Bengaluru-based online home design startup Livspace today launched an automation platform to integrate e-commerce and on-board more interior designers as ‘design entrepreneurs’. The freelance designers can work for Livspace from anywhere in the world, by paying a commission, and can thus get more business in a highly fragmented industry, Anuj Srivastava, Co-founder and CEO, told YourStory.
(L-R) Ramakant Sharma, Shagufta Anurag and Anuj Srivastava, Co-founders of Livspace
This platform enables 10x faster project turnaround time and increased earning potential up to six times for interior designers, a company statement said. Anuj said: “You can either hire contractors and designers on your own – like the Meru model. But the smart way is to ensure that using this technology, people who are providing this service can actually become entrepreneurs.” He claimed that with e-commerce and design automation platform, they can become more productive and make more money. “A platform wherein designers, architects, contractors et al can come together and will automatically get access to a high quality customer. They can thus access all the goodness of an e-commerce catalogue with superior designs for the home design industry,” Anuj added.
About 150-200 out of the 2,000+ designers are already certified. “If all of them are productive, there will be 15,000 projects each year – each for Rs 10 lakh, making Rs 1.5 crore. This is massive business due to the high amount customers spend and that is the scale we are looking at,” Anuj explained. Initially, it’s an invite-only programme.
E-commerce benefits
An e-commerce-like experience gives consumers choice, warranty, price and transparency. Anuj believed that interaction with the designers is significant for all customers. “Designing can happen from anywhere; but at the beginning we want them to be able to have interaction with customers. So for now, we are getting on-board freelancers from the cities we are already present in. We are looking for those with some work experience,” he said.
Livspace caters to Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai. Their trials took place in Gurgaon and Bengaluru, cities with a community of designers. In 6-9 months, they got about 500 projects, and have delivered more than 100 already. Anuj said: “In the last 6-7 months alone in Bengaluru, productivity of designers has gone up by 600-700 percent on an average, as they get to do as much work in a month as they used to do in a year. As opposed to three months, it takes them one day to design an entire home and we can ship it almost immediately.”
Freelance designers usually do only 3-5 projects in a year, as it is hard for them to find customers and, often, cannot get the benefit of gross margin or pricing. “Entire industry has been ripe with price overrun, time overrun – with no adherence to time and quality,” says Anuj. The best people who can provide quality interior design services are not able to meet the requirements only because the industry is fragmented. They don’t make enough money so the customer experience is suboptimal – but now, Anuj said, they can sell to more customers and business by adhering to Livspace’s pricing policies.
He added, “We are one platform where they get everything –design technology, project managers, experience centres. Designer from Mumbai have requested us to put more items in the catalogue as space is a constraint there.”
Home design industry is worth $25 billion in India now, and is expected to grow to $35 billion in three years. Within the next two years 4-5 percent of this market is poised to move online. Livspace claims they have become profitable in Bangalore and are already seeing margins in the range of 40-45 percent. The ‘design entrepreneur’ concept is new to the industry as few models across the globe have tried it out.
In the aftermath of the housing debacle and, more recently, the acquisition of CommonFloor by Quikr, many have been wary and question whether the real estate platforms that we see springing up in the startup atmosphere actually work.
Thirty three-year-old second-time entrepreneur Manik Kinra, however, believes that the real estate segment, while complex and full of hurdles, holds great potential and is far from impossible to crack. Pin Click, founded by Manik, aims to bring value to customers in the housing market.
Following a technology, people and process-driven approach, the team brings in a basket of services that includes understanding what kind of home an individual needs with the help of property experts and helping them make the right choice. One can also get unbiased property advice while buying a property. It also offers a property management vertical for owners and tenants on the rental side.
Team at Pinclick
Second time lucky
With his earlier startup Jade Magnet, Manik had built a crowdsourcing platform for creative and marketing support services. He says that they were able to scale up to multiple geographies, but the nature of the business didn’t allow the trajectory they had hoped for.
Manik says,
In real estate, I felt that if we were able to crack the model and build seamless processes to deliver value to customers across the two verticals of selling and renting properties, then growing to multiple cities wouldn’t be difficult. Also aspirationally, real estate continues to be high on the list of most people, which means the demand is very high.
Starting two years ago, Pin Click first began with hiring a team of trained real estate professionals and soon realised that the structure didn’t allow them to scale.
Bringing in new learnings
Initial growth was slow as a complete overhaul of the team was required to build in-value systems that were more in sync with process-based selling. Being a little old school and believing in creating a much stronger foundation, they decided to add only one city on the sales side and haven’t gone outside of Bengaluru for the rental vertical.
Manik explains,
“One lesson from Jade Magnet was that scale loosens the control on almost all metrics, and if the metrics are not defined, chances are that you will end up messing up on some of the key parameters. We are ensuring that we understand each of those metrics as we grow month on month and build control systems around them before we change gears.”
Initially, they kept focus on building the distribution and sales team and, in parallel, collected the data points to build a strong foundation for the technology engine, which meant hiring was carried out while keeping the same in mind.
Traction and team
While Manik got the idea of starting Pin Click, he roped in the team of co-founders over the course of a few years. Each came in through common connections or through meetings at different stages of their careers.
The founding team had a broad range of specialisations, with Puneet Kinra coming from an investment banking background, with around two decades of experience, and Shaishav Kumar having significant product and technology experience.
Apart from the three founders, the members of the core team have skill sets across digital marketing and execution, and deep technology development.
In the past 24 months, the team claims to have engaged with around 550 customers who bought residential units from Pin Click. On their rental vertical, which they started recently, Pin Click manages around 300 homes in Bengaluru, with 10 percent of them as shared accommodation while the others are single family homes.
“We interact with over 1,500 prospective customers every month now between Bengaluru and Pune, and are trying to build a customer service layer to ensure that we are able to provide value to all our customers,” says Manik.
While building a strong base, Manik believes that there currently isn’t a clear differentiator between several startups in the real estate vertical.
The market of real estate
However, as an industry, there are players which either focus on listing-based technology platforms or distribution and fulfilment. On the fulfilment side, most technology driven players either engage in the selling or renting of homes or shared accommodations.
“We are probably the only one engaged in both verticals. We charge our service fees from the sellers, which in the case of sales are the builders and in the case of rentals, the owners. The buyers/tenants get our unbiased services without any cost,” says Manik.
There is also Bengaluru-based Milgaya that works toward providing a hassle-free, transparent, and guided experience in the selling, renting and buying of residential properties.
The Indian real estate market is believed to be worth $100 billion, of which the primary residential market is estimated at $60 billion. The brokerage market is estimated at around $3 billion, and 60–70 percent of it is concentrated in the top 10 Indian cities.
Pin Click had raised a seed round when they started and this helped build the sales process and the team for the property advisory side of business.
This was followed with a pre-Series A round in March this year, which will be used to build the rental vertical across both operational cities and at the same time work on technology and product development.
“We will spend the next 3 months strengthening our current position in the two markets we are present in for the property advisory business, while scaling up rental solutions (both managed rental and shared accommodation) in Bengaluru,” says Manik.
Unless you’re a hermit living in the Himalayas, you’ve probably heard of Pokemon Go. It has become a global cultural phenomenon since its launch a few weeks ago. For the uninitiated, Pokemon GO is a free-to-play Augmented Reality exergame for smartphones based on the Pokemon universe. Underneath all its layers, it is a modern day marketing powerhouse.
A bevy of businesses have reacted to the Pokemon Go rage in their own ingenious ways.
Bloomberg published an interesting piece about L’inizio’s Pizza Bar in New York. The proprietor reported a 30 percent increase in sales by using Lure Modules.
McDonald’s Japan launched Pokemon-themed Happy Meals, which have been flying off the shelves, leading to a 23 percent increase in their share prices.
The Rogue & Vagabond bar in New Zealand has been marketing itself as a ‘Pokemon-friendly establishment’, making use of Lures to get hordes of people to visit.
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Alabama has been offering a special group admission price of $13 to visitors with the Pokemon Go app.
U.S telecom giant T-Mobile is offering free data to their users for 1 year for playing Pokemon Go.
See how businesses are cashing in on the Pokemon Go craze:
A Best Buy employee displaying Poke-Offers ( Source: Imgur )
A pub advertising their Pokestop status ( Source: Reddit )
What makes this game so lucrative for businesses today?
Data Mining:
The game collects a lot of user data. Your Google name, Gmail address, your physical location, your IP address and the most recent web page that you visited are captured by servers. Big Data is essential for bigger and better marketing campaigns, and Niantic knows that. I can imagine a lot of tech and retail giants lining up to get their hands on this data goldmine.
Sponsored in-game content:
Product placement in video games has been done in the past with varied success. Expect the same from Pokemon Go in the future. Sponsored in-game content in the form of upgrades and items could be a massive opportunity as the game is a ready-made mass advertising platform. The digital sleuths at Google won’t take long to figure out a way to put AdWords in the game. The only challenge is to not let the ads disrupt the gaming experience.
Sponsored Locations:
Niantic has confirmed that they will partner with businesses in the future to create sponsored Gyms and Pokestops. The biggest news coming out regarding this is McDonald’s sponsorship deal. It will be initially implemented in Japan, converting more than 3,000 McDonald’s restaurants into sponsored Gyms. Similar tie-ups are in the works the world over.
If you happen to be an SME business owner, here is how you can leverage the Pokemon craze for attracting more business:
Direct Footfall increase:
If your business happens to be a Pokestop or a Gym, or is situated close to one, then you can use the “Lure module”. They are available as an in-game purchase, which attracts Pokemon to your location for 30 minutes. For $60, you can have an exponential increase in visitors for 30 minutes at your establishment. Maybe you could interest them in your wares once they are done hunting.
Brand Promotion:
This is a golden opportunity, to be grabbed with both hands, to advertise your SME. Getting your brand associated with the game is a chance to get easy publicity by word-of-mouth marketing.
Leverage Social Media. If your business enterprise happens to be a Pokestop or a Gym, advertise it on social media.
Devise Schemes and Offers. Offer discounts to Pokemon Go players for every check-in to your business on social media.
Provide Value Indirectly. If your business doesn’t happen to be in the vicinity of a Pokemon location, you can advertise the presence of a phone charging facility (the app consumes a lot of battery!) and offer discounted products and services to players of the game.
Go all out with events. Organise a Pokewalk. Ask your staff to dress up in company branded clothing and offer freebies to participants. It will guarantee loads of social media mentions.
Business Standard revealed an interesting story about California-based fitness startup GOQUii. They have been organising fitness-based events called Active Sundays for a while, usually attracting 40-50 people. A Pokewalk was organised by them in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi, inviting individuals to play the game while working out.
