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Tag: bangalore startups

  • Bonito Designs – India’s Most Promising Interior Designing Brand

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Bonito Designs.

    Decorating a home is no more done by looking through numerous catalogs. It is about making one’s unique personality speak through the space they live in. Good interior designing involves a creative balance of aesthetics vs functionality, storage vs space, grandeur vs minimalism, luxury vs budget and many such infinite combinations of aspects that go on to define the space that people would live in.

    Established in 2012, Bonito Designs has been working towards its goal of making great designs accessible to Indian customers at affordable prices.

    Know about Bonito Designs, founder, funding, services, revenue model, growth, awards, and future plans.

    Bonito Designs – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Bonito Designs
    Headquarter Bangalore, India
    Sector Interior Designing
    Founder Sameer AM
    Founded 2012
    Total Funding $6.3 million (Pre-Series A)
    Competitors HomeLane, Livspace, Foyr, Creative Axis Interiors, Design Cafe, Urban Ladder, Pepperfry
    Parent Organization Bonito Designs Pvt Ltd
    Website bonito.in

    Discover more about Bonito Designs:

    About Bonito Designs and How it Works
    Bonito Designs – Target Market Size
    Bonito Designs – Founders/Owners and Team
    Bonito Designs – Products/Services
    Bonito Designs – How it Started?
    Bonito Designs – Name, Tagline and Logo
    Bonito Designs – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Bonito Designs – Startup Launch
    Bonito Designs – User Acqusition and Growth
    Bonito Designs – Startup Challenges
    Bonito Designs – Competitors
    Bonito Designs – Funding and Investors
    Bonito Designs – Awards

    Exhaustive List of Top Startups in Bangalore [2020 List]
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    About Bonito Designs and How it Works

    Bonito Designs, a bangalore based startup, focus on bringing to life a bespoke area that tells a story about you, and where you and your family do not just live; but are able to thrive, rejuvenate and eventually get in touch with their blissful self for a much more meaningful life.

    Great interiors involves placing customers and their personality’s needs at the center. It’s about how each of these can be played in order to define their space around them; for them. Bonito Design’s motivation is to figure out their customer as a person, and then go on to create the interiors of their home that makes sense every waking day to them.

    “We wake up every day to find a newer, better way of marrying the aesthetics of design with the wonderful things that represent our consumers and their lives. As design thinkers and evangelists, we go the extra mile to innovate, do whatever is necessary to deliver more at every step involved in making their dream a reality.”, said Sameer AM, founder of Bonito Designs.

    They listen carefully, respect, empathize and are sensitive to the vision, ambition, truth of their consumers. The team try to articulate them into words, materials, shapes, design and reality. And collaborate with consumers to co-design, co-curate and co-create the home of their dreams.

    Bonito Designs is a professional design firm started by young entrepreneurs building on design obsession and a vision that every home deserves to be a designer home and every person deserves designer living.

    Bonito Designs – Target Market Size

    Interior Designing, as a super set of decor, home furnishing is a $670+ billion market worldwide and clocks a 6-7$ billion for the Indian market. A lot of broad markets ranging from furnishing to furniture are included in this space. Design-led market size varies from country to country.

    Bonito Designs – Founders/Owners and Team

    Sameer AM, Rickson D’souza and Vathsala CR are the founders of Bonito Designs.

    Sameer AM - Founder and CEO, Bonito Designs
    Sameer AM – Founder and CEO, Bonito Designs

    Three more promoters along with Sameer and Rickson are currently heading the company on different fronts. The team of Bonito Designs consists of:

    • Sameer AM – Chief Executive Officer
    • Rickson Dsouza – Chief Operating Officer
    • Arun Kumar Gonal – Chief Human Resource Officer
    • Bharath S – Chief Design Officer
    • Pradeep Bhat – Chief Technology Officer

    The startup has a team of 200+ passionate individuals.

    Success Story of Hidecor – Workspace Designing Startup
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    Bonito Designs – Products/Services

    Bonito Designs is a professional design firm started by young entrepreneurs building on design obsession and a vision that every home deserves to be a designer home and every person deserves designer living. It is a design talent powerhouse with high caliber design experts from across Indian and International design schools.

    The startup has a team of 200+ passionate individuals. They have a cumulative experience of 400 man-years of design & delivery. They have delivered 1500 homes in the last 7 years across the city of Bengaluru while garnering praises, awards, and experience across various typologies, sizes and themes.

    The company offers a full-service from conceptualization to design, planning, visualization, and project management with utmost care of personalization and quality delivery.

    Bonito Designs – How it Started?

    The inspiration for starting Bonito came from the will to bring stories into empty spaces that you will call your home. Many stories were heard at that time back in 2012 where customers looking to get their home done had lost the money they had invested or received designs that were totally different from what they were promised. This had brought about a sense of responsibility to help out in streamlining the process for a better outcome and authenticity in the industry.

    The full spectrum service going from idea to execution is a series of services stitched together to bring in a finished product to the customer – that is a loving home. It requires immense passion and willingness on part of all the partaking vendors and contractors to bring in the enthusiasm to walk the mile and dive into the details that are needed to make justice to the appetite the customer demands.

    The identity of Bonito Designs has always gone through a shape-shift at a crucial juncture in the journey of the company.

    Bonito Designs Logo

    The most recent change in the identity marks the lift-off of the company where it starts taking off from being just another startup to marking its territory in broader markets.

    Success Story of De Space – Founders, Challenges and more
    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified informationon different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on. Great home decor and furnishings is now a style statement. And with modulardesigns entering the…
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    Bonito Designs – Business Model and Revenue Model

    The company is in the business of realizing dream homes for consumers. Every home begins with a dream and they exist to give life to it. They build aesthetically beautiful homes that our consumers aspire to live in.

    Bonito Designs revenue model is generated by a fee-for-service revenue for providing end to end interior design services to their consumers for their residential homes. It is divided into three phases – design, production and execution.

    Bonito Designs – Startup Launch

    In 2012, when the founding team finally got around to establishing the company, they had a small start where everyone on the team was required to be hands-on with every project received. They launched Bonito in Bangalore – based out of a small office space where most of the team worked out of day in and out.

    It was a factory cum a small makeshift office that didn’t even have a bathroom. The love of their customers and the word of mouth advocated by their customer family drove them to jump for larger avenues. Later on, the startup wanted to reach new audiences and started their YouTube channel which is to date most referred to by any new customer.

    Bonito Designs – User Acqusition and Growth

    “Our values and guiding principles such as honesty and transparency have been key to gain initial traction. In an industry that is plagued by opaque operations and accountability, we were able to garner great confidence by simply being direct with what could be done and what couldn’t.”, said Sameer AM.

    Customers appreciated the directness with which the company did business. They took these values above the business itself and at times it meant rejecting business in certain cases. The word of mouth publicity along with the popularity of Youtube channel has been an immense push to take their business to the next level.

