Rs.1.5 lakh, which comes from nearly 300–400 completed orders. Out of their current customer base, 70 per cent are recurring clients. “A very small but highly motivational milestone we have achieved is that we have matched our operating expenses from our sales in the first month of our operations,” shares Aniruddh, proudly.

Currently bootstrapped, the company is looking for raising capital to bolster their expansionplans, wherein they are targeting tier2 and 3 cities of India. With concrete plans to hit the markets of Udaipur and Kota in early 2016, they hope to have a presence in at least 12 tier-2 cities of India by the end of 2016.

YourStory Take

With a modest local start yet unique local flavours, Orbuy shows promise. Entering an almost untapped market was a gap duly converted into an opportunity and furthermore, a profitable enterprise. But the hyperlocal market is getting more and more crowded by the minute. Orbuy is well-equipped for the oncoming storm with its distinct features like WhatsApp ordering and notification through missed calls, but that will only take them as far as a marginal edge. For going the distance, an exhaustive spread of products, competitive prices and meticulous service is the simple yet million-dollar-recipe, and that is where their focus must be. Building a pan-India presence should be a long term goal, but only after they strengthen their bastion in the fortuitously-virgin Jaipur.

The startup ecosystem is a world full of reluctant leaders and unlikely heroes. The archetypal ingredients of a truly robust business story could be a gaping hole in the marketa keen observer’s eye for spotting that problem and wanting to address the frustrated commoner’s despair at having to experience it day after day. Anupam Attri’s is one such story.

Belonging to a family with all members engaged in service, making himself marketable and employable for the best possible job was the highest 30-year-old Anupam had grown up aspiring for. In year six of his career at Reliance Power, the engineer’s life seemed to be going down that predictable route. But, the seed for entrepreneurship was sown in Anupam’s life when he grappled with a crude day-to-day problem that no one seemed to be solving in a fairly technologically-forward country.

“There used to be a regular chaotic scene at my home in Delhi when I used to forget to turn on the water pump when water supply started and turn itoff and it used to get burnt after it overran. Most households in India live like this, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it. This nuisance became food for thought. Why can’t pumps turn on and off, automatically, I thought,” says Anupam.

Only in his second year as an electronics engineering student at Thapar Institute, it was a feasible idea to dabble with, and it hit the jackpot. At an exhibition conducted by the Department of Science & Technology (DST) (under Ministry of Science & Technology) for promoting innovative ideas, Anupam’sproject was selected as the only student project for innovative and commercially feasible project.He received the cheque of grant from DST for R&D of the product followed by patent application. This was the first milestone of his splendid journey to come.

Anupam, along with his brother, Amit Attri, formed Attri Enterprises Limited and launched the product commercially under the name, ‘eWAS® Water Automation System’ in 2009.

Backing his innovation with market research, Anupam says that around 60 to 70 per cent of people do not know of any gadget that could automate their water pumps. Further, there were no major Indian players in the global market estimated to reach $17.73 billion by 2020.

Anupam says, “The water automation sector must not only manufacture standard products, but also have constant R&D and engineering to modify existing products, in order to meet the customers’ changing requirements. Along with that, very dedicated service is required. Above two major characteristics are absent in all the existing small players of the sector.”

After this assessment, the Attri brothers were confident that their technology will find its space in the market, owing to its uniqueness.

eWAS® was commercially launched in April, 2011 as a solution engineered with a vision to save water and power along with furnishing complete water automation solution. The innovation is published under the journals of Indian Patents. Once it is installed, the water pumps, valves and water related systems turn on and off on their own with no human interaction. The device is applicable to indoor, outdoor, household, commercial, and industrial consumer goods which find its utility at every household or commercial and industrial unit where water is in use. It runs on the existing systems such that the user doesn’t need to re-install or change existing water pump and water system.

Through the automation process, the product saves water as well as power and ensures tension-free automation of water pumps. Its outer body is made up of ABS plastic to make it electric shock-proof, with magnetic sensors that make it rust-proof, preventing salt formation and maintenance costs. It is also micro-controller based, like a computer, where multiple failure-check programmes are installed.

Bootstrapped on Rs 15 lakh, Anupam embarked upon his pilot entrepreneurship journey on a part-time basis. Thus, eWAS began with just one employee who assisted him in manufacturing, and another was hired later to assist in installation. Marketing was done passively through their website. With this simple model, eWAS was in business with one product addressing the problem of water automation.Today, four years hence, the company has over 80 product offerings, and has captured its space in a market populated only by local competitors like Arihant Water Control, Sri Savita, and Bharathi Electronics. eWAS plans to stay ahead by building a pan-India franchise network. “Currently, we have over 15 franchises across India, and we’re targeting 100 to 150 franchises pan-India in the next two years,” Anupam says.

The retail price for single tank-pump combination automation unit ranges between Rs 4,000and Rs. 5,500.After their diversification, their projects range from Rs 2 lakhs to Rs 20 lakhs.

The major players in the automation and instrumentation market for the water industry are the American General Electric, Emersion Electric and Rockwell Automation,German Siemens AG, Swiss ABB, among others. “We are targeting the niche where these companies do not take projects, like households, schoolsand colleges, hospitals, commercial premises, hotels, architects, real estate projects, RWA, etc., where project size is from Rs 5,000 to Rs 5,00,000 and this niche relies on unreliable local players.”

Globally, the water automation and instrumentation market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 11.75 per cent, from 2014 to 2020. However, Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 12.07 per cent from 2014 to 2020. The water automation and instrumentation market is estimated to reach $17.73 billion by 2020. In India, the water automation market is nascent and growing in an unstructured manner. There is no secondary data for the sector in India.However, Anupam says it can be estimated at least $2 billion.