The event was an unprecedented success with over 500 people attending. It quickly became the largest gathering in the event’s 18-month timeline. The use of Lure Modules went down well with budding Pokemon hunters, and the brand generated favourable amounts of goodwill.
Summing it all up, these Infographics convey ways in which SMB manufacturers and retailers in India can cash in on the Pokemon craze.
Bountiful opportunities for Manufacturers
Pokemon Go is a boon for Retailers, Food & Beverage players
An enterprising entrepreneur has already come up with a 3D printed iPhone 6 case built specifically to play Pokemon Go. The construction is such that it aids aiming to make sure you never miss a throw again.
Fuelled by Pokemon Go, retailers like GameStop and RadioShack are reporting 45 and 50 percent increases respectively in sales of phone chargers and charging equipment.
With time, improved hardware on smartphones will usher in a new era of mobile apps that will exist in an Augmented Reality ecosystem supported by enhanced geolocation abilities. The game has started a technological revolution that will have deep consequences on the business and marketing ecosystem in the future.
Entrepreneurs generally start out on their journey with a basic Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It may not have an amazing user interface (UI) and multiple features, but it aims to get one particular task done well. Further on in the lifecycle of a product, entrepreneurs tend to add more functional features and improve the UI to enhance appeal. But adding too many features can be a problem as well, as it can add to the complexity and initial learning curve, putting off users.
Many entrepreneurs have utilised the concept of ‘minimalism’ well in the last few years to grow their startups. Through this thought process, entrepreneurs strip down a product to its bare essentials and try to make it perform one core task exceedingly well. Tumblr and Google Translate could be taken as good case studies of the minimalistic approach. An Indian startup Buno aims to make note-taking simpler through this same philosophy.
What is it?
Short for ‘Bucket Notes’, Buno is a note-taking appwhich aims to make the job of jotting notes through a gesture-based system, quick and simple. With its simplistic and minimalistic approach, the founders aim to compete with the likes of Evernote and Google Keep by focusing on the users’ key need, which is simple hassle-free note taking.
Share directly
The app relies on ‘swiping’ for different functions- users can swipe to take a note and then swipe again to save it. Then through real-time cloud sync, the notes are backed up and users can access it across multiple devices. To ensure security, Buno has a four digit PIN-based security system and the team claims to utilise the highest grade security techniques for end-to-end encryption.
Buno’s aim is to provide a minimal interface to avoid any distractions while taking notes, to help users focus on writing more effectively. Some other interesting features include-
File organisation– Bucket (folder) system for organising and accessing notes easily.
Social sign in– Buno has enabled Facebook and Google sign-ins to ensure quick access.
Share directly– To eliminate ‘copy-pasting’ across different screens and apps, Buno lets users share notes directly from within the app.
Word count and image integration– To let users keep track of their notes, Buno provides character, word and paragraph count on the screen along with the ability to add multiple images to the same note.
The story so far
Jayant And Deepesh (HelloWorld Dev)
Buno was developed by HelloWorld Dev in collaboration with50x Apps. The core team of Buno includes Deepesh Sondagar (CEO), Jayant Rao (Design head), Puneet Kohli (Product lead) and Arun Swaminathan (Technical Architect).
Deepesh had earlier started a company to design custom phone cases and claims to have sold it at ten times the price within 18 months of its launch. He currently handles operations, finance and management at Buno.
Jayant looks after design and digital marketing and relies on his experience working with companies like Ogilvy and Featherlite Furniture. Arun has published research papers and worked with companies like Barclays and Cognisant in a technical capacity. He also has prior experience in architecturing apps to enterprise grade software.
Puneet has four years of experience in the app development space with his startup ReFocus Tech. Talking to YourStory, Puneet noted that Buno came into existence in November 2015, based on the founding team’s personal needs. He said,
Being a gadget freak, I generally change my phone every two months. I have the habit of taking notes throughout the day for various ideas including sensitive information. So I tried and tested a lot of apps but they were either too cluttered or too ugly for my liking.
Arun and Puneet (50x Apps)
While having dinner with a bunch of close friends, he realised that his friends too had faced similar issues. So they decided to work on an app that provided a clean, user-friendly and minimalistic interface to take notes. Puneet Kohli from50x Apps says, “We all put a lot of thought into how we could make the process of taking notes really easy. It’s a pain to have to press so many buttons to take a note with current applications – especially during meetings.”
So they decided to make buttons redundant and developed a gesture based UI that helps users take notes with ‘swipes’ performing different actions. Buno is currently working on a web-based version of their product to help users sync their notes across their smartphone and web browsers to enhance user appeal.
Traction and revenue model
Available on Android and iOS, Buno is currently free to download and use. Going forward, the team aims to include some in-app purchases or a subscription model for premium features and are also exploring options like charging for storage space and cloud backup after a certain limit.
Puneet estimates that they have about 8,000 installs across both platforms, and according to their metrics, eight percent of their users use the app daily, while 21 percent of users use it at least once in a month. In terms of the demography of users, Buno found that 54 percent of their Android users were from Germany, while the iOS version is most popular in China, accounting for 40 percent of their users. Puneet also noted,
The average session length for Buno is 20 seconds,which is completely in line with our motto of making note-taking super easy and quick.
Sector overview
Smartphones have now become the default screen for most users. Though most people prefer desktops and laptops for taking lengthy emails and finishing reports, smartphones are extremely useful for jotting down quick notes and reminders. The three big players in this sector are Evernote, Google Keep and Microsoft’s OneNote.
Each platform has their own set of features that appeal to different users. Google Keep is estimated to be more streamlined, with better search integration, and quicker. Evernote, on the other hand, has API integrations and premium web clipper tools that make notes searchable in Google results.
Buno is a well designed app and has an interesting value proposition. The ability to get an overview of character, word and paragraph count in one place is quite useful. The swipe gestures take a few minutes to get used to, but are quite intuitive once you get a hang of them.
While Buno is a good alternative to Evernote and Google Keep in some aspects like UI and design, the app still has some drawbacks at this stage. There is currently no desktop support and integration, and users can only access their notes across smartphones and tablets. Also, adding more gesture-based commands to add colour or bold different parts of text could enhance user appeal.
Overall, Buno is a good attempt by a bootstrapped startup to take on industry giants by focusing on user interface and design. Including a few more tweaks and adjusting their product in line with user feedback will help the Buno team enhance the stickiness of their app.
He observed that implements used in farming were expensive and bore no government subsidy. Because of this, small and marginal land holding farmers, who constitute 85 percent of farmers’ population in India, were not taking interest in purchasing such tools and, hence, not able to draw any mechanical help.
According to a FICCI report Transforming Agriculture through Mechanisation, released in December 2015, farm mechanisation in India is 40 percent against the 95 percent in the US and Western Europe, 80 percent in Russia, 75 percent in Brazil and 48 percent in China.
Vikas, from interactions with the farmer community, also noticed that where implements were being used for farming, they were used for a small period of time. Farmers who owned such tools utilised them for less than 2-3 weeks in each season; and the rest of the time they lay idle. Why not bring the idle implements to the use of other farmers who didn’t have any, he wondered.
Based on the idea of sharing economy, Vikas launched Ravgo in May 2016. An agri-equipment rental marketplace for the agriculture sector, it aims to bring access to modern technology for small farmers who cannot afford ownership of expensive machinery.
“Through Ravgo, farmers can access agriculture services, superior farming technologies and latest equipment at affordable costs without the hassle of ownership,” explains Vikas.
He adds that the objective is to enhance productivity through farm mechanisation and thereby increase the income of farmers. The platform leverages Internet technology to provide benefits of mechanical technology to small and marginal farmers.
Business model
The agri-equipment rental marketplace follows a commission-based model in which it charges a certain percentage from vendors in lieu of the business it brings to them.
Vikas says that in agri-equipment rental business, an hour of service fetches as high as Rs 1,000. “This rental economy has proved a boon for both vendors (agri-equipment owning farmers) and consumers (farmers). The former gets a regular source of income on his investment (equipment) and the latter saves lakhs of rupees on purchase of new tools and gets the service for as less as a few thousand rupees,” Vikas says.
Ravgo launched operations in Faridkot district of Punjab by enrolling vendors who own agri-equipment. It has on-boarded 50 vendors in one month and claims to have offered its services to more than 200 farmers.
It plans to launch operations across Punjab in the next rabi season.
Why mechanisation is the need of the hour
Small landholdings and poor economic condition of farmers have resulted in minimum use of agriculture equipment. Indian farmers are either not aware of new type of machines or cannot afford to buy such machines. Because of these factors, agricultural productivity has remained low and farmers have lower incomes.
According to Vikas, mechanisation can result in savings of 15-20 percent in seed and fertilizer consumption, savings in time and labour cost and enhancement of farm productivity.
Mechanisation is concentrated on tillage and seedbed preparation and harvesting. More than 50 percent harvesting of wheat and rice is mechanized and harvesting of the rest of the crops with machines is less than five percent. In tillage, old types of equipment such as cultivator and disc plough are still used.
How sharing economy will help farmers
Such kind of an economy has benefits galore. Farmers won’t need to buy tractors and other equipment, which will be available at a fraction of the cost of ownership, combined with any time access to the product and its services. For the vendors, their income will increase as they rent out products.
Government is also promoting agri-equipment market
According to analysts, the size of the tractor hiring market is Rs 15,000 crore per annum. Vikas pegs his own potential market size calculation thus: with area under food cultivation in India at 125 million hectare, and average cost of servicing one hectare for two seasons at Rs 15,000, assuming 30 percent mechanization on rental basis, the market size is estimated at Rs 56,250 crore. “If one adds the need for mechanisation in sugarcane, fruits and vegetables, the market size can go up to Rs 70,000 crore,” he says.
With such a large market and the need to promote agriculture and increase productivity, the government itself is sparing no efforts on the sector. It budgeted a hike of 44 percent in farm spending in the 2016-17 Union Budget, touching Rs 35,984 crore, and plans to direct it towards creation of a national e-market for agricultural produce, irrigation schemes, crop insurance, higher production of pulses and interest subsidy for easing the burden of loan repayment from farmers.
Recently, the Central government has allotted more than 300 CHCs, which give machinery on rent to farmers who cannot afford the equipment, to companies such as Mahindra, John Deere and VST Tillers. Doing its bit, the Karnataka government has allotted 160 CHCs to SKDRDP, Shree Kshetra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project.
Giving a run for its money to Ravgo will be companies such as Mahindra which early this year launched a startup of its own, Trringo, to make tractors and implements more affordable for farmers by getting it to them on rent. Another platform, EM3 Agri Services also offers a range of agricultural equipment services, on a pay-per-use basis.