    The recent couple of quarters have demanded a totally different approach to increase their customer base. It required a combination of building up of various verticals such as partnering with realty networks and agents to convert them into evangelists of the brand and that too has added to the business’s intake capacity of the customers.

    As of date, the company continue to experiment and explore various ways in which they can increase the engagement with their customer base and they believe it is only going to get stronger than before. In the last one year, the company has grown tremendously in terms of size of revenues, no of homes delivered, and employees (from 65 to 220+).

    Success Story of DesignerPeople- Branding and Designing Agency for Startups
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    Bonito Designs – Startup Challenges

    Every design is a new challenge to us as nothing is pre-set for us in the backend. Sometimes, our designers tend to truly push the boundaries of their creativity making it all the more challenging for our backend systems to bring these designs to life. One way or the other, we always find a way to overcome these and that’s what makes our job all the more exciting.

    Bonito Designs – Competitors

    HomeLane, Livspace, Foyr, Creative Axis Interiors, Design Cafe, Urban Ladder, Pepperfry, Flipspaces Design Labs are some of the competitors of Bonito Designs.

    Competition is constantly growing. However, Bonito Designs look for inspiration from around the globe and try to learn and imbibe the best from everyone, locally and globally. They try to set higher benchmarks to improve themselves instead of focusing their energies on competition.

    “Our core philosophy revolves around design and it is our passion to live and breathe design into everything we do that differentiates us from the rest. Everyone says they do customizable or personalized designs. Our core differentiation is the extent to which we customize designs. We also spend a lot of time understanding our customers – their passions, hobbies, interests, lifestyle etc. to bring out spaces that truly reflect their personality.”, said the founder of Bonito Designs.

    Bonito Designs – Funding and Investors

    The Bonito Designs funding stands at $6.3 Million till date. In March 2019, Bonito Designs announced a pre-Series A fund raise of $6.3 million led by early-stage strategic investment venture Tomorrow Capital. The aim was to use the fresh capital in R&D, expand the product base, and improve the digital infrastructure.

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    March 2019 Pre-series A $6.3 million Tomorrow Capital

    Housejoy – Get Home Services On-Demand
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    Bonito Designs – Awards

    • Bonito was awarded the “Best and Most Innovative Interior Design Firm of the Year 2020”
    • It received India Award under “Residential Projects”
    • The company was titled 40 under 40 Best Interior Designers of India 2020 by National Architecture and Interior Design Excellence Awards 2020
    • The startup was awarded the ‘Best Interior Design Company of the Year 2019’ by CommonFloor
    • Bonito was awarded the ‘Best of Houzz 2014’ by Houzz

    Bonito Designs – Future Plans

    Having delivered over 1500+ homes in 7 years in Bangalore, Bonito Designs is rightly placed to expand their services to other markets in the near future. Also, in terms of capacity, their production and execution capabilities have expanded multifolds in the last 6 months.  

    Their Youtube channel is the most subscribed interior design channel in Asia and third most subscribed in the world. The startup also have a very strong presence across all social media channels. Their mantra of “Live Breathe Design” trickles through everything they do today and in the future as well.

    Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs

    What is Bonito Designs?

    Bonito Designs, is an interior designing startup based in Bangalore that offers end-to-end home interior decorations for the kitchen, living room, bedroom and more.

    Who are the Bonito Designs founders?

    Sameer AM, Rickson D’souza and Vathsala CR are the founders of Bonito Designs.

    Who are the Bonito competitors?

    HomeLane, Livspace, Foyr, Creative Axis Interiors, Design Cafe, Urban Ladder, Pepperfry, Flipspaces Design Labs are some of the competitors of Bonito Designs.

  • Voonik – Personalizing The Shopping Experience More Than Ever

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Voonik.

    There was a time when women/men used to take their friends to go shopping just to have a little help in the selection process. Roundabout the same time, people were paying huge amounts to the stylists and designers to get a personalized style statement.

    To shift this paradigm online and optimize the whole process to being smooth and handy came in Voonik in 2013. Get insights on Voonik’s Company Profile, Voonik Founders, Funding, Competitors, Business Model, Growth, Revenue and more.

    Voonik – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Voonik
    Headquarter Bangalore
    Sector eCommerce
    Founders Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan
    Total Funding $34.5 Million
    Net Profit Rs 28.9 crore (FY20)
    Revenue/Turnover Rs 44.76 crore (FY20)
    Expenses Rs 15.99 crore (FY20)
    Founded 2013
    Website Voonik.com

    Voonik – About & How it Works
    Voonik – Founders and Team
    How was Voonik Started?
    Voonik – Name, Logo and Tagline
    Voonik – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Voonik – Funding and Investors
    Voonik – Startup Challenges
    Voonik – Competitors
    Voonik – Acquisitions
    Voonik – Growth and Revenue
    Voonik – Awards
    Voonik – Future Plans
    Voonik – FAQs

    Voonik – About & How it Works

    Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan launched Voonik to personalize the shopping experience for men and women. Yes, Voonik initially was launched for both men and women but later they decided to only focus on women’s clothing.

    Now, Voonik is a personal clothing shopping app for women, allowing them to buy apparel from multiple brands and fashion stores, according to their body type, lifestyle, and budget.

    Voonik enables women customers to directly shop like on any other e-commerce portal or the customer can provide some inputs like her body shape, skin tone, height, and personal style to let the application advise some dresses for her.

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    Voonik – Founders and Team

    Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan are the founders of Voonik.

    Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan - Founders Voonik
    Founders of Voonik

    Sujayath Ali

    Sujayth did his MBA in Technology and Finance from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science Engineering from MepcoSchlenk Engineering College.

    Before Voonik, he was working as VP, head of Visa Checkout merchant program at Visa. He has also worked for Amazon as a senior product manager in the states for 7 Years.

    Before co-founding Voonik, he worked for Freshdesk as a Principal Developer, Narus Networks as Tech-Lead and Aryaka Networks as Technical Architect. Voonik originally started with a 12 member team which now grew to more than 150 employees.

    How was Voonik Started?

    Navaneetha and Sujayath went to college together and have known each other for more than 20 years now. Navaneetha was not very new to the startup scene because he had been a garage stage engineer at big companies like Zoho, Freshdesk, and Aryaka. And as we know, the other co-founder, Sujayath was in America spending 7 years at Amazon and Visa.

    “We first discussed the idea of starting something together over a Facebook chat session” Says Sujayath.

    Back then, Navaneetha had an idea for a SaaS offering based on his long and intriguing experience at Zoho and Freshdesk. On the other hand, Sujayath pitched an idea of creating an entirely new way of shopping to enable the users in buying what suits their build, lifestyle, and budget. The former was convinced by the idea of the latter, both quit their jobs and that’s how the idea of Voonik was originated.

    Voonik – Name, Logo and Tagline

    Voonik’s tagline is “Everyday Fashion”, suiting its tagline, Voonik offers a range of options in every fashion category for the Indian urban market.

