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Across the Indian start-up sector,
growing networks of alumni from some of the best-known colleges in India and
overseas are helping entrepreneurs find money and grow businesses. From IITs,
BITS Pilani to IIMs...start-ups by alumni of renowned institutes have taken
India by a storm in the past few years.
Radhakrishna and
Raghunandan G, both IIM-Ahmedabad graduates, launched Taxiforsure in 2011 as an
online platform through which consumers can rent taxis. The company has
partnered with around 25 cab operators in Bangalore and around 15 in Delhi,
including branded operators like Mega Cabs and Cell Cabs.
The company, which claims to have reached operational profitability in Bangalore, has also done its own branding on about 550 cabs that are operated by small local operators. The past couple of years has seen the launch of a number of online and mobile based taxi booking services.
The two cofounders expect their company to earn revenue of Rs 100 crore by fiscal 2015.
The company, which claims to have reached operational profitability in Bangalore, has also done its own branding on about 550 cabs that are operated by small local operators. The past couple of years has seen the launch of a number of online and mobile based taxi booking services.
The two cofounders expect their company to earn revenue of Rs 100 crore by fiscal 2015.
Phanindra Sama was 25 when he founded
the pioneering venture together with his BITS Pilani batchmates Charan
Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri. In June 2013, they sold redBus to the Ibibo
Group for an estimated Rs 600-700 crore, the biggest overseas strategic
acquisition of an Indian internet asset.
RedBus now sells over a million tickets a month, and the gross value of transactions on the site last year was about Rs 600 crore, up from Rs 350 crore the year before.
Given the operators' wariness to computerize, redBus initially worked on the basis of seat quotas from operators, and returning unsold seats within a defined time before the departure of the bus. Three and a half years later, they introduced a bus ticketing software for the operators that could link to the redBus portal. To their utter surprise, it was a phenomenal success!
RedBus now sells over a million tickets a month, and the gross value of transactions on the site last year was about Rs 600 crore, up from Rs 350 crore the year before.
Given the operators' wariness to computerize, redBus initially worked on the basis of seat quotas from operators, and returning unsold seats within a defined time before the departure of the bus. Three and a half years later, they introduced a bus ticketing software for the operators that could link to the redBus portal. To their utter surprise, it was a phenomenal success!
S1. The billion dollar Mu Sigma story
Mu Sigma is one of the fastest growing companies in the world. It has
raised a gargantuan grand total of 163 million dollars in funding over nine
years of its existence, and holds the unique distinction of securing the
largest funding round ever by a business analytics company. For its founder,
Dhiraj C Rajaram, it all started because of three reasons: one, his unending
urge to learn; two, to separate noise from signals – in terms of information
that comes to businesses in their day-to-day life. And three, his belief that
innovation in businesses is nothing but chance. Read the story of his inspiring
journey on YourStory..
2. Phanindra Sama of redBus says best
is yet to come, after acquisition
We at YourStory have
had a great relationship with redBus and have been associated with them since the
beginning. Having seen the company’s meteoric growth in the past few years, it
was interesting to know what founder Phanidra Sama thought about the
acquisition. He told us in the initial days, their focus was to solve a problem
with technology. “None of us ever thought of how big this would become or where
this company would go five years from now. But halfway through, we began to
think that we’re onto something,” he said, adding that the best from redBus is
yet to come.
3. An entrepreneur from Aurangabad who deserves
applause – Clear Car Rental
This is the story of
Sachin Kate, who hails from Aurangabad in Maharashtra. From selling newspapers
to being a school-going office boy at a computer institute, the road to
starting up wasn’t smooth sailing for Sachin. Part-time jobs gave him
confidence to startup. His venture, Clear Car Rental (http://www.clearcarrental.com/) provides both local and outstation
travel solutions. The services grew to 150+ cities within India and has a home
team of 100 who manage the operations. A local hero in Aurangabad, Sachin was
far from the limelight before this article.
....
....
In what would be a
dream for most entrepreneurs in the Indian startup ecosystem,Housing.co.in (http://housing.com/in) raised a second round of funding in
less than a month of its previous investment. Over a dinner meeting with former
Network 18 CEO, Mr. Haresh Chawla, the team closed on the funding deal.