The startup has seen a revenue growth at 100 per cent per annum. Generating Rs 12 lakh in its first year, it has raked in Rs 24 lakh in its second, only for it to escalate to Rs 50 lakh last year, with an average of a Rs. five lakh monthly revenue.

Anupam says, “We are advancing to a stage to raise external funds in order to sustain growth and increase the pace.”

Website: eWAS

It is a common belief in Child Developmental Psychology that the sensory experiences a baby has, have a profound impact on his or her overall development and learning. In 2008, UK-based child development specialist and child psychologist Dr Lin Day created the Baby Sensor and Toddler Sense programmes.

These were designed with the basic belief that caregivers and parents play a strong and integral part in a child’s development. Designed for infants from birth to 13 months, the programmes focus on stimulating the child’s senses, which leads to accelerated physical and brain development.

Building the ropes

Looking at the gaps in the early baby and infant learning ecosystem in India, husband and wife duo Anju Cherian and Jose Paul, 35, left their corporate jobs abroad to return to India with their daughter and make a positive difference in the lives of young Indian parents and children.

They established AJ Plackal Eduventures in October 2014. They began with introducing award-winning international early learning programmes and creating localised solutions that meet the needs of Indian audiences.

“We currently represent the Baby Sensory, Toddler Sense and Mini Professors programmes from the UK. We are the master franchisee for India and our neighboring countries. We also run The Alchemy Nursery, a specialised daycare and learning centre for infants and toddlers,” adds Anju.

Through interactions with parents, the duo realised that parents rued the lack of daycare and early learning centres that provided the same level of quality and focussed on early years’ development.

“To address this demand, we launched The Alchemy Nursery, a specialised daycare and preschool for children from birth to three years following the Early Years Foundation Framework Stage (EYFS) framework from the UK,” says Anju.

While the programmes were well received, due to a number of factors stemming from the many cultural barriers in India, they knew that the infant programme was something they would need to nurture over a longer period of time.

So, they decided to collaborate with several other groups like children’s specialty hospitals, large residential communities and mother child stores to educate customers about the importance of early learning in infants.

In parallel, they also launched the Toddler Sense programme to help children below the age of five. Owing to growing demand from parents who had heard about the programme, they have also launched additional venues in other parts of Bengaluru.

“To beat the high real estate costs, we offer the classes from existing venues, which met our international health, safety and operational standards,” adds Jose. In all, it has been a great first year that has witnessed them launch two programmes across three venues and branch out into the daycare and preschool space.

Learning and re-learning

While AJ Plackal Eduventures was established in 2014, the seeds of the idea were sown in 2012. Anju took a break from her corporate career to focus on raising their daughter. Being a voracious reader, she prepared for her new role by reading up extensively on early years’ development in children.

The more she read and researched, the more convinced she was of the importance of sensory stimulation and the impact of the first five years on a child’s development.

After speaking to her husband, the duo started exploring parent child programmes they could attend with our daughter. “This is how we came across the Baby Sensory programme developed by the UK’s leading child psychologist Dr. Lin Day. Amongst all the programmes we attended, Baby Sensory stood out for how well-researched and well-designed it is,” says Anju.

After having experienced the benefits of the programme, the duo decided to bring Baby Sensory and its affiliate programmes to India, with the desire to make a positive impact on society.  They spoke to the parent company in the UK and went through an extensive selection process before being awarded the master franchise for Baby Sensory and its affiliate programmes in India and our neighboring countries.

They spent time in the UK getting trained on the various programmes and business aspects. Eventually, they decided to move back to India as a family and focus on making the programmes a success in India. “We are also proud to be supporting young parents who are often far away from their families and dealing with parenthood on their own,” says Jose.

The programme and its benefits

Anju adds that every activity in Baby Sensory has been scientifically designed to provide a rich environment full of interesting sights, sounds, smells, colours and materials that help build a foundation that boosts brain development in a child.

Toddler Sense is designed for kids in the age group of one to five years. The award-winning toddler development classes introduce children to a galaxy of magical worlds. Here, structured activities go hand in hand with the freedom to explore and imagine. Each week has a unique theme, meticulously constructed to stimulate a child’s brain, co-ordination and physical development.

Growth and future plans

Starting with one location and one Baby Sensory class a week, AJ Plackal Eduventures today has three centres across Bengaluru that offer both Baby Sensory and Toddler Sense classes, with over 10 times more babies, toddlers and their parents attending the classes every week.

The overall number of children registered for the classes are also growing month on month. “Our revenue model is very simple. We charge our customers a subscription fee for the classes, schooling and care services. Going forward, our revenues will be a mix of subscription fees from our own centres and a franchising fee through network expansion across the country,” says Jose.

Currently bootstrapped, the duo aims to focus on continuing to make Baby Sensory, Toddler Sense and The Alchemy accessible to more parents and children across India through a network of own and franchised centres.

“Our franchising programme is also designed to enable women who are looking for flexible business opportunities that fit into their own schedules,” adds Anju.

They are also working on launching different new international early learning programmes, starting with Mini Professors, which will be launched in the first half of 2016. “Over the next two years, Baby Sensory, Toddler Sense and Mini Professors will be present in all the key metros across the country,” adds Jose.

With owning more gadgets comes the hassle of repairing them. Ankur Gupta claims to have broken over 10 phones in a year. And his constant visits to repair shops at Nehru Place in Delhi made him almost an expert on the subject among his peer group.

Ankur, 24, is the Co-founder of RepairMyGadget.in, a Bengaluru-based gadget repairing firm. After finishing his engineering from Amity University, Ankur did an MBA from Narsi Monji Institute of Management Studies. Prior to founding RepairMyGadget.in, Ankur worked with Airtel for a year.