A win-win for all
Both farmers and equipment vendors are pleased with the turn of events, giving positive views on equipment sharing specially during periods of high demand. “Now we do not have to approach different vendors for equipment,” says Gurpreet Singh, a farmer in Gudduwala village, near Faridkot.
Other practices Ravgo is trying to implement in the sector include price standardisation, high availability of equipment and high asset utilisation for equipment owners. Through Ravgo, vendors can increase their service area and get higher asset utilisation. “This is a seasonal business and we get only 45-50 days when our equipment is required, so it is very important for us to get maximum service requests during those days,” says Amritpal Singh, who owns a laser land leveller.
An alumnus of Chitkara University, Akshay Ahuja was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug at the age of 19. In the second year of his college, he undertook two projects-teaching school students basic circuits and electronic-related concepts, and a six-week industrial training for B.Tech students.
Akshay Ahuja, Founder, RoboChamps
Luckily, he managed to get 29 B.Tech students from all across Chandigarh to train them on the use and functioning of Atmega8 IC technology. Building a teaching centre while still a student was a challenging task. The students were provided training on the roof of a building under construction.
What caught Akshay’s attention was the speed at which kids at the summer camp were learning, in comparison to BTech students. This instigated him to try an experiment. He put one of the kids, Aryaman Verma, from the summer camp workshop in the industrial programme with the B.Tech students. To his surprise, the nine-year-old learnt the Atmega8 IC technology better than the B.Tech students. This confirmed to Akshay the need for RoboChamps, which he then launched in 2013 in Chandigarh.
Creation of robotics module
RoboChamps creates robotics modules for students to help understand various scientific and technological concepts. These modules are made keeping in mind the relevance they hold to the different scientific and mathematics concepts students learn in schools.
According to Akshay, the components for every kit are sourced from different parts of the country, including Delhi and Chennai. Some more sophisticated components like breadboards are imported from China. Currently, RoboChamps has close to 40 such modules.
The startup conducts workshops in its academies and has tied up with various schools to conduct open workshops. With the intention of giving back to the society, RoboChamps also conducts free workshops in slums.
We do not rent out or buy entire properties for our academies. Instead, we have tie-ups with different schools and organisations that allow us to use their premises for the required hours of coaching,” explains Akshay.
Bootstrapping
Akshay bootstrapped RoboChamps with his own money of Rs 20,000. More than the financial hurdles he found it difficult to get the right set of talent that was equally motivated. Other challenge he faced was the multiple rejections from schools, which found it difficult to trust a young entrepreneur.
Akshay Ahuja with students
In January 2013, RoboChamps’ module was rejected by close to 50 schools. Akshay one day visited a well-known school in Jagraon, a district in Ludhiana and got the chance to meet the principal, who was impressed by the learning method. That’s how RoboChamps got its first client.
Overcoming all the initial hiccups, RoboChamps just started to take off, when Akshay’s co-founder scooted with all the money the company earned in the initial few months. With no resources left, Akshay had to put in a considerable amount of money again and start from scratch.
Today, RoboChamps has 10 academies and 50 teachers who regularly conduct classes and workshops in different cities in Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, and has covered more than 500 schools and reached 20,000 students.
Creating a network of schools
RoboChamps will be conducting an event, Build Your Bot, on August 28, in Gurugram. It is set to bring together around 20,000 students and help RoboChamps associate with more than 100 schools from Delhi-NCR region as well.
For the upcoming Build Your Bot event, we require a good amount of money. But all of that will be raised through students’ fee and sponsorship deals. The money raised through the event will be used to open more eobotics academies in the coming years,” Akshay adds.
The robotics courses are priced at Rs 1,600 per month for a 16-hour training period, including training services. The company targets students from Classes III to XII. By the end of 2016, it is looking to open 32 robotics academies, in cities like Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Bathinda, Amritsar and Chandigarh.
Market overview
A recent report by Research and Markets estimates that the global industrial robotics market was $28.22 billion in 2014, and is predicted to reach $41.18 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 6.5 percent for the period. Schools are now increasingly focussing on incorporating robotics learning as a part of the regular curriculum, and startups have sensed this as a huge business opportunity.
Similar to RoboChamps, Noida-based Robotech Labs is a service provider in robotics and embedded education that conducts training workshops for colleges. Jay Robotix built the ROBOX line of educational robotic kits for K-12 students, which include building blocks. Robotix Learning Solutions provides robotics-based STEM education to students from Classes IV-XII.
For 19-year-old Shivani Kapoor, the idea of joining a prestigious institute in Delhi was exciting. But it also meant having to deal with the tedious task of finding a place to stay that was close to college, convenient as well as inexpensive. This meant she had to deal with brokers, tour an unfamiliar city and talk to unknown people.
44-year old Viren Jain faced a similar problem while trying to find accommodation for a relative’s daughter who had come to Delhi for her education. He found his time being spent mostly in visiting several parts of the city, dealing with multiple brokers and checking out different options. He found it surprising that there was no single place to check the status of accommodations, with accurate descriptions and pricing.
Helping students find accommodation
“Going through real-estate portals also didn’t help as a lot of them declined providing accommodation to students. That set me thinking and the idea of a platform was born where students could find accommodations,” says Viren.
Viren thus started Studentacco, a students-only accommodation portal that brings the different kinds of student accommodations like PGs and flats on one platform.
Working as an online aggregator for quality furnished accommodation in the student community, Studentacco aims to facilitate an informed, swift and transparent transaction.
While the idea was in place for Viren, who is an alumnus of Manchester Business School and Shri Ram College of Commerce, he found it difficult to convince people to be a part of the portal, as there is a general bias against letting property out for students.
After some convincing on checks and balances, the team was able to work with owners to create clean, spacious, standardised and fully-furnished accommodations.
(L-R) – Viren Jain, Aarti Jain and Amit Chhabra
Understanding student needs
Viren’s wife Aarti Jain, also an alumna of Manchester Business School, and ex-Director of Rollatainers Limited, soon joined him in his endeavour.
Viren found the third co-founder in Amit Chhabra, who had strong operational expertise. Starting May last year, the trio began to work towards building a stronger base for Studentacco across Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida. Today, the team consists of 15 people.
Viren says:
We are focusing on getting people who understand the accommodation problem that students face. Understand their core needs along with understanding the concerns of the home and PG owners.
Adding more to the numbers
Studentacco has been able to aggregate over 14,000 student beds and accommodations across Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon till date. The team is targeting to touch 20,000 student beds in the next three-four months.
Studentacco is working to create branded, ready-to-move-in, fully-furnished living spaces. It works on an aggregator model and charges PG and house owners for every accommodation closed.
“PGs offerings are non-standardised and there is no predictability of the facilities and amenities available at any location. Studentacco strives to provide the same experience across all the accommodations,” says Viren.
Studentacco works by matching students with quality accommodation providers in a trustworthy manner. The team ensures that the offering on the site is fully verified and has authentic pictures, which enable quick decision-making by the student.
Currently bootstrapped, the startup intends to expand across Delhi NCR, and also looking to raise funds for multi-city expansion. The team intends to target the top 10 student hotspots in the next two years.
The growing need for student accommodation
The market for student accommodation seems to be growing even in India, where it is believed to be worth $3 million. A survey conducted last year suggested that there were close to 50 lakh students enrolling in colleges and universities across 20 cities in the country.
Of these, close to 54 percent were from other cities, and only 4.8 lakh hostel seats were available for the base of 27.5 lakh students. This meant that the remaining students had to seek accommodation at PGs or flats.
Gaurav Munjal founded Flat.to—acquired by Commonfloor—which focuses on helping students find relevant accommodation. Apart from that there also is Housing Anywhere, an international platform that helps students find accommodation as per their requirements in 118 countries and 531 cities. Then there are big players like Student.com and Uniplaces.
In India, hotel aggregator Wudstay is looking to expand aggressively in this space. The company claims to have provided over 35,000 beds since the launch of its hostel and PG network across five cities, starting with Kota in Rajasthan.
A survey by NASSCOM (2014) revealed that India is the fastest growing startup base in the world and ranks the third among global startups in the world; about three to four startups are born every day. Zooming in on Bengaluru specifically, the city is ranked the 15th biggest startup city in the global level according to Compass (2015), accommodating about 3,100-4,900 active startups. The Compass survey goes on to state that venture capitalists favour Bengaluru over other cities – this could contribute to an accelerated growth rate of startups in the coming years. Though the blooming entrepreneurial spirit may be good for the nation’s economy, on the flip side it could also mean that the number of non-compliant startups is on the rise. Why does a word such as compliance even matter for startups, which just want to take their business to the next level and get investors pumping capital in their business?
Compliance and its importance is often overlooked by many startups new to the business ecosystem simply because they are not aware of the existing laws. Ignorance may not be bliss in such cases as it affects a startup’s viability and attractiveness to a potential investor. For instance, the Economic Times reported that venture capitalists are “getting experts to check businesses they have invested in to catch any oversights or discrepancies”, pointing to the necessity of being compliant to the law of the land. Such diligence and foresight would benefit both the company and the investors, simply by assuring potential investors that the startup they are investing is in safe hands, thereby gaining the trust of the investors.
It is always a safer option to get business registered at the initial stage and pay taxes, rather than getting caught later and pay penalties that could result in damaging lawsuit, and lose the credibility of the company in the long run. Failing to comply to legal obligations could also hinder the progress of the company and other several consequences, such as imprisonment and disqualification of key personnel of the company. The compliance laws are so stringent that failing to comply can even lead to the shutdown of the startup even before it gets going. Ignoring the legal terms can subject to intrusive action by regulatory agencies.
How to register your startup and stay compliant?
Often times, new and small firms are unaware of nuances of the issues and can be subjected to intrusive action by regulatory authorities. In order to make compliance for startups friendly and flexible, simplifications are required in the regulatory regime. In early 2016, the Ministry of Labour and Employment mandated a Direction in accordance to the ambitious ‘Make in India’ and the ‘Startup India Action Plan’ conceptualised by the Government of India. This Direction has been stated as one of the many regulatory changes sought to be introduced encouraging startups and entrepreneurs. What exactly are these startup-friendly initiatives?
a. Self-certification
As per the Ministry Directive, startups shall be allowed to self-certify compliance through the startup mobile app with nine labour laws. In case of environment laws, startups that fall under the ‘white category’ (as defined by the Central Pollution Control Board) would be able to self-certify compliance and only random checks would be carried out in such cases.
b. Inspection
Startups may be inspected on receipt of credible and verifiable complaint of violation, filed in writing and approved by at least one level senior to the inspecting officer. In case of the labour laws, no inspections will be conducted for a period of three years. As the startup may have to eventually hire employees, the following basic documentation needs to be in place:
Confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement (NDA)
Offer letter/ employment agreements
Non-competition and non-solicitation agreements
Intellectual property assignment agreement
HR policy/ Employee handbook
c. In case of a factory startup
Factories Act embodies the law relating to regulation of labour in factories. The statute prescribes terms of health, safety, working hours, benefits, overtime and leave. The statute is enforced by State governments in accordance with the State-specific rules framed under the Factories Act. Before construction of a factory, environment clearance has to be obtained from Ministry of Environment & Forest.
