One evening at Delhi airport, I encountered a person who reminded me of how there are many people in the world who are brave enough to get past their hurdles to live a fulfilling life. I noticed a woman in her thirties asking people for help. She boarded my flight and took the seat next to me. When she went past me to take her seat I noticed that she had a slight limp.

She then got on the phone and started talking about disabilities and inclusion. My curiosity had piqued by then and I initiated a conversation. It turns out, this well-dressed woman who had some kind of physical disability was the HR Associate Director of Snapdeal. She was travelling to Chennai to meet her parents who live there. We struck up a conversation and I learnt her story.

Born with a disability

Thirty-year-old Madhumitha Venkataraman, born into a Tamilian family, lived her initial years in Delhi and then in Mumbai. She was born with an orthopaedic disability called ‘Left Hemiparesis’ (minor paralysis on the left limbs). Madhumitha said her parents ensured she did not feel out of place because of her condition. They enlisted help from all health professionals, including acupuncture treatments, surgery, reiki, physiotherapy etc.

The condition, understandably, made life difficult for Madhumitha, who never knew a normal childhood.

“I was busier than other kids juggling all this and had no time to play,” she remembered.

She added that children asked strange questions and teased her about her calipers. “But I learnt Bharathnatyam and though my hand movements would be funny, I never stopped trying,” Madhumitha said.  She then decided academics would be where she would make sure she excelled.

Challenges during the formative years

Madhumitha moved to Mumbai from Delhi when she was in Class V, and tackling her teens with the disability was the toughest period of her life.

“It was then that I really understood the meaning of being disabled. Losing weight was harder, most people sympathised with me more than they liked me and I could not participate in many things, be it sports or dancing.  Due to my disability, I could not pursue a career in engineering, but that took me to management and I excelled there,” she explained.

Travelling by the local trains was no easy feat for her. “It was very tough to board those crowded local trains of Mumbai. I have fallen down many times, but after all it was just a fall… I decided to continue my journey as I knew that was the only way to go further in my life and my education,” Madhumitha added.

That was the time she developed a new attitude. With every challenge she encountered, she learnt to be stronger and tried harder and started seeing herself as someone who had a disability but who also had a lot of strengths.

“I worked hard at every opportunity that came my way and never said ‘no’ without trying, whether at work or with other interests I had, like dancing, scuba diving or para-gliding,” Madhumitha said.

Career and social responsibility

After completing her graduation, Madhumitha was placed at GE as an HR manager, and started to enjoy the corporate world.  She completed her MBA in Jamnalal Bajaj Institute. As she progressed in her career, things changed, her accomplishments spoke louder than her disability and she found herself more confident and enterprising. She travelled across the world alone on official trips, with no fears in life.

Once, while Madhumitha was recruiting for her company, she had a chance to interview a person with disabilities. When she rejected his application based on his educational qualifications, the person wondered aloud if she, as a person with disabilities, herself did not recruit him, then who would. This gave Madhumita many sleepless nights. She then decided to do something for the disabled and the under-privileged but wished to do so while still remaining in the corporate sector, as it did help open doors.

Madhumitha then moved to Bengaluru taking up her position as Associate Director Human Resources, at Snapdeal, and also led the company’s diversity and inclusion charter, called Advitya. Through Advitya, Madhumitha hopes to connect with corporate heads of other companies to encourage employment for disabled persons.

“I feel happier and more fulfilled now. In the past year, heading Advitya has been personally meaningful and we also focus on all forms of diversity – gender, disability, LGBT, culture, because within inclusion there can be no exclusion,” she said. She is also a part of and founded a support group for persons with disability called ‘one step at a time.’

Road ahead

“I would be lying if I say there is no struggle today; simple things like crossing the road, walking and wading through the infrastructure, typing on the laptop with one hand and cutting vegetables and cooking are all tough. This journey is going to be a constant struggle. I believe it is best to deal with it one day at a time and I have learnt potential ways of ‘juggad’ to deal with every challenge I encounter,” a positive Madhumitha said.

She blogs on disability, speaks in conferences, and recently ran a 5K marathon. She was also recently awarded for her achievements to deal with disability.

As the flight journey wrapped up, Madhumitha contemplated on her life currently. She said, “As I go through the journey, I see a lot of goodness around me every day; strangers who come to help without showing it, who support in so many ways. Of course, I meet a lot of people who excessively sympathise or hurt me with their remarks, but I have also been privileged to have wonderful colleagues at work and amazing friends who have treated me as an equal and in fact pushed me to stretch my own limits.”

Madhumitha Venkataraman’s Facebook Page.

Two sales professionals had just stepped out to get some air and grab a bite on what seemed to be a day just like any other in June 2014, not knowing that their next meal was about to lead them to an idea that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will laud, one day. “The idea came in fluke while having snacks. As the snacks were served on a newspaper obituary column page, we felt a bit disturbed as it looked so insulting to see tribute pages being used to serve snacks. We thought to ourselves, ‘can’t these be presented in a more respectable and presentable manner, which also stays forever and can be accessed globally and be remembered and shared?’ These questions gave birth to Shradhanjali. The sole purpose was to maintain the sanctity of our deceased ancestors legacies,” says Vivek Vyas, Founder and CEO of India’s first online obituary portal, Shradhanjali.com – a startup that came to be showcased at the first Indian Language Digital Festival Bhasha, earlier this month on March 11.

Keeping the spirit alive

A first-generation entrepreneur, Vivek was in his seventh year of working in sales and training, and had been instrumental in developing and training the Baroda module of the bancassurance team of SBI, taking it nationally to the number one spot. He had always wanted to plug the gap between the real and virtual world. His co-founder, Vimal Popat, came with 12 years of experience in sales, man management and developing successful dealerships and agencies, having worked with Castrol India Ltd. and later, managing a unit of more than 100 successful financial advisors with Tata AIG, where he also created many records. The two had been colleagues there for four years until that lunch in 2011. Over that afternoon, they decided they wanted to take a leap of faith with this innovative idea they had arrived on. And they leapt, if not following the sound of a cash register chiming, than just the fulfillment of helping people keep alive the memories and legacies of their loved ones.

How to pay your Shradhanjali

With the beta launched in 2011 and the final version of it incorporated in 2013, their interactive online platform invites contributions to remember and celebrate the lives of all the passed souls, through text, videos and pictures. Trying to keep their model as simple as possible yet comprehensive, they have facilitated the uploading, posting, sharing and publishing of the complete memoirs of one’s loved one, which include – biographies, family details, photos, videos, complete with background music selection. People from across the world can post their condolences and memories and also set reminders for their birth and death anniversaries year on year. What’s more, the biography and condolences can be penned down in ten different Indian languages– Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Guajarati, English, Malayalam, Tamil, Bangla and Kannada, and will be adding Telugu, Punjabi, Assamese, Bodo, Konkani, Manipuri, Nepali, Oriya, Sindhi, Santali and Dogri to that list in the coming three months.

“The newspaper obituary market is a highly scattered market and no one has ever tried to capture the market size. The market is huge and hasn’t been tapped so far. Every year, more than seven million people pass away and with an average family of four, 28 million people directly get affected by the loss of their dear ones,” says Vivek.

Shradhanjali has garnered customers from major parts of India, USA, Canada, UK and Africa, whose primary need is to relive memories of their loved ones and pass on their legacy to their descendants.

Of goodwill and good fortune

As of now, they operate with ‘Freemium’ model wherein they charge Rs 5,000 from a subscriber. But, the profiles of martyrs, educationists, activists, sports persons, politicians are kept on complimentary basis.

The website has published over 400 paid obituaries so far. Their monthly revenues range in between Rs 65,000 and 80,000, with close to 9,000 monthly unique visitors to the site.

Legacy.com and tributes.com from USA are the biggest players in the sector across the globe. Tributes.in, obituaryindia.com and newspaper obituary columns are working in the same space that they are in, locally.

They have been covered more than 160 times, and made it to the Limca Book of Records and India Book of Records, and winning the Manthan South West India Award, Big Business Plan by Espark-Viridian, and the Real Diamond of Gujarat award. Prime MinisterNarendra Modi appreciated the service through a letter addressed to Vivek, too, stating, “I am glad to know that Trinity Unicepts Pvt. Ltd, At Rajkot, is launching Shradhanjali.com. Keeping the memories alive through an online portal is a memorable effort by the designer of this website.” YourStory’s language festival, Bhasha 2016, also lauded their ideology of doing this great work alongside celebrating our Indian languages.

With zero spend on marketing and advertising, the team has leveraged social media to get the word out. Now, they are looking to expand to States other than Gujarat and launch three other subscription plans to suit the diverse needs of their customers.

Website

Bigbasket’s story so far

Recomended read from September 2015: The Bigbasket of groceries is set to get bigger

Sector overview

Recommended read: Does Flipkart shutting down ‘Nearby’ spell trouble in the online grocery sector?

Future plans

Bigbasket aims to use the proceeds of this round to finance its growth through further penetration into existing markets, expansion into Tier II cities across India, scaling-up of its recently launched express delivery and specialty store business that caters to top-up and emergency purchases, and increasing the product range offered to customers.

The revolution of mobile payment has simplified payments for the common man and has eliminated the use of cash and cards in day-to-day transactions. With telecom networks offering 3G and 4G services across geographies at an affordable price, India now is the second largest telecommunication market, with rural areas witnessing one-fourth of the total subscribers.

Founded in November 2015, The Mobile Wallet (TMW) is a Mumbai-based online payment solution startup that uses barcode and QR code technology to process payments. This encrypted transaction mode ensures safety, reliability and convenience. Both offline and online merchants can accept payment using this technology. The customer does not have to share her card and bank details with the merchants. The startup uses 256-bit encryption data security to secure the bank credentials of users.

Each customer and merchant is mapped by a unique QR code for identification and security. The app is equipped with a bar code scanner to read these QR codes and the data is passed through an encryption. Coupled with locational intelligence, the app is capable to interact with the nearby merchant environment. The startup is developing technology not only for the last-mile payment but also for the discovery stage in the consumer journey. IoT is another area that TME+W is currently exploring to simplify the payment systems.

The company recently raised a seed capital of Rs 33 crore ($5 million) from an angel investor.

We are currently investing in attracting and retaining the best in the class developers and engineers from premium institutes to develop capabilities and scalability,” says founder Vinay Kalantri.

Vinay (34) has completed his Bachelors in Business Management from Drexel University, Philadelphia, US. He is the Director of Mumbai-based Digi Port and MD of QueMobile, a telecommunication services provider that he started in 2011. “Once that was established my urge to thrive more in the technology industry made me go on and start The Mobile Wallet,” states Vinay.

The wallet works on 2G speeds and is targeted at small-store owners. The merchant app is now available on the Google Play Store and the Amazon app store for Android phone users and Blackberry (OS10 +) users. The startup has on-boarded 25,000 merchants from Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Kolkata, Gujarat and Indore. It is aiming to reach 50 more cities in the next three months and eventually on-board one million merchants in one year. The company has a team of 110 employees with the tech team comprising 60 percent, and 20 percent in sales, marketing, HR and legal. It has a special department for the merchants driven by a 1,200-strong merchant acquisition team.