    Voonik Logo
    Voonik Logo

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    Voonik – Business Model and Revenue Model

    Business Model

    Voonik basically is a marketplace where the retail stores register and get to showcase their products. Voonik brings multiple online stores into a single cart. So it showcases product ranges from stores like Jabong, Snapdeal, Fashionara, Fashionandyou, Yepme, Zovi, etc.

    Revenue Model

    The revenue model of Voonik is generated by charging a 15 percent commission on every sale to the brand or the seller. And the deliveries are done by a third-party logistics partner.

    Voonik – Funding and Investors

    Voonik has raised a Total Funding of $34.5 Million till date.

    Here is the Vooniks Funding Details:

    Date Amount Round Investors
    February 2014 $500k Seed SeedFund
    June 2015 $5 Million (~Rs 32 crores) Series A Sequoia Capital, SeedFund
    June 2016 $20 Million Series B Sequoia Capital India
    July 2016 $3 Million Debt InnoVen Capital
    February 2017 $6 Million Series C RB Investments Pte. Ltd.

    Voonik – Startup Challenges

    Costly Shipping

    Our biggest challenge for Voonik in the initial days was extremely costly shipping. It was particularly losing money on every shipment. And so the venture decided to work on projects where the team observed shipping across each category.

    They eventually came up with the right algorithms through permutations and combinations to make shipments more cost-efficient. And soon after, Voonik had a 20% gross margin on shipping.

    Marketing

    The second-biggest cost driver for Voonik was marketing. Apparently, to save recurring overheads, it stopped focusing on traditional channels like Facebook and Google.

    Instead, Voonik approached innovative channels for marketing to make money immediately. One of these initiatives was referral programs that allowed Voonik to make money from the very first transaction.

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    Voonik – Competitors

    Voonik’s Competitors – LimeRoad, Jaypore, FabAlley, Myntra, Jabong, FashionAndYou, Adoro Marketplace, ShopClues, Yepme and Snapdeal.

    Online fashion space is as crowded as it can get. New players are coming in fashion industry. And now with Instagram and its buzz, it has become very easy for people to sell fashion apparel online.

    Given that, there’s so much happening out there in the online fashion zone. Be it creative concepts like style cracker who customly assigns stylists to its customers to make a box of accessories paired with the dress. Be it bag fashion portals like Myntra and Shein, all of these along with Voonik are competing neck to neck to cater to the same audience.

    Voonik – Acquisitions and Mergers

    TrialKart

    Voonik acqui-hired TrialKart in 2015. TrailKart is a mobile platform providing a virtual dressing room experience to the users.

    Getsty

    In 2016, Voonik acquired Getsty which is a personalized shopping portal for men.

    Vilara

    In June 2016, Voonik stepped into the premium e-commerce segment by launching Vilara.

    Dekkoh

    In September of 2016, Voonik undertook an acquisition of Dekkoh which was a personalization and styling app.

    Dekkoh

    Voonik did not stop here. It has also acqui-hired three startups, Zohraa, Picksilk.com, and Style, to further build the platform and taking it deep towards personalization by adding more and more personal stylists and connecting them with its users through a chat-based app.

    ShopUp

    According to the reports in February 2020, Vooniks B2B business was merged with Bangladesh-based startup ShopUp. ShopUp is a platform that helps businesses go online. It enables e-commerce, store, logistics, sourcing, marketing and working capital requirements.

    Schoolay

    On February 2020, Vooniks B2C business was merged with kids activewear startup Schoolay.

    Voonik – Growth and Revenue

    • Voonik reported 264% jump from losses of Rs 17.63 crore (FY19) to the Net Profits of Rs 28.7 crore (FY20)
    • Voonik had a revenue of Rs 44.76 crore in FY20 as compared to FY19 i.e Rs 21.45 crore
    • Voonik had over 10,000 downloads in the first month with an average rating of 4.7.
    • Today, it has over 20 Mn registered users
    • Total 17 million application downloads
    • Close to 2 million unique visitors per month
    • Displays more than 15 Lakh products from 22,000 sellers.
    • Caters to an average of 20,000 daily orders
    • Currently has a rating of 4.1 at Google Play Store.

    Voonik – Awards

    2014 – Voonik was amongst the Microsoft Ventures India’s list of 16 startups for its summer batch of the accelerator program.

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    Voonik – Future Plans

    Voonik has big plans of taking onboard offline boutiques and launching chat-based features. Currently, the app is only giving recommendations to the customers, but the users are not able to chat with the stylists. Hence their main priority in the long term plan is to take personalization to the highest level on Voonik.

    Voonik – FAQs

    Who are the Founders of Voonik?

    Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan are the founders of Voonik.

    How much is Voonik Funding?

    Voonik has raised a total funding of $34.5 Million till date.

    How much is Voonik’s Revenue?

    Voonik reported 264% jump from losses of Rs 17.63 crore (FY19) to the Net Profits of Rs 28.7 crore (FY20).

    How does Voonik make money?

    Voonik basically is a marketplace where the retail stores register and get to showcase their products. The revenue for Voonik is generated by charging a 15% commission on every sale to the brand or the seller.

    What is Voonik store?

    Voonik is an online marketplace operating in products for women’s fashion.

  • Spoonshot—Leveraging Artificial Intelligence To Predict Food Trends

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

    Artificial Intelligence is now penetrating almost every existing domain. Finance, healthcare, education, transportation and many sectors  are witnessing active use of AI. This intelligence is now being used for an upcoming niche: prediction of consumer tastes and food trends. Spoonshot, a startup based in Bangalore, is using AI to help businesses operating in the food and beverages sector serve their customers better by providing useful insights on future food trends and guest intelligence.

    Spoonshot’s AI-powered tool is saving FMCG companies time and money while enabling them to become trendsetters. StartupTalky interviewed Spoonshot CEO Kishan Vasani to understand more about the startup.

    Spoonshot – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Spoonshot
    Headquarter Bangalore
    Founders Kishan Vasani and Sai Sreenivas Kodur
    Sector FMCG
    Founded December, 2015
    Website www.spoonshot.com
    Parent Organization Spoonshot.com

    Spoonshot – About
    Spoonshot – Vision & Mission
    Spoonshot – Target Market
    Spoonshot – Founders & Team
    Spoonshot – How It Started
    Spoonshot – Ideation, Designing, & Prototyping Of The Product
    Spoonshot – Product/Service
    Spoonshot – How It Works
    Spoonshot – Work Culture
    Spoonshot – Name, Tagline, & Logo
    Spoonshot – Business Model & Revenue Model
    Spoonshot – User Acquisition
    Spoonshot – Startup Challenges
    Spoonshot – Funding & Investors
    Spoonshot – Advisors & Mentors
    Spoonshot – Acquisitions & Mergers
    Spoonshot – Future Plans
    Spoonshot – FAQ’s
    Spoonshot – Conclusion

    Spoonshot – About

    Spoonshot is a food AI company that is raising the bar for insight-led innovation. It believes in exploration as the catalyst behind the novel, successful products and uses it as the very fuel to help food and beverage companies shape the future and bring about new trends.  