The following compliances shall be observed while setting up a factory
Approval of site plan
Factory licence
Consent from Pollution Control Board under Air (Prevention & Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 & Water (Prevention & Control of Pollution) Act, 1974
State Electricity Board – Load Sanction Letter
Local Authority Approval to set up plant / industry
d. In case of a shop or a commercial establishment
Shop and Establishment Act provides statutory obligation and rights to employees and employers in the unorganised sector of employment, i.e., shops and establishments. A State legislation, each State has framed its own rules for the Act. A certificate of registration of the establishment should be obtained.
So, as you can see, building Smart Cities is not as simple. We need to go beyond technology and gadgets and get a grasp of the real issues so that the foundation and building blocks of the Smart City is there to stay for generations.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
Every organsation has a story to tell. While for some the process of articulating it is easy, for others their narrative may be fraught with hardships and challenges. Many have the misconception that the art of storytelling for a company lies with the marketing team. But what they fail to realise is that the organisation’s or even an individual’s story needs to be reinforced internally whenever the opportunity arises.
This is where a company like Ahsomeness comes into the picture. A creative enterprise, Ahsomeness helps transform a thought, emotion, or communication into a storybased narrative, presented in a blend of films or videos.
The beginnings
While the thought behind Ahsomeness was born towards the end of 2014, the creative enterprise came to be in early 2015. It all started when chartered accountants Ashish Chawla and Shivani Kaul while working at KPMG, were approached by their colleague for help in creating a unique gift for his daughter that she would cherish for a lifetime. Ashish and Shivani, along with the parents, then put their heads together and figured out a beautiful narrative that depicts the daughter’s life, which became a hit with anyone who saw it.
Ashish Chawla (L) and Shivani Kaul (R)
After their respective stints at KPMG, the two moved onto roles in other companies—Ashish worked with GE before becoming a part of the core team of one of India’s first few funded e-commerce companies, while Shivani worked with WNS Accenture, before becoming the Content Head for Aspire—before revisiting their earlier project. Hence, after more than 13 years in the corporate finance world, Ashish (35) and Shivani (35) chose to finally pursue their professional dream of creating content based on moments, and built Ahsomeness.
The ah! moments
The team works with varied audiences – from billion-dollar corporates to startups, event management companies, wedding planners, kids and their parents, to schools, individuals and social groups.
“‘Ahsomeness’ is a belief that a thought or an emotion that comes from an honest mind carries a ‘hero’ in it which has the power to create an ‘Ah!’ moment for the creator of the thought, its user, the general audience and perhaps the world at large,” notes Ashish. This would help craft a new product, an ethical or even a brand value.
The business of creativity
The core idea of Ahsomeness is bringing in quality in primary execution, visualisation, music and writing. Apart from Ashish and Shivani, who are the startup’s creative heads, the team comprises of a strong and vastly experienced set of writers, illustrators, animators, videographers, video editors, musicians and sound engineers.
Ahsomeness has worked with brands like Canon, Goibibo, Viom Networks, Max Insurance, IndiHire, Pearl Academy and GSK to name a few.
The makings
The team first gets a brief from the client. Based on the key takeaways to be presented, the team designs a creative script, including a story, poem and lyrics, which reveal the most telling aspects behind a thought or a message an individual or a company is wishing to get across.
Then the team brainstorms on the best way to depict the concept. This involves a combination of animation, live shoots and still shots depending on the requirement.
Simultaneously, the team comes up with original music to create an emphatic emotional connect with the audiences, while striving to keep the commercial aspects of a business at bay.
“As a result, the core message of our adverts, videos, animation and jingles have a lasting appeal in the minds of the audiences,” says Ashish.
The challenge of explaining creativity
The team initially found it a challenge to explain the massive amount of creative work that goes into crafting a narrative, be it is using original music written specifically for a particular idea, or using a uniquely designed storyline and innovative visuals to establish the right connect with the audiences.
“That apart, we had to surpass tons of big fish in the market,” adds Ashish.
Changing the status quo
However, he notes that it is difficult to find a professionally organised agency such like theirs, which makes music-based video content available to corporate, event companies and to end B2C segment (individuals, schools, social groups, kids and parents) directly.
Mostly, musicians function separately. Even video and animation production houses are different from the creative agency. Ahsomeness, on the other hand, is one-stop shop as far as core idea generation, script and lyric writing, music composition and video visualisation and direction are concerned.
The team plans to beef up its marketing efforts by targeting more corporates. It also intends to build a stronger sales and business development team to get larger reach.
While the team refused to share its revenue details, it claims to be cash-flow positive. For the corporate clients, the startup charges on a project-to-project basis of an approximate cost of Rs 2 lakh per project, the team also works on television commercials for which they charge approximately Rs. 50 lakh and the individual client projects are priced at anywhere between Rs 50,000 and 70,000.
“Ahsomeness plans to foray aggressively into schools and intends to make learning voluntary, enjoyable and awesome using a blend of story-telling, music and creative visuals,” says Ashish.
A report by Cisco suggests that by 2017 over 70 percent of the world’s mobile Internet traffic will be made of videos. In the Indian context by 2017, the country’s video traffic is expected to touch 1.8 exabytes per month. Thus making it close to 66 percent of all IP traffic of that year. Online video reach today is about 100-120 million from platforms like YouTube.
Modern technology has improved our lives for the better. Recent advances in technology have shown that some of our science fiction fantasies could indeed soon be realities. The popular 2002 science fiction flick Minority Report explored the possibilities of technologies that could help law enforcement capture criminals even before they committed crimes.
We haven’t reached that ‘utopian stage’ yet. However, advances in big data and machine learning have shown that, with a big enough data set and predictive analytics, it is possible to predict human behaviour and take corrective action in advance for some use cases.
A recent collaboration by an Indo-Dutch consortium that included the Government of India, the Netherlands organization for Scientific Research (NWO) – the Dutch R&D organization participants from organisations including IISC, Bangalore, IIT Kanpur, and two startups – Tarah Technologies and Aarav Unmanned Systems looked to explore the possibilities of this by collecting data from the Kumbh Mela that was held recently. Here is a story of the whole initiative and how a bootstrapped Tarah Technologies became a part of it.
Story so far – From CRM to big data
Neelima Vobugari
Started in late 2010, Tarah Technologies is a big data consultancy firm focussed on competency development and consulting. The startup originally started out as a customer relationship management (CRM) consultancy firm and in 2014 pivoted to operating in the big data domain prominently focussing on machine learning.
Neelima Vobugari, Founder of Tarah Technologies, is a Big Data Consultant and has nearly 16 years of experience working in different IT domains. Before starting up, she worked at multiple startups and companies including IBM for almost a decade. She then felt a strong pull towards entrepreneurship and starting up on her own. So she equipped herself with the required skills through a course on entrepreneurship for women entrepreneurs at IIM Bangalore in 2009.
Dr Srinivas Padmanabhuni
At present, the startup has around 10 employees with varying skills, with primary among them being in big data and machine learning. Dr Srinivas Padmanabhuni functions as the Chief Mentor and brings to the table his experience of about 15 years in the IT sector. He has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, and also has B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur and IIT Bombay, respectively.
Prior to being part of Tarah Technologies, Srinivas was Associate VP heading research at Infosys till October 2015 and the President of ACM India till June 2016. He also has seven granted patents, 15 filed patents, one published book by Wiley, and over 70 refereed journal and conference papers to his credit, in addition to invited talks and editorial positions.
Having bootstrapped so far, Tarah’s two main offerings to generate revenue include consulting and training related to big data for different clients. Tarah declined to name their clients for confidentiality reasons, but added that they work with large educational institutions which contribute to the skill development of individuals across different domains like Business and IoT analytics. Neelima said,
In our consultancy, we use machine learning software to solve real world problems from the data collected.
The platform had provided training services to six clients for around six months. Despite the demand for training programmes, they decided to put it on hold to focus more on their consulting business. Neelima noted that they have consulted with five clients over the past year and sees this sector growing though it is still in its infancy in India.
Tarah works on a flexible project or monthly billing model based on the needs of the clients. Based on their expertise and having worked with different clients in the past and also because of Srinivas’ extended network, Tarah Technologies was recently approached and chosen in an Indo-Dutch consortium of a team of companies, academicians, and researchers from different domains in an effort to automate crowd management at the Kumbh Mela.
The long-term aim of the ‘Kumbh Mela experiment’ is to develop advanced methods and algorithms to support events planners and managers manage extremely large groups. This project is being funded by NWO and Government of India’s Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DIETY). Neelima noted that considering the initiative was a noble cause with far reaching consequences, Tarah had offered their expertise and platform (servers, etc.) pro-bono for the cause. DIETY and NWO sponsored travel and other related expenses.
It is a well-known fact that during large scale events like Kumbh Mela, Hajj Yatra and other similar events, the footfall of crowds is in tens of millions. So managing such unexpected crowds is difficult in normal scenarios, along with the enhanced risk of disasters such as stampedes occurring due to confusion.
So, to better understand the underlying pain point and solve this issue, different organisations part of this multi-year multidisciplinary research effort are working on three key research areas related to the understanding and management of massive human crowds – data collection, data analysis, and modeling/prediction.
Srinivas Padmanabhuni and Neelima Vobugari
The data collection phase happened during the recent Kumbh Mela that occurred from April 22 to May 21 at Ujjain. As Kumbh Mela is considered among the largest such gathering in human endeavor, the team of researchers and companies felt that it was the ideal project to gather a large volume of data for diverse model building. The data were collected through a variety of means via sensors, go-pro cameras, drones, apps, physical questionnaires, videos, call data records, etc., all of which were fed to big data analytics to enable derivation of models. Neelima noted,
Patterns of movement of the crowd is for the first time being studied anywhere in such a comprehensive manner with real time diagnostics. When a situation like a stampede can be predicted well in advance, precautionary measures are taken to avoid life loss.
Apart from Tarah Technologies, Aarav Unmanned Systems (AUS) was the other Indian startup that was part of this initiative. With the help of AUS’s drones, the Kumbh Mela team was able to effectively model the entire layout of the Kumbh Mela venue at Ujjain. Yeshwanth Reddy, Co-founder of AUS, noted they had also planned to deploy drones during the event to collect more data. But, because of some regulations that cropped up at the last moment, they were not allowed to. But ground-level data were collected through various other means.