Advitiya Sharma, Co-Founder Housing.co.in, told us how the investment boosted the team’s
confidence. “The manner in which the investment happened and more so, the
person who’s behind the investment has really got everyone in the team pumped
up. Haresh Ji has done quite a lot through his career,” he told us.
5. ideaForge’s UAV comes handy in Uttarakhand
Founded by five IIT
Bombay alumni, ideaForge (http://www.ideaforge.co.in/web/home) is in the business
of developing alternative energy charging devices for various consumer
electronic products and developing high-end technologies in the field of
autonomous aerial vehicles. The first product from the company is called Netra,
a collaborative work with DRDO, deployed to scan the air space in flood-ravaged
Uttarakhand in hope of locating missing survivors. Netra is a completely
autonomous hovering Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) ideal for short range
missions and requires very short training time.
6. The story of Rootwork’s early success
Six friends from NIT
Allahabad, landed on an idea for an app while still in college. They
eventually started Rootwork, (http://rootwork.co/) making apps for any smart devices
that are around you today (smartphones, smart TVs, phablets, tablets, Google
Glass), and everything smart that’s going to arrive tomorrow. “At
Rootwork, we materialize our own ideas by publishing apps through Zitrr
Studios. But as an ITeS company, our mainstream business is to create and
deliver bespoke apps to businesses, startups and individual app publishers,”
they said.
7. Rotimatic: Rotis at a click of a button
A machine for almost
every Indian, who has spent hours in the kitchen. That’s Rotimatic (http://rotimatic.com/). It will help you make rotis at the
click of a button. Rotimatic comes from Zimplistic, a venture founded by
Singapore-based Pranoti Nagarkar. Zimplistic is one of the 15 Singapore
startups which has received a total grant of $6 million from Spring Singapore.
Rotimatic also has an impressive board which will help scale up the company.
The major demand will come from South Asia and Indian expats living abroad.
8. Shared cab service Cubito launches in Bangalore
An ambitious effort
by a group of BITS Pilani Goa graduates to change the way transport works in
India, Cubito (http://cubito.in/) offers shared cab services and
started with a six-month pilot run in Goa. Cubito pools people sharing the same
route (as opposed to the regular source –destination pooling solutions) and
arranges for a common cab to transport them. Cubito has introduced their
services in Bangalore for daily commuters initially for weekly and monthly
booking and have made the pricing simple at Rs7.5/Km (introductory offer for
people registering in July is Rs. 6/Km).
9. FBI Arrests ShopClue’s CEO – Sandeep Aggarwal
The arrest of Sandeep
Aggarwal – who is at the helm of ShopClues, (http://www.shopclues.com/), a Gurgaon-based marketplace and an
earlier Silicon Valley-based Internet analyst — shocked many. He was arrested
by FBI agents in San Jose, California (US) alleging insider trading charges.
Following the arrest Southern District of New York administration announced
criminal charges against Aggarwal. ShopClues had raised more than $16 million,
including $10 million in March 2013 from Helion Venture Partners, Nexus Venture
Partners and Netprice.com, a Japanese business group based in Tokyo.
10. Meet Oravel’s 19-year-old founder Ritesh
Agarwal
Ritesh Agarwal got into the thick of the web very early in life, at 13.
And by 17, he had started his first company, Oravel. Oravel started as an
Airbnb clone but the model has undergone a twist. Oravel received a seed round
of funding from Venture Nursery. This story was how Ritesh got selected for the
final round of “20 Under 20” Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious two-year program
where fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the foundation’s network of
tech entrepreneurs, investors and scientists (like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page,
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel).
11. How did Myntra ship orders in less than an hour
Bangalore-based
eCommerce company, Myntra (http://www.myntra.com/) hogged media attention when it
shipped orders in less than an hour. COO Ganesh Subramanian told us how he did
it. “Optimizing the supply chain is the key. There are technological
improvements involved but the basic problem solved is to reduce the queue time.”
He also told us about the supply chain at Myntra, how they decided to set up
their own logistics division in 2012, setting up last-mile operations and so
on. After you’ve hit a certain scale, delivering via your own logistics is
cheaper, he said.