    Spoonshot equips the food and beverage industry with unprecedented foresight of emerging market needs. By transforming long-tail, open information from diverse and authentic sources, Spoonshot’s proprietary food science infused algorithms connect disparate data sets, to deliver personalized insights, predict trends, and identify novel opportunities. Today, Spoonshot is supporting the world’s best-known brands in meeting the future needs of their customers.

    Spoonshot – Vision & Mission

    Spoonshot is on a mission to replicate human cognition in the domain of food. We humans have developed special skill sets—chef, nutritionist, doctor, foodie, scientist, psychologist, etc. Spoonshot’s core technology which is referred to as #foodbrain, is designed to adopt relevant components from each of these skill sets.

    Consumer tastes are influenced by many factors. Geography, purchasing power, external influence, mood, etc. are important determiners of  one’s taste buds. At Spoonshot, every variable that is likely to affect consumer taste is included to enable #foodbrain deliver the highest level of accuracy in prediction. This foresightedness is then used by the food and beverage companies while developing and rolling out products and services.

    “Today incrementalism is the go-to-strategy for most FMCG companies that want to create new products or flavors. And the sad reality is while 58% of R&D spending is directed at incremental innovations, only 14% is used for breakthrough or disruptive innovations. Under this scenario, Spoonshot  is working towards bringing about true innovation in the food industry” says Spoonshot CEO Kishan Vasnai  explaining how Spoonshot is making a difference.

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    Spoonshot – Target Market

    Spoonshot’s target industry is FMCG, where sales is forecasted to top $720 billion by 2020. Spoonshot’s target customers are large FMCG companies in North America.

    Spoonshot – Founders and Team

    Kishan Vasani and Sai Sreenivas Kodur are the founders of Spoonshot.

    Kishan Vasani & Sai Sreenivas Kodur | Co-Founders. Spoonshot

    Kishan Vasnai is the CEO of Spoonshot. He has 10+ years  of experience in the startup segment and 7+ years of experience in food tech domain. Kishan founded a digital marketing agency named ‘U Want Media’ in 2006, which he exited in 2011. Kishan is the ex COO of ‘Just Eat’ (India) and also worked as the head of international marketing in ‘Just Eat’. Besides, Kishan co-founded ‘One Cause’, a UK based NGO that promotes education as the solution to poverty

    Sai Sreenivas Kodur is the co-Founder & CTO of Spoonshot. Sai, who is a computer science graduate from IIT Madras,  has 5+ years of experience in the tech sector. He worked as a software engineer in Myntra, Zomato, and Kiwi, Inc. before joining Spoonshot.

    Kishan built the core team using LinkedIn, and came in contact with Sai through LinkedIn’s platform.

    When I first started looking for a technical partner, I quickly realized that I was not interviewing them, but that good candidates were really interviewing me, asking all sorts of difficult questions about my experience and the business model. I was specifically looking for someone with a computer science background, essentially a real geek, and while they didn’t need to have food tech experience, it was a great bonus. But the most important trait was that I needed to find someone that I could get along with, someone I could have a beer with. With Sai, I was lucky to get all of the above – Kishan

    When Kishan met Sai, the latter was at Myntra in a well-paid job. Kishan knew he would have to  work hard to on-board Sai. The duo met several times and discussed the industry and opportunity for hours before the decision to work together was established. Alignment on the opportunities in the food tech segment was relatively straightforward given that both Sai and Kishan had background in this domain. Also, Sai had a similar startup idea but didn’t pursue it. Finally, Sai and Kishan came together to start Spoonshot. Kishan even asked one of his friend, the CTO of a company, to interview Sai for ensuring his technical prowess.

    Spoonshot – How It Started

    Spoonshot founder Kishan Vasani’s, personal experience with food was instrumental in Spoonshot’s launch.

    During his stint at Just Eat Group in London (2011-2013),  Kishan stumbled upon several opportunities that interested him (like white-label apps for restaurants). Kishan noticed that the actual dining experience didn’t necessarily match the restaurant ratings and reviews available.

    One of my favorite dishes served by a restaurant in Bangalore has a restaurant rating of 3.1. Conversely, I’ve been to several highly rated restaurants (4.0+) and thought the food was average at best.

    With reviews and ratings being almost useless, Kishan wanted to find something that would give consumers more accurate insight on their dining/ordering experience.

    Initially, Kishan thought of dish rating as a good way to solve the problem because of its relevance and granularity as a data point. But further research highlighted that taste is subjective and varies greatly from person to person. A more innovative approach was required.

    “It wasn’t until 2015 after I had left Just Eat and started working at a London fintech startup called Osper, that I decided to jump off the entrepreneurial cliff. At Osper, I was working closely with the Founder & CEO, Alick Varma. Seeing him build his dream business with such passion and drive essentially drove me to leave and start my venture. ”

    Kishan and Sai did extensive research about the FMCG industry for almost 9 months. They met over 130 industry professionals to get a clear understanding about the problems and opportunities in the Food and Beverage industry before starting Spoonshot. Spoonshot initially started as a  B2C company that was building a personalized food discovery app for the Indian market. Spoonshot was then known as ‘Dishq'(a combination of dish and ishq, the hindi word for love). Dishq focused on shifting the notion of food ordering away from ratings and reviews to more visual and emotionally driven decision-making.

    Later, the company pivoted to become  a B2B company and re-branded itself as Spoonshot.

    Given that  Sai and I both previously worked in the food/restaurant tech, we made certain product and customer assumptions based upon our knowledge. In hindsight, we should have completed more thorough market research as this would have saved us a lot of time and pain – Kishan

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    Spoonshot – Ideation, Designing, & Prototyping Of The Product

    Spoonshot tested its very first insights through a Hackathon with Ferrero (the manufacturer of Nutella). Spoonshot received a positive response which gave the team confidence and conviction to further explore this opportunity.

    After 3 months of deep industry research in the US (Spoonshot’s target market), Spoonshot built its very first insights prototype for a US-based food startup called Milkful during the Techstars Farm To Fork Accelerator.

    Milkful’s product that comprises health snack bars has been created for a very specific audience. They wanted to understand new ingredient combinations that would meet their consumer’s needs. Once again, we received good feedback. This allowed us to iterate our solution further.

    The next version was used to deliver insights to a global ingredient giant. This project was far more complicated with high stakes. After 3 months of intensive engagement, Spoonshot delivered its insights and the client was satisfied with the results. This gave the Spoonshot team the conviction and validation to develop a full-fledged platform.  

    Spoonshot – Product/Service

    Spoonshot has built an AI-powered insights platform infused with food science to assist FMCG brands uncover hidden product opportunities and accelerate incremental revenue by leveraging Spoonshot’s unique insights.