Post the data analyses and modelling stage, which will take some time because of the large volume of data, the aim is to create a decision support software that predicts the crowd well in advance and alerts the organisers in form of an early warning system.
Interesting implications
While the current use case is for Kumbh Mela, Neelima believes that this ‘crowd management system’, which relies on research from machine learning, complex systems, and organisational behaviour, could be tweaked to other use cases such as managing traffic on roads, pedestrians on busy streets, and tourist areas with large footfalls.
As we move into a more connected world where buzzwords like internet of things (IoT) and connected devices are slowly becoming mainstream, it will be interesting to see what more can be done with these devices and sensors that track a lot of useful ground level data.
There are several startups that serve the retail industry. And only the ones that survive understand the problems faced by the retailers and the pains of the consumers. Some of the well-known starups like SnapBizz and StockWise are working with retailers to help them understand the sales cycles and buying patterns. They have been able to advice retailers to stock smart and work with the consumer goods supply chain to manufacture products that matter to the consumer. All this is going to change the lives of retailers. But what about the consumer? When a consumer walks into the store, he/she is stuck in long and time-consuming queues. Xlogix, a company founded by Deepak Kaushik and Amar Revadi, are busting those long lines and are helping retailers churn out their stock better.
After 20 years in the corporate world – in sales and marketing – Deepak and Amar shared a common problem with retailing. Amar was surprised that the local store that he would visit frequently could not capture his habits and neither could they understand what products could be stocked better to improve margins. For Deepak it was a different problem, every Saturday he and his wife would waste at least 30 minutes in long queues at retail stores in order to make payments at the cash till. “Retailing in India is yet to understand easy check out for consumers and also stream line the supply chain to suit behaviour habits of the region,” says Amar, Director at Xlogix Technolytics Private Limited.
The two of them being common friends discussed this hypothesis casually over a coffee and realised that this was a business opportunity that they could go after. Having no immediate family commitments, they decided to plunge into building a product for the retail industry in January 2015.
According to CRISIL, there are 10 to 12 million kirana stores in the country. About 10 percent of them have some form of data capture through computers. About 100,000 of them have point-of-sale systems and own at least 4000 square feet of retail space. Then there are organsied retailers who use the latest software and ERP and own at least 20,000 stores in the country. That said there is a problem. None of them have been built to figure out consumer shopping habits. The loyalty systems and customer relationship management tools do not talk to each other too. “We decided to change all that. Technology should make the customer the centre of shopping and the retail chain needs data to streamline its stocking,” says Amar.
Here is how the technology works
The customer walks into the store and downloads the app of the retailer. The app connects through the local LAN and opens up the shopping aisle on the app. The customer can then use the app to swipe the QR code or the bar code – of the item – to make the purchase. This data gets captured at the cash till. The customer can either chose to go to the self-checkout till to make the payment or can use a payment gateway to complete the sale.
“The app works only in the store and not at the consumer’s home,” says Deepak, Director at Xlogix.
The retail IT market is a $2.5 billion market and the organised consumption market – according to Ernst and Young – is $65 billion (Rs 4,30,000 crore).
“There are not many technologies that have connected the long tail of mom and pop stores,” says Srinibas Behera, CEO of Retigence Technologies.
Amar and Deepak have signed up four large department stores and a large corporate chain. The experiment with the corporate chain is happening at the Royal Meenakshi Mall in Bengaluru.
The business model and the competition
The company’s business model is based on annual maintenance contracts and outcome-driven business. The software manages loyalty programmes of retailers and provides them an analytics engine to create dashboards to understand their business cycles. This can make the retailers bargain for better terms with distributors and consumer goods companies.
Amar and Deepak have to contend with several companies they compete in this space. Some of the well-known names are SnapBizz, GoFrugal, and StockWise.
These companies have signed in more than 2,000 retailers and work with over 10 corporates. Xlogix revenues are less than Rs 1 crore today. SnapBizz and GoFrugal would have revenues upwards of more than $1 million. However, the opportunity exists for Xlogix because the retail universe in India is large. The two founders have invested close to Rs 50 lakhs. But if they crack it, the business can hit revenues and valuations that can run into millions.
In an era when every major global sports team is investing millions of dollars in data analytics, there is a tendency to go easy on local-level competitions. Very often, local competitions are fiercely fought and players are only as good as a club. And statistics help a club in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a sportsman. Since many sports are managed as businesses that are sponsored by corporates the accountatbility of a team is only measured by the number of fans the teams players can draw to the stadiums. The team managers need the best team to take the field. With this as the narrative Naveen Ningaiah, a 32-year-old IT engineer, plunged deep into using technology to provide insight on sportsmen and women.
The early days
Naveen was not a sports enthusiast by any means. Like a typical South Indian, he went on to finish his engineering degree and found a job in the corporate world. But he harboured a desire to move in sports circles. The Indian Premier League had plunged the nation in a sever bout of cricket fever then and Naveen realised that there was potential in using the same formula for local leagues and competitions.
“Every State-level sports team invests in data tools. But interpreting data is a problem,” says Naveen, adding that his company, Sports KPI, was born in the strangest of ways.
In 2013, Naveen was in Amsterdam on deputation for a project when he decided to take a look at the hockey talent in the area. He walked into a club and introduced himself as a sports scout wanting to take young players to play in India. He was having a bit of fun and just wanted to know what the management of the club thought about coming to India. The coach of the hockey club invited Naveen for dinner and wanted to discuss the terms of sending professional youngsters to represent clubs in India. “I was shocked that they really wanted to take it forward. They told me their requirements and I realised that there was a business here,” says Naveen.
He returned to India and began to chalk out all his ideas. But he was still not sure how tech can play a major role in bringing players to India. However, things took a different turn in India when he asked the coach of the Bangalore Football Club if there was a data analyst for the team. The word “data” caught the attention of the coach and Naveen quickly began to draw out numbers on the plays of the game. He showed him numbers on how many tackles, passes and assists were delivered by his players. Luckily for Naveen the Bangalore Football Club was buying an international analytics tool and Naveen was called in as an expert. This set the ball rolling.
He became a part-time data analyst for the club and that year the club won the national championship. Naveen soon became popular among clubs, and it started him out on a path to building a platform for many local Indian clubs to use data efficiently. In April 2015 Naveen set up SportsKPI and the company has already signed up four football clubs and a couple of kabbadi clubs. The revenue of the company is around Rs 30 lakh over the last six months. The company has invested Rs 5 lakhs and is a four member team.
The business model
Naveen works on any third-party sports data analytics platform. A typical club would ask for a service for six months. Naveen would buy an analytics tool, take all the raw data from the club and churn it on the data platform. Most clubs would want to know if the price paid for a player would be effective based on the available budget. They would like to know cheaper alternatives of players who can perform the same tasks more effectively. Naveen and his team would also provide cameras for a game to assess player moves and finishes. Then they would combine all this data and analyse the entire team’s strengths with individual merits. They would also compare data with players from the competition. For this, the company charges a fixed sum per season.
Experts opine that such platforms as Naveen’s are just figuring out their way. “These sports analytics platforms are still in their infancy and need to flesh out a business model based on long-term contracts,” says R Natarajan, CFO of Helion Ventures.
“Sports is a great business and technology is yet to play a major role in making it meaningful for clubs and players,” says Mohandas Pai, MD of Aarin Capital.
SportsKPI is now focussed on building a complete data platform. It hopes to eventually compete with users of platforms like SAP and Oracle’s Ruckus. The company believes that there are enough clubs in the world that cannot afford analytics and technology, but have some of the best talent to offer. SportsKPI wants to become the bridge between the local, state and national leagues. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the sponsorship spend on sports globally is worth $145 billion and even a five percent spend on analytics and technology makes this a $5-billion business globally. Naveen seems to have hit the ball in the right trajectory. He only has to reach his goal to become a valuable startup.
Out in the streets of Navi Mumbai, Anand Ramulu of Balaji Traders (a grocery trader) visited one of his cousins, who owns an 800 square foot kirana store, to understand his cousin’s new marketing strategy. Everyone in his family was talking about the way he was working with a company to increase sales by using tablets. Upon visiting his cousin, Anand realised that his cousin was working smarter with technology. He had invested in a TV screen – to display promotions – a WiFi connection and a tablet.
On prodding his cousin to share his trade secrets, Anand got something to ponder over. His cousin was working with a young company which aggregated the promotions of consumer goods companies on to the TV screen in the store and provided the kirana owner with the ability to understand consumer buying patterns by using analytics to crunch sales data. The next thing you know, Anand signed up with this company to get these systems in place in his store.
The startup helping kiranas gain a 360 degree view of their consumer business and their business with distributors of consumers goods companies is called SuperZop. Today, there are 50 kirana stores working with this startup in Navi Mumbai.
The beginning
The company was born on the floors of a corporate global retailer in Bangalore, where senior executives Darshan Krishnamurthy and Prithwi Singh began to talk about the benefits of delivering technology to mom and pop retailers. The market they were vying for was the 10 million mom and pop retailers that had no exposure to modern retailing technology. Ernst&Young pegs the market opportunity to be $550 billion.
Darshan and Prithwi then met Raghu Allada (Prtihwi’s former classmate in IIM-A’s batch of 2007 who was now a consultant) to take this idea further. The three founders spent the year 2015 in extensively researching the problems faced by kirana stores. “We found out that kiranas were blind to any form of data, they just ordered things on gut feeling,” says Darshan.
The findings of their research were:
Kiranas did not notice customer behaviour.
They did not bargain with the distributors to stock items that complement each other.
They did feel the need to invest cash in data collection.
Mom and pop retailers were left with no working capital.
They did not churn their stock better.
A kirana works with 800 stock keeping units at any given point of time and the mind is not capable of telling what sells beyond the obvious. Sometimes a customer buying soup packets could also be buying breads of a particular kind. So a balance between how many breads to stock versus soups is something that a kirana owner can never do because he looks at stock in isolation.
In January 2016, SuperZop was born to solve these problems.
The business model
The three founders began to build a platform which could show live product promotions at kiranas – played on the TV at the store for consumers. This technology is sold to kiranas for a certain fixed sum (the company did not wish to disclose the figure ). This gives a double benefit to kiranas because the FMCG companies promote their products at the store and then consumer buying behaviour is captured live at the store. The kiranas get extra margins for selling promoted products, and they also get data on customer shopping habits as every item purchased is scanned through a tablet-based application.