During his visits to repair shops, Ankur realised that there were several problems with the traditional model, be it the time consumed in multiple visits or the different rates charged. Often, there are times when there is a minor problem but charges are very high. Ankur decided to put an end to this by starting RepairMyGadget.in with his roommate Ashwani Kumar, who was a product manager at Quicksilver Solutions. Ankur says,

It was a personal experience with gadget damage that led me to search for best price-verses-quality combo in the gadget repair sphere. After 15 days of extreme discomfort at service centres to get my mobile repaired in vain , the need for an organised player to list and serve customers became apparent. After confirming the idea with hundreds of friends, I decided to go ahead and create a marketplace for gadget repairs.

It was not easy for Ankur to start up in this sector as things were very unorganised and it is difficult to find people to hire as well. Ankur got his first hire from an OLX posting. Zakir Hussain, a technician from Kashmir with over 17 years of experience under his belt, decided to join them. At present the team has eight people and serves across Bengaluru. For deliveries, they have partnered with Roadrunner and Parcelled.in throughout the city.

One of the biggest problems in this sectors was the lack of organisation and the amount of time spent in going to places for getting gadgets repaired. Ankur adds,

It is disheartening to see repairmen getting meager salaries while the retailers get a major chunk of the pie. In the world of gadgets, customers were forced to visit service centres where they were charged heavily. Similarly at local shops, there is a constant threat of being cheated with price and quality. Moreover, there is no system in place that equips customers with the history of repairmen.

Once a customer places his order online filling a form detailing his gadget, and the defects, his list gets populated with vendors who can service his gadget. The device is picked up from his location and he is also provided a replacement gadget for the time his gadget is being serviced. In most instances, his gadget is returned within 48 hours with a two-month warranty. The company offers cash on delivery as well.

On the market, Ankur says,

We are sitting in a country that holds 1.5 billion gadgets including laptops and mobiles phones. With 90 per cent issues being screen damage and an average cost of Rs 1,500, we are sure this is a billion-dollar opportunity. The B2B segment holds immense opportunities too.

Within four months the company has serviced around 2,500 orders and claims to grow at 40 per cent month-on-month. In the coming years, it is looking to grow to more Tier I and II cities. It is also looking to partner with e-commerce firms to expand its range of services.

Whenever a gadget goes bad, the cost is not only in terms of money but also in terms of the time consumed when it comes to running around for getting it repaired. RepairMyGadget is going a step ahead by providing pick-up and delivery and focussing on customer satisfaction by providing an alternative gadget to use. However, will the current model scale up? Only time will tell.

Website

When YourStory started chronicling the startup ecosystem in 2008, few companies, including the ones in our INDIA 100 2015 list, were known beyond their immediate circles; seven years down the line, these companies have grown to become not just India’s best-known names but have also attracted global attention to India and its maturing fast-startup ecosystem.

In 2012, Bangalore ranked 19^th within the world’s startup ecosystem. By 2015, the city moved up four spots to 15^th place, but 6^th in terms of access to funding. The year has been epochal. Prime Minster Narendra Modi made startups the central theme of his Republic Day speech. Entrepreneurship has gone mainstream; spreading to every corner of the country– even the marriage market is more accepting of founders, who are the new celebrities in town! And for the very first time in the history of Indian startups, Flipkart’s Sachin and Binny Bansal have made it to the top 100 in the prestigious Forbes list.

The INDIA 100 ranking shows the 100 hottest companies that have demonstrated their ability to scale up and seized opportunities through 2015. These are the startups that stayed in the news through the year and grew substantially. These 100 companies have already demonstrated the ability to achieve various levels of scale; some have been around for more than half-a-decade. Aside from these every year YourStory showcases 30 of the most promising tech start-ups you need to watch out for.

YourStory discovers and showcases emerging tech startups that might eventually go on to achieve similar ‘success’ as the TECH30 at our flagship event TechSparks each year.

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Also, early next year, YourStory is coming up with Young Workplace Awards – India’s only Definitive Startup Workplace award –  which will chronicle the best of the workplaces in the ecosystem.

INDIA 100 – METHODOLOGY: We took around 1000 startups that have raised over $1 million and who were in the news during 2015. We put these names through our internal ranking system to evaluate them against three parameters: growth, revenue and funding. The next step was to partner with Mattermark to get their GrowthScore for each. Once we had 100 startups, we then re-ranked them using four equally weighted variables from Mattermark: growth score, mindshare score, employees’ month-over-month growth and total funding. (More about GrowthScore here).

The search for a quality and standardised relocation service sometimes throw you in the crowd of vendors with minimum expertise. Deepu Chandran took a plunge to organise the highly fragmented relocation industry in India and launched Pikkol in April 2015.

Pikkol is a Bengaluru-based relocation services aggregator and a technology-centric logistics firm. It aims to create the technological, analytical, and operational backbone to facilitate all relocation requirements in the market.

Deepu, an alumnus of IIM Bengaluru, says,

Pikkol was born out of extensive research that we did in the logistics and home services segment that helped us identify the problems the consumers face while relocating. We felt that many of those problems related to accountability, reliability, and transparency could be solved with technology and our unique approach of aggregation.

Pikkol provides standardised service experience and tailor-made relocation packages for customers. Its adaptive algorithm captures the inventory and computes the right truck size, packing requirements, and price. Once the consumer confirms the booking on the platform, based on its proprietary algorithm the right team is allotted to the move to ensure a hassle-free relocation experience for the consumers. Majority of customers place their request on the Pikkol App, which is available on both Play Store and App Store.

Currently, Pikkol has more than 1,200 trained movers and over 300 trucks through relocation vendors. The startup conducts sessions to train vendors in a bid to offer quality service experience to the customers. After a detailed evaluation and registration, the vendors receive trainings on the deployment of technology (strong analytics-based technological backend and logistics network) for process improvement and guidelines on the materials to be used on packings.