    The platform is an innovation and trends research tool. It is designed to be the creative spark for product development by encouraging exploration, generating inspiration, a place for ideation. Following are some major components of the Spoonshot platform:

    (1) Ingredient Networks: A way to uncover emerging and novel ingredient combinations.

    (2) Startups Explorer: Details the innovation and product development of new food and beverage enterprises.

    (3) Trend Trek: A place to discover the latest food ingenuity around the world.

    Spoonshot has designed the platform such that users need not ask it questions, but are continually given answers or insights personalized to the user’s needs.

    The increasingly dynamic consumer landscape in the age of digital means that it is harder than ever before to track customer needs and tastes. There’s simply too much data and too many opinions. Quite frankly, it can be overwhelming. Also, legacy research and insights providers over-rely on lagging indicators and archaic methodologies, which lead to stale ideas. To add insult to injury, these agencies sell the same data to you and your competitors, so finding an edge is next to impossible.

    Spoonshot’s bleeding edge technology leverages the power of AI, food science, and large, diverse data sets, to give the companies a tool specifically for  early-stage product innovation, ideation, and inspiration.

    We want the consumers to have better, more relevant product choices, and not be overwhelmed by the current situation of over choice.

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    Spoonshot – How It Works

    Spoonshot uses domain knowledge (food science) as a means to contextualize and extrapolate insights based upon the changes it sees in its data pipelines.

    Food science refers to Computational Gastronomy and Nutrition Science.

    Computational Gastronomy refers to applying data science techniques to the chemistry of food. Spoonshot extends this by collecting data related to flavor, sensory and texture. Nutrition Science refers to the break up of nutrition in different items. Spoonshot also enriches this with data on how a style of cooking influences nutritional value.

    The company builds several types of ingredient networks using this data. These ingredient networks define how the ingredients are inter-related (e.g. ingredients could be similar in taste, smell, nutrition, substitution, texture, etc). This serves as a fixed knowledge base which acts as the backbone to build products.

    Spoonshot has built a trend data store which tracks food related data along with two key dimensions:

    1. Time.
    2. Geo-location.

    This gives the company information on which ingredients are trending and in which locations.

    Spoonshot – Work Culture

    Spoonshot currently has 22 employees comprising data scientists, food scientists, and developers with the common love for eating.

    We have a very friendly, no-hierarchy work culture and are as transparent about our decisions and plans with the team. We have a potluck once a month, team lunches, and learning sessions so that there is a good mix of fun and learning – Kishan says commenting on Spoonshot’s work culture.

    Spoonshot’s hiring funda is simple: Hire foodies with a problem-solving mindset.

    The five values below are the guiding stars for the Spoonshot team:

    • First-principles: Don’t make assumptions, but be curious and inquisitive.
    • Be bold: Don’t be afraid to think big and execute bigger and bring your personality to the problem.
    • Show passion: Commit wholeheartedly and with real belief.
    • Drive excellence: Lead by example, go the extra mile, and accept/deliver nothing less than great.
    • Give first: Be helpful, kind, and open.

    Spoonshot Logo

    The name Spoonshot has been derived from ‘moonshot thinking’.

    We are a great believer of the ‘moonshot thinking’ – a combination of a huge problem, a radical solution to that problem and the breakthrough technology that just might make that solution possible. Our core technology is focused on enabling FMCG companies to stay ahead of trends. It’s almost like a crystal ball for early-stage product innovation, ideation, and inspiration – Kishan explains

    Spoonshot logo represents the spoon for the F&B and moonshot thinking. The tagline is ‘Be The Trendsetter’, and the company did an extensive marketing exercise to derive at this motto.

    Spoonshot – Business Model & Revenue Model

    Spoonshot is a SaaS platform and charge an annual access fee which includes a number of licenses/seats.

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    Spoonshot – User Acquisition

    Spoonshot got accepted in the Techstars Farm To Fork Accelerator in the summer of 2018. The power and reach of their network was incredible and changed the trajectory of the business. Spoonshot was able to connect to many of its customers through this channel. The second major channel for customer acquisition was through a leading industry event where Spoonshot presented a demo of its platform on stage. Within 24 hours of the presentation, the company had 30 new B2B customers on-board.

    Spoonshot – Startup Challenges

    Finding product-market fit in the FMCG industry was a major challenge. The next major challenge was and continues to be tech recruitment.

    Bangalore has many developers but finding good ones, with the values aligned to our business, with reasonable salary expectations is very difficult. We have tried many things to improve our recruitment process and still I don’t believe we have a winning formula. Perhaps the most pertinent point is that whether you are hiring or not, recruitment should never stop.

    Kishan shares the following few tips that he keeps in mind while hiring.

    • Do not Hire fast: There’s the risk of bringing in people who are either not technically sound or culturally right.
    • Do not hire someone who is not a culture fit.
    • Do not Hire too slowly: Too many rounds means you can lose candidates to other companies.
    • Be cautious while using an agency: We’ve used some of the ‘best’ agencies in Bangalore and it did not led to a new hire.
    • Think before hiring interns: The quality is mixed but you get great executional bandwidth. Great interns have been hired as full-timers. Interns even after joining full-time may want to pursue further studies. Also, they do not have any other work experience to benchmark against; this can be both good and bad.  

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    Spoonshot – Funding & Investors

    Spoonshot has raised a total funding of $1.712 Million in 4 rounds till date. Below are Spoonshot funding details-

    Funding Date Funding Stage Funding Amount Investor
    Early 2017 Angel Funding $37k HNI
    2017 Accelerator $120k Zeroth.AI
    2018 Pre-seed $555k Techstars, Arts Alliance & HNIs
    2020 Seed Round $1 Million SRI Capital

    The recent funding round on September 2020 was led by SRI Capital. This financing will be used to fuel the Spoonshot’s growth plan and for further investment in its Proprietary technology and team.

    Spoonshot – Advisors & Mentors

    Spoonshot has current and former executives at some of the industry’s leading US organizations including Cargill, Ecolab, McDonald’s, Conagra, General Mills, and the National Restaurant Association as its advisors.

    Spoonshot – Acquisitions & Mergers

    Spoonshot acquired Brisky, a restaurant analytics startup in 2018. Brisky provides restaurants and bars with customer satisfaction intelligence, helps them understand their customers needs better, and quickly highlights the areas that need attention.

    Spoonshot – Future Plans

    Till September 2019, Spoonshot was in the beta stage, and even then it  had over 40 companies, that includes over 15 billion dollar companies, testing its FMCG trends platform. The platform was publicly launched on 1st October 2019.

    In 2020, Spoonshot is planning to scale the business in the following ways:

    • Launch new features (as demanded by its customers).
    • The company is currently focusing on North America, and has plans to launch new markets (locations being evaluated include UK, Japan and China).
    • Launch a version of the platform designed for large restaurant operators.

    Sharing his vision, Spoonshot CEO Kishan Vasani said, “We believe our technology (#foodbrain) and the platform will become the de facto choice for the food industry, across FMCG and restaurant/food services, for being on-trend and providing customers with the choices they need and want”

    Spoonshot – FAQ’s

    Who are the Founders of Spoonshot?

    Kishan Vasani and Sai Sreenivas Kodur are the Founders of Spoonshot.

    What is Spoonshot?

    Spoonshot’s technology leverages food science and artificial intelligence to predict consumer tastes and food trends. It’s AI-powered tool is saving FMCG companies time and money while enabling them to become trendsetters

    How much funding was raised by Spoonshot?

    As revealed by the founders, Spoonshot has raised a total funding of $1.712 Million in 4 rounds till date. The recent funding round on September 2020 was led by SRI Capital for $1 Million.

    Who is the CEO of Spoonshot?

    Kishan Vasnai is the CEO of Spoonshot.

    Spoonshot – Conclusion

    Spoonshot delivers food & beverage innovation intelligence by leveraging AI and food science. Our insights reveal the future of food through a deep understanding of emerging and evolving consumer and market needs, enabling us to accurately predict trends and uncover innovation opportunities.

    58% of R&D spending is directed at incremental innovation, while only 14% is used for breakthrough or disruptive innovations.

    While incrementalism is fuelling the revenues of companies today, they have forgotten to look at how they can create revenues for the day after tomorrow. Consumer panels and surveys are square pegs in a world increasingly made of round holes. Incremental gains are a band-aid for a bullet wound.

    At Spoonshot, we believe that exploration is the catalyst for novel and successful food innovation, the very fuel to help you shape the future, to set the trend. We examine the root cause, start at the very beginning, and build from first principles. We adopt the mindset of our inner inquisitive child, always learning, never biased, always curious, never fearful. We believe that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. #bethetrendsetter

    That’s ‘Spoonshot thinking’.

    You can find out more about our thoughts and research on our YouTube channel.

  • Refrens – A Revolutionary Payment Gateway for Freelancers

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

    As people look for alternatives beyond their day jobs, they are quick to stumble upon freelancing. Freelancing is now emerging as a viable career option. Gone are the days when it was merely seen as a source of side income. However, this path isn’t void of difficulties. One such obstacle is a slow payment gateway. A freelancer’s will to take up projects dies down when payments aren’t received on time!

    This is where Refrens comes into picture. It aides freelancers by providing an optimal mechanism for payments gateway.

    Refrens – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Refrens
    Headquarters Bengaluru
    Founders Naman Sarawagi and Mohit Jain
    Sector Fintech
    Founded 2019
    Parent Organization Refrens Internet Pvt. Ltd.

    Refrens – Vision And Mission
    Refrens – Product
    Refrens – Industry Details
    Refrens – Founders And Team
    Refrens – The Idea And Launch
    Refrens – Product And Services
    Refrens – Name, Logo, And Tagline
    Refrens – Business Model
    Refrens – Funding and Investors
    Refrens – Customer Acquisition
    Refrens – Challenges
    Refrens – Future Plans
    Refrens – FAQs

    Refrens – About

    Refrens provides a payment gateway system for freelancers to send and receive payments comfortably, which offers free invoicing, payments, and expense management system. It was founded by Naman Sarawagi and Mohit Jain in 2019.

    The platform currently has 12,000 businesses and freelancers using the system, which is growing at 10 percent every week.

    Refrens – Vision And Mission

    Refrens wants to create the easiest way for freelancers to collect payments and collaborate with other freelancers. Refrens provides a payment gateway system for freelancers to send and receive payments comfortably.

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    Refrens – Industry Details

    The freelancing industry, better known as the ‘Gig Economy’, has since immense recognition and growth over the last decade. There are around 20 million people working as full-time freelancers in India. This number stands at more than 6 million in the USA; such is the influence of freelancing.

    On the other hand, the payment gateway service is also witnessing rapid adoption in India. Since this is the digital era and everything’s online, the technologies and tools powering the internet need to be efficient and flawless. This includes payment gateways as well. The existing payment mechanisms have tremendous scope for improvement which Refrens is working on.  

    Refrens – Founders And Team

    Refrens was founded by Naman Sarawagi and Mohit Jain in 2019.

    Naman Sarawagi, founder of Findyogi
    Naman Sarawagi, Co-founder of Refrens

    Naman Sarawagi is the product and marketing manager at Refrens. Moreover, he is the founder of FindYogi.com. Naman has previously been a product manager at Freecharge and ZipDial.

    With a penchant for investing in the right places, Naman has put his money in Daily Ninja and Holidify. Daily Ninja is a startup providing subscription based delivery of daily products whereas Holidify is a holiday planning website.

    Mohit Jain, Co-founder of Refrens

    Mohit Jain handles Refren’s technical division. He was the CTO at Findyogi.com. Mohit has been a tech consultant at various startups.

    Findyogi.com is a website that compares the prices of the product across different e-commerce websites out there. The company was acquired by Way2News in 2016.

    Refrens – The Idea And Launch

    I met a lot of good freelancers during my course of growing multiple startups but finding them and interacting with them was tough. It looked like a good market to solve problems for – Naman Sarawagi, Co-founder of Refrens.

    The duo scrutinized industry reports on the market size and the tools used by freelancers and other professionals for payments. They launched a raw product in a closed group. With the feedback received, they started improvising on the product.

    Their initial product wasn’t well-received by the audience. It called for excessive change in user habits. After incorporating the responses received by some freelancers in the product’s second iteration, Refrens’ offering was quick in getting accepted by the freelancing community. People found the tool simple and slick.

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    Refrens – Product And Services

    Refrens is a simple invoicing and payments collection system. Once the user has processed their first invoice through Refrens, the intuitive system gets the user hooked onto it through the numerous features the platform offers. For freelancers, it becomes easy to enable options like adding payment methods, offering discounts, etc. for their clients via Refrens.

    Refrens - Freelancers receive payments
    Refrens – Payment gateway system

    Refrens is an invoicing and payments service provider. The company’s core segment revolves around B2B freelancers. The Refrens team strongly believes in freelancing as the future of work. As a result, this domain needs significant enhancements and advancements to be successful.

    Refrens was launched to solve the delay and inefficiency freelancers face when collecting payments from different customers. It is possible to create an invoice within 30 seconds on Refrens.

    Refrens- Name, Logo, And Tagline

    Refrens - Payment gateway system
    Refrens Logo

    Refrens is a play on the reference. The team believe that the freelancers get business from reference of past clients so it is an important part of their growth.

    Refrens – Business Model

    Refrens plans to monetize the platform through its optional payment gateway facilities and by selling custom financial services.

    Refrens – Funding and Investors

    On May 2020, Refrens raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a group of angel investors including Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder of Paytm) and Anupam Mittal (Founder of Shaadi.com).  

    Date Amount Investors
    May 2020 Undisclosed Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Anupam Mittal

    The investment round also saw participation from The Collective fund, Mumbai-based early-stage fund Firstcheque, Amiya Pathak of Ezcred, Gireesh Subramaniam of Freshworks, Sujayath Ali, and Navaneetha Krishnan – Founders of Voonik.com, Amit Lakhotia of Park+, Ajeet Khurana – CEO of Zebpay, Founders and senior management of Kaleyra, Founders of DailyNinja, Springworks, and few others.  

    The startup said it will use the funds for expanding reach of the platform and adding freelancer friendly financial services.

    Refrens – Customer Acquisition

    Both the founders had a closed group of friends who were the first 10 users. They later announced the product on a couple of forums and freelancing groups. The platform currently has 12,000 businesses and freelancers using the system, which is growing at 10 percent every week.

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    Refrens – Challenges

    “Convincing freelancers about a new tool is difficult and time taking to do 1-on-1. We are now growing from our customer base.”, said Mohit Jain, co-founder of Refrens.

    Naman says that social media has stopped working when it comes to attracting customers. They tried a couple of hacks around Facebook groups and pages but weren’t successful in driving mass attention.

    Refrens – Future Plans

    The company is just a few months old and has a little over 500 users.

    Please note that we publish profile of companies of at least 8 months old startup. However, an exception was made in this case because of the team, vision, and its product.  

    Over the next few months we will expand our capabilities around accepting multiple currencies through multiple payment instruments. Over the next 2 years, we want to be the leading platform serving freelancers in india. We will be going deeper in their workflow and more useful features to collaborate – Naman

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    Refrens – FAQs

    What is Refrens?

    Refrens has created the easiest way for freelancers to collect payments and collaborate with other freelancers. It provides a payment gateway for freelancers to send and receive payments comfortably, which offers free invoicing, payments, and expense management system.

    What is the Pricing Plan of Refrens?

    Refrens is Free Forever. You can create invoices, quotations and can manage your expenses anytime. You can access any of these for lifetime for free. But you only pay a small fee if you wish to receive payments online.

    Who are the Founders of Refrens?

    Refrens was founded by Naman Sarawagi and Mohit Jain in 2019.

    What is the state of Refrens Funding?

    On May 2020, Refrens raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a group of angel investors including Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder of Paytm) and Anupam Mittal (Founder of Shaadi.com).

    How does Refrens make money?

    For every online payment done through Refrens, it keep a small payment gateway fee.

    How many transactions can you make on Refrens?

    Unlimited. There is no limit for the transaction you make. You can create unlimited invoices and record transactions. All absolutely free.

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  • AttainU – Bridging the Skill Gap in Software Engineering Sector

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

    The education sector is the most significant sector for any country, especially for a developing country like India. In India, however, there has been a growing gap between the industry needs and the skills of the students. A study by employability assessment company ‘Aspiring Minds’, carried out in 2017, shockingly revealed that 95% engineers in India are not fit for software development jobs.

    Addressing such gaps, AttainU has molded its courses to make students skilled enough to do justice to their jobs. AttainU provides a high-quality, scalable, professional skill training platform enabling India’s young population to step up and meet the global talent shortage. Currently, AttainU is offering online, live software engineering courses.

    Get trained, get hired, pay once you get a job

    AttainU helps you to completely rewrite your career with its Live and Online full stack development course. A Full stack web developer is a master in many coding languages for the front end design and development of a website along with a backend coding language besides knowing how to manage and maintain a server.

    Read About AttainU Company Profile, Funding, Competitors, Revenue, Business Model, Growth, Logo, Fees and Challenges.

    AttainU – Company Highlights

    Startup Name AttainU
    Headquarter Bangalore
    Sector Ed-Tech
    Co-founders Divyam Goel, Vaibhav Bajpai
    Founded 2018
    Parent Organization Leetu Education Pvt. Ltd.
    Website attainu.com

    About AttainU and How it Works
    AttainU – Target Market
    AttainU – Founders and Team
    How was AttainU Started
    AttainU – Product Development and Startup Launch
    AttainU – USP and Innovation
    AttainU – Fees
    AttainU – Placements
    AttainU – Enrollment Process
    AttainU – Name and Logo
    AttainU – Business Model and Revenue Model
    AttainU – Startup Challenges
    AttainU – Competitors
    AttainU – Funding and Investors
    AttainU – Growth
    AttainU – FAQs

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    About AttainU and How it Works

    AttainU uses a centralized online college simulation approach facilitating immersive interactions between aspirational learners and domain experts while delivering consistent learning outcomes at scale.

    AttainU works with a vision to provide a high-quality college alternative to deserving students, who are either not employed satisfactorily with their existing qualifications or are looking to upskill for better employment opportunities in the field of technology.

    In the process, they aim to systematically solve education-related problems in an individual-aligned (interest and ability), market-aligned (outcome-focused), and scalable (accessible, affordable) way while ensuring high-quality outcomes at all steps.

    AttainU has built a vertically integrated solution covering-

    1. Enrollment – Here, AttainU helps the students to figure out their fit for the course, which is based on their aptitude, inclination, and, most importantly, the ability to put in the required effort.
    2. Skill Building – This is the main central piece which allows the startup to deliver high-quality learning outcomes at scale. The crux here is maintaining high student engagement during the course. This is achieved through facilitating highly immersive interactions with instructors, mentors, and peers focused around a centrally defined course path built-in line with industry partners and delivered by industry expert faculty. Delivery and measurement of granular learning outcomes are built in to make sure each student is on the expected learning trajectory.
    3. Placements – The core of the higher education system. Through placement mechanism, AttainU prepares the students for placements, does the matchmaking, and facilitates the interactions between its industry partners and students.
    4. Income Share Agreement – This is a deferred fee payment model conditional to employment. It ensures that aspirational students can afford this high- quality education irrespective of their financial background.

    There are 24 million students enrolled in colleges across India. Even after spending a significant amount of time and money, more than 80% don’t get a job or a satisfactory job. The team at AttainU believes that a significant number of these students, if provided the right platform can do much better in their careers.

    AttainU bridges the gap between unemployable college graduates and global talent shortage. This is one of the persistent problems India currently faces, and it’s essential to address this issue to exploit the demographic dividend; to evolve into a high-quality human resources capital of the world.

    AttainU – Target Market

    The education sector in India is estimated to stand at $91.7 billion in FY18 and is expected to reach $101.1 billion in FY20. There are around 9 Million people coming out of colleges/year (CAGR 11%+), but 75% of them don’t make it to the White Collar Workforce.

    College enrollments will increase 3x over the next seven years. 80% of students after graduation lack the basic subject matter expertise and life skills. Given the global talent shortage and working-age human resource surplus in India, India has the potential to become the HR Capital of the World.

    Byju’s – Read the interesting story behind starting up Byju’s
    Imagine you are sitting in a packed class, and the teacher is explaining animportant concept. While it’s seeming that everyone else is understanding theconcept and nodding their head in unison, you are feeling a bit off beat, asevery word being explained is simply getting bounced off your head. D…
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    AttainU – Founders and Team

    Divyam Goel and Vaibhav Bajpai are the founders of AttainU

    Divyam Goel is the CEO & Co-founder of AttainU. He looks after building a strong team aligned towards the company’s goals for the next phase of growth. He is also responsible for meeting the right set of investors who are looking at investing in the Ed-tech industry.

    He comes from a deep tech background and believes education is one of the most important challenges that need to be solved in India. After graduating from IIT Bombay, he moved to Bay Area after a short stint with Microsoft in India. Divyam was part of the team which set up growth engineering at Uber. Eventually, he moved to India with the Next Billion Users (Google Pay) team at Google. Divyam wanted to work on an impact first problem and use his skill set to solve for scale, and that is how AttainU was founded in 2018.

    Vaibhav Bajpai is Co-founder and COO at AttainU. He looks after student outreach and student enrollment.

    Vaibhav Bajpai, Divyam Goel are Founders of AttainU
    Vaibhav Bajpai, Divyam Goel | Founders, AttainU

    Divyam Goel and Vaibhav have known each other since 2006. They both grew up in the same hometown, Lucknow. Soon after graduation, Vaibhav joined GeeksForGeeks as their third full-time member, in December 2015. GeeksforGeeks went on to become the largest computer science interview preparation platform globally. After GeeksforGeeks, Vaibhav wanted to work on the deeper education quality problem at the college level, which led him to co-found AttainU with Divyam.

    AttainU Team
    AttainU Team

    Currently, AttainU has a dedicated team of 15 members with high efficiency, where every individual holds multiple responsibilities. Their hiring strategy is to scientifically and unambiguously assess for culture, role, and stage fit.

    How was AttainU Started

    Working in the Bay Area with startups and top tech companies like Uber and Google is always the highest aspiration for any software engineering graduate in India. After graduating from IIT Bombay Computer Science Engineering in 2012, Divyam Goel pursued the same path.

    Over the years, the internal quest for the purpose of life led him to believe that giving back to society is important. Six years, one startup and two big company experiences later, the impact of his work started taking precedence over financial returns. Having identified Education, Healthcare, and Public Infrastructure as the top three problems in India, Divyam moved back to India in late 2017 to create an impact in these sectors.

    Divyam Goel has spent around eight months studying the education sector, collecting information, and identifying the first principle facts in the education domain in India. Divyam spoke to over 150 people at length, covering the entire vertical, kindergarten to professional skilling as well as the entire horizontal vertical from the work NGOs were doing in the extreme rural areas to the premium IB schools of the country.

    Thorough research led the AttainU founders to come up with two observations –

    1. To be able to solve a problem at scale in a free-market approach, a for-profit model is the most efficient way.
    2. It makes the most business sense to start with the problem where customer motivations are most aligned to benefit from the solution.

    With the above two realizations, the team has zeroed upon higher education space. AttainU selected recent college graduates as the company’s target audience. Once the target audience has been selected, the team started working on the go-to-market solution. For the same, they have taken insights from the past and present education industry.

    Also, they observed that there were some companies, trying out online live college simulation models in different domains, in different parts of the world and that there is a very high level of student engagement in the same.

    AttainU team in their extensive research has engaged with a wide number of stakeholders, and got to understand their views-

    • Industry Leaders, including CTOs –
      a) Are of the view that there is a definite, strong need for industry-aligned skilling.
      b) Believe that finding the right talent for the right role, especially at the fresher level, has become extremely time and money intensive.
      c) Thinks that college graduates lack the basic fundamental subject knowledge as well as the professionally required life skills.
    • College Educators –
      a) Are not interested in the undergraduate teaching outcomes and don’t have any incentive to be.
      b) Having no industry experience, they don’t understand the industry requirements.
      c) They need to follow AICTE norms, restricting them to follow a particular curriculum.
    • Views of Existing and Previous Education Companies –
      a) Recorded, self-paced material based learning does not have the desired impact as a simulated course.
      b) Majority of the companies were measuring metrics which are not at all related to learning outcomes, including the number of views, number of packages sold, etc.
    • Students –
      a) During College, being the first generation from their families, students feel that the college degree will get them a job and hence don’t have the motivation to learn from any other source.
      b) After College, however, the students’ views are much different.

    AttainU team found that-

    • After college, the students get disillusioned by the system, and gets motivated to learn the right skills to get into the right careers to the highest.
    • Also, the team found that many students regret taking the wrong branch at the wrong College, from a career perspective, due to either lack of exposure or lack of finances makes it unfeasible for them to pay for a coaching institute which would increase their chances of getting into a Tier 1 college by 5x.

    AttainU – Product Development and Startup Launch

    AttainU has followed the below steps in the same sequence –

    • Curriculum and pedagogy preparation – The team, interacted with potential industry partners and professors from IIT Bombay and IIM Bangalore to include both the hard skills and professionally required life skills in the curriculum as well as the best practices and pedagogy to put in place to ensure high student engagement from the beginning.
    • Enrollment preparation – AttainU identified what qualities matter in the students who would be able to benefit from these courses and how can they best assess these qualities.
    • Getting the right team in place – Identifying the skill gap that exists between Divyam and Vaibhav, they have put in efforts to get the right team that fills in the gap.
    • The first batch – Through digital marketing and network, the team was able to identify the first 19 students for the first batch, 17 of whom are still with them 6+ months later.

    Having followed an extensive pre-launch preparation, the AttainU team used techniques like digital marketing, community network, and word of mouth to popularize their services among the target audience.

    “We are a mission-driven, impact the first startup, and our customers love our value proposition. Word of mouth has been immensely helpful, as at this point, we are getting 20,000+ student applications every month”, said Divyam Goel.

    Furthermore, they have used a combination of referral programs, digital marketing, network community, and multiple business partnerships to reach out to potential students.

    AttainU – USP and Innovation

    AttainU’s USPs are-

    1. High completion rate, 90%+ in an online medium – Removing the location obstacle from learning.
    2. Placement related payment model (Income Share Agreement) – Removing the money obstacle from learning.
    3. Zero to One course i.e., from no coding background to high-quality entry-level software engineering – Making it possible for anyone willing to put in the effort to learn.

    AttainU – Fees

    AttainU helps you to completely rewrite your career with its Live and Online full stack development course. Get trained, get hired, pay once you get a job.

    Fee Payment Options:

    Option 1 – Rs. 2,25,000 (Pay after Placement)

    Option 2 – Rs. 1,00,000 (Upfront Fee Payment)

    AttainU Fee Structure

    AttainU – Placements

    AttainU helps you to attain your dreams, by giving opportunity to get placed in companies with intense preparation before hand. It has base of 170+ Hiring Partners.

    • Exhaustive 6 Step Interview Preparation
    • Interview scheduling upon Course Completion
    • Each Graduate can sit for Multiple Interviews
    • