Exotel-cloud telephony firm

In 2011, when Vijay Sharma headed marketing in doctor appointment booking platform Practo, he was given an assignment to hire people. The chemistry post-graduate from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science did an earnest job. He trolled social media profiles of potential hires. He scanned not just the big three social media- LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter- but other social communities like Quora, Angellist, Github, Dribble, Foursquare and Instagram. He made cold calls based on candidates’ profile. Soon he was sitting on a powerhouse of candidate data on an Excel sheet. And using that data, he hired 50 people for Practo for marketing, engineering and technical roles. But he didn’t stay in Practo long. Within six months of joining the company, a desire to start a venture of his own pushed him to co-found cloud telephony firm Exotel. As a co-founder, he had to wear many hats and recruitment was one of major ones. But the excitement of Exotel started wearing away by the third year. “I switched off. I used to tweet, and put up Facebook posts at least twice or thrice a day. But that drastically reduced,” he says. Sharma’s mother, who follows him on twitter, realized something was amiss. One day, in 2014, she told him: “I know you will end up doing something stupid. But if you really want to do something good, do it where your heart and passion lie.” That was a turning point. He decided to start a venture in recruitment solutions, one that would enable companies to hire by analysis a candidate’s profile on social media platforms and other public sources using data science and predictive analytics.

He roped in his BITSian junior of four years, Sudheendra Chippagari, who in turn brought with him two other BITSians, Saiteja Veera and Rishabh Kaul. “It was a BITSian mafia of sorts. In fact, 30 out of the 70 employees are from BITS Pilani,” Sharma laughs. They called their venture Belong. “It was clearly my calling. I realized being an entrepreneur today is relatively risk-free. You will find other entrepreneurs wanting to hire you in case you don’t make it. The experience is invaluable. Besides, I thought persistence always pays,” Sharma says. By the middle of 2014, Belong has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners India. The venture also has high profile investors like Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Blume Ventures, redBus co-founder Phanindra Sama, and Sierra Atlantic founder Raju Reddy. Belong’s clients include Ola, Practo, and Snapdeal, for who it has hired over 130 people in the past few months with an average salary of Rs 24 lakh.

“In one case, our algorithm identified a candidate for a company and it turned out that the candidate had on social media pointed out a technical flaw in a product developed by that same company. The company promptly hired him,” says Sharma. He said his objective is to make the recruitment engine mimic the human mind, and support it with data. 

Tinystep- parenting platform

After passing out from IIT Kanpur in 2006, Suhail Abidi joined PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as a senior consultant. But at some point during the three years with PwC, Abidi realized it wasn’t what he wanted to do in life. “I didn’t feel settled. I was just doing it because others were doing it. There was no higher purpose to it,” he says. He then went to do MBA at Stanford. There he was exposed to the huge potential in entrepreneurship. But he quickly realized that one cant just startup without being close to the problem. “You need to be connected to a particular problem and really have to be persistent to find a solution to it,” he says. That realization came after he started an app development company in Silicon Valley. Within a year of starting it, Abidi ran into problems. “It was difficult connecting with the American customers and understanding their demands,” he says. In 2014, he left the company and returned to India with his wife, and among their priorities was to start a family. But they realized that was not going to be easy. “We saw many of our friends take the plunge without a good enough support system to raise a kid. Many of them were nuclear families. Even finding a good nanny was a three months process,” Abidi says.

And that gave him the idea for his next venture. Keeping their family plans on hold, Abidi started a platform to help parents connect with each other and ask questions and share experiences related to parenting. He called it Tinystep.   

Again, the biggest challenge was to understand his users. “None of us were parents in the team. So we had no means of understanding what parents really wanted,” he says. Another challenge was to get mothers to understand their app features. “Many of them don’t update the app, so rolling out new features also proves to be difficult. Mobile app is a new concept and not everyone knows how to use all features,” he says. It took a strong analytics team and a lot of time to make users become comfortable with the app. To solve the first problem, Abidi got many mothers as advisors on board. Their suggestions proved invaluable. Abidi says it is important to surround yourself with people smarter than you. Having a set of people one can learn from, helps the company grow. “Almost all my team members are younger and smarter than I am. All the decisions are made by them, I am simply the facilitator,” he says.