Services in the wallet

TMW offers services like mobile recharge, bill payment and DTH, online shopping, travel services, entertainment, sending and receiving money, retail shopping, financial services, food and beverages and gifts and florists.

Going by the RBI guidelines, TMW has developed a procedure to attend the grievances of the customers in respect of various issues by setting up customer support and a grievance redressal mechanism.

Privacy policy

To open an account in TMW, users have to provide name and e-mail address, telephone number, credit, debit information, date of birth, taxpayer or employer identification number and more. The company claims to not share users’ personal information with third parties for marketing purposes without seeking one’s prior permission.

The revenue will be generated through user and merchant acquisition. We are currently working on creating value between users and merchants. This will definitely create a platform for brand tie-ups,” says Vinay.

M-payment industry is on growing spree

The mobile wallet adoptions in rural and semi-urban areas are mostly driven by the Government’s Digital India initiative.  According to India Mobile Wallet Market Forecast and Opportunities 2020, India is expected to reach $6.6 billion by 2020. 6Wresearch predicts that the value of India’s mobile wallet transactions will reach $11.5 billion by 2020. Currently, India has about 135 million wallet users. PayU Money, Paytm, Mobikwik, Oxigen and My Mobile Payments are considered to have captured the majority of the market share. The country is moving towards cashless economy, with more than 40 percent of e-commerce transactions happening via mobile phones in India.

However, the introduction of Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and Bharatpay may threaten the growth of mobile wallets in India. The National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), a primary body, will govern all the retail payment systems in India.

The Mobile Wallet

Foodtech and food delivery apps have been on a roller-coaster ride this past year, and continue to garner attention and investor interest. The year began with news of Series C funding for Swiggy, and funding for FreshMenu, in addition to news of other angel investments in this space. In September last year, Zomato raised a funding of $60 million. They too have ventured into the online delivery space.

While $35 million and $60 million in funds raised is considered one of the bigger investments in India, Chinese food delivery and group buying company Meituan-Dianping raised a whopping $3.3 billion. According to China e-Commerce Research Center, Meituan’s transaction volumes reached $860 million in the first six months of 2013.

US, India, and China – the Big Three

While 2014 was a good year for foodtech with a total of $2.4 billion of private capital invested in the space, the main difference from previous years was the number of deals and the maturity of the startups.

In an interview with YourStory, Kunal Walia of Khetal Advisors said that foodtech investments in India are a perfect follow-through to the recent trend of ‘habit-forming companies’ attracting significant rounds of capital.

So, why is the foodtech scenario so much bigger in China? Ben Jiang of UC-Web says that outside of just foodtech, O2O (offline-to-online) plays a big role in China. Mobile Internet, he adds, is the future of China’s Internet industry and O2O is at the centre of mobile Internet. “So you can see that the significance of O2O in the market and this includes group buying, food delivery and lots of other forms of mobile businesses,” says Ben.

In any case, when all three markets are compared, we see that the Chinese are the strongest and still growing. Many believe that the country has so many successful food delivery players because of the extent of smartphone penetration in the country. India, China and the US are driving smartphone growth worldwide, with China in the number one position, followed by the US and India.

There are three different types of players in the Chinese food space. The first is group-buying startups like Meituan/Dianping, who have their own delivery team. The second includes companies like Baidu (Baidu Waimai) and Alibaba (Koubei), e-commerce giants venturing into the space. The third type is the pure-play food delivery startup like Ele.me.

Baidu launched food delivery services in May 2014. Since then, the team claims that Baidu Takeout Delivery has shown an increasing GMV of nearly 8x from Q1 to Q4 in 2015.  Baidu Takeout Delivery currently operates in more than 100  cities, and claims to be taking more than 1 million orders per day. As of Q4 2015, Baidu Takeout Delivery was leading in 63 cities based on working age demographic, according to the company’s internal analysis.

Of all the mentioned Chinese players, Ele.me leads the country’s O2O food ordering market with a 40 per cent market share, according to a report by Analysys International. Several of the larger Internet companies are also venturing into the O2O space, the biggest of them being Alibaba.

In 2013, the number of active smartphone users touched the one billion mark for the first time. China again took the lead with 436.1 million users, the US had 143.9 million users and India had 76 million.

The city syndrome

However, like in India, food delivery and ordering apps are more popular in Tier I and II cities of China as well. This is mainly because of user demographics. Ben says that young professionals are too busy to cook. Going to a restaurant with their busy schedule isn’t much of an option either, so their focus is on ordering food online.

In India too, there is a focus on the Tier I and II cities, not just with the audiences, but also in terms of investor interest. Seedfund Venture Partner and accomplished investor/mentor Sanjay Anandaram says that most technology-enabled food businesses are operations-intensive. “Most of these app-based food businesses gain initial traction in certain pockets of a city, but the same cannot be expected from all parts of the country,” he adds.

It seems foodtech will always have a market as long as hungry people crave convenience. However, the unpredictable nature of the business with no specific patterns is leading to logistical issues. High cost of delivery and the need to ensure quality and temperature of food add to the difficulties.

To ensure long-term sustainability, foodtech startups need to focus on their unit economics and have better control on both supply and demand. The future looks interesting for foodtech, and with the breakthroughs in new age technology, a day may not be too far when drones will be able to swiftly deliver food within record times.

Cutting the competition

However, the food business in China is highly competitive and cut-throat. Niklas Ostber, Founder, Delivery Hero, was quoted in TechCrunch saying that the competition in China has become anything but sane, where companies have been flooding the markets with free food to users and no commission to restaurants. He also added that the investment needed to survive in the market is steep.

In the recent past, the focus on delivery of anything has brought Ele.me and Meituan under scrutiny. The Chinese media have reported that the giants have been involved in illegal businesses by selling food from unlicensed restaurants. The scrutiny has gotten stronger after a CTV programme airing, which reported on Weibo that authorities in Beijing will investigate the different food ordering platforms.

While the situation is under scrutiny in China, India still has a very long way to go, be it in terms of market share and penetration as in China, or in terms of using technology to build food and breaking into the market as in the US.

There are few things in this world that bring more joy than food, and even with all the different food delivery apps and foodtech platforms, one can’t top a good fine-dining experience. And this sporting season, nothing can give you better fun than food and cricket. Especially, if it happens to be restaurant of famous former cricketer Zaheer Khan.

The idea for Zaheer Khan’s ‘Hospitality’ was as an offshoot of several ideas. After different brainstorming sessions, Zaheer Khan and his family felt that starting a restaurant and a sports lounge would be a great idea, as, after all, Zaheer’s second love is food. This gave birth to ZaheerKhan’s in 2005.

Pacing the growth

Anees Khan, Director at Zaheer Khan’s, and Zaheer Khan’s brother, who joined the restaurant business in 2006, says that they aimed to develop a sense of community and anticipation at Hospitality. And then it was all about getting the food right and making it unique and relevant.

The first restaurant was set up at Lulla Nagar, Pune. Initially, the focus was on the fine dining aspect of the restaurant. Later, a sports bar and lounge were added.

“Sports bars are the new subcultural phenomenon in offering value for money and being a major player in a sports fan’s experience of a given game. I am assured that my sports bar will capture audiences in giving them a preferred place to whip up some high octave team fervour especially during matches like between India and Pakistan,” says Zaheer Khan.

Alifya Sayed, Director at Zaheer Khan’s Hospitality, and Zaheer Khan’s sister-in-law, adds that it wasn’t easy to be a part of the industry which is growing each second. There were many who told them to explore other avenues, but they were sure of the idea and were passionate about it. “Everything else just seamlessly worked towards fulfilling our love for food,” adds 32-year-old Alifya.

Testing waters

The challenges faced were primarily regarding licencing, manpower and customer service consistencies. Being first-generation entrepreneurs, they had to learn everything on the go.  The team, therefore, took its time to learn, unlearn and relearn things from its first outlet in Lulla Nagar to the next at Phoenix Mall in 2010.

While Anees had done a course in Hotel Management from UK, there was a gap between what he learnt and the job. It took them time to get the operations and processes in place.

It was to ensure the quality of meal and service, the team put various checks in place. Starting from training of the staff, sourcing of the ingredients from the right vendors, and customer interaction and, ultimately, the taste of the food, everything is closely monitored and managed by the core management team, the duo say. The first year was all about learning the nuances of cost.

A steady growth

Today, the company sees a growth of 35 to 40 percent YoY. Anees says that it takes six months to a year for the first restaurant to break even. In the past ten years, they have had six outlets across the city. Even with the growing play of food delivery and foodtech companies in the space, the trio believe that hospitality is a vast industry and it cannot break the appeal of fine dining and sports lounge.

Aniruddha Patil, one of the regulars at Zaheer Khan’s, says the restaurant has seen steady growth since the launch. He adds that from initial wow factor of a celebrity restaurant to creating a place where the food speaks for itself, it has been an amazing journey to be part of.

“Infusing music, sports and delicious food has reinforced the concept of a sports bar in major cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune. Currently, we are looking to expanding in Pune before venturing into smaller cities where the idea of sports bar is slowly gaining momentum. We are also having major expansion plans in cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune,” adds Zaheer Khan.

The business of experience

The market size of fine dining is expected to reach $195 million by 2018 and is believed to be growing at a healthy rate of close to 15 percent. Apart from bringing in the experience of fine dining, celebrity restaurants capitalise on infusing the sense of grandeur and awe associated with famous names.

Some of the other celebrity-run restaurants include Tendulkar’s in Mumbai, ‘Royalty,’ Shilpa Shetty’s nightclub in Bandra, Dino Moreo’s Crepe Sensation, Arjun Rampal and Suniel Shetty’s restaurants, among others.

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The thought of riding a cycle to work seems rather appealing, but the idea of heading to office sweaty and showering there puts most people off. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a vehicle that gave you the convenience of a motorbike or scooter while rushing to work and the exercise benefit of a cycle while heading back from work? This is exactly what Narayan Subramaniam, Niraj Rajamohan and Preetham Murthy are building.

Over the past year, Ultraviolette has been looking at innovating personal mobility. The team is looking to solve the fundamental problem emerging in the urban lifestyle and transportation space.

Shifting gears

While doing his Masters at Umea, Sweden, Narayan saw how people were beginning to view mobility in Europe and Asia. Narayan and Preetham, who was then working at his own waste management firm, decided to start Ultraviolette.

Preetham says the idea of Ultraviolette resonated at a personal level. As a student in San Francisco, he had found it difficult to ride his cycle at all times, and what Ultraviolette was building made practical sense.

“We started off in a small room in Koramangala and began working on the initial core design and raw prototyping. One of our core IPs was design, we wanted to make most things in-house, but we also knew that the different iterations would cost money, so we went in for a large-scale 3D printer,” says 30- year-old Narayan.

A few months later, Niraj, who was working on his own venture HereNow, joined as the third co-founder.

Changing mobility

The trio decided to down their focus to two fundamental aspects –personal mobility for the first and last mile of the commute, where public transport is established, and building a vehicle that suited an individual’s mobility and exercise needs.

“Vehicles aren’t adapted to our lifestyles. Our need for exercise hasn’t been considered when we look at the motorcycles, and the cycles don’t account for our need to travel somewhere quickly,” adds 30-year old Preetham. This led them to create Twister.

“The Twister is built differently, it works as a cycle and a bike. The frame can be rotated 180 degrees; in one mode, it offers you the ergonomics of cycling. The other mode offers you the ergonomics of riding a bike. Unlike the cycle with a motor, the experience, seating position and the performance of the vehicle is different in the cycle and bike mode,” adds Narayan.

The team says it considers all aspects of our social and urban lifestyle and fuses them with mobility. The initial designs and prototypes were worked on by Narayan and one of the core team members Karthik Kannan.

While there are cycles with motors available in the market, they are fundamentally meant to be a cycle and are retro-fitted with a motor. So if someone is looking to travel long distances, it doesn’t work.

Gliding to the Twister

The team realised that working on the prototype for Twister would cost money and they would need more resources, especially to get the IP in place. “We knew we couldn’t take a few sheets of paper and go to the investor and say this is the idea so invest in us. We had to have a functional prototype,” adds 30-year old Niraj.

To raise the funds to begin work on Twister, the team began with Glide as a design on paper; after software validations, they procured standard motors and batteries off the shelf in South East Asia. Most of the body and components were 3D printed.

Once the prototype was ready, they created a video to present to investors, most of whom liked the idea, but were unwilling to take a risk. Narayan adds that finding the ideal match between them and investors took time. “We needed to find someone who was willing to bet on something that wasn’t yet a trend in our country,” he says.

The team raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from a Chennai-based investor. Twister went on to win an Excellent Design Award, and was showcased at the International Bike Show, Taiwan in March 2016.

Cracking the mould

However, building the initial prototype wasn’t easy. Although they had the idea on paper, extracting functional essence was a challenge. It took various iterations to get the right match, Niraj says the product would look great at the workshop, but once they got it into their studio, they realised it needed changes.

In addition to the challenges of ergonomics, the team realised the battery technology needed to be built from scratch. Niraj who built the battery technology stressed the need for cooling and thermal efficiency to avoid fires.

“We are working on improving the efficiency of the batteries in terms of charging and thermal efficiency to make it safe even if you use it in a very high performance mode. You will see the same kind of technology that goes into the Tesla,” says Niraj.

This year, the team will have a soft launch and conduct pilot studies at Germany, Sweden and Amsterdam; go to universities and towns; and launch in the European markets in 2017, priced between $3,500-5,000.

While the design, manufacturing and assembly will happen in India, Ultraviolette will be tying up with vendors in Taiwan and China for high-precision manufacture. They are also working on a performance based two-wheeler for the Indian market, which is in its R&D and ideation stages.

The market of EV

With the government targeting 100 GW of solar by 2022, and an ambitious plan to put seven million electric and hybrid vehicles on the road each year by 2020, the industry is likely to gain pace.

Globally, several companies have released electric vehicles into the market. These include Brammo, Zero Motorcycles, BMW, Electric Motorsport, Hollywood Electrics, Yamaha, Harley-Davidson and Lito.

Japanese Terra Motors started selling electric scooters in India in 2015 and announced that they were building a $5 million plant in Gurgaon. At the Consumer Electronic Show 2015, Gogoro announced the Gogoro Smartscooter and Gogoro Energy Network, a battery-swapping network.

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Enterprises are waking up to the security risks involved in connecting their IT-systems to the consumer world. They have reason to fear the new-age hacker because cyber-attacks are becoming more frequent and increasingly dangerous. These hackers are extremely well paid, by State and non-State agencies, to steal information, some of which is sensitive to national interest.

Today, enterprises offer services over the cloud to cars, homes and factories, which are connected to smart-phones of the consumer, or the factory manager in the case of the latter. These smartphones and devices have changed the architecture of enterprise IT, and in this era of metamorphosis, many companies are yet to secure their IT, which connects them to the consumer world. A hacker can break into a smartphone and enter a car’s engine control module, which they can then use as a gateway to enter the cloud of the corporate when it is remotely fixing a software patch in the car.

These new-age hackers are called black-hats, and there is no stopping them. Recently, Chrysler, in the US, recalled 1.4 million vehicles to fix software, which was hacked by black-hats. In this context, India too is vulnerable and needs security startups that can protect its Corporate and Government institutions’ sensitive information.

Imagine if the SCADA machines controlling India’s Power Grid were shut down remotely by a hacker from China or Russia. This would result in economic and social chaos across India. In such an event, money would be pulled out of India’s stock market. But somebody would have netted a profit globally. It sounds like a conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, that is the truth that we are waking up to in the cyber-world.

The birth of Innefu Labs

Of late, India has had its share of innovative software security companies trying to make a living out of fighting these black-hats. Abhishek Sharma and Tarun Wig, friends and self-confessed white-hats – hackers with ethical intentions to protect information – dabbled with protecting their personal computers before they embarked on a startup journey. A few years of corporate experience taught them that the security market in India was dominated by MNC companies. Abhishek had to quit his lucrative job in TCS after Tarun Wig, who worked as a security consultant, convinced him that they could build a decent security company with their expertise in the subject. Their premise was to engineer a security platform that could be cheaper, yet powerful, for Indian Corporates and Governments to use. Their aim is to become a substitute for off-the-shelf products sold by MNCs such as RSA and Symantec.

However, there was also another reason they chose to build their own company. Data from McAfee, the security company, suggests that India has witnessed attacks on more than 300,000 of its websites. The report adds that cybercrime is a growth industry where the returns are great, for black-hats, and the risks low. The report estimates that the likely annual cost to the global economy from cyber-crime is more than $400 billion. A conservative estimate would be $375 billion in losses, while the maximum could be as much as $575 billion.

Their firm Innefu provides two-factor authentication, open source intelligence, link analysis with pattern matching and fuzzy logic, social media monitoring and email encryption products. Their biggest client to date is the DRDO, the defence research wing of the Central Government, and other government departments. Tarun did not want to divulge details of the implementation because of strict non-disclosure agreements with their clients.

“Folks in the industry said that we would not last more than three years. They expected us to change our business model. But we are glad we stuck with security services and, in the process, we have several clients using our products,” says Tarun Wig, co-founder of Innefu Labs.

Their first client was a public-sector bank, which gave them a chance to encrypt emails in 2013. The client has stuck with them since and these relationships have helped increase Innefu’s revenues to close to $1 million, and they have acquired 51 clients in two years. The business has been self-funded and the duo invested less than Rs 1 crore.

“I wish the Indian government would create a fund for security software firms. The US and China have government funds supporting startups in our field,” says Tarun. He adds that since government services will be delivered on smart-phones, at least in the next five years, the Android operating system, or any other operating system, needs to be secured from hackers.

“Most of this data will be of national interest and must be protected locally,” says Tarun.

The market opportunity

• Cyber Security is a big business and several firms have raised large rounds of money. ThousandEyes, based in the US, has raised $60 million over the last three years
• Consulting firm Gartner says that $76.1 billion was the total amount spent on cyber-security in 2015. Cyber-security companies like Sourcefire and Veracode, from the US, became large businesses in the last decade because they were able to raise venture capital money and were also supported by large corporates.
• Aujas Networks is the only security company to have scaled up from India. It focused on the US market and offered IT-Risk compliance as a service.
• However, over the last three years, Indian startups like Appknox, Instasafe, Shieldsquare and Paladion are going after the Indian enterprise security market. But that being said, there have been no funding deals in the Indian security space. Even Impermium, which was rumoured to have been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount, was based in the US. The founding team members are Indians and they had raised $9 million for the company there.

The business model

The business model for security startups, like Innefu Labs, is clearly based on securing long-term contracts with banks and government departments. It is in securing many such deals that these businesses can survive and scale up. These businesses stand the risk of being commoditised. Unless they focus on research-based engineering and creating intellectual property, they will not survive. “Startups can focus on winning businesses from small industries and medium-sized banks to scale up. But they can also work with IT services companies to penetrate into banks,” says R Natarajan, CFO of Helion Ventures. He adds that the differentiation comes from being vertical experts rather than focusing on horizontal business lines.

Hopefully, in time to come, the government creates an eco-system purely for security startups. But the Indian government is yet to look at verticals, which they need to secure in the name of national interest. Perhaps security startups, like Innefu, deserve that push, and protection, to build their technology and scale up their business.

A Chandigarh-based entrepreneur KS Bhatia has attracted the attention of Google CEO Sundar Pichai by selling water pumps online. Sundar Pichai appreciated his business model at his ‘Digital India’ speech before PM Modi in the US last year.

Inspired by the brainchild of his 14-year-old son Aagaman, KS Bhatia founded Pumpkart.com in June 2014. Pumpkart.com is a Chandigarh-based online B2B marketplace for water pumps and other related accessories. The platform allows manufacturers, dealers, and customers buy and sell pumps. It also provides its customers with multiple payment options such as online payment, COD, and EMIs.

Pumpkart aggregates pumps from 200 manufacturers and 1,000 dealers, distributors, and OEMs available pan India. With its direct association with manufacturers, Pumpkart maintains physical inventory for products.

I always wanted to take the pumping industry to new heights. I am in the pumping industry for the past 15 years, and have worked hard to make people aware of the role of pumps in their lives. Pumpkart is aimed at helping customers make informed choices for any type of domestic, agriculture, and commercial pumps. With our new model, we are more focussed on B2B via O2O stores,” says 44-year-old KS Bhatia.

KS Bhatia is a chemical engineer from RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, and an MBA from IMT, Ghaziabad. He has been successfully running a company called Air Fluid Engineers and Equipments, which deals in pumping projects, since 1998. The company’s main focus was serving B2B institutional clients, like real estate construction companies, state housing department, air-conditioning companies. He has also worked with contractor likes firefighting and plumbing, and Sewage and Industrial OEM’s.

Online-to-offline model

Pumpkart has initiated an offline store vertical by opening its first exclusive Pumpkart.com touch and feel store in Chandigarh in February 2016, which is managed by six employees. It plans to open 100 such stores in the next four years via franchising model in different formats and become a one-stop solution for both institutional and contractors clientele.

Pumpkart.com is currently self-funded and backed by the existing venture Air Fluid Engineers and Equipments, which has achieved a turnover of Rs 19 crores in the last fiscal year (as per the balance sheet). Currently, the overall expenses and marketing budget of Pumpkart is minimal given the capital infused in it is personal money. KS Bhatia so far has invested Rs 1.25 crore in Pumpkart.com. Currently, they are in talks with some investors to raise funds.

Pumpkart has an in-house team of 20 people handling technical support, online promotions, customer support, logistics, and business development. It has also services to support website development and networking.

This segment is not touched by anyone so far. Therefore, we are not selling on low prices or offer discounts from our pockets. Our aim is to bring the profitability in this vertical in a short span,” says KS Bhatia.

Since Pumpkart deals directly with all the manufacturers and distributors, it does pricing according to their said margins. The company provides customers free installation and one year warranty, but any manufacturing defect is borne by the manufacture.

During the initial days in June 2014, it used to sell seven pumps a month and the number eventually reached 700 pumps. In the last few months, the average sale has been in the range of 40 to 50 pumps daily. In a span of 18 months, it has sold 10,000 pumps. It gains a margin of 5 to 10 per cent from the entire sales process.

Amplifying the service model

Pumpkart will soon create a sales network through sanitaryware, hardware, and plumbing shops by offering them the commissions. In a bid to strengthen the service model, Pumpkart will kick-start RepairingIndia.com in the next three to four years, which will connect rural or sub-urban repairing centres across India. KS Bhatia stated that the initiative is likely to meet the repairing needs and organise the entire repairing industry.

Government-backed services

Pumpkart has signed an agreement with the Government of India to serve the entire government facilitated 2.5 lakh kiosks across the country. Primarily, it will start by serving five per cent of the entire network of Government Common Service Centre.

According to Ken Research, the India Pumps Market size in terms of revenue generation is expected to increase at a CAGR of 17.5 per cent during the period of FY 2015-19. The Indian government announced to invest significantly in the infrastructural development in the country; thereby the demand for pumps will gradually pick up pace. Moreover, increased investments in the irrigation and oil gas sectors will also push the demand for pumps.

Pumpkart claims to be the pioneer in India when it comes to online marketplaces for water pumps. With a separate team for search engine optimisation in place, it has invested in Google AdWords and gained visibility in both Google US and UK. Pumpkart achieved a turnover of Rs 3 crore last fiscal year, and it is expecting a turnover of Rs 25 crore this fiscal year.

Pumpkart

They say poker is a gamble, but not so long ago, they said that about entrepreneurship too. And if you think about it, the two aren’t all too different. Your skill decides your competence; and your decisions decide your victory;this equation hardly has room for luck.

Check, fold, muck and repeat.

Or.

Call, raise, go all-in, win and repeat.

A good businessman also weighs up the hand he is dealt and attempts to make something of it; he then bets on himself, raises the stakes and takes the plunge. He taps into his progress and goes all-in; he doesn’t fold when he’s so close to victory, even when he senses competition. With a combination of nerve, attitude, and flair, he sticks it out until he’s the last man standing.

As does a good poker player. Clawin D’Souza, 26-year-old professional poker player, is both. He became one of the first Indian players to reach the Supernova status, an elite player ranking, having played over 5 million hands and won over 35 titles since he first started playing in 2008.

Check

Clawin has hated numbers as far as he can remember, until he met Sandhya Raman, who helped him befriend his math,in the ninth grade. Armed with his newfound love for numbers, Clawin also wanted to become a sportsperson, as he found himself decently good at everything he tried his hand at – but, he realised, not the best. “I also used to play a lot of football, but I always felt like I was at a huge disadvantage because there were always kids my age who had way more experience and training than me. I was always looking for a sport where I could be that person people look up to.”

The BBM graduate from Presidency College in Bengaluru got his chance, and he decided to call the universe on it. “I started playing poker in 2008 when I was in college, on a Facebook Poker App where you play for non-monetary chips. I read a little bit online about some basic strategies, and I was instantly hooked to the math and psychology that is so intrinsic to the game. Poker brought out the competitive side of me. I remember sitting for hours on my computer trying to increase my score to a million play chips.”

Call

Upon reaching this goal, his naiveté led him to think he could take on the world. While the spirit was bang on, perhaps his timing wasn’t.“Amateurish fearlessness crashed head first into reality when I was invited to a real money home game for tiny stakes. This is where I first realised that if Texas Hold ‘em poker is a game of a thousand levels; I was still ensconced in level zero.”

Hardly deterred, if anything, Clawin was more enamoured by the mysteries of the game and wanted to crack the code. “That was when I realised why they say that poker is a game that takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master. I came across a site that trains players and gives them some free money if they pass a quiz, so I started searching online for strategies and built a strong foundation for this beautifully complex game.”

Raise

Before he knew it, he was making a lot more money playing poker than he was at his day job as a business development manager. The year was 2008. “I decided to take a year off to try playing poker professionally. This was my opportunity to be ahead of the curve and be one of the first people who took the game seriously, in India.

The gamble paid off. “I feel like a small rockband that blew up overnight!”He raked in winnings of over Rs 10 lakh in the first 18 months of his professional journey.

Tap

Gaming law in India is the state’s domain, and high courts of states like Karnataka, West Bengal, Goa and Sikkim
have unequivocally declared poker as a game of skill. But the sport of poker in India is yet to get the light of day from an ever-rigid mindset, where as a blanket rule, any card game is labelled as gambling. But it is starting to be part of the young adult consciousness and vocabulary. “Poker, however, has a 80 per cent skill factor in the short run, and is a 100 per cent skill sport in the long term, given one plays enough number of hands. I can best liken it to chess, where the focus is firmly on being decision oriented, and not result oriented. Over the long run, variance in poker tends to zero, and much like any other sport, the cream rises to the top.”

But, Clawin feels the sport has come a long way in getting traction. “It is a game thatcan be learnt easily and now Indian poker websites like Spartan, PokerHigh and Baazi make it incredibly simple to instantly log on and be part of the action,” he says.

All-in

His greatest high was when he won a tournament at the Asian Poker Tour in 2012, where he walked away with a little more than Rs. 2.5 Lakhs in a single day. “As a player who had started at stakes as low as Rs. 50, this was a dream come true. After that I got selected as a poker coach at an international poker site and had the opportunity to travel around Europe to teach poker.”

For Indian poker tournaments, the biggest buy-in is Rs 1 lakh, which has happened twice in the last six months in Goa. The more popular way of playing poker is online cash games that run 24/7 on multiple Indian poker sites.

Last year, Clawin played the Rs 1 lakh buy-inHigh Roller tournament in Goa. “It was a great experience because the sharpest poker minds in India played for a total prize pool of over Rs1 crore. The competitive spirit in the poker room was palpable, and I really felt like I had ‘arrived.’”

Presently, he plays the India Poker Championship held at the Deltin Royale, and the Spartan Poker and Poker High tournaments online, from home, for four to six hours a day. “Besides this, I spend a decent amount of time trying to further understand the mathematics behind various situations in poker,” says the star, who is now gearing up to take on the World Series of Poker next year.

Repeat

Given the stage the player as well as his favourite sport is at currently, Clawin thinks it is only natural that he become an architect of the trajectory the sport will take, in India. He feels the interests have been aroused, but no formal means exist for aspirants to cultivate their skills. “My plan is to figure out ways to introduce this sport to a larger audience. I am presently working on an online poker school where I intend to teach the basics of poker strategy in a structured and organised manner. I have already been coaching players on an individual basis, and presently it takes anywhere between two to eight coaching sessions to transform a beginner with little experience into a winning player.” The poker school is presently free but he intends to create a membership structure where players pay a monthly fee to have full access to our strategy articles and videos.

Entrepreneurship is tough enough, but imagine starting up in a small town with none of the ‘ecosystem support’ that a big-city entrepreneur takes for granted. Google had changed its search algorithm to make offline link building useless, and Abhilash Pillai and his team in Latur were suddenly out of business.

Abhilash along with his two friends had set up Spiderroost Technologies, a web development and SEO company, in 2006, and had to shut it down as it wasn’t doing well. Even the Global SEO contest they won didn’t save it. It was like, all of a sudden, audio cassettes were replaced by MP3’s and then nobody would buy the old cassettes.

Entangling the Spider web

“The new algorithm required much more skills for the team and we were not prepared for this. Finally, I dissolved the partnership firm and decided to go for web designing as I could work as a freelancer on my own and earn money,” says 39-year-old Abhilash.

Though born in Kerala, Abhilash and his family moved to Latur when his father had started businesses in the town. His father had migrated from Kerala to Mumbai, and later was asked to take charge of a construction contract at Latur by a company he was employed at in Mumbai. He then decided to start his own business in Latur.

Abhilash finished his schooling in Latur. He then went to Pune for his CA and returned to Latur to look after his father’s business. With deep interest in computer science, Abhilash used to spend most of his spare time to learn web designing, SEO, graphics, and animation on the Internet.

After shutting down Spiderroost Technologies, Abhilash started to learn a lot more about web design. He approached few hotels and asked them whether they needed a website done. “I did my first website for Rs 1,500, and the client was very impressed with my work. I then did a few more at a lesser cost. It was pretty hard to educate people about websites and took lot of time to convince them. Then came the TV ads showing websites for Rs 100, which made marketing web design business harder,” adds Abhilash.

Bringing the offline online

He soon decided to wait for the customer to show up and demand a website. He kept taking on freelance web design and services projects. With time, he was able to establish his next company Rinisha Web Services, started in 2010. Abhilash adds,

“The most painful thing for an entrepreneur is to begin something from the start. I tried on various freelance sites, but without a minimum number of reputation online (reviews) it was hard for me to get orders.”

However, Abhilash saw that the scope of Rinisha in Latur was limited. He found that he had to create speed draw videos, graphics and other small freelancing jobs in freelance sites to get some extra money. He realised that the revenues were just enough to meet his expenses. Rinisha got one client in Latur, and two companies in Pune and Mumbai.

Abhilash wanted to create a company that not only had a presence in smaller towns but could reach across the globe. And he felt that e-commerce was the perfect answer.  So, with the need to do something bigger, he decided to start Kots a fashion e-commerce platform in October 2015.

E-commerce in Latur

After a lot of research, Abhilash decided to build Kots. The site is in its beta version, and the payment gateway is pending. It is an online portal that sells men’s apparel. It is a venture of Rinisha Ecommerce Private Limited, founded by Abhilash and his wife.

For t-shirts, the team is creating graphics in house, while the manufacture and shipment of the products is being executed by 99 Prints Tirpur. The team at Kots has an arrangement with the company, where the orders placed on the website will be designed in-house in Latur, but will be manufactured and shipped to the consumer from 99 Prints.

For the other apparel like trousers and jeans, the team has tied up with local manufacturers in Latur who don’t have an online presence and are looking to sell their products online.

To back up the project, Abhilash has started a retail outlet as well to support the online business until it picks up steam. While Rinisha Web services exists, with Kots, Abhilash believes that he can reach a wider audience and even showcase the web development and digital marketing skills of Rinisha.

Apart from funding, Abhilash is looking for partners in specific areas like logistics, traditional or offline marketing, legal and finance and artificial intelligence. Currently, two final year BCA students Sumeet Jadhav and Anup Dabadgavakar are part of the team. There also is Shubhangi Kadam and Priya Vibhute who work as graphic designers.

The growing e-commerce market in Tier II cities

The Tier II and III city markets are becoming big in the radar of both local players as well as bigger players like Amazon. The e-commerce giant reported that it has witnessed massive growth in Tier II cities, reaching 50 per cent, from the 36 per cent a year ago. Many believe that an undeniable advantage in Tier II cities is that the market is unorganised compared to Tier I cities.

Speaking about why Latur, Abhilash says that, “Many people say I am the right person in the ‘wrong city’, probably signifying that I have a better future in bigger cities. But I choose to stay back as I want to do something different and bring about some kind of Internet revolution in Latur. But in these 9 to 10 years, I have realised that if you are a tech person living in a small Tier III city you will understand how difficult it is to do business without venturing into other cities.”

Website

This story unfolds in Bihar’s Banka district, one of the poorest districts in the country. A recipient of the Backward Regions Grant Fund Programme, the main source of income here is agriculture. There is a small-scale weaving industry as well, and the average daily income of a weaver Rs. 30 – or so it was till a few years ago.

The protagonist of the story is Udyan Singh, a Banka-based civil engineering diploma holder who served in the Railways for five years before turning to ad film making. His love of creativity took him to Delhi, where he created over 100 ad films, and a primetime television serial – Ek aangan ke ho gaye do – for Doordarshan with Lekh Tandon.

During his visits to his hometown, he could not help but notice the plight of the local weavers who were too poor to even send their children to school. In 2012, he came back to Banka with a plan. “I wanted to make a change to the lives of the hundreds of weavers in Banka. With more exposure through strategies like exhibitions, they could earn more for their hard work,” says Udyan Singh. And that’s how it began.

With the number of weavers declining in Banka due to the community’s declining financial situation, Udyan’s move encouraged more people to take up weaving as a profession and become part of the century-old legacy, whilst making a livelihood.

Paving the way

Banka Silk aims to not just impart skills to the weaver community, but also connect them with markets and help them become self-sustaining.  Udyan currently employs about 5,000 weavers. “We employ up to eight members in the same family, and ensure that their children go to school,” he says.

The weavers extract silk filaments from home-grown cocoons and the yarns are treated using age-old processes to produce various types of fabrics. The entire ecosystem is kept away from the effects of manufacturing equipment that uses non eco-friendly raw materials and processes. Even the dyes used are vegetable-based, which ensure a zero-carbon footprint.

Udyan brought designers from NIFT, trained the artisans in design and skills, and invested Rs 25 lakh to build the foundation for the company. Launched officially in July 2015, Banka Silks works directly with the weaver and artisan community without any middlemen, and provides silk, khadi, and linen fabric, as well as readymade dupattas, sarees, and stoles priced between Rs. 4,000-8,000. Targeting professional, upper class women, they conduct exhibitions in Patna and Delhi, in addition to selling online with indianroots.com, Indianartizans.com, sabsaman.com, and their own website. The retail business orders are worth above Rs 5 lakh per month.

The number game

Handloom and ethnic products are not unpopular among the urban population. Data from the Association of Corporations and Apex Societies of Handlooms (ACASH), the nodal agency for supply of handloom goods, shows that executed orders were worth Rs. 68.25 crores for FY 2014-15, and during 2015-16 (till November 2015) it was worth Rs 62 crore.

Yet, poverty affects rural area artisans in most parts of India. Despite abundant schemes and subsidies, these weavers and artisans are not able to qualify for financial benefits. They can be empowered only when they get a standardised wage rate.

Udyan says that Banka Silks has not received any subsidies from government agencies like Khadi and Village Industries Board. “There should be cluster support from the government for artisans’ training programmes. Improved technology is essential for quality control and textile dyeing,” he adds. His weavers suffer losses if B2B clients complain of variations in colour and weave.

However, there might be a chance for revival of the handloom industry, which is believed to be the largest cottage industry in the world. The export of handloom products rose at a CAGR of 6.9 per cent to $ 368.0 million in 2014–15 from $ 264.2 million in 2009–10. More private players are finding opportunities for entrepreneurship in the weaver community. New entrants like Okhai and bigger players like Craftsvilla bring hope to the Indian handloom industry to grow through e-commerce as well.

“We have had about 200 per cent growth since inception, and we are aiming for Rs.50 lakh a month in revenue,” says Udyan. Along with the B2B tie-ups with brands such as Biba, Jeevika, and Avantika authentic, Banka Silks has witnessed a turnover of approximate of Rs.4 crore in the last quarter with Rs 25-30 lakh each month. Currently, with a team of 18, in addition to freelance designers, Banka Silks is targeting a turnover of Rs.5 crore for 2016. They are now in talks with Pantaloons and Fabindia.

With great momentum, Banka could be the role model for the rest of India and traditional beauty in textiles can be reborn and provide livelihood to thousands of weavers.

Technology has changed the way we communicate and made it easier and faster to pass on important information. But, sometimes, the large volume of conversations happening across different platforms makes it difficult for people to keep up and retain context.

OriginApp aims to solve these pain points and help users connect and communicate with their contacts in a more seamless and intuitive manner. Aimed at boosting productivity for both parties involved in a conversation, the app allows users to create custom profiles, figure out the best time to call people based on their availability, and also add context to calls.

How it works

Currently available for users in India, the US, Canada, Australia, Singapore and the UK, users need to sign up and verify their contact number. They can then create their own customer profile with the help of predesigned templates in the app. The user profile doubles as a smart caller ID for calls made to users who are on the OriginApp platform.

Users also have the option to make changes and update their profile in case there is a change in their circumstances such as a job or location. On the other hand, users get updates whenever their contacts modify their profiles. The app helps users manage contacts from the default (Google) app or other contact apps.

Some interesting features include

Callnote: Users can type a short 60-character note that pops up along with the username while calling a person. However, for this to work, both users need to have the app installed. Otherwise, the ‘callnote’ is sent as an SMS to a recipient who doesn’t have the app.

Active Status: Users can pick one of three status options- Available, Urgent calls only or Do Not Disturb (DND) as their status message to let potential callers know about their availability and the best time to communicate.

Deeper search: Based on the profile details entered, users can also search their contact list based on profession, company name, and other variations apart from the regular search feature based on contacts’ names.

‘HIYA’: Comparable to Facebook’s poke, or the popular ‘Yo’ app, users can greet each other with a ‘HIYA’ to get the recipients’ attention.

Story so far

OriginApp was cofounded by Pramod Ghorpade (39) and Dinesh Kumar (37) and the startup currently has a 17-member team. Pramod and Dinesh have close to 36 years of work experience between them. The idea for the venture came to them over coffee when they started discussing how communication is evolving and what the next era of communication would be like.

To translate their thoughts to reality, they went ahead and studied the sector across multiple countries and found that more than 85 per cent of people across all generations still prefer to use voice calls, texts and e-mails as primary forms of communication instead of the more popular social media channels where people spend a lot of time.

So they decided to work on a way to make communicating with contacts more seamless. They believe that the next wave of social communication will directly originate and rely on phonebook contacts. Talking about current issues and the need for a dynamic phonebook and other features, Dinesh said,

The current scenario is such that most of our contacts are outdated, and lack details and context on who is calling and whom I am calling. We also seem to get to know about the actual scenario only after calling someone. Thus, there is a lot of inefficiency.

So, OriginApp aims to help users manage their contacts better and also connect with people at the right time. Dinesh’s goal is to make their platform the single point for everything related to contacts including and integrating communication, calendar, organiser and social tools. OriginApp currently includes WhatsApp integration; it soon plans to include Skype, Wechat, Viber, and other platforms as well.

Talking about the safety of user data and custom profiles created on the platform, Dinesh added that they do not store any contact information directly on their cloud servers and consider users’ privacy to be a top priority.

OriginApp is free for users and the team is currently working on an advertising platform based on localisation, personalisation and context to help them monetise the platform in the future. Bootstrapped so far, the startup feels there is potential for such a solution in India and abroad. Currently available only for Android users, the team is developing an iOS app.

Sector overview

With smartphones gaining prominence worldwide, startups and enterprises are looking to interact with consumers in a more personal manner and active mobile numbers are the best data points for businesses to leverage.

Truecaller is the biggest player in this space and claims to have access to over two billion mobile numbers, globally. They recently launched their SDK and gave 12 Indian startups early access to connect with customers. Rapportive, which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, is an interesting solution that helps users leverage information about their e-mail and LinkedIn contacts.

OriginApp is trying to solve the tough problem of making contacts more useful and relevant. Some interesting startups and solutions in this space include Colorado-based Fullcontact, which provides person-based insights for professionals, enterprises, and developers; CallTag, which sends a text message with custom tags to provide context before a call; Status, which automatically updates contacts when a person is free. So, there is sufficient market validation for OriginApp about the need for their platform and the complexity of the problem.

What we liked

OriginApp is a well-thought-out and executed app that aims to ‘kills two birds with one stone’. The ability to add Callnotes and set statuses based on availability makes communication with business contacts more seamless.

Custom profiles that can be updated at any time and features like ‘HIYA’ add to the app’s functionality and usefulness. The search functionality, which goes beyond just names and allows users to search based on other data points, is also a useful feature.

What could be improved

While OriginApp lives up to its promise, there is room for improvement and minor tweaks that could make the app more useful. Currently, there are no restrictions on the HIYA feature and users could annoy their contacts with endless pings. Dinesh confirmed that they plan to restrict this feature, based on user feedback, to prevent misuse.

Dinesh also confirmed that they will allow users to associate certain tags for themselves and other users in the next update of the app, to further enhance their search tool.

YourStory take

With smartphones becoming the centre of the Internet universe and mobile numbers being part of our digital identities, OriginApp wants to help users build their ‘mobile identity’ and leverage their personal and professional contacts in a more hassle-free manner. With a lean team that has bootstrapped their way so far, it will be interesting to see how the developers of OriginApp further improve their product and how they crack their business model.

Website- OriginApp

What do you think about this app, do let us know in the comments below. Also do check out other apps under our App Fridays series.

Also download the YourStory Android or iOS app for more updates.

In January last year, I was on a train to the famed IIT Kharagpur, an institution that I always wanted to study in, for a business-plan competition. I’d invested Rs 10,000 on this trip and was hoping to make 10x returns on my investment. How was I planning to make the 10x returns? By winning, of course.

In a fast-paced startup environment, risks and high returns are two sides of the same coin. And when you are a student entrepreneur, the risk appetite is even larger.

What happened to the investment? Well, it failed, and it was not the first time, at least in terms of resources, time and effort. The thing about running a company whilst you are still in college is that these are valuable investments, and when they fail, it hurts. Yet, you do it again, despite the fact that you are living on a month-on-month basis on boiled eggs for dinner and travelling in broken buses across State lines.

There are moments you wonder why you are doing this to yourself. And most of those moments fade away because you remember how and why you started doing this.

1) The Eureka moment

You started it because you noticed a genuine problem your brother was struggling with and you realise that you had struggled with it too. You remember how, no matter how much you studied, after a point, your scores for your favourite entrance exam always plateaued. And when your sibling complains about the same thing, four years later, you wonder why tech hasn’t solved this yet.

So you decide to fix it yourself. Bring on board a few friends who can help you and you all start taking a crack at it together. After all, all that coding skills you picked up over the past few years by interning with different companies should help, right? Especially when you even have the knack for good ideas and always looked for creating value through beautiful products.

Or that’s what you strongly believe, until you go on to sell to someone, and you get a polite no. You then think maybe they aren’t a ‘tech-friendly’ educational institution.

Related read: An Open Letter to crazy 20 somethings who believe they can change the world

2) You pitch and pitch

You decide to come back from the setback and decide to pitch to more institutions. You want to impact the way millions of kids study, by showing them where exactly they are going wrong and helping them fix that instantly through this nifty SaaS solution that you have built.

However, all this hard work doesn’t yield anything again. You only get more no’s. You travel to more cities. The internship money you had earned and saved for travelling is now used for servers and commuting between different institutions and travelling to B-Plan competitions.

You call your dad and say that the world is unfair. You hadn’t done that in years and it helps to know you can still resort to old comforts in times of distress.

3) H for Hustle

Meanwhile, you get a little more hustle, you start talking to some people who may have experience in areas you don’t know. You don’t manage to fix all of them but you fix some loopholes. You at last start to realise where you were going wrong.

It helps that you get to bounce off these ideas with a new potential advisor/mentor you met and you conceptualise a new product based on mutual experiences. Things are suddenly starting to look up, because hope is addictive. Hell, both you and your co-founder travel to two different competitions and both of you win.

4) It’s ALIVE!  

You christen your product and launch a shiny new landing page describing its different features, and showcase how a student can connect to a tutor in a few seconds and get his/her doubts solved via chat. Except you don’t map out the product timeline. You think of every possible edge case and try to build a feature set for all of those.

However, the landing page is doing great. There are lots of tutors signing up, friends and seniors whom you haven’t spoken to in ages start wishing you luck, and you feel you are onto something brilliant. Inevitably, a lot of analysts from different VC firms start reaching out to you. You haven’t built a product, you haven’t seen a real user, you haven’t earned a penny and yet you start taking these calls. These turn into meetings and you think something might actually work out. So you drag your co-founder with a broken foot also to a meeting all the way to Delhi.

5) Mentors, meetings, carry on, John

An hour later, you know they aren’t going to fund you even though they don’t say it explicitly. You have heard enough nays to know when it’s headed in that direction. But, you have gotten stuck in this loop, so you go through with the other meetings too. Obviously, they don’t work out either.

All this has only impacted the product because you realised you can do only a few things at a time and this was killing massive amount of time. You get back on track, code through the nights, keep up the cheerful face of your brand on social media and start taking those compulsory tests you have to take to pass courses.

Also read: These Manipal Grads were making Rs 30L in third year of college, then they decided to start up

6) A House of Cards?

It is starting to take a toll on you but you absorb it. You do it, because there are five juniors who gave up different internships and hoped for you to ensure that they can keep working on this. You still have no clue where the money will come from and figure all problems will be resolved when you launch and you do a closed beta. The reactions are good. Students and tutors love it but you know you need a little more time to release a good product.

You are quickly running out of time. It’s nearly the end of the semester and you still haven’t launched. No one has funded you. Two big players in the edtech space in India announce their huge funding rounds on the same day and you get even more worried.

7) The security blanket

Your advisor who has already raised a seed round offer to acquire you and you have a way out at last. But you and your co-founder debate for hours, weigh the pros and cons and finally over a cup of chai at 5 am decide to sell the company.

You knew it was early but you yearned for a sense of security after a brutal set of 10 months. Moreover, now you could ensure all your interns had an internship. You could see a lot of them making full-time offers and you are glad that everyone would be happy.

You start working in a small office, preparing for launch and sign all the documents over the next few weeks. Someone tells you that you are the first ones in 50 years of BITSian history to have sold a company while in college.

You choose to remain unfazed and you are back on your feet the next day with the mission to launch. And so is everyone who had stuck out so far. You wonder what made them believe in you or the mission you set out for all of them, but they do and you’re glad that you haven’t failed in building a team that has wholeheartedly supported you through every change.

Travels and travails

You launch the product, things are going okay but you aren’t seeing as much traction as you had hoped for. So you start thinking on your feet more often, try out different social media strategies, own the product by constantly iterating and making it better, and you crack it when you are on the front page of a national newspaper.

You see more users than ever, higher activity than ever and you see lots of people are paying for what you had built. You are thrilled, because you start seeing kids using the product as early as five in the morning and as late as two in the night. You are growing at a decent rate and you manage to crack retention too on most subscriptions.

Oh, you are still in college. So you shuttle between Pilani and Bengaluru every month. While you can pay for flights now, there is hardly anything left at the end of every month. You know things are going to get better but you start wondering how difficult it has been.

You wonder why there weren’t enough people you could talk to and handle situations better. You wonder why the accessibility point is so low. You wonder if that’s the case after being from a college like BITS, how it would be for someone at a college with lesser access points. You wonder how hard it would be for someone to get a job. You wonder how you can help achieve those dreams.

I can’t get no satisfaction

So you decide to quit the product you started and built. You quit the role of VP of Products and wonder if you shall ever have that sort of a role again. You quit the possibility of a higher salary, thousands of dollars in equity and decide to take the risk again.

You talk to your co-founder and he wants to do it too, because he reminds you how you both started building your product. You start to realise that enabling youth with the right set of skills through access points to the right set of people is what you have always wanted to do.

You figure why not now, why not today.

My Ocean’s Eleven, hello, TapChief

You assemble the same crop from your first venture  and start building again at the beginning of the new year.

On February 18, 2016, we went live with TapChief to ease people’s way to do what they love by connecting them to the right experts who have been there and done that.

And thus began my new chapter.

If I can add value or help in any way at any point, you can feel free to setup a call with me on TapChief, here.

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

T-Hub, located in the IIIT-Hyderabad campus, is India’s largest incubator for startups. T-Hub is a unique partnership between the Telangana government, three academic institutes (IIIT-H, ISB & NALSAR) and other key stakeholders in the startup ecosystem. With startups, accelerators, investors, and workspaces all in one place, T-Hub plans to create a tight, vibrant, and successful community of entrepreneurs in the city.

As the COO and one of the founders of T-Hub, Srinivas Kollipara is a crusader with the cause of improving the startup ecosystem in the city. Having closely worked with startups his entire life, Srinivas is leading his troop of entrepreneurs, which now swarms the city of Nawabs.

T-Hub was started last November, as a miracle of collective and individual collaboration. Built on an area of 70,000 square feet, T-Hub has world class facilities for entrepreneurs to thrive. It also provides separate space for incubators and accelerators, and has special arrangements for entrepreneur-investor meetups. T-Hub provides a platform for entrepreneurs, mentors, investors and academia to interact and collaborate.

Srinivas believes that T-Hub will help write the history of Indian entrepreneurship in the years to come. After 20 years of management experience, working with international teams and projects, Srinivas believes that the formation of T-Hub is his greatest success story. He says, “I dream of T-Hub becoming a global phenomenon, when some of the most successful startups will be incubated by us. And the day is not very far if you trust my instincts.”

Srinivas has lived in different countries, and believes that the startup culture of Silicon Valley has been appropriated by cities all over the world, without much heed to the local details. This is also the reason no country has been able to replicate the Silicon Valley. “Ignoring local dynamics and issues will never allow us to realise our true potential,” Srinivas says.

Why Hyderabad?

Srinivas and the city of Hyderabad go a long way. The city is a conglomeration of talented workforce and world-class research in potential medicine, biotech, and agriculture. Hyderabad has grown significantly as an IT hub in the past decade. Srinivas hopes that T-Hub will give these sectors the space for collaboration and innovation the city dearly deserves.

Despite the advantages the city offers, Hyderabad was a tough nut to crack. Srinivas recalls how there was a time when entrepreneurship was not the buzzword in India and the only city where people wanted to start up was Bengaluru. He wanted to bring Hyderabad to focus too, and started convincing people to start up in the city. Even back then, IIIT-H played a major role in ensuring that his ideas reached the younger crowd.

Things changed in 2014 for good. Telangana was formed, and the new IT minister, K. T. Rama Rao, challenged his own limits to build Hyderabad as a startup hub. He and his team soon came up with a new IT policy that eventually led to the formation of T-Hub. The government has also been actively supporting institutions in its attempt to make Hyderabad a city that helps not just the IT sector, but startups and entrepreneurs as well.

On a lighter note, we ask Srinivas about the rivalry between Bengaluru and Hyderabad that exists among the young startup community. Srinivas laughs at the idea of two cities competing for the spot of number one startup hub in India. “T-Hub was never intended to flare the debate. We believe in collaboration. A health competition is good, but the larger goal is to build many such centres across the country,” says Srinivas.

Life and motivation

Srinivas spent his childhood in UK. His father was a famous doctor, who later started his own business. Srinivas was sent to Vijayawada for his college education. Vijayawada came as a shock to Srinivas. It took him a considerable amount of time to adjust to the chaos and fun that India offered. Once accustomed to the organised chaos of India, Srinivas’ journey has been filled with joy and learning.

During his college days, Srinivas stayed with his grandfather and uncle, and was strongly exposed to the social reality, traditions, and culture of India. His grandfather was a populist Left leader, who had worked for the development of Vijayawada and the nearby area of Gannavaram. Srinivas says, “I too wanted to do good work and give back to the society.”

After finishing college, Srinivas started his own company called Omega Immunotech Pvt Ltd, that imported diagnostic enzymes from UK. A few years later, his company was acquired by a large pharma company. After working in different companies for the next few years, in 2007, Srinivas finally left his corporate career to set sail in the startup waters. Soon, he became a popular startup mentor, acclaimed not just in India, but internationally.

Srinivas believes the scope for entrepreneurship in India is huge and the country has the potential to cause great impact to the world at large. He is hopeful of Hyderabad’s potential and the unique way academia, government, entrepreneurs, and investors have partnered to make to make T-Hub possible.

What’s more disruptive than a hybrid of cooler and air conditioner that comes at a tenth of an AC’s running cost? This means electricity consumption of only 250 Watts per hour, compared to an air conditioner that consumes 2,400 Watts per hour. So if you were paying Rs 5,000 per month (air conditioner), you will now pay around Rs 500. And wait, it’s environment-friendly too, as it is possibly the world’s only cooling product that uses the refrigeration cycle but does not emit heat in the environment.

This miraculous cooling technology is called Vaayu, developed by Pranav Mokshmar from Indore and has been backed by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia. After almost five years of trials and errors, patenting process and funding efforts, Vaayu began operations in October 2014.  

Vaayu Hybrid Chillers – a patented technology – acquired a funding of Rs 1 crore under collateral-free CGTMSE scheme of the State government of Madhya Pradesh through Corporation Bank, Indore. The startup has its manufacturing unit, constituting two plants, at Sanwer Road in Indore. The product has been tested for more than 100 units and the company is getting bulk orders from companies that care about environment and cost-saving. It has reached six States – Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Delhi, Haryana and Uttarakhand, through its appointed dealers and distributors. These dealers are selling Vaayu to retail customers.

“Also, since the product is a new concept, we are opening ‘Vaayu Experience Zones’  for customers to get a feel of the Vaayu cooling. We have also appointed sales and service dealers to cater to the needs of the industrial and commercial customers,” explains Pranav.

Too good to be true?

Disbelief was a common reaction the founders – Pranav and Priyanka – received each time they made a presentation about Vaayu. “We were once presenting before a team of scientists and science professors and most of them said that our product defied all the laws of thermodynamics,” quips Priyanka.

So how does Vaayu work exactly? “As soon as Vaayu chiller is switched on, the compressor starts and the refrigerator flows in the cooling coil to chill the water. This water reaches the pads of the machine by pumps. The hot air outside comes in contact with the chilled water and the molecules present in the hot air lose temperature. The thermostat helps to put the compressors on and off as per the need of the water temperature to be maintained and prevents overheating. The condenser cools down the refrigerant and helps in dehumidification of excess RH to control the humidity level. The chilled air is finally pushed inside the area where the unit is installed through a fan of the machine,” informs Pranav.

In short, Vaayu doesn’t make you shiver like an AC but basically brings the temperature to a legitimate level and controls the humidity so that the environment becomes pleasant.

Vaayu chillers look like coolers and ACs so to make them workable in terms of installation and to meet customer needs. “We have recently launched a revolutionary product, VAAYU MIG 24, which has a capacity of cooling 1,000 sq.ft., and consumes only 800 Watts,” says Pranav.

The company intends on expanding to ten more States in the financial year 2016-17. “In the next five years, we plan to go pan India and also start exports, as we have received enquiries from Mexico, UAE , Africa etc. We are planning this expansion through sales returns along with expecting to get some funding through VCs,” he adds.

A power couple

Priyanka, Pranav’s wife, did most of her post-graduation studies after marriage. Pranav – a commerce graduate with a diploma in HVAC (heating, venting and air-conditioning) – worked as a product manager in multinational companies such as Carrier, Samsung and LG for almost 14 years. But being a technology-curious person, he started his own venture of commercial AC sales and service in 2008, and commissioned many noted projects in Madhya Pradesh. Priyanka, in the meantime, acquired an MBA in Marketing (Prestige Institute Indore) and PhD in Management (Devi Ahilya University) and apart from writing research papers, had begun giving lectures in various institutes in Indore.

“Initially, Pranav’s office used to be at home, so during the summer of 2010, his father pulled him up for heavy electricity bills, since his team used ACs. So one, day he got a few components of AC and they all began working with coolers. When I asked, I was told they were trying to see if a compressor could be fitted into a cooler. I seriously thought this must be one of his whims since he loved experimenting with electronic appliances and machines. Little did I know back then that he would end up inventing a technology we would patent later,” says Priyanka.

Pranav points out the importance of marketing the product. “Twice we had a choice between getting a lot of money from investors and selling out the patent. However, becoming millionaires just like that wasn’t exactly our goal,” shares Pranav.

Sometimes, the couple  find it hard to come to terms with the fact that they have come this far. “But then we remind ourselves of what late Dhirubhai Ambani had said, ‘Think big, think fast and think ahead. Ideas are no one’ s monopoly’,” says Priyanka.

Vaayu recently won the Mega Launchpad – an event co-sponsored by YourStory Media. And their latest award is the Skoch Order of Merit and Skoch Best SME of India Award at the Constitution Club of India in Mumbai held recently. In addition, they are one of the top five startups chosen by the Government of Madhya Pradesh for the Prime Minister’s dream project ‘Start up India Stand Up India’.

Website

When Rajesh Sawhney, Sanjeev Singhal and Bal DiGhent were looking at an idea for starting up, they first thought of an ingredient box. The idea was to send a box filled with ingredients that are prepped and in the perfect amount required to create a dish, the recipe for which is also provided.

This concept was launched in April 2015, but within a few months the founders realised that the model would take time to scale and the Indian market would take close to five years to warm up to the idea. “People were liking it, and we were growing but it wasn’t as fast as we realised we needed to grow,” adds Rajesh.

The important shifts

The startup, therefore, decided to pivot, and started with ready-to-eat foods. The first product was a combo box of a panini, salad and juice. It was priced between Rs 200 and 250, but it nevertheless connected with the young working professionals, who were looking for quick healthy meals.

The next important shift came with the idea that desserts can be sold along with food. So, in October last year, the InnerChef launched its desserts platform, Indulge. The team were thinking why make their own desserts, when there already were  by roping in the many talented women entrepreneurs running dessert businesses from their home.

“Today, Indulge contributes to 30 per cent of our business and is the fastest growing category in the food menu,” adds Rajesh. He says that experimenting and focussing on customer needs has gotten InnerChef ahead.

Working with different models

InnerChef has a food model, where the food is prepared in various central kitchens, and there is a dessert model that works more like a hyperlocal marketplace. While the sourcing works from different locations, the delivery systems, packaging and consumer interactions work along one channel.

Indulge works on the curated marketplace model, which goes through a screening and tasting process, post which partners are invited to the platform. Most of the partners on the Indulge platform are women. “We are looking at 100 cities with over 1000 home bakers and we are also focussing on Indian desserts and ice-creams,” adds Rajesh.

Phanindra Sama, one of the investors at InnerChef, the team played a stronger role in his decision to invest. “Also, I have been to Bal’s restaurant multiple times and I was sure that quality was one thing InnerChef would never compromise on. The team is a brilliant combination of domain and technical expertise,” adds Phanindra.

Expanding geographies

After testing waters in Gurgaon and Delhi, InnerChef began expanding into other markets and cities last November. Bengaluru being the strong second, there are three kitchens present in the city: they started with Maratahalli, moved to Koramangala and with the acquisition of EatOnGo in March this year, the team believes they can capture the Indiranagar market.

The team also acquired Flavour Labs, the food truck company in Gurgaon in March, thus making their move into the mobile kitchen space. The team also launched their kitchens in Mumbai and will be soon looking at Hyderabad, Chennai and West Delhi markets.

“If you look at the food business, the delivery model in itself is a $15-billion industry. Today there are different kinds of players in the market like Dominos, aggregators and discovery models. But the InnerChef kind of model has control over the quality of the food, backend, supply-chain and menu, which makes it very important for an Internet-based restaurant,” adds Sruti Komarappagari, Endiya Partners, investor at InnerChef.

Setting up the ops

Rajesh says that since food is a perishable item, they wanted to have close supervision. They knew that they had to follow a hub-and-spoke model to expand. However, now the challenge is to ensure that the same supervision and quality is met across different cities.

“Setting up a kitchen isn’t as complicated as it is made out to be. There is a team of cooks, chefs and workers who are collaborative. The size of the kitchen, orders, catchment areas, capacity and location all have a certain science associated with them. We are learning as we go, it makes sense to first begin with denser urban areas and consumer sets,” adds Rajesh.

With an average order value of Rs.500, with products ranging from Rs 100 to 300, InnerChef is one of the more expensive foodtech players in the market. This means that the focus is more on condominiums and offices.

The team claims to be growing at 40 percent month-on-month. It gets over 1,000 orders in a day.

Sateesh Andra, Managing Director, Endiya Partners, investor at InnerChef adds that metrics like cost of customer acquisition, repeat orders placed by customers, operational expenses and corporate expenses play a strong role. “When we looked at the health metrics of InnerChef they were very healthy and kitchens are doing very well. The team is carefully building the business brick by brick, which is what matters a lot,” says Sateesh.

The interesting saga of the food business

The foodtech business has several players. FreshMenu, which raised its second round of funding in January, follows a similar model. The other bigger players in the business include Zomato, Swiggy and HolaChef.

Sateesh believes that the food business isn’t one where the winner takes it all.  However good the food is, one will get bored of the same cuisine every time, and people are going to keep trying different things. Sateesh believes there is room for several players to become big businesses in this space.

“At the end of the day, an ​​​​​​​​​​​​​Internet restaurant is something that we believe in. There are several things at play here, there is delivery and logistics, food, supply-chain and analytics. The team at InnerChef has got the crux of the food business, which is customer experience, operations and great technology,” adds Sateesh.

Sruti and Sateesh adds that while there is a prevelance of me-too companies in the foodtech space, like in several other sectors, the survival of players depends on several factors. The capital in the market will be deployed to the strong players, and some of the money, Sateesh believes will be pumped into the good companies of the food sector.

Website

Not all startup stories are about multi-million dollar valuations or instant scale. Some can be just about the growth a company achieved from all its learning.

Jay Krishna’s journey with DigitSecure started in 2010. The fintech business acted as a gateway helping retailers and merchants with solutions around online payment processing, coupled with smartcard (loyalty) solutions. Jay claims the company to be amongst the first few to introduce the mobile Point of Sale (PoS) card payments in the country, providing services to Homeshop18 and Aramex then.

But while working with retail and e-commerce companies across boards, Jay sensed that last mile was becoming a huge problem. From identifying customers’ addresses to deploying digital signature during payment, every step was a huge challenge for them. And this was not just the case with retail; the banking industry faced the same issues as well.

Jay says

“Seeing this, we thought rather than payments we should rather focus on the last-mile payments problem. Added to that being equipped with an enterprise DNA, we thought we could solve that on a large scale.”

In June last year DigitSecure successfully completed its pivot to LastMile.Mobi, a proprietary platform providing comprehensive solutions around digital Identification, biometric attendance, delivery payments etc.                                                                                       

Dealing with the ‘Last Mile’

 LastMile.Mobi is a combination of proprietary mobile handheld solution combining biometrics along with card payments deploying a secure, certified cloud platform for faster processing of transactions.

A financial institution typically takes three to four weeks to acquire and on-board a new customer. The delay is attributed to the identification and verification steps taken before the actual collection or payment.  Digital signature at doorstep takes almost 20 days. The firm aims at getting it completed within 24 hours.

This is the same in government organisations, where delays come about during transfers of social benefits, as well as for e-commerce companies that struggle to deliver goods purchased through cash-on-delivery mode.

How does it work? 

Offering Platform as a Service (PaaS), the solution deploys workforce, empowering organisations to perform instant consumer identification (eKYC), digital payments, and geo-verify addresses on consumer’s doorstep using an in-house developed solution for the mobile platform, that can be integrated with a device. The solution can be used in instances of last-mile transactions, including by e-commerce companies making deliveries, at rural retail shops, by fieldworkers needing biometric verification and by banks and insurance agencies for verification.

Their device Freedom also has an inbuilt fingerprint/iris scanner, geo-track and multiple-party payment capabilities that connects doorstep commerce. Freedom has different versions also having a bar code scanner etc priced from Rs 13,000 to 24,000.

Looking at scale 

The firm, at present, works with e-commerce giants like Amazon and other financial services entities like MasterCard, HDFC Bank, Yes Bank etc. (as listed on their website).

The firm hopes to have 30,000 touch points that facilitate daily transactions by next month. It is in the process of building infrastructure for one lakh touch points, which will enable it to cater to at least one million transactions a day in the near future.

For 2015-16, the firm has earned revenue of $4-5 million and is aiming to reach $12 million in revenues by the end of FY 2016-17. The firm is also looking to be present in 30 cities by the end of this year.

With the government backing initiatives like Aadhaar authentication, the digital payments scope of the country is estimated to grow. Reserve Bank of India had also approved licences for 11 financial institutions to set up payment banks.

On the opportunity size, Jay cites a report from McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) in December 2014, that predicted that by 2025, digital identification will grow from nascent to 100 percent, digital payment transactions from $one billion to 12 billion, and businesses accepting digital payments will increase from 600,000 to six million.

Moreover, Statista reports  on digital payments claim that the total transactional value in the segment amounts to $28.96 billion in 2016, and is expected to show an annual growth rate of 18.36 percent. This, clearly, gives a lot of scope for startups like Last Mile.Mobi.  Additionally, this seems to be a unique segment where hyperlocal overlaps with the fintech sector.

However, with smartphones becoming increasingly equipped with fingerprint scanners and some trying to move towards iris detection, it will be interesting to see whether moving forward the need will still stay put for such startups, or will evolve, demanding better technology.

Website: lastmile.mobi

College search engine Collegedunia recently raised a Rs 3-crore pre-Series A round, to spruce up its mobile offering for tech-savvy millennials, who form its target market. The funding, from Umang Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Gaadi.com, will be deployed for product development and team hiring. After noticing a steady increase in mobile web traffic on its platform, the startup recently launched its Android app, with an iOS version currently under development.

Collegedunia collates information on higher education in India and abroad and currently claims to feature 20,000 colleges, institutes and universities, with data on one million fees structure on its platform. It covers areas like fee, placement, alumni record, rankings, awards and extra-curricular activities, and claims to average 60,000 visits every day across mobile and web platforms.

Story so far

Founded in 2014 by Sahil Chalana (28), Collegedunia now consists of a team of 100 with an average age of 25 years. Sahil, a 2010 BITS Pilani graduate, initially started an education forms startup – getmyform.in. While they achieved success by helping build 3.14 Digital, the startup did not work out in the long run and the founders parted ways.

Sahil then noticed that there was a huge gap in the data collated and the quality of information being sought by college aspirants in the pre-admission sessions. So, along with his team, he pivoted on their existing model and worked on lead generation for educational institutes and launched Collegedunia.

After bootstrapping for about six months, the startup raised Rs 1 crore in angel funding from Gaadi.com CEO Umang Kumar and other undisclosed investors in November 2014. Some of the key members include-

Himanshu Jain, a PEC Chandigarh graduate who helped build TrulyMadly from scratch is currently the CTO at Collegedunia. Nishit Kumar, an ex-employee at IDS Infotech leads Collegedunia’s content, and built it from scratch to the current 30-member team. Ashish Kumar, an NIT Jalandar gradudate, leads operations and helped build and grow Collegedunia’s mailer and affiliate business. Sanjay Meena, a DCE graduate and ex-Career 360 employee, leads Collegedunia’s sales efforts.

Positioned as a platform for college research where students can explore and compare their future study destinations it offers State and city-wise listing of top colleges and universities with reviews and ratings. Collegedunia also puts efforts into maintaining its user interface and experience and caters to three major sections currently. The college section provides information on course fees, placement, admission etc., with 30,000 reviews of 9,000 colleges. The exam section gives info on 18 streams, along with practice papers and tips, while the course section provides details on over 6,000 courses available across India.

The startup’s current revenue model relies solely on ads. But, going forward, it aims to add more revenue streams, with an online marketplace for preparation material. Collegedunia currently counts NIIT Group, Educomp Business Schools, NMIMS, Alliance Business School, Lovely Professional University, British Council, IDP Global as its clients.

Mobile app strategy

With about 38 percent of its traffic coming from mobile, the startup believes that mobile as a platform can contribute to exponential growth. Sahil says,

College search is the second most important thing for a student and we aim to be the mobile personal admission assistant to the student during his admission hassle.

Collegedunia sees the most traction for engineering and management-related queries, but is also seeing other avenues like law and fashion picking up. With a mobile app, the startup aims to provide a more personalised experience to users and ensure that users get access to relevant information at the right time.

The app allows users to set up their profile and explore colleges based on different filters such as locations, streams and substreams. Users can also explore colleges based on custom filters such as facilities, placements, male-to-female proportion, best ROI etc.

Sector overview

The Indian education market is estimated to be worth $100 billion and is poised to witness major growth in the years to come as the country will have the world’s largest tertiary-age population and second-largest graduate talent pipeline globally by the end of 2020.

The total amount of foreign direct investments (FDI) inflow into the education sector in India stood at around $ 1,200 million from April 2000 to June 2015, according to data from Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP).

Some of the interesting players in this space include, Careers360, which raised an angel round in 2014, and more recently, in December 2015, acquired Mumbai-based NoPaperForms.

Online test preparation startup Toppr has made two acquisitions so far, with Manch in Febraury 2016, being the most recent. Another interesting development in the education space was when Khan Academy partnered with Tata Trusts last December, to create specialised, freely available online content tailor-made for India.

Future plans

Collegedunia aims to reach one lakh visitors per day and cross one million installs in the next six months. Its long term vision for the next 12 months is to cater to the end-to-end needs of students looking for admissions in India. It then wants to replicate the same model abroad and venture into online counselling.

With about 25,000 installs in two months, Collegedunia is optimistic about its mobile growth and aims to offer counselling services through its app in the future. While it currently offers information about 20,000 colleges across India, the startup hopes to double the figure by the end of 2016.

YourStory take

India holds an important place in the global education industry, and is estimated to have more than 1.4 million schools, with over 227 million students enrolled and more than 36,000 higher education institutes. With mobile gaining widespread adoption in the taxi and e-commerce industry already, it is most likely the next turf for edtech startups to fight it out in the near future.

The education sector unlike most other sectors in India is not affected by price consciousness. Indians are generally willing to pay a premium for accurate and timely information related to education, so there is a tremendous opportunity in this sector. With 20,000 colleges and institutes covered, Collegedunia has a good opportunity to cash in and also help better the lives of millions of aspiring students.

Website- collegedunia.com

Marilyn Monroe once said, “Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.”

Well, as any girl would agree, the right shoes are almost impossible to find if you have a design in mind. Shoe shopping often brings up the dilemma of having to make compromises on the size, colour, pattern or heels. But what if you have an option to design your own shoes, in the comfort of your home and on your laptop screen, with the guarantee of expert hands at work to give you the perfect shoe?

About a year ago, three friends from Uttar Pradesh found a business opportunity in that question.  In March 2015, Rishabh Singh, an MBA graduate from IIM Indore, co-founded Purplehide with his friends Shubham Gupta and Chinmay Sehgal, to give every woman that perfect pair of shoes. At Purplehide, customers can design their shoes using  an online 3D tool with their choice of style, colours, heel type, and heel height.

The website has been functional from November 2015. Having handled the family’s business of furniture manufacturing earlier, Shubham is now COO and is managing the manufacturing units and operations of the company. Chinmay is currently pursuing MBA in the US, and is involved in devising strategies for the team.

The Lucknow boys

Customised shoe-making is not a very common idea in India. Rishabh, who had always wanted to start up in the e-commerce space, bumped into the idea during his stint as a management professional. He says,  “Whenever my female friends are shopping for shoes they go to a hundred shops to find the prefect pair, but may not find it after all. I knew of some efforts in foreign markets- like NIKEiD in the US market and Shoes of Prey in Australia, offering customised shoe designs.”

Rishabh figured that there is a great opportunity if they can control the cost of manufacturing and bring the price down to comparable solutions in the market. After discussing with his friends and ensuring the plan, he quit his job and came back to his hometown, Lucknow.

Since they do not have any background in shoe manufacturing, the founders were worried about the quality they could provide. For research, they visited manufacturing units in Kanpur and Agra, and talked to professors from footwear design institutes in Rae Bareli and Noida. “We are now confident that we can build shoes from scratch,” says Rishabh.

Currently, with styles that include ballet flats, pumps, sandals, Oxfords, and ankle boots, as well as 70 different colours and textures of leather, 200 million different permutations are possible on their website. Once you design the shoe, you can rotate it and see it from all angles, and upon purchase, it will be delivered in two weeks.

Growing on you

Lucknow and Kanpur are traditionally shoe manufacturing hubs. Due to the ease in availability of labour force, Purplehide set up a small manufacturing unit in Lucknow, after pouring in Rs 10-15 lakh each as initial investment. But they had a hard time convincing the manufacturers, to whom customisation did not make sense as they are used to bulk orders from big brands.

The first few weeks’ business was purely through word-of-mouth and social media. This year, they have started advertising on Facebook and have been getting good reviews from fashion bloggers and social media. “Our website has around 1,000 visitors per day. Even if they don’t buy it, they design a shoe and keep it in the cart like a hobby,” says Rishabh.  Depending on the material and type of the shoe, their charges range from Rs 2,000 to 5,000.

Currently, Purplehide gets orders from working women in the age group of 20 to 35, from Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi, and Kolkata.  They are expecting celebrities in their clientele – Shivshakti Sachdev of Balika Vadhu fame has already bought a pair of pointed toes from Purplehide.

A brand on its own

The first shoe order from outside their network was the most exciting moment for the team. Rishabh remembers that it was a black back ankle boot, ordered from Allahabad. Incidentally, that was the only order from a Tier II city. But with more advertising, they believe that Tier II and II cities won’t be hard to crack.

While not planning to collaborate with any brands and becoming one on their own, Purplehide is considering offline retail model with iPad or tablet once they get seed funded. “We hope to be profitable this year, because this is a high margin product. We make profit in every shoes we sell; we need not give any discounts,” says Rishabh.

So far, the nine-member team has received 100 orders in five months. Targeting 1,000 orders a month, Purplehide’s plans for future include men’s shoes, ladies’ bags and wallets etc.

Potential for growth

India is second only to China as the largest producer of footwear, with about 13 percent of overall production in the world – not surprising considering we have more than a billion pair of feet to fit. While the average global footwear consumption is 2-3 pairs per person, in India it is 1.1 pairs.

In the domestic footwear industry, which is estimated to be worth around Rs 20,000 crores, there is more than enough space for disruption and Purplehide might just be the beginning. India’s growing fashion industry and tech advancements will add charm to such innovations, despite competition from brands.  Purplehide has already started working on a mobile app for its 3D designer and is expected to launch it by May 2016.

‘Purple’ stands for ‘royal’, and ‘hide’ for ‘leather’. “We believe this is a name we could build a high-end brand around,” says Rishabh. If it was a glass shoe that did the trick for Cinderella, it could be some royal leather ones for India’s shoe lovers.