The FMCG companies pay SuperZop for airing promotions through their cloud-based platform and the kiranas get the added benefit of using data intelligently. Every day and every week, the kirana gets data on what has sold well in comparison with products of a similar category. This enables the kirana shop to bargain with distributors and to work closely with them to stock only those products that sell in their catchment area. “The data can be sold to consumer goods companies, and it can be monetised in several ways,” says Raghu.
SuperZop isn’t the only company endeavouring to capture this market. They face competition from the likes of Xlogix, SnapBizz and StockWise. These three companies are building different business models to capitalise on the business opportunity offered by mom and pop retailers. Even with all these companies entering the market, only 0.01 percent of the market is covered. So the opportunity for all of them is enormous.
Venture Capitalists are yet to bet big on such businesses. “The business needs scale and all of us are finding different distribution models to win over kiranas,” says Srinibas Behera, founder of StockWise.
SuperZop has invested Rs 35 lakh in the business. Being a seven-month-old company, their revenues are not a fair measure of their success. But their plans are to scale up to more than 500 kiranas in under a year and tie up with as many FMCG companies in India as possible.
The opportunity is gigantic. Hopefully SuperZop can fly its idea to success.
When it has become the norm to whip out our phones to check online reviews for everything—be it for a new restaurant or the latest Bluetooth speakers, the process for college search and discovery is still done the traditional way. Youngsters whittle down their list of colleges to apply to from magazine rankings or from what their peers are saying. They spend hours on end doing research work, making the whole process tiresome and time-consuming.
Hardik Thakkar and Upneet Grover found themselves in this exact situation when they were looking to pursue their post-graduate degrees. Friends since their days in Infosys, the duo would always discuss ideas and were sure that they wanted to start a company together.
In June 2014, they finally decided that they needed to start something that worked as a social college search platform. They launched Getmyuni last February to help students choose the right college through exhaustive reviews and peer ratings, engaging forums and alumni connect.
Team @ Getmyuni
Bringing in the peer connect
While choosing colleges for their PG, both Hardik and Upneet struggled to get relevant information from peers and also to communicate with fellow students/alumni to understand the pros and cons of each college.
There was scattered information available on different forums and they mostly had to rely on personal connections to get peer information. Thus they wanted to primarily focus on the social connect aspect of Getmyuni.
The duo started Getmyuni after substantial groundwork. Hardik has moved on from the team, which now has Nirmanyu Arora, who has plenty of hands-on experience with creating products in the edutech domain, Manish Gupta, an MBA in Business Analytics, and Tushar Mehta, a BE from NSIT.
The initial challenges for the startup included the difficulty in sourcing user-generated content and getting students to write college reviews without having to spend money on it.
“As a result we created campus ambassador programmes, strong referrals and in product marketing programmes and were lucky to have a good word-of-mouth going around. We were surprised by the number of students who were willing to help aspirants and hence wrote long, unbiased reviews,” says 29-year-old Upneet.
Breaking the market
He adds that they came up with a new revenue stream where they were enabling brands and companies to reach out to students via competitions.
“We were making enough money to support the business till we finally got the funding of $50,000 from Tlabs. With that funding plus our revenues increasing month-on-month we’ve been able to scale to a million users per month on the platform, something we are incredibly proud of,” says Upneet.
However, Upneet believes that the classifieds space is tradition and has been built purely to generate leads. There isn’t much peer information.
“We saw a huge opportunity in the user-generated content space in education, given that there were clear winners in other industries and they all had one thing in common – they had UGC at their core, for example, Zomato for food, Tripadvisor for travel and Glassdoor for jobs,” explains Upneet.
Numbers and future
Getmyuni claims to have over 11,000 colleges listed and over 40,000 student-written reviews on its platform. Since its inception the team claims to have over one million sessions, growing at 60 percent month-on-month.
Their revenue run rate is at Rs 10 lakh. The revenue model of the platform includes generating and selling high quality, verified student leads to colleges that are the right fit, and also ads and student enrollment.
The team is looking for its next round of funding. The aim is to fortify its position as the best college search destination and kickstart sales for domestic colleges.
Getmyuni is also looking to tap into the market for students wishing to study abroad.
“We aim to build the strongest college recommendation tool. We believe that currently a lot of students are being misguided by offline consultants to suit themselves, and if there is a fair portal, which bases a student’s background, marks and abilities, using advanced algorithms, to present them with the right set of college recommendations, that product will be a super success,” says Upneet.
Several online portals and apps have made the online shopping experience easier for people. But what happens to the unbranded neighbourhood retail fashion stores? In most cases, these stores source finished goods or cloths from traditional wholesalers and traders. To make life easier for these retailers, 33-year-old Rohit Dangyach, an IIT Roorkee and IIM Bangalore alumnus, started WholesaleBox.
WholesaleBox is an e-commerce portal for traditional wholesalers and traders in the unbranded fashion and lifestyle category. It helps retailers get vast variety of clothing and fashion goods right at their doorstep.
Catering primarily to the unbranded and regional brand goods market, Jaipur-based WholesaleBox claims to sell goods at less than 25 percent to what the stores would normally get.
Bridging the gap
“There is an immediate need for an efficient procurement and distribution model in the unbranded goods market. The market size accounts for approximately 70 to 95 percent across majority of the industry,” says Rohit, a former Cardekho employee.
The thought behind WholesaleBox was born when Rohit noticed that the stocks were offered at a wholesale price of Rs 350 to some of the retail outlets. The same stock was later sold for Rs 295 to a trader in Mumbai and was bought at Rs 250 from a factory in Jaipur.
Looking at this price gap, Rohit thought it would be best for retailers to buy goods online directly from the factories, thereby saving close to 30 percent of the channel margin. When Rohit received a positive response from a few traders and retail owners he spoke to, he decided to start WholesaleBox late last year.
After freezing on the idea, Rohit decided to build the core team. He roped in his friend Chandan Agarwal, an MBA graduate and an investment banker, who had a backpacker’s hostel chain, to join in as a co-founder. He also met Rakesh Shekhawat, who ran a Software Services Company at startup oasis incubator, and Madhur Bhaiya, an IIT Delhi graduate.
Changing mindsets
They found it difficult to get good quality manufacturers on board to sell on the platform. Rohit adds that their initial quantities were also low.
“These manufacturers hated the word online as some of them had tried selling on B2C portals and they had bad experiences because of single shipments, returns, lack of transparency and accounting hassles,” says Rohit.
Some of them were not very educated to handle the complex reports and payments of online B2C players and made losses because of high charges. However, they managed to rope in few factories.
WholesaleBox connects manufacturing and retailing businesses for transacting goods on their platform, and it removes close to seven intermediary layers and brings the costs down by at least 20-30 percent.
This enables shops to sell their products at a much lower rates than online / offline competitors.
Team @ Wholesale box
Breaking the middlemen loop
Currently, a retail shopkeeper either procures through intermediaries or by travelling to manufacturing hub. In case of purchase through intermediaries, the prices of the product increases. The middlemen were making these margins only by knowing who the seller and buyer was.
In case the retailer travels to the manufacturing hub, he has to leave the shop, incur travelling expense, and has to buy at least two to three months of inventory in the limited travel time and the design available in the market at that point of time.
“By buying through WholesaleBox, a shop can easily breakdown his orders in several orders of smaller quantities based on the demand and fashion trends,” says Rohit.
This reduces the working capital requirement from few lakhs to few thousands and the retailer always has the latest design at his shop.
From manufacturers’ perspective, they get a pan-India reach to shops. In traditional model, manufacturers suffer from lengthy working capital cycle of two to three months and SOR (sale or return policy).
Manufacturers selling online incurred astonishingly high online selling costs of approximately 30 to 35 percent and then accommodate additional costs of photoshoots, inventory, warehousing rental and salary costs, cost of returns.
The manufactures sell complete sets through WholesaleBox resulting in zero dead stock. The working capital cycle is reduced to approximately 15 days and they get to sell across India. They also get analytics to help them modify their manufacturing plans. WholesaleBox also has a tie up with lendingkart to provide 30 days credit to shops buying through their platform.
A booming B2B market
The B2B e-commerce market is fast growing. A report by the Frost & Sullivan suggests that by 2020 the B2B e-commerce market will be worth $12 trillion. This trend makes B2B e-commerce almost two times bigger than the B2C market.
A research report by Frost & Sullivan suggests that Alibaba is a pioneer in the B2B e-commerce space with a GMV of a whopping $27.28 billion. In India, the B2B e-commerce market is expected to touch $674 billion. Currently, China, USA, and Japan are the biggest market drivers of the B2B e-commerce market.
WholesaleBox claims to have over 7,000 registered shopkeepers with over 20,000 shopkeepers browsing through their catalogues and interacting on the platform. Rohit claims that their monthly GMV has been growing at average rate of 20 to 25 percent.
The platform plans to grade and rate buyers as well as sellers along with providing them a seamless transaction experience on the platform.
The team aims to tie up with wholesalers across the country. The team now has more than 200 Jaipur-based manufacturers and are also getting in requests from Surat, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and other manufacturing hubs.
With a series of innovations and new ideas, the digital healthcare sector shows immense growth and performance. Consider the case of CareOnGo, after setting up a mobile chain of co-branded pharmacy stores which allows users to buy medicines from their neighbourhood approved pharmacies, it tried to expand its offerings.
According to CareOnGo, during its course of aggregating micropharmacies on a single platform, it observed lots of lacunae in the B2B pharmaceutical segment. Owing to lack of use of technology, there were many inefficiencies in the industry. The B2C segment was much more organised and comparatively more advanced than B2B. Being the segment that does not deal directly with end consumers, it has been ignored for long. CareOnGo thus identified the opportunity to provide end-to-end technology solution to the micropharmacies instead of just being an incremental sales partner. The platform reshaped its model and merged inventory, sales, and procurement into one platform.
“The reason behind changing the model was to redefine end-to-end solutions by catering to the needs of micro-pharmacies from both procurement and sales segments,” says Yogesh Agarwal, Co-founder of CareOnGo.
Recently, CareOnGo launched a B2B mobile app ‑ InstaStock ‑ to facilitate pharmacy retailers, hospitals, health institutions to procure medicines and health products from more than 100 brands directly from the manufacturers. It has also tied up with LendingKart, allowing instant working capital loans to the tune of Rs 1 crore and allows higher margins through bulk procurement for retailers. According to the platform, more than 800 pharmacy retailers are actively using the InstaStock app and buying from the platform.
“Pharmacy supply chain has been devoid of high-end technology till now and distribution has been running in a traditional way, with no accountability and efficiency in the processes. The vision of the company is to simplify the pharma supply chain through technology helping retailers overcome major operational hurdles in logistics, procurement of products, margins, and credit facilities. The company has identified the scope in India to bring transparency in the healthcare sector and to also aggregate the players in the entire supply chain. “With more than eight lakh pharmacies in India, we are aimed at streamlining both the consumer and retailers to bridge the gap,” says Yogesh.
CareonGo seems to be consistent in its B2B approach. Early this year, targeting the B2B segment, it introduced Pharmalytics feature, an analytic platform dedicated to pharmacy retailers, on its platform. This analytic platform helps retailers to analyse sales, purchase and inventory stock to solve the business challenges. With data analytics, the platform is enabling these pharmacies to cut down their logistic costs, calculate their margins on the spot, and stock up for specific orders for infections that require temperature control.
It also introduced Caresol, a desktop and cloud-based ERP solution that comes with an in-built POS solution to help these pharmacies to streamline the payment process, both online and offline. The ERP solution is linked to the inventory of the pharmacy, enabling real-time availability of medicines and OTC products. The ERP solution uses the localised demand analytics data shifting pharmacies from blind inventory to predictive inventory management for greater savings and better stock management.
Journey into the past
Launched in August 2015 by Yogesh, Aditya Kandoi and Ritu Singh, CareOnGo started out its operation from a small office at Karol Bagh in Delhi with four tech team members. Initially bootstrapped, it pumped Rs 40 lakh into the company and also launched its first version of the app, which they claim has crossed 10,000 downloads in just 15 days.
After the funding round, CareOnGo expanded its reach to the Delhi-NCR region including Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida.
Within two months, they raised a pre-Series A led by Farooq Oomerbhoy, followed by Anupam Mittal and Anand Mittal of People Group; Ravi Garikipati, Head of Flipkart’s Ads Business; Vibhu Garg, Co-founder of Unicommerce, along with Singapore Angel Network and Konglo Ventures, among others.
When growth took off
After two consecutive rounds of funding, the platform claims to make a sharp headway. From expansion in cities to onboard stores to new services, it claims to have come a long way in this segment.
The platform started its service in two cities — Delhi and Bengaluru — and has expanded to Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad and Kolkata. From a few hundred tie-ups, it has increased its reach to 800 stores. Besides, it has also tied up with around 100 brands, which are offering direct service to stores via the InstaStock platform, slashing the role of middlemen and directly offering benefits to drug stores. They are planning to expand to more cities by the end of this year. It will also be venturing into diagnostics by bringing a similar solution for local diagnostic labs.
CareOnGo has been growing at a rate of 90 percent month-on-month in terms of sales. They are a 21-member team with a workforce cut-across technology, marketing and business partnerships.
What others are doing?
According to IMS, retail pharmacy was expected to cross $11.5 billion by the end of 2015, growing at a rate of 20 percent year-on-year.
In this enormous market, there are various players that are vying with each other to grab the largest piece of the pie. Some of the big names in the sector include 1mg.com, BigChemist, NetMeds, mChemist and Practo.
In April this year, 1mg, the digital healthcare platform, raised Rs 100 crore in Series B funding led by Maverick Capital Ventures. Existing investors Sequoia India and Omidyar Network also participated in the round.
Experts says that the e-pharma players are trying to set up an ecosystem that will address various issues related to the industry. The idea is to solve the problem of authenticity (currently this market has more than 30 percent counterfeits and spurious medicines) and unavailability (more than 40 percent of the orders are either partly fulfilled or not fulfilled at all) of medicines. Using technology, these players are trying to address the issue and giving the industry a wholesome solution.
They, however, add that amidst the continuous resistance posed by the drug association and struggling with many government regulations, it will be interesting to see how the e-pharma industry solve industry problems and brings more transparency in the market through technology.
It was late in the night and two friends — Akshay Mehrotra and Ashish Goyal — couldn’t help but discuss the financial woes the end of the month inevitably brings. Even though they were no longer students, the end of the month almost always meant a flat wallet.
Although they began by talking about their own situation, they realised this problem couldn’t be unique to them and that most young working professionals had to have the same woeful tale to tell. When they decided to scout the market for financial solutions, they didn’t find any product that could help them.
“We felt the need for a product that could bring an end to the month-end money woes faced by young working professionals,” says Akshay. After meeting over a 100 working professionals across cafeterias, IT parks, and coffee shops, the duo decided to build a mobile app — EarlySalary.
Team @ EarlySalary
The app’s workings
Powered with social media underwriting, EarlySalary gives instant cash and short-term loans to young working professionals in India.
The app targets young salaried individuals between 22 and 35 and works in much the same way as a salary advance or short-term bridge cash loan. The personal unsecured loans are available for as low as Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 lakh for up to 30 days with an interest rate of 0.09 percent a day.
The consumer can apply with his/her Facebook ID, PAN card number, or bank login verification or statements. Once he or she applies, it takes about an hour for the money to get transferred.
“The core of EarlySalary is our risk assessment module and decisioning — ‘Social Worth Score’ — which analyses the credit-worthiness of the individuals beyond financial credit scoring,” says 35-year-old Akshay.
The score includes a traditional credit score and a social media score. The eligibility of the individual is ascertained within 10 minutes. EarlySalary is backed by NBFCs (non-banking financial companies).
Working along a non-traditional model
Akshay explains that while most of EarlySalary’s use cases are for lifestyle maintenance like shopping, holidays, and celebrations, some of the cash requirements also come in for house or city shifting, job changes, and medical emergencies.
For Ashish and Akshay, both former Bajaj Allianz employees, setting up a fintech startup was the next logical step. It was when they realised they needed someone with underwriting expertise that the chairman of their board, Hemant Kaul, advised them to meet Vimal Saboo, a CA with 18 years of experience. He soon joined the core team. Also, knowing that technology was the key for EarlySalary, they knew they needed someone with strong experience.
So when Akshay met Vivek Jain, a former principal architect at Infosys heading the banking technology division, he thought he had found the final piece of the puzzle.
However, when they began building the product, they found that there were a lot of pieces that still needed to fall in place. There was a need to build acceptance and topline volume, choose the right customers to lend, and get a strong control on bad loans.
Looking at a non-traditional way of credit scoring and decision making, the duo decided to build technology to develop mobile- and cloud-based decision systems, bring in data science and risk modelling, work on a digitalised repayment and collections system, and create digital and machine support for the underwriting model.
“The strong part was that almost everyone who joined us believed in the journey and within 20 days of starting operations, we had nearly 20 of our key resources on board,” says Akshay, a former Future Retail Ltd, PolicyBazaar.com, Big Bazaar, and Bajaj Allianz employee.
The payday loan market
Starting out from Pune, EarlySalary is now also operational in Mumbai, Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Chennai, and Bengaluru.
Akshay adds that their underwriting system is churning out loans to young working professionals using a machine-learned algorithm called Social Worth. It has also claimed to process applications for more than 4,500 customers across locations and has disbursed loans worth Rs 2 crore.
EarlySalary provides short-term loans for 30 days, and aims to focus on the age bracket that most traditional banks and lending platforms are wary of. The team is also in the process of launching new products catering to various needs of the same consumers. They raised seed funding of $1.5 million from Ashok Agarwal of Transcorp Group and are looking at the next round of funding.
EarlySalary aims to reach seven metro cities in the next one year by adding one city every 45 days.
“We are optimistic that in the next 24 months’ time, we can build a lending book size of Rs 200 to 300 crore. The company aims to deliver a revolutionary new business model which is set to change lending market in India,” says Akshay.
The aim of a backpacker is to experience the unknown, learn about new cultures, meet new people and gain a better understanding of the world. But, the journey of backpackers is not that easy and there are various challenges they face. Living on a strict budget and at the same time finding the right place to stay are the main problems they encounter.
Uday Jhamb quit his job and took the plunge into the travel sector to provide solutions to backpackers. A traveler himself, Uday always wanted to work with the travel industry. However, he started his career in the IT sector and worked there for a few years till he finally decided do something that he really wanted. After quitting the IT industry, he moved to Dubai and worked in a hospitality company for a few months and came back to India.
After returning from Dubai, Uday was sure that he wouldn’t work anywhere. He wanted to see India. He packed his bags and travelled the length and breadth of the country. During this time, he realised the problems faced by backpackers. He wanted to follow his heart and thus decided to launch hostels for backpackers.
Since he didn’t have much money to launch a travel startup, he contacted some of his schoolmates and asked them to help him launch a travel-centric startup and join him as co-founders.
In November 2014, Uday, with Rajesh Borah and Shubham Garg, kicked off Roadhouse Hostels in Goa, their first property. The trio started the platform with an initial investment of Rs 20 lakh, which was spent on setting up the first hostel, launching the product and building the brand through social media and marketing.
“We provide a mix of shared and private accommodation to majorly solo travellers and offer an experience different from all presently available accommodations,” says Uday Jhamb, 29, Co-founder of Roadhouse Hostels.
A different kind of experience
He emphasises that Roadhouse Hostels provides an entire experience to solo travellers and helps them smoothen all aspects of travel across India. It takes care of safety and comfort and also focuses on keeping the property social to enable people to interact and bond.
We provide an environment which encourages equality and respect and also introduces travellers to local cultures and practices to raise awareness.
Currently, Roadhouse Hostels is a chain of backpacker hostels with properties in Goa, Jaipur, and Varanasi.
It claims to have served 14,000 travellers from more than 45 countries. By the end of this year, it says it will serve over 20,000 travellers through five properties. It plans to launch two more properties in Goa by next month.
Early this year, the company had raised seed funding from Indian Angel Network. The funds are being used to set up properties in different places across India, enhancing technology and expanding the team and brand.
“Indian Angel Network with its mentorship has helped us improve our execution style, clarity on business plans as well as transform our working styles and growth aspirations,” says Uday.
Adopting new methods
“We are different in a way that we emphasise on providing the most authentic yet budget experiences in a city. We have tie-ups with the best places, be it restaurants or massage parlors, where our guests get a certain percentage of ‘Roadhouse Hostels discounts’. This helps in making the overall experience affordable, enabling them to save money and giving them that extra room to experience the city a little more than what they had planned in their budget,” says Uday.
Seeking a share in the larger market
According to United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), the value of Youth Travel in 2007 was estimated as $143 billion. At the end of 2012, this had risen by 28 percent to $183 billion, with young people accounting for nearly 20 percent of all international arrivals.
“We are looking to tap into the hostel and accommodation space, which is roughly 30 percent of the travel market in India. We generated approximately Rs 40 lakh in the last financial year, and are looking to increase the turnover to Rs 1.50 crore this financial year by adding more properties,” says Uday.
Besides, he is also trying to create a community of travellers who are positive about exploring new places and adventures. Strategically, he is also tapping into the most visited route/destinations of backpackers by expanding into those markets.