12. Low-cost notebooks from 2 IIT Roorkee grads –
Adister story
With Adister, (http://adister.in/) graduates from IIT Rourkee, Shubham
Agrawal and Anubhav Goyal bring print advertising to notebooks, and sell
student notebooks at a very nominal price (40% less than the market price, they
claim). While there are large players like Classmate, which are quite popular
among the urban students, a lot of India’s students still buy from local
notebook brands from their local stationary shops. The low cost of an Adister
notebook, like a newspaper, is subsidized by the ads that it carries.
13. How Rikant Pitti co-founded EaseMyTrip
Rikant Pitti’s father
used to travel a lot and always used to book his tickets via his travel agent.
This was in 2005 when OTAs were not that popular. One day, Rikant checked the
price of the tickets online and found that the travel agent was charging Rs
1500 more. With the number of trips his father took, the loss was over Rs 20000
per month. Rikant started booking tickets for his parents, then relatives,
friends of parents and so on. EaseMyTrip (http://www.easemytrip.com/) has over 275 employees on board and
is a multi-crore company. Rikant is looking at a turnover of at least Rs 1,200
crore in 2014.
14. The two PhD dropouts behind the social media
and analytics startup – Airwoot
Airwoot (http://www.airwoot.com/) is a New Delhi-based social media
listening and analytics startup founded by Saurabh Arora and Prabhat Saraswat.
They met in 2008 at the Technical University of Denmark, pursuing Masters.
Prabhat continued his doctorate in Denmark while Saurabh went on to pursue his
doctorate in cloud computing architectures at Hasso-Plattner Institute in
Berlin. Midway, they both dropped out and returned to India. They did different
things before coming together to start Airwoot — a social customer support
helpdesk.
15. From IT to dairy farming – Amrutha Dairy Farm
Santhosh D Singh worked with IT majors like Dell, and America Online
before starting Amrutha Dairy Farms. To make it a success, he leveraged the
expertise around project management, process improvement, business
intelligence, analytics, and resource management he had accumulated over years
of professional life. “I decided to get into dairy farming, as this was a
relatively stable and profitable business in the unpredictable world that is
Indian agriculture sector,” he told us. He won the NABARD awarded Silver Medal
for taking initiatives to get into dairy farming.
16. Ex Goldman Sachs analyst starts Frilp for local
service recommendation through social graph
Chennai-based Frilp (https://www.frilp.com/) is an application focused on
connecting users with local services and businesses through recommendations
from friends and colleagues. From the business owners’ perspective, Frilp helps
the 40 million SMEs and consumer facing businesses to get an online presence
when they are recommended by their happy customers. Ex Goldman Sachs analyst
Shyam Anandaraman was keen to startup and he joined hands with Senthil
Kanthaswamy on Frilp.
17. From coding to selling pani-puri – Gapagap
story
When Prashant Kulkarni was working with Infosys, he ate pani-puri from a
roadside vendor, fell sick and had to stay off his favorite street-food for
months. This prompted him to look for hygenic pani-puri. He found that there
were no brands selling this popular snack. Prashant launched ‘Gapagap’, India’s
first pani-puri brand. Today, under his venture Chatar Patar, Prashant and his
team manages Gapagap and other several products like 80 types of bhel, 27 types
of chaats, pohas, etc. Chatar Patar sells pani-puris in 112 different flavors.
18. Ex Wall Street
banker’s 335th - the
Confidence Fitwear
Following a
successful career as an investment banker with UBS in New York, Poornima
Vardhan returned to India to become an entrepreneur. While she was planning to
make her move, she observed that people generally focussed on looking good
rather than feeling good. “There was a fit for every kind – slim fit, petite
fit and more. But I did not find a confidence fit anywhere; clothes and
accessories that make us look and feel confident,” says Poornima. Thus began
her entrepreneurial journey with 335th, (http://335th.com/) with a concept of ‘Fitwear’.
19. Mumbai floods made an entrepreneur – Rasilant
Shiladitya Mukhopadhayaya was at his friend Sahil Anand’s house when
incessant rains led to flooding in Mumbai. Almost marooned, Sahil and he got
talking about RFID (radio frequency identification). Shiladitya had done a RFID
project in 2005 for Texas Instruments. The duo raised money from their families
and started Rasilant Technologies, a global automation solutions and system
integration services company. They have had 35 major projects till date,
including Bajaj Auto, Reliance (multiple companies) and IL&FS.
20. Tale of Viral Curry
Social media agency Viral Curry was founded by engineering graduates
Garima Juneja and Gaurav Mishra. A team of five, Viral Curry works on a simple
revenue model – retainer fees for a minimum three months with a fixed monthly
package. Garima says, “We basically think about the brand’s present image and
what we can relate it to while keeping the most important thing in mind –
Things with which the audience can relate.” So far, they have had over 15
clients.
21. A high potential business from IISc Labs – MYMO
Wireless
MYMO Wireless Technologies is one of the many innovative companies
incubated at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In a team of
electronics and communications engineers, many in the top level management are
PhD scholars, who have gone through the pains of having to leave projects
because of various constraints. Tools like MW1000, developed by them, allows
researchers to concentrate on the algorithms without having to worry about the
nitty-gritties of coding for DSPs and by the looks of it, people are willing to
shell out a bomb for it.
22. A tech backbone for cab services – 360 Cabs
An integrated solution brings together cab agencies, cab drivers and
travellers, seamlessly on a single technology platform — a technology backbone
for cab agencies. That is what 360Cabs aims to be. In simple terms, it is a
technology solution for unorganized cab agencies to streamline their business
and scale it to the next level. It equips cab agencies to service their
customers better, retaining the existing customers as well as adding new ones.
Lokesh Bevara, who started 360cabs, told YourStory about his startup.
23. For the love of dog – Dogspot.in
Rana Atheya, Vizal Atheya and Shalesh Visen, passionate dog-lovers,
started Dogspot.in in 2007, as a place for dog lovers to connect. Their site
grew in popularity and the trio got fulltime into it in 2009. They introduced
technology to the dog shows across the country by automating their processes
and had their foot in the doors of everything related to dogs in India. In
2011, they decided to enter eCommerce and there hasn’t been any looking back.
DogSpot has about 3500 products listed on the site (not only dog products) and
does close to a 100 deliveries a day with an average ticket size of INR 1300.
24. How to find the right product online – BuyHatke
BuyHatke, an online product and price discovery service, started out of
frustration with online shopping portals. Now BuyHatke has an inventory of over
4 crore products on the net and claims to receive over 500,000 unique page
views monthly (traffic stats on Alexa). They also recently launched their
Chrome extension and a separate mobile comparison platform. Envisioning to
become the single starting point of every purchase made online in India, this
ambitious site strives to keep improving their product.
25. Alma Mater lets you doodle and play with your
tee designs
Alma Mater is an online store providing apparel and memorabilia to
alumni students from schools and colleges across India. Founded by Varun
Agarwal and Rohn Malhotra in 2009, the company has shipped 3,00,000 units
till dates and is continuously innovating to push this number. They give an
option called Play, which lets you doodle on tees. It has over 2000 art vectors
and over 800 fonts to choose from. You can upload your school/college or
company logo. They have worked with over 2500 school/colleges, 600 corporates,
400 private groups, 100 start-ups in 180 Indian cities and six countries.
26. How Tune Patrol made an exit
Tune Patrol is a social music discovery platform that works towards
developing and connecting a thriving community of independent musicians and
their fans in India. The product was launched in March 2012, hosting content
from close to 150 bands. Tune Patrol is one of the star companies from the new
breed of startups coming from BITS Pilani and it had also managed to raise
angel funding to the tune of Rs 10 lakh. Brijesh Bhardwaj, Saurabh Gupta,
Karthik G, and Pronoot Barkakati, the co-founders at Tune Patrol, told YS how
they won an exit.
27. The ShopClues story
Sandeep Aggarwal was a stock market analyst, who provided research
coverage on global Internet giants like Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!,
Microsoft, and Expedia. In 2010, Sandeep wrote a sector defining report for the
India Internet and also launched research coverage on MakeMyTrip. When he came
to India for this, Sandeep identified room for eCommerce. He built on the
technology front while in Valley and came to India by September 2011 and
subsequently launched ShopClues in November along with his core team.
28. Harvard Business School duo quit to startup
Handybook
Handybook, the brainchild of Umang Dua and Oisin Hanrahan, enables
online booking of ‘handy’ services from cleaning to plumbing to painting. It is
expanding base in New York, Boston and San Francisco. Umang told YourStory what
motivated the duo to quit Harvard Business School to pursue this dream. The duo
had launched Handybook while still at B-school and when the business started to
get traction, and they saw the potential to build something big, they decided
it deserved their unwavering attention. “The fascination of being able to take
something from an idea to a real business that people can actually use,”
spurred them on.
29. Helping people find a new house with a click –
CommonFloor
Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani wanted to develop a platform
that could bring together people who live in gated communities and came up with
CommonFloor.com in November 2007. CommonFloor is now in 120 cities across the
country. Around 60,000 communities are listed with them today, constituting
more than 50 lakh homes. “We have more than 60,000 projects listed on our
portal and this is the largest compared to any property portal in India. The
number of property listings has grown by more than 500% in the past financial
year,” Sumit told us.
30. Starting up out of college – WebandCrafts
Webandcrafts, a web solutions company, provides companies with web designing,
web development, graphic designing and internet marketing services. The firm
started in Chennai in 2009, then shifted base to Thrissur, Kerala, in May 2012.
Today, the startup has successfully hosted over 2,500-plus websites. The
startup has a client list of over 500 clients, including Australian
construction company Strong Force, Thomson and SMR, which Webandcrafts founder
Abin Jose Tom counts as their most prestigious clients.
31. How a VC turned entrepreneur to startup
Craftsvilla
Manoj Gupta is
Founder/CEO of Craftsvilla.com, (http://www.craftsvilla.com/) an online marketplace for Indian
products. Earlier, he was Principal at Nexus Venture Partners, an India focused
$600 million Fund, and the board member of multiple companies, including
Yebhi.com and Sohanlal Commodities in India. He told us the story of how he
downsized from 80 to a lean and mean 8-member team. “The ’lazy’ ones were the
first to go, ’talkative’ species the next one, ’political’ crap the third lot
and ’less skilled’ ones were the last. Only those who were hard working,
passionate, remained and are now shaping next journey of Craftsvilla,” he told
YS
32. A Makemytrip in cab aggregation space –
TaxiForSure
TaxiForSure idea materialised over many conversations between
Raghunandan G and Aprameya Radhakrishna on cab availability in India. Over
those, they stumbled across the idea to be an aggregator for radio taxi
industry in India. Founded in late 2011, Taxiforsure’s first set of unknown
customers came from intranet posts in companies by employees who had used its
service. Later, Facebook ads and radio campaigns widened its reach. The venture
does extensive online and offline marketing campaigns, facilitates over 2,000
bookings per day across two cities Bangalore and Delhi (NCR).
33. Zomato’s India business breaks even
This article written on July 26, 2013, was an interview with Zomato
founder, Pankaj Chaddah just as their India business hit even. He spoke
extensively on their present and future expansion. Calling the break-even
milestone “a great validation of our business model”, Pankaj told us:
“Honestly, it only encourages us to grow faster. It gives us great confidence
in our business model, both B2B and B2C, and now it is a question of
replicating it in enough places. We haven’t had the time to sit back and think about
the past and journey so far, and I hope that we don’t get that time either.”
34. Bringing travellers around the world together
through Tripoto
Anirudh and Michael,
who had met at Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, started Tripoto (http://www.tripoto.com/) to bring together travellers from
around the world, share and discover real, and actionable crowd-sourced travel
stories. The startup maps every single destination in the story, along with the
associated content and pictures. A travel itinerary tied to a traveller profile
provides additional information, such as the nature and interest of the
traveller. It adds to the authenticity of the content. Further, people can
connect with these travellers and ask questions related to their trips.
35. Urban Ladder in Indian homes
From McKinsey, to Amar Chitra Katha and to starting up at Urban Ladder,
Ashish Goel’s professional progression bears no sign of being conventional.
Every stint, however, was as successful as the other one. Ashish explained his
choices by blaming them on his unquenchable thirst to learn. Ashish spoke at
length about starting Urban Ladder. Their secret to success is marketing, he
said: “Marketing is our trade secret. Our target market is an online shopper
who has made a purchase of a lifestyle product at least twice a month. At
least, that is our ideal customer.”
36. Applying gesture-based technology – The Fluid
Motion
Agrawal brothers, Abhinav
and Raghav, started with Trutech Webs, a cloud computing solutions company
based in Mumbai. They built a testing platform iLiftOff, and soon branched out
into a totally different product called ‘The Fluid Motion’. (http://www.thefluidmotion.com/) using gesture-based technology. The
Fluid Motion team believes that gesture technology shall surpass the touch
based technology primarily because it can be used with huge sized screens, with
the user standing up to 15 feet away. Their product has information
application, retail application, computer control boardroom application and 3-D
application.
37. Catering to carnal desires – Kaamastra
Kaamastra is an online store for adult products started by Rahber and
Maqsood Nazir. The site sells bedroom lingerie, role play costumes, intimate
massage and bath products, lubricants and erotic body jewelry. Their customers
are not just the urbane individuals of metros, but enthusiasts from Tier 2
& 3 cities like Patiala, Lucknow, and Chandigarh as well. The products are
delivered in a black cardboard box with no distinguishing names or logos. If
you pay online, you are billed under a completely different name (not
Kaamastra) to maintain your privacy.
38. DJ turns entrepreneur to sell ‘farsan’ online –
Farsankart
Darshan Dhruv joined
his family business of packaging after four years with an MNC abroad, but
wasn’t satisfied doing “the regular stuff”. People around him were surprised
when he spoke of his plans to sell ‘farsan’ (Gujarati snacks) online. Today,
FarsanKart sells farsans from Vadodara’s leading farsan stores like Payal,
Sukhadia, Jagdish, and mukhwas from Vadodara’s famous JK Mukhwas. He is tapping
the large population of Gujaratis abroad with www.global.farsankart.com, which caters to the UK, USA and
Canada. Darshan plans to reach 160 countries in another two years.
39. Holidify to discover little known places
During their college days at IIT-Bombay, Kovid Kapoor, Rohit Shroff, and
Prateek Chauhan were always on the lookout for weekend holiday destinations.
They soon exhausted all the travel options available online and realized two
shortcomings in the industry: “The destination choices offered by most websites
are limited and generally populist in nature, leaving very little options,
especially if one is a power traveller. In such a scenario, travellers have
lesser independence in choosing a destination and have to depend on what is
being offered,” Rohit found. That’s the idea of Holidify.
40. From hobbies to business – CityShor
To individuals, CityShor tells what’s best in Ahmedabad in food,
fashion, travel, events, home décor and entertainment — the unusual and unheard
stuff of Ahmedabad. To businesses, CityShor is a visually heavy online media
company that aims to fill the gap left by print, radio, and hoardings — one
which can help cover/promote a product. Pallav Parikh and Pankaj Pathak started
this out of their personal passion for travel and writing. The duo claims to
have covered every nook and corner of Ahmedabad on CityShor and wants to scale
this model to reach more cities.
41. Happy feet forward – Mink
Divya Raheja and Harsha Chordia, college friends from Chennai, wanted to
design footwear. They found a cobbler, who helped them and started Mink in
2010. While in college, they custom-designed their friends’ old sandals, crocs
and even jazzed up medical shoes for people they know. They started selling
their products on Facebook and soon broke even. “Even when you are ready to
invest money the manufacturers are not ready to try anything new, at least with
young entrepreneurs. We want to get into manufacturing our own footwear other
than just custom-designing them,” Divya said.
42. Delivering Apps well and fast – AppStudioz
With a simple mantra: deliver apps well and fast, Saurabh Singh started
AppStudioz in April 2011. Just over two years old now, App Studioz already has
more than 160 employees and has served more than 230 clients across the globe.
Concentrating mainly on mobile apps across platforms, AppStudioz builds apps in
various areas, including 3D/2D games, Enterprise, and now also in wearable
computing. AppStudioz has built more than 700 apps till date and bank heavily
on quick turn around with quality work to keep the client satisfied.
43. Design and crafts from the weavers of West
Bengal – Maku story
Maku Textiles, a designer brand which encourages the use of handwoven
cloth, was started by Santanu Das, a designer from NID, Ahmedabad, and Chirag
Gandhi, an engineering graduate from Nirma University. The duo designs
the fabrics and gets them woven from weavers in West Bengal and Kutch, Gujarat,
Earlier based in Ahmedabad, they have moved to Kolkata. “We want to create a
better ecosystem for these weavers so that the craft is not lost and it is a
fair deal for everyone in the game, from the weaver to the middleman to the end
customer,” they told us.
44. The Thrillophilia adventure
Abhishek Daga and Chitra Gurnani Daga, the husband-wife team behind
Thrillophilia, have been working on the startup for about three years. They
first raised an undisclosed seed amount from a US-based investor in 2011, and
the next round was for $200,000. Abhishek told us, “While in entrepreneurship,
the lines between personal and professional lives are blurred. In our case,
there is no line! We talk a lot about business, even at home, at holiday and
everywhere. While that might not always be great, but it’s really exciting for
VCs, as we’re a team that’s literally, always thinking about the business!”
45. An online payment solution for masses – PayU
PayU India, online payment company, launched PayUPaisa, a web-based
product which empowers buyers to pay and sellers to get paid online. The
product is free for sellers and provides beneficial selling tools like a free
webstore, free storefront and email invoicing. On the other hand, PayUPaisa has
a strong dispute resolution centre to safeguard buyers and keep their money
safe even when they have paid for a product or service. It has a strong dispute
resolution centre to safeguard buyers and keep their money safe even when they
have paid for a product or service.
46. Building smart solutions for Indian customers –
Silvan Labs
Hi-tech security system, smart device management and other home
automation systems that posh apartments in Bangalore boast of are powered by
one startup – Silvan Labs. Dr. Giri Krishna and four others – Avinash Gautam,
Ajay Gupta, Nandakumar and Mohan G – are the brains behind the company. All of
them have had stints at Texas Instruments before starting up Silvan Labs in
2008. When they began, Silvan Labs placed themselves as a product provider.
“One of the biggest learning for us was that Indians don’t buy products, they
buy solutions,” told us Giri.
47. Harvard grad wants to rejuvenate politics with
Swaniti
“Swaniti was originally conceived at Harvard in 2009. Two of my
colleagues and I had noticed that there was this incredible interest from
graduate students at Harvard to want to work with political leadership in
India. Some students had even gone back to India after graduation and decided
to work in politics and development. However, there were a number of students
who could not secure a project/position with a political leader because he/she
often lacked the network,” Rwitwika Bhattacharya, who started Swaniti to
address this need, told us.
48. Diner’s friend, restauranteurs too – dineout
Dineout, web-based restaurant table reservation and deals service, pop
up on the radar of many in the restaurant business as a friend, because of the
business that they generate for restaurant owners and as a fierce competitor to
other players in the segment. The startup competed with 40 other companies to
win YourStory’s WebSparks prize in January 2013. Co-founders Vivek Kapoor and
Sahil Jain shared details of their entrepreneurial journey with us in this
story.
49. For shy adults – ShyCart
Shycart is an e-commerce startup which deals with products that people
shy to buy at physical stores. “Necessity is where the idea for Shycart came
from. Vivek was the one to come up with the idea. And it hit the chord
directly. I understood the potential of the idea as I knew e-commerce can
help,” co-founder Arul Oli told us. They focus largely on adult hygiene and
adult entertainment, besides lingerie.
50. Lured by the weird – ShortCircuit
Co-founded by Richa Johri along with her husband Vipul, Shortcircuit
exclusively focuses on the idea of corporate and retail gifting by adding a personal
touch to the products. “Weird things attract me a lot and I always had an
instinct to start something of my own. We make products targeting a niche
market because for every product we make, we add some personal touch,” Richa
said when we asked why the name ‘Shortcircuit’. Shortcircuit is a team of
seven. Richa is the creative head while her husband looks after the financial
and legal matters of the company.
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More Important Links :
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/biz-entrepreneurship/10-successful-start-ups-by-iit-iim-bits-alumni/exotel/slideshow/24648054.cms
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/iits-in-delhi-mumbai-churn-out-most-tech-entrepreneurs-1568652902193.html
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-great-startups-by-IITians
https://www.businessinsider.in/business/startups/news/these-10-indian-colleges-have-produced-indias-most-funded-startup-owners/slidelist/77140792.cms
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More Important Links :
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/biz-entrepreneurship/10-successful-start-ups-by-iit-iim-bits-alumni/exotel/slideshow/24648054.cms
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/iits-in-delhi-mumbai-churn-out-most-tech-entrepreneurs-1568652902193.html
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-great-startups-by-IITians
https://www.businessinsider.in/business/startups/news/these-10-indian-colleges-have-produced-indias-most-funded-startup-owners/slidelist/77140792.cms