Tinystep is hoping to become a WhatsApp for parents. It has seen 20,000 apps downloads and has received backing from Flipkart. And it doesn’t work out; Abidi won’t be going back to the corporate world. “I will either join a startup or a smaller organization that is looking to solve a problem,” he says. 

MoEngage/SaveZippy- A leading coupon network company

Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth kumar started their first venture together in 2009 when they were just 20. They were in their third year of college with a dream to be successful entrepreneurs, build an awesome company and influence the world. It was a marketing software that they built a platform to help event organizers co-ordinate and communicate. But no! It didn’t pan out that way. It made a little money, but eventually had to be shut down. “It didn’t scale, and we realized we couldn’t take it further,” recalls Raviteja. But the two classmates from IIT-Kharagpur’s 2006-10 computer science batch was determined not to give up. After working in two different companies for a few months post their graduation, the two got back together to start again this time a venture focused on developing cool mobile, social and location based products. SaveZippy one of the leading coupon networks in India, was their main product. “We managed to get between 100k and 200k downloads for SaveZippy. We were trying different strategies then, trying to get as many installs as possible. But somehow, we couldn’t engage our users. We knew it was not doing what we wanted it to do,” says Raviteja. It was then that he and Yashwanth took one of the most important decisions of their lives to ditch SaveZippy and move on. “We wanted to solve a global problem. And what we faced in SaveZippy was a global problem the struggle of app makers to engage users who have already downloaded their app. So we thought we would do a venture to help app makers tackle that problem,” Raviteja says. 

That was the genesis of their platform MoEngage, which they founded in July 2014. Raviteja says getting the first customer is always the biggest challenge for any startup. “Fortunately, we got TaxiForSure as a client in our initial days, which propelled our journey,” he says. 

MoEngage was also selected by Alchemist Accelerator, a Silicon Valley based accelerator dedicated to enterprise solutions. The venture received seed funding of $750,000 in 2014 itself, from Helion Venture Partners. In 2015, it raised $4.25 million in a Series A funding led by Helion. The platform continuously analyses smartphone users and the information is used to send periodic customized notifications to get users to use particular apps. MoEngage today has clients all over the world. His years of entrepreneurship have taught Raviteja a couple of important lessons. Do things lean, he says, and get to the market as soon as possible. “Second, get mentorship. Get ideas from experts, the best in the industry, and guide yourself to the right path,” he adds. 

Socialblood- blood donor platform

Karthik Naralasetty’s Socialblood started as a Facebook group for blood recipients and donors and was later made also into a website. People who require blood post the request on the Facebook page or website and donors respond. Each blood group has a different Facebook group. The Facebook groups saw more than 10,000 joining and actively participating within a month of its launch. Many around the world noted the success and Naralasetty received invitations from organizations in more than 20 countries to start operations in those regions. Bengaluru based Naralasetty, who was then running a startup that built and managed third party websites, decided to convert his side job into a full-fledged NGO. Thus was Socialblood born, in 2012. Today, the platform is available across several platforms, including app, website and Facebook, and its vision is to build the largest network of blood donors, hospitals and blood banks on the web.

Once on a trip to the United States, Naralasetty met Facebook founding president and investor Sean Parker and the two happened to discuss the former’s plans for Socialblood. “Parker advised against making it a non-profit as it would then end up looking for grants and funds all the time. So we decided to generate income that would be enough to sustain us,” says Naralasetty, who now splits his time between the firm’s New Jersey (US) and Bengaluru offices. “if there is value addition,  there will be revenue,” he notes.

The company today has more than 150,000 users with big user bases in India, Brazil, Bangladesh, and the United States. The company does not see any revenue potential in India as requests for blood are from individuals. In the west, in contrast, blood banks have an advertising budget to solicit blood. Socialblood helps the blood banks do the donor acquisition at one tenth of their usual marketing spend.

Naralasetty was born and brought up in Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. His father wanted him to pursue a career in the United States. But Naralasetty returned mid-way through his computer course in New Jersey to start something of his own. He, however, chose to come to Bengaluru. “I did not see my future as a person repaying loans and getting an H-1B visa,” he says. “Of course, my parents were upset. But now they look at me with respect. A lot of my father’s friends tell him that they read about me in a newspaper or saw me on television, and that makes him happy,” he adds.

The Socialblood homepage greets you with a quote from Hollywood actor Will Smith: “If you are not making someone else’s life better, then you are wasting your time….” Naralasetty is driven by this value. “Despite the many serious problems the country faces, educated Indians prefer building billion-dollar consumer companies rather than aiming for social impact. Success has to be measured in the number of people you are impacting rather than the revenue you are generating year after year,” he says. This could change, Naralasetty believes, if more Indians enter the social space. Many say investors are not as interested in social startups as they should be. “There are several impact-focused funds, but regular VCs do not want to invest. Raising money is always going to be tough,” says Naralasetty, whose Socialblood is backed by Google India and South East Asia managing director Rajan Anandan, Nasscom product council chairman, serial entrepreneur and angel investor Ravi Gururaj and seed fund Blume Ventures. 

Fxkart- an online foreign exchange dealers

Soon after returning to Bengaluru from his honeymoon in Dubai in 2013, Abdul Hadi Shaikh went to his preferred vendor on Commercial Street to exchange the few dirhams he had left with him. While he was at the store, his wife took a stroll, checking out the other stores in the vicinity. Just when he had finalized the exchange rate, his wife returned and told him that the money changer next door was offering a much better rate. This was an embarrassment for Shaikh, because forex markets was something he dealt with, having been head of research at Ratings Intelligence, a research intelligence firm for Islamic investors headquartered in London. “Quite deservingly I was jacked in my area of expertise, much to my wife’s amusement. But this incident left me wondering, why not create a web-based comparison platform for getting the best forex deals,” he recalls. The banks charge was more than the interbank rate, while the authorized money exchangers have small stores, untrained staff and no visible branding.

That was the beginning of Fxkart, an online aggregator of foreign exchange dealers, which started with Mushtaq Shah, the founder of Rating Intelligence. Shaikh had worked for Shah for more than seven years after passing out of college. Shah, who is also co-founding partner of hedge fund Quantmetrics Capital Management, was earlier an executive director at Goldman Sachs International. Shaikh graduated in commerce from Mahaveer Jain College in Bengaluru and joined Ratings Intelligence to start its Indian operations. “My father was wary. I could have easily secured a job at E&Y (audit firm Ernst & young), having interned there during my college days. I told my father I wanted to try out this (Rating Intelligence) option for a couple of years and see how it goes. I guess my seeds of entrepreneurship were sown during that time,” Shaikh says.

Fxkart’s services are free for consumers, but the company charges the 100 odd money changers on its platform. When consumers feed their requirement on the platform, forex dealers will offer their rates, and the consumer can choose to go with the best rate. Fxkart earns a commission on every successful transaction. The platform sees about 35 transactions of about $2.5 million since it went live in January. “When you are running your own company, there is no start time and end time. You are always engrossed in it. My wife is a doctor, and she was not keen to marry someone in her own profession as the schedules are hectic and the working hours are odd. She chose to marry me as I had a five-day work week and fixed work timings. Six months into the marriage, Fxkart started taking shape, leading to long working hours, weekend work and a whole lot of travel. Now she says I tricked her in to marry me,” Shaikh laughs.

SenseGiz- technology based

Once in 2011, Abhishek Latthe had to take a train at Liverpool in order to go to Southampton. He boarded the train, placed his luggage in the compartment, and then got off it to beat the boredom. There was still some time for the train’s departure. By the time he re-boarded the train, the cops had come in on a routine check, noticed the unattended baggage and took it away and put it in the lost-and-found centre. That was when Latthe first contemplated a venture in the lost & found space. He was then doing an MSc in mechatronic from the University of Southampton, studying advance digital control, sensors & signal processing and instrumentation. Soon after his post-graduation, he worked as a management trainee and then moved to become the head of operations in his family-owned business in Belgaum that was into alloy castings and manufacturing.

In 2013, he decided to revisit his lost & find idea, and launched a venture called SenseGiz in Bengaluru.

He decided to experiment with sensors and wearables, ideas that were just emerging at that time. “People thought I was pursuing a bold experiment,” he says. Last year, Latthe’s team launched their first product called Find, a Bluetooth based tag that can be used to track and find keys, pets, laptops, mobile phones or luggage. The small square device can be synced up with your smartphone through an Android, iOS app. Find consists of 25 different components including micro controller, sensor, buzzer, and a battery unit, and is manufactured and assembled in Mysuru. Some 20,000 customers have been using it. Among the customers are some US retailers. One uses it for geolocation, for pushing notifications on your phone-if you are looking for shirts, it will alert you on the best deals on the shop floor. SenseGiz recently floated a subsidiary in San Francisco where it employs a few sales professionals. It has also raised $600,000 from Japanese investor Indigo Ventures and Karnataka Semiconductor Venture Capital Fund.      

ApartmentAdda- apartment service

When Sangeeta Banerjee and Venkat Kandasamy moved to India in 2007 after a long stint in the US, they came across a pain-point that would prove to be the making of their startup: Management of the apartment complex in Bengaluru in which they were living. The committee responsible for the management faced many difficulties- be it coaxing its tenants to pay up the monthly maintenance charges, sending newsletters, maintain accounts and deciding on cost-effective solutions for any problem that might crop up. The husband and wife realized that this was only the tip of the iceberg for those in charge, who were invariable volunteers. They put their heads together for a solution, and the result was a private portal aimed at getting around these difficulties. When Sangeeta and Venkat introduced their brainchild to the managing committee of their apartment complex, the response was one of resounding acceptance. They did not bat an eyelid before agreeing to but the product, recollects Sangeeta.

“We were elated that we had our first paying customer even before we had registered our company.” They founded their company, ApartmentAdda, in early 2009. 

Sangeeta and Venkat graduated from the college of Engineering Guindy in Chennai and were associates at the Louisiana State University, US. They then worked for ERP consultancy and web solution based organizations in India and the US, both of which helped them in developing the portal. In 2010, the couple moved to Mumbai, the city that literally pioneered the apartment culture in India decades ago. Mumbai was both an opportunity and a challenge. The city’s laws and regulations were unique, so the product had to be tweaked. The move to Mumbai also opened them up to more complex and larger bodies managing apartment complexes, and importantly, a heterogeneous market.

ApartmentAdda has since developed a number of other features. It allows neighbors to interact with each other, generate expected visitor lists, restrict entry to flats and deliver messages. “From a software tool, we have become a private social media network, a la LinkedIn,” Sangeeta says. In 2011, Sangeeta, who is the CEO of the venture, won the Women Entrepreneur Quest (WEQ) award, part of the annual Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. She says her product proved to be a life-saver for many in Chennai, when the city was inundated by the recent rains. “When our users sent updates on the system regarding their recruitments, people from other places could calibrate their relief activities. That gave us an immense sense of satisfaction,” she says. 

Cook'dIN- Home based cooks

Cook'dIN, a Gujarat-based startup has launched a unique online convergence platform that offers its patrons access to the goodness and health of home cooked food. The unique service proposition of cookedin.com is aggregating home-based cooks (housewives / cooking enthusiasts) and connecting them to consumers that seek an alternative to 'mass cooked meals'. Cook'dIN has been launched in the city of Ahmedabad in the 1st phase with both home-based cooks and consumers connected through its web interface. The services are set to expand rapidly to key urban centres of Gujarat in 2016.

Abhijeet Goswami, Co-Founder, Cook'dIN, said, "We have conceived Cook'dIN as a catalyst, a facilitator that creates a primary/secondary revenue stream for homemakers and low to median income groups by catering to the need of consumers for home-cooked food."

"The total size of Indian food service market is expected to be INR. 65,000 crore ($10 billion). The food delivery market in India is pegged at an approximate Rs 16,250 crore ($2.5 billion), out of which the unorganized home cooking and delivery market stands at Rs 9800 crore ($ 1.5 billion)," added Goswami.

"The huge migration of skilled workforce and professionals crisscrossing different geographical and cultural zones to the country's teeming urban centers is what has generated this need gap. We realise that there exists a huge demand in consumers for home-cooked food and a variety of traditional food that is healthier and wholesome. In our 1st phase, we wish to take Amdavadis and subsequently the whole of Gujarat," said Goswami.

Goswami further said, "To start with we are eyeing a potential customer base of 4.4 lakh households out of 11 lakh households in Ahmedabad city. Home Chefs who are registered on Cook'dIN have a huge marketplace to cater to and as there are not many restrictions on the Home Chefs they continue to remain their own bosses. The yearning in urban households for 'Ghar ka Khana' is what spurred the idea of Cook'dIN."

Helpchat- A chat based platform

 Ankur Singla was paying himself Rs.20,000 as salary in 2012 when he married his girlfriend. That was three years into his entrepreneurial journey; he had not taken home a salary at all. “We had been seeing each other for a decade. And she knew I could earn more if I wanted to,” Singla says. Today he indeed is earning much, much more. His venture, Helpchat, is growing rapidly, and venture capital firm Sequoia, which started investing in Helpchat in 2012, sharply increased its commitment earlier this year with an investment of Rs100 crore. Singla graduated in law from National Law School, Bengaluru, in 2007. He was campus-hired to work in London for Linklaters, a firm advising corporates on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and company structuring. He was there for two years and then returned to India to start an online legal document making firm called Akosha in Chandigarh. Within a year though, he moved to Delhi because he found attracting talent difficult in Chandigarh. He also started doing legal consulting for corporates because the document making business was not bringing in much money. The venture did manage to Rs5 lakh from the Morpheus accelerator. But Singla says the running expenses then was such that the funds were enough for the venture to survive only for seven to eight months. And indeed, things started becoming difficult soon.

 Though Akosha offered a variety of services, the only one that was getting a lot of traction was consumer complaints about problems like defective products and delays in product delivery. But that was not a very profitable business. Those customer complaints, however, provided Singla with a fresh idea. He pivoted Akosha into Helpchat, a chat based personal assistant that helps people find and get services delivered. A user can key in a question like where to find a particular store, and Helpchat’s backend centre will provide the answer. The user can even order products through the platform. Helpchat takes a commission on every transaction. Singla also developed enterprise software that helps large companies address consumer complaints a platform that today has clients like Kotak Mahindra Bank, Aircel, Micromax, and Snapdeal. Helpchat is now automating many of these services, and that recently led to some layoffs. That has been stressful but Singla says stress is part of any entrepreneurial venture. The only thing that is changes is the cause of stress. “The stress of running out of money is more difficult to handle. Today with money in the bank, I am sleeping better,” he says. In his erstwhile legal profession, Singla was taught to deduce what could potentially go wrong. The six years long entrepreneurial journey has taught him to unlearn that lesson. “Now I always think which step has a better chance of being the right one. Because there are plenty of mistakes one can make,” he says thoughtfully

Zapr- A media tech startup

“We knew right from the beginning our venture would be in the field of technology as all of us have an engineering background,” Sandipan Mondal says when asked about their maiden venture. “And doing something in advertising space looked attractive to us as a lot of the methodology and practices adopted were decades old. It looked like an opportunity to solve a really big problem,” he adds.

Mondal, along with friends Deepak Baid and Sajo Mathews, started media tech startup Zapr in 2012. The startup says it India’s largest media consumption repository and audience targeting platform. The company’s technology analyses the offline media consumption behavior of millions of Indian television viewers. This helps the content owners identify their offline audiences and reengage with them across the digital and mobile space. “We thought having a better understanding of what the content consumption preferences of millions of people are would be interesting. If we can provide data along those lines, we would be helping the advertising and media industry,” Mondal, alumni of IIM Ahmedabad, explains. Mondal, Baid and Mathews were together in the 2008-10 batch at IIM and the three spent lots of time at the institute planning their venture. After graduation, all three joined various corporates. But within two years they regrouped. “But it was not easy to start, as a couple of years in corporate life would hardly provide you with the savings to put together a venture. We had to collect seed funds from our friends, several chipped in with their annual bonuses to make our dream come true,” Mondal recalls.

Zapr, which now counts Nielsen, NDTV and IMRB among its clients, recently raised an undisclosed amount from e-commerce platform Flipkart with participation from the founders of Saavn, Micromax, and Mu Sigma. Zapr was also part of the first batch of GSF Accelerator. Mondal’s parents were “cautiously supportive” of his decision to become an entrepreneur. “Obviously, if you pass out from the best B-school in the country and then decide to turn into an entrepreneur, eyebrows are bound to be raised. It was easier for Baid who comes from a family of a business folk.” The three friends purchased a TATA Nano together and, till recently, always drove to work as a sign of solidarity.  “Keep innovating regularly” Mondal calls it is the most important lesson he has learnt along the way. He also says it is important to be surrounded by mentors as they serve as a guiding force. “We were fortunate to have mentors who helped us at crucial moments,” he says.