“We want to open 20-25 hostels and enhance our presence and sale through technology. We are presently coming in places which are already on travellers’ routes. After this phase and after gaining a larger market share, we will get into offbeat locations and thus provide a medium for travellers to explore more places and cultures,” he adds.
A look at the sector
Zostel is the known name in the space, which provides hostel facilities for backpackers. There are other smaller players such as Moustache Hostel, Stops Hostel and Le Pension that offer similar hostel services.
Earlier this year, Oyo Rooms acquired Zo Rooms in which all of Zo Rooms’ listed properties were transferred to OYO. However, all transferred properties are still operational.
With young travellers making up one in five international arrivals, there is clearly a significant market share already existing – allowing design-and-value focussed hospitality brands to use this new math to thrive with updated, modern products.
If your one such backpacker planning to embark on a trip, find your way to Raodhouse for an entire experience.
As of last year, over eight percent of startup activity was believed to have taken place in Hyderabad. According to YourStory research, as of 2015, over 39 deals amounting to $52 million were made across Hyderabad-based startups. This year, over $14.7 million has been invested across 21 deals in the city.
Sanjay Enishetty, Founder 50K Ventures, says
By 2018, the Hyderabad startup ecosystem will be bigger than the Bengaluru startup ecosystem.
There are several factors that could contribute to this theory, one primarily being a thriving talent pool across sectors, thanks to several high-end and top institutions across the city.
Also, Hyderabad, has one of the largest incubation centres—T-Hub—in the country, which referred to as ‘incubator of incubators’.
Ramesh Loganathan, VP Products and Centre head, Progress Software, and one of the city’s most sought-after mentors and advisors, hails T-Hub’s initiatives to be autonomous. Though inside the IIIT Hyderabad campus, and despite being a government initiative, it is completely governed and mentored by industry stalwarts.
Taking in all its potential, YourStory decided to take a quick look at the top startups in Hyderabad:
Caremotto
Started by surgeon Niranjan, Caremotto began operations in March this year. Dr Niranjan founded Caremotto, a part of the SLP Leadership Program, when he noticed that despite the number of healthcare and healthtech platforms, there still was a clear need for a platform that help patients discover the best hospitals and procedures for surgeries at guaranteed prices.
“I found that even in the smallest of surgery procedures, patients were wary of going to the doctor, and postpone the procedure. I thought it would be best to bring in some transparency to the surgery and surgical procedures,” he explains. (Website)
OMitra
Started by Vikas Jagetiya, after a particularly harrowing journey, OMitra is a unique Indian rail social app, aiming to solve most of the common problems that a train traveller may face. After you book a ticket on IRCTC, and receive an SMS, the app identifies the SMS and sets everything up for the passenger: it tracks the train, finds co-passengers, creates reminders prior to the journey, and lets you know if you have been confirmed from your position on the waiting list. It also does real-time tracking of the train and its stops. (Website)
Tourity
After a particularly bad trip to Konark, Anoop Munshi started Tourity, realising the need for a travel portal that could help travellers connect with tour operators, fellow travellers and get access to travel itineraries. Working as a peer-to-peer marketplace, Tourity ensures that every traveller gets to choose between a wide range of trusted choices.
Using technology, Tourity provides travellers with accommodation help, tour package with hosts, transportation, food, and an on-the-go digital travel guide as a personal navigator. (Website)
Orvoz
Started this year by Ramesh Mudunuri, Orvoz is a patient-engagement platform to address the gap in interactions between doctors and patients. In most cases, diagnosis of diseases and consultations can be done earlier on, but as most people avoid going to a doctor or hospital, many treatments get delayed, be it consultations, diagnostics, home sample collections, medicine delivery or even routine checkup.
Looking at this problem, Ramesh decided to build Orvoz, a cloud-based platform that claims to take care of everything, providing efficient patient care, whether it is building awareness, going through records, consulting with outpatients or even regular checks. (Website)
Hey Hyderabad, listen up! We are coming to your city on August 23 as part of TechSparks city meetups happening across India. Get ready to listen and engage with us and tell us your stories. Book your spot for free here.
The grand finale event for TechSparks 2016, India’s most loved startup summit, will be held in Bengaluru on September 30 and October 1. Interested in applying to be the TECH30, this year’s top 30 early-stage startups? Apply here.
Started by Manikanta Racharla, ShopTap is a sales platform that helps bridge the gap between sellers and buyers in the online and offline space. It connects the offline traditional stores with the online world. Using the point-of-sale platform, the customer can look at a whole range of inventory.
Apart from that, the web and mobile dashboards help organisations with engagement, conversations, and sales. There are close to 14 categories. The customer chooses the product, the salesman places the order, and the product is delivered with the payment done via cash on delivery.
By the end of this year, the team intends to expand across Hyderabad, and is also intent on expanding to Tier II and III cities. The team is also looking actively to raise its next round of funding. (Website)
Healthsutra
Sai Krishna believes that, over the years, we have forgotten the health and nutritional value of ingredients like jowar, millet and barley. With changing lifestyles, most people end up eating junk food, and lead sedentary lifestyles, making several heart and diabetics-related commonplace.
Therefore, with his three year old startup HealthSutra, Sai decided to manufacture healthy food options, like barley or millet flakes, to promote a healthier lifestyle. (Website)
Bucker
Started by IIIT Hyderabad graduates, Bucker acts as a smart assisting layer for all the different services that help the consumer reduce the time one spends in searching, comparing and jumping across multiple apps.
Working in the background, Bucker identifies the user’s need for a service, makes queries, compares results and provides the best option for the user. The app is integrated with over 15 apps, providing assistance across three verticals: cabs, food ordering, and mobile recharge. The team raised seed funding from Sanjay Enishetty of 50K Ventures. (Website)
Kahaniya
The idea of Kahaniya came to Pallav Bajjuri and Devendra Gona a few months ago. Devendra, a voracious reader of Telugu literature, found it difficult to find good Telugu stories online. Looking at the problem, Devendra and Pallav realised that there were many people who wrote stories in regional languages, but they were lost. To revive stories in regional languages, Kahaniya has stories, poems and short fiction work of different regional language authors. (Website)
It then identifies potential health risks from the data, and provides a personalised health plan to beat those risks. The team has raised a pre-Series A funding round of Rs 4.4 crore from Bitkemy Ventures (re-invested); Maheshwari Investment. Pvt. Ltd.; and from other HNIs like Anshoo Gaur (Indian Angel network, Amdocs), RamaKrishna Reddy, and Sandeep Seerapu.
Appilyever
Started by Rakesh Gupta and Sumit Handa, Appilyever works along mobile, web and physical channels with the bride, groom and their families to create the perfect wedding. The offerings include curated content with fulfillment support, e-commerce store, and even expert advice.
The platform has close to 2,000 products spread across 10 categories, and it also allows users to create events, send out invites and share updates. The team has raised a funding of $400,000 in February from angel investors and entrepreneurs. The round was led by Varun Aggarwal, Co-founder and COO of Univariety.
With the launch of T-hub and increased focus by the various stakeholders in the ecosystem, Hyderabad is all set to revive itself after the political unrest and Telengana trouble in 2014. However, the Hyderabad startup ecosystem still needs to compete with Bengaluru and Delhi NCR, which have deeper pockets and more funding.
Tom Thomas, COO, CIE Hyderabad believes that currently the Hyderabad startup ecosystem has all the key ingredients in place, but still needs a catalyst to create a booming ecosystem.
Hyderabad, nevertheless, has been a strong entrepreneurial hub. Explaining this, Sateesh Andra, Managing Director, Endiya Partners says,
You look at the top names in the healthcare and pharmaceutical world. The entrepreneurs are from Hyderabad. People from Hyderabad have always been great at entrepreneurship and setting up businesses.
The obvious answer to how to become a startup is to look at a problem and use technology to find a solution. Prabhu S N M, the 27-year-old founder of Street Smart Mobile Technologies, realised that 80 percent of India uses text messages and they have no way of telling whether their messages are important or not. The rest of them are using WhatsApp, Hike and Facebook Messenger and these younger Indians do not use regular messenger services. So he, along with Prakhar Dighe (25-years-old) and Sudeep Sesha (23-years-old) created an app that would work, even at 2G speeds, to pull relevant information for the customer from the SMS application and organise it into a calendar. “Today, an average person transacts at least two times on his phone, and he gets at least ten marketing SMSes a day. It can be a nightmare,” says Prabhu.
The information on the app shows up like a dashboard based on your interest. It shows bill payments on one end and due dates on the other, with reminders. It allows the person to clean out spam SMSes. The game here is data; the app understands a person’s usage habits and suggests the purchase of various products, from groceries to insurance to digital coupons. This seven-month-old startup has an investment of less than Rs 10 lakh so far, and is now scouting for business partnerships to cross sell services on the app. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India estimates that the SMS market in India is more than 6 billion messages a day. On an average, a person gets 6 messages for transactions and marketing.
The founders met while working at a company called Base2Media Works in 2013, which is incidentally owned by Prabhu too. While theorising about the next big business idea, the three founders caught on to this idea and launched SMS Sunami. The app currently has 1,000 downloads. The founders all come from engineering backgrounds. Sudeep had worked with corporate groups like HCL and Allianz for three years before plunging into entrepreneurship in 2013. For Sudeep and Prakhar, this is their first venture, and they took the plunge thanks to Prabhu.
Sunami founders: Prakhar Dighe, Prabhu SNM and Sudeep Sesha
The business model
The business model entails offering SMS organising for free. The app throws in offers that are non-intrusive, which will be monetised with partnerships with businesses. “The technology is fairly simple, but it is our analytics engine that can throw in relevant offers to customers,” says Sudeep. The company has tied up with 10 businesses to offer digital coupons. The company makes 20 percent on the bill value should the offer be accepted.
Eventually, the company plans to connect the offline world – by location – to the customer and then tailor-make offers locally. By then, the founders are betting on a chat bot and a strong payment engine to complete the loop for transacting on the phone.
There are companies like N2Manager, Gate SMS, SMS Guard and SMS manager that offer the organisation of SMS. Organising apps have not raised money at all in India due to the simplicity of the technology. This is because not all of them, globally, have figured out the closing of the transaction route to connect app users with shopping habits. The competitors of SMS Sunami are in the early stages of discovering a business model that works.
“These businesses work on scale and only time will tell if there is a business to business to consumer model that works in this country,” says V Balakrishnan, co-founder of Exfinity Ventures.
These are companies that need enormous spending. Only 100,000 downloads could get them the funding required to take them to the next level, which is getting businesses to connect with customers. However, the three co-founders are confident that they have the analytics capabilities that can connect businesses to consumers just by organising SMS.
Traction and revenue model