“We use the information engine to aggregate load movement to various destinations and generate real-time pricing based on demand and supply of right vehicles for intercity movement. Through this we intend to ensure reliable logistics for intercity moves for the entire unorganised segment,” says Deepu.

 Entrepreneurial stint

 Thirty-three-year-old Deepu is a second-time entrepreneur. Prior to Pikkol.com, he co-founded Innomantra, a consulting firm, in 2010. After being successful in his first entrepreneurial venture, he took an exit and decided to start Pikkol.

At Innomantra, he worked with organisations such as Google, NetApp, ABB, and Larsen & Toubro. He began his career at Larsen & Toubro and was responsible for strategic planning and new product management. In 2008, he was awarded the India Innovation Prize by the Government of Karnataka and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

Building team

Deepu’s co-founders – Jayaram K., Siby Mathew, and Suraj Valimbe –also joined forces to kick start Pikkol. Jayaram is an alumnus of IIM Lucknow and was an entrepreneur who built a travel journal app in his earlier entrepreneurial venture. He handles product architecture and operations excellence at Pikkol.

Siby is an alumnus of NIT Calicut and was associated with HP for nine years, he now handles the technology team at Pikkol. Suraj holds an MBA from Welingkar Institute of Management and worked with Hitachi and Tata Croma. He heads operations in Pikkol. The startup has a team of 26 employees, including 10 technical professionals. The team also boasts of a lot of second time entrepreneurs which includes Siddharth Gulati, Sreeju Sreekumar, Rohan K, Anand Jacob, Aniket Gite, Aditya Prabhu, and Arun R S.

Gaining numbers

 Pikkol since inception has grown close to 1,000 per cent and managed to reach a monthly revenue of more than 50 lakhs. The startup so far has facilitated over 6,000 house moves.

Pikkol initially started its operations in Bengaluru, and now it operates in Mumbai, NCR, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune and 10 tier II cities. The startup has also started facilitating moves to international locations such as Middle East, US, UK, and Singapore.

 Deepu claims that initial customers came through social media and post that 40 per cent of new customers are referred by the existing customers. Pikkol does more than 1,000 house moves in more than 100 locations per month across India with metro cities generating 80 per cent of the requests. In the next one year, it intends to expand footprints in 20 other tier two cities.

According to Deepu, Pikkol’s cloud-based solution for order management and operational improvement is one of the sources of revenue. The cloud-based solution is a SaaS product used for capturing inventory of customers and other move details including date, source, destination, slot preferences, and packing specifications. The strong analytical engine that supports this cloud-based solution is the one that facilitates the logistics through the right choice of truck, route optimisation, load aggregation, and optimal price generation.

In the next three to four years, the startup is planning to reach around Rs. 500 crores revenue.

YourStory take

 There was a time when relocation services was considered as a vertical of logistics industry. However, the last decade has witnessed a significant transformation in this space. Companies in the packers and movers industry have created a niche for themselves over the last few years by leveraging the new age technologies.

MM Movers & Packers, RelocateXP, Zippon, Agarwal Movers & Packers, EzMove, P.M. Relocations, and more are trying to redefine the relocation industry in India.

According to experts, relocation industry in India is estimated to be around $2–5 billion driven by the hassle-free relocation requirements, usage of innovative technology, mobile applications, tracking tools and software and more.

Pikkol

Big corporations and the employable model

A couple of months ago Brazilian entrepreneur Gustavo Tanaka shared a massively popular post on Medium titled, ‘There is something extraordinary happening in the world,’ where he discussed eight reasons he believes the world, despite all evidence to the contrary, is changing for the better. Number one on his list was that no one can stand the employment model any longer. He writes, “We are reaching our limits. People working with big corporations can’t stand their jobs. The lack of purpose knocks on your door as if it came from inside you like a yell of despair. People want out. They want to drop everything. Take a look on how many people are willing to risk entrepreneurship, people leaving on sabbaticals, people with work-related depression, people in burnout.”

Young entrepreneurs Greg Caplan and Sam Pressin demonstrate the truth of this statement through their social project Remote Year. On the website the project is described thus: “Remote Year brings together a community of 75 professionals from across the globe to spend a year, working, travelling, and exploring 12 cities around the world. Spending one month in each city, the community will connect with local cultures and business ecosystems, forming lifelong, borderless personal and professional relationships along the way.” 2015 was Remote Year’s inaugural year and it received a record 75,000 applications for those 25 spots.

Taking off

Husband-wife duo Anuja Joshi and Gaurabh Mathure had a glamorous life going for them in New York. Accomplished designers, Gaurabh was a creative director and Anuja a design strategist in Manhattan before they turned nomads.

With their careers firmly on the upswing in one of the most aspirational cities in the world and having just moved into a new apartment, this was admittedly the strangest time to chuck it all and travel. But as Anuja says, “If not now, when?”

She continues, “Gaurabh and I love to travel but a limited number of holidays and a 9-5 schedule meant our traveling was also limited. I have to admit, taking a year off and leading a lifestyle on-the-go was not in my life trajectory.” It was Gaurabh who found about the Remote Year program and convinced her that they both should apply. They did, but then forgot about it.

Months later, when they were shopping for new furniture for their new apartment, a phone call informed them that they were one of the desired 25. They held off on the new furniture, put their possessions in storage and jumpstarted their journey from Prague in June 2015.

Remote Year requires applicants to pay a onetime sum of $27,000, which takes care of their airfare and

accommodation costs for one year of wandering across the world. But Remotes are required to have jobs during this period where they can work…well, remotely. Anuja says, “We get most of our money through freelance work. We don’t make our New York salaries but we work enough to fund this trip without cutting into our savings.”

Building a business while travelling

For many, this would be the worst, most impractical time to start up a new company – right in the middle of life’s grand adventure and amidst shaky finances. But the idea behind Pikka Box makes it essential to launch while they travel, Anuja emphasises. She says, “As with everything, it started off with a very simple thought. Gaurabh said one day, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to send our family a box of souvenirs/products/things we like from every city we travel to?’ We shared this idea with some of our friends and they wanted one too. That’s when we decided to take it on the road and make it a business.”

Pikkabox

Pikkabox, born in June 2015, was a passion project that became the business. Gaurabh explains, “Once our mind was made up to travel, we both decided to make sure we had freelance work that would get us through the year. The idea was to make enough to power a simple lifestyle and give us the space to pursue our passion projects. While our decisions were theoretical before we started, six months into our travel, we’ve realized that it is possible. We also do a financial review for our personal spending every two months and keep a monthly log of all our expenses for Pikkabox from each country.”

It’s a business in which they are both in for the long haul, so they are satisfied keeping its profile low for now. Anuja adds, “We thought we would test it for a year through our travels and then give it roots when we are back on the ground.”

Gaurav says, “As designers, we have always been more interested in the ‘how and why’ behind the products we experience. It is a growing trend we’ve seen and thought it should be the one to address. While our customers order boxes filled with local products, what we really want to deliver is stories and insights about the culture, through products. We want people to be curious about new places, learn more about them and adopt new rituals through the products we send them.

There are a lot of subscription/mystery boxes out there but none that we’ve found in this category.”

There is a delightful inspiration behind their startup’s name. Anuja says, “Pikka Bird is a fictional character from the novel Mostly Harmless from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy book series. Pikka Birds from the planet of Lamuella tend to get ecstatic or surprised by everyday things like the sun rising or a perfectly ordinary leaf lying unexpectedly on a stone but are completed unaffected by an alien spaceship landing.

“At Pikkabox, we have our own Pikka. Our Pikka loves finding beauty and excitement in everyday objects – a local chocolate or stamps from that country to a local craft. From everything Pikka gets excited about, we create a mystery box of things that best represent each country.”

Business model that fits in a suitcase

In order to be incorporated with their current lifestyle, the business model has to be compact and simple. Anuja says, “Every month we travel to a new place. For the month we stay in this city, we curate a box of products that are culturally relevant, that talk about a ritual of that country and give you a glimpse of this city and country through six to eight products we curate. We make only a limited number of boxes each month and put them on our website for sale. Whoever buys Pikkabox, we post it to them. We ship all boxes at the end of each month.”

But simple doesn’t mean simplistic. The duo has thought out strategies to maximise the concept’s potential. Anuja elaborates, “Our main value is discovery and curation of local products and telling the right story about them is what we do best. In every city we travel to, we create partnerships with the makers we source products from. For now, we have two customer categories: (1) people who are curious and want to learn something new about a place that’s on their wish list and (2) well-travelled people who want to send unique gifts to their friends and family.

Subscribers

Gaurabh says, “Pikkabox works differently than a subscription box. We make only a limited number of boxes per month and put them online to sell. The rate at which the boxes get sold out depends on the popularity of the country itself. For example, Istanbul, Turkey, was far more popular than Ljubljana, Slovenia.”

Beyond customers

“Pikkabox can be curated for brands who want to connect with their customers to tell cultural stories through products. Currently, the hospitality and airline industry are our focus areas as we’ve received a few inquiries,” Anuja says.

Future

“The unique aspect of Pikkabox is that we are building the business as we travel. We are currently laying the foundation of the business, building partnerships and creating a brand.

“In the future, we will also make our own select products, either ourselves or in partnership with some of the makers who we have already sourced products from. We have identified a couple of opportunities for products that we would like to make ourselves,” Anuja shares.

Life

Meanwhile, the couple is six months into their year-long adventure. Currently they are in Hanoi, Vietnam and will

head to Japan in the New Year. For the last four months of their wanderings, they will be exploring different cities in South America. Anuja is most excited about hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Pichu.

One imagines it will be hard to return to the rigours of the 9-5 job once this magical year is over. How do they plan to

incorporate their wanderlust into that? Gaurabh says, “Our philosophy has never been to overplan our lives. While planning is important in certain parts of life, at the moment, we are making calculated decisions on-the-go. I love my work and wouldn’t want to let go of it completely. Even before getting on this year long journey, I wanted to live a lifestyle of working eight months a year and indulging in personal growth (traveling, learning new skills like surfing, etc.) for four months. Having gone through this year-long experience has shown us that it’s possible to do both seamlessly and will certainly try and include it in our lifestyle in the future.”

Launching a startup is a great feeling. You get an idea and then you rear it like your own baby and nurture it into reality through hard work and dedication. But that’s not the end of it! In fact, that’s when the actual work starts. The marketing approach you follow during the early stages of your startup might decide its success or failure.

In today’s digital marketing arena, video can be a great source of brand marketing and building. But, mastering video marketing can be a tough proposition. You need to have a precise, well-thought-out plan to make it work. In this article, I’ll list tips that can help any startup get going with video marketing to build a solid online presence. Right from the creation of the video, to marketing and using it for audience engagement, I’ll cover them all.

1. Video creation

Just a few years ago, commissioning a video to advertise a product/service used to be a Herculean task! First, you had to find a solid scriptwriter and get the storyboarding done. Then, you had to find the right actors to star in the video, get a crew to shoot the whole thing, take it to the editing table and then finally it would be done.

But times have changed for good. Now you don’t have to spend a lakh to get a video created. You can commission a video on Fiverr for just $100 to $500 and get your video done within a week.

How did this happen? Well, there was never a dearth of creative video makers in the world but accessible hardware was always a cause of concern till a few years ago. But rapid technological innovation in the entertainment space has changed the whole ecosystem. Who needs a professional camera to make videos now? The latest iPhone comes with a camera capable of recording 4,000 videos! Who needs an editing studio now? Tools like Animoto and Powtoon allow you to easily edit videos anywhere and anytime.

2. Hire video content creators

On platforms like YouTube and Vine, you can find original video content creators who can do scripting and storyboarding for you at a relatively lower cost and with faster turnaround time. They can also take care of the actors and editing for you. All you have to do now is promote and market the video and sometimes, even that is taken care of by the creators.

If you want to do some research and find the right creators who can make a video for you, use tools like Vidooly’s Creator Wizard.

Examples:

Dollar Shave Club and Will it blend video series are great examples of how videos can actually “build” successful brands.

Dollar Shave Club:

Will it blend:

3. Distribution

After getting the video done, you need to distribute it in places that matter. There are many video sharing and distribution sites out there and you need to decide and shortlist the ones that can work for you. YouTube, Facebook and Vine can be great platforms for increased visibility for any kind of business. Others like Dailymotion and Vimeo can be good for you if you are a media agency or a production house.

If your video is useful and entertaining enough, these platforms will give you the reach organically. You don’t even have to spend a dime to promote it. Well, of course you can spend a bit of money and give it a little extra push, but that’s up to you. If you ask me, YouTube and Facebook are by far the best options currently.

4. Optimisation and marketing

After getting the video created and uploading it on platforms of your choice, you need to optimise it to give it the maximum reach. If you have a YouTube channel, upload the video there and follow all the best practices to ensure that the video not only gets a lot of eyeballs, it also reaches the right audience. Use annotations and cards in the right places to divert the viewer to your website. Use the right keywords in your title and use the best tags to increase the search volume for your videos.

You can also target your prospective audience through paid advertising on Facebook and YouTube. YouTube and Facebook video ads can be run on relatively lower CPMs when compared to other websites or owned platforms like blogs. If you manage to get good traction on your video in the initial few days, it’ll have enhanced long-term reachability and engagement.

5. Micro video sharing sites

If you want to target an international audience, you should also consider short-form video social platforms like Vine, Snapchat, Instagram and Dubsmash. Though these sites aren’t as big in India, they have a huge user base in the West, especially with the millenials.

In today’s fast-paced world where the attention span of people has dramatically reduced, utilising these popular channels can give a lot of visibility to your content. Because these services are built exclusively for smartphones, you might not find it useful if you’re targeting older demographic.

Do keep it in mind that shorter time limit on the content on these platforms (six seconds on Vine and 15 seconds on Instagram) can be challenging. You need to think creatively to squeeze in your message in such a short duration.

Here’s a great example on how brands can use Vine:

Sony’s Inception Vine: The ad takes viewers inside the frame of the phone, inside that phone and then back again.

https://vine.co/v/MTXW7uLvF1v

Snapchat is another great product that can help promote your brand. Its biggest draw is its 100 million active daily users. Not many brands have cracked Snapchat marketing yet but they’re slowly warming up to it. Taco bell used it to promote the re-release of its Beefy Crunch Burrito. Huffington Post uses it for brand building.

6. Live video streaming

For startups, live video can be a great tool to build communities, encourage audience engagement and interact with its fans and followers. If a startup has a new product or partnership announcement coming up, building excitement around it can be easier by scheduling a live video stream. Live interviews of the founders where they explain their journey in building the company can also be a powerful video content which will be interesting for everyone.

7. Educate, engage and entertain

One of the biggest mistakes that startups or even established brands do while creating marketing videos is that they always correlate any brand video to a brand advertisement. Well, gone are the days when promotional videos had to be advertisements. Nowadays, any video which educates, entertains and engages your potential customers can be a promotional video.

This is why you should chalk out a plan to create such ‘infotaining’ video content regularly. If you are a clothing brand, you need to upload a lot of DIY content (eg: ‘How to wear a saree’) which will draw a lot of eyeballs, especially from foreign shores. If you are an educational channel, you need to regularly come up with informative and how-to type videos.

If you run an e-commerce company, Vat 19 can be a great example that you can emulate. It is an e-commerce company where one can order unusual but awesome gifts. Its YouTube channel has almost two million subscribers and 10 per cent of the overall traffic to its website is driven by just YouTube.

8. User-generated content

Consumers are always more interested in hearing the views of their peers than the clever sales pitches of marketers. That’s why user-generated content (UGC) can be a great way of building trust and engagement. If you analyse the top 100 videos on YouTube, Facebook and Vine, 30 per cent of videos on YouTube, 50 per cent of videos on Facebook and 17 per cent of videos on Vine are UGC.

A thorough research of all video platforms can help you identify content creators who can relate to your brand. Then you need to analyse and find out if there is a theme or story in these videos that can strike a chord with your target audience.

AirBnB’s Vine campaign is a great example on how brands can use UGC. They crowd-sourced a whole bunch of Vines and created the first-ever short film made completely of Vines.

9. Don’t miss out on Facebook video

If you do all the hard work, get the video created and then only use it on YouTube, you’re missing out on one of the most important channels of video distribution. I’m not talking about using the YouTube video and promoting on Facebook; I’m talking about uploading the video natively to Facebook so that it stays in your Facebook page’s video content library.

Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm places a lot of weightage on videos now and when a video is uploaded natively, you have a much better chance of it being seen by your target audience.

Buzzfeed is a great example for brands on using Facebook video. It already runs four popular video brands on Facebook – BuzzFeed Video, BuzzFeed Food, Tasty (BuzzFeed) and BuzzFeed Life and is gunning to add some more to its fleet. Collectively, BuzzFeed generated over two billion views on Facebook just in the month of September. Tastemade is another popular Food brand on Facebook and its page has almost six million likes. It looks as if food publishers have found the perfect recipe for success on Facebook. However, 2016 will definitely see publishers from other niche also entering the fray.

Oren Katzeff, Head of Programming, Tastemade, explains, “When you create something that inspires people to create that thing themselves, they want to share it. Content that is inspirational on Facebook can lead to action. People watch what you did, duplicate it, then try to do it themselves.”

If you analyse these video publishers on Facebook, there are some best practices followed by them all. You can also try to incorporate them in your Facebook video strategy for better results. Here are a few to get you started:

1. Majority of these videos are 15-50 seconds long
2. Using the right thumbnail is absolutely important. It is actually harder than on YouTube since you have to abide by Facebook’s 20 per cent text rule. So be creative and use as little text as possible in the thumbnail.
3. Don’t rely a lot on the audio. Native videos on Facebook play automatically when users scroll past them on their news feed. Therefore, the video should be compelling enough and should deliver its message even without sound.
4. You can bypass the NewsFeed and build a library of videos by publishing videos directly to the videos tab. This ensures that interested people can find more video content of your brand.
5. Use a Call to Action whenever possible.

Conclusion

As online video continues its stupendous rise, your brand should have a strategy in place to ride the wave. Ease of access to online video advertising mediums has made it much easier for startups to build a brand identity and it’s the perfect time to try your hands at it. Do you have ideas or interesting success stories on startups using video platforms? Do share them with us in the comments.

About the Author:

Subrat Kar: Subrat is the co-founder & CEO of Vidooly, a YouTube marketing & analytics software product for content creators, multi channel networks & brands that help them to grow their online video business organically. He can be reached out at subrat@vidooly.com, follow him on twitter @subratkar

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

This article is sponsored by Intel.

Proving a broader support to the government’s Digital India initiative, Intel has launched multiple initiatives like the Intel India Maker lab that provides infrastructure to budding entrepreneurs and platforms; International Science & Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) that stimulates a culture of innovation and technology-enabled transformation in youth and the Innovate for Digital India Challenge.

It was in April 2015 that Intel and DST launched the Innovate for Digital India challenge. Aspiring or existing entrepreneurs and innovators were invited to develop intuitive and easy-to-use solutions to drive technology adoption or create applications that accelerate the delivery of e-governance services through eKranti/MyGov apps on mobile platforms.

The challenge saw an overwhelming response with 1,900 entries from all over India. And on November 20, the top 10 winning teams and their ideas were announced.

One of the 10 finalists was Jayalaxmi Agrotech. The company’s crop-specific app in regional languages and English, will provide comprehensive information to farmers, helping them take timely decisions to minimise crop loss and improve productivity. This app helps provide higher knowledge about smart farming, making agriculture in India a profitable business. A remarkable aspect of the app is how it breaks down the literacy barrier, so that even someone with barely any formal education can access and understand all the features.

The Ballari, Karnataka-based company has 15 apps related to different crops, including wheat, coconut, cotton, sugarcane, tea, as well as a variety of fruits and vegetables. They also offer two apps on animal husbandry. Over 35,000 farmers have downloaded the apps so far.

The information on the app is updated on a regular basis and addresses matters such as sowing and transplantation methods, fertilizers to be used and their dosage, pest management, irrigation and harvesting techniques. Users also receive reminders via the app on schedules related to irrigation, administration of fertilizers and pesticides, and in the case of livestock, their vaccination.

Founder Anand Babu was joined by his cousin, L. Sivaprakash, when he set out to make life easier for farmers. While both have had corporate careers for over a decade each, they were keen on doing something that would have real social impact. Their app may not have a fancy name, but they are clearly committed to their vision of bringing about social transformation through empowering farmers.

This article is sponsored by Intel.

Intel has launched multiple initiatives to support the government’s Digital India initiative, which includes – the Intel India Maker lab that provides infrastructure to budding entrepreneurs and platforms; International Science & Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) that stimulates a culture of innovation and technology-enabled transformation in youth and the Innovate for Digital India Challenge.

In April 2015 Intel and DST launched the Innovate for Digital India challenge, which was an invitation to aspiring or existing entrepreneurs and innovators to develop intuitive and easy-to-use solutions to drive technology adoption or create applications that accelerate the delivery of e-governance services through eKranti/MyGov apps on mobile platforms.

The challenge attracted 1,900 entries from all over India. The top 10 winning teams and their ideas were announced on November 20.

One of the top 10 finalists was Indian TTS, a Text-to-Speech engine built on the Intel ® Edison board for Indian languages, with a strong emphasis on the rhythm and prosody of speech that is closer to natural enunciation. This solution will help various end users like local guides, alert systems in manufacturing, and interactive voice response (IVR) software – essentially, it will allow a machine to ‘speak for itself,’ based on the situation at hand, the response it has been programmed to provide.

This article is sponsored by Intel.

Proving a broader support to the Digital India initiative, Intel has launched multiple initiatives like the Intel India Maker lab that provides infrastructure to budding entrepreneurs and platforms; the International Science & Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) that stimulates a culture of innovation and technology-enabled transformation in youth and the Digital India Challenge.

It was in April 2015 that Intel and DST launched the Innovate for Digital India challenge. Aspiring or existing entrepreneurs and innovators were invited to develop intuitive and easy-to-use solutions to drive technology adoption or create applications that accelerate the delivery of e-governance services through eKranti/MyGov apps on mobile platforms.

The challenge saw a whopping 1,900 entries from all over India. And, on November 20, the top 10 winning teams and their ideas were announced.

One of the top 10 finalists was Aurrasure, a solution built on Intel® Edison board and powered by Intel® XDK. It is a cloud connected mobile and web integrated system that predicts and monitors environmental parameters. This low-cost, multiple-point pollution monitoring system will empower government functionaries and individuals to keep a check on air pollution and contribute to control it.

Several cities and industrial areas in India are grappling with the constantly worsening pollution, leading to a large number of health issues among the population, which in turns leads to economic losses in the wake of loss of productivity. India clearly needs such solutions before it goes the way of other heavily polluted regions of the world.

Building and owning a home is something almost everyone aspires for. However, the actual process of constructing a house can be quite tedious. Deciding on and buying the different construction materials required, not to mention figuring out where to buy them, and understanding quality differences, etc. is a harrowing task. It was this very situation that 43-year-old Vineet Singh found himself in two years back when he began building his house in Delhi.

There wasn’t a single website or portal that could give him all the information he needed in a consolidated, helpful form. He and his family spent long hours doing research and wading through different magazines. A few months later, he met Puneet Dalmia, MD of Dalmia Cement Bharat Limited. Puneet too was renovating his house at the time and his experience was just as bad as Vineet’s.

It occurred to Vineet that if someone like Puneet, a big name in the building materials industry, had to face such problems with all the resources he had at hand, one could only imagine what a common regular individual went through to survive the ordeal. This common pain-point led to detailed discussions, and it was then that the idea of solving this problem for the regular consumer came about, and Buildzar was born.

What does the platform do?

Buildzar is an online marketplace for all home construction and home renovation solutions. It caters to homeowners, builders, architects, and designers and aims to make the home-building experience smooth and hassle-free.

The platform offers the full range of construction materials, including cement, steel, sand, bathroom fittings, electricals, tiles, paint, bricks and blocks, stone aggregates, water tanks, and more.

“We have also launched a one of its kind turnkey home building solutions, where anyone planning to build a home can get materials, design, and labour services – all in a one-stop shop,” says Vineet.

This unique offering, called ‘Build Your Home with Buildzar’ (BYHB) aims to offer the consumer a professional interaction and allows them to make decisions about building the right home in a short time, sometimes just a few hours.

Joining forces

Buildzar was founded by Vineet and his friend Swapnil Tripathi. Swapnil and Vineet have known each other for 15 years. They tapped their vast network in consumer internet industry to build a solid team right from the beginning. Headhunting firm Clarity Consulting helped them find their Chief Product Officer, Vivek Sinha. Their Sourcing and Operations Director Romil Kaul, Turnkey Solutions Director Darshan Gundawar and Supply Chain Director Ashutosh Srivastava were similarly headhunted.

“We have Sonjoy Chakravorty and Amit Gulati as Associate Directors, e-commerce, and Ashlesha Yadav and Avinash Singh as Tech and Design Heads, respectively. Everybody saw that bringing innovative ideas to the $150 billion global construction industry was a great opportunity. Swapnil’s success at 99acres, which was a hard industry with huge competition, has added a lot of credibility to the setup,” adds Vineet.

Creating newer products

To remove the information asymmetry that currently exists, they have created unique products like Beztimate, a construction cost, quantity, and timeline calculator and store, organised as per an available budget. “We have designed use-case-based combos according to each stage of construction, so that customer does not have to take care of dealing with multiple vendors and scheduling deliveries,” elaborates Vineet.

When they started out, they grappled with answering several basic questions like what was the market size, what were the consumer’s pain points and who were their industry parallels like a Nestopia and central mart Introducing e-commerce to an industry where product prices fluctuate all the time was a huge challenge. On the consumer side, the industry works on a credit-based system, and customers are reluctant to pay taxes. So the team decided to keep an open aggregator model and take the money upfront.

Revenue and numbers

Vineet says that Buildzar started attracting consumers from the very first day, adding that the platform fulfilled orders worth Rs 8 lakh in July. Since then, Buildzar has witnessed tremendous growth. In November, it sold building products worth more than Rs. 1.1 crore, around one-third of total sales since inception.

The team claims that they have clocked gross sales value (GSV) of Rs 5 crore in their first four months, with a run rate of Rs 2 crore a month. Vineet says their average margins are around 3 per cent now, which they intend to increase as they grow.

All transactions are on a 100 per cent advance-payment basis. “We have 275 unique customers and are averaging seven repeat transactions per customer. Our average order value is Rs 55,000.  Our logistics costs are nil, as we follow a marketplace model,” says Vineet.

Buildzar has sold products across 18 categories including steel, cement, electricals, plumbing, flooring, paints, bathroom, kitchen, wardrobes, etc. It has also forayed into eco-friendly products such as solar water heaters and AAC blocks (substitute for bricks).

They started out with 30 sellers on the platform and now have more than 250 building material suppliers across Delhi/NCR. In addition, over 100 domestic and international brands actively sell products on the Buildzar.

“We have defined standardised packages of home construction, where the customer can get design, materials, labour and site supervision at a flat per square foot rate,” says Vineet.

The team not only aggregates but also standardises their service providers to sell design, engineering and construction services. Every service provider on Buildzar has clearly defined deliverables, and provides quality materials and workmanship. Payment milestones are clearly defined.

Funding and future

Buildzar received its initial funding from Puneet Dalmia, and the team is planning to raise series A funding in the next few months.

“Building a new behaviour for consumers and suppliers in a conventional industry is always a challenge. Over a period of time, we have managed to build trust among our users and create a shift in shopping patterns. The customer can not only buy products such as cement, steel and aggregates online with a single click but also manage the delivery time as per their convenience,” explains Vineet.

Buildzar currently delivers to Delhi/NCR and plans to expand to 12-15 large and tier-2 cities over the next three years.

Market space

According to a 2013 PWC report, the construction industry has been a significant contributor to the economy, contributing around 8 per cent to India’s GDP. The sector grew to 13.9 per cent in FY13 when compared to the previous year. The construction of premium real estate accounted for 7-8 per cent of the Indian market. Mumbai and Delhi alone were believed to account for 55 per cent of that market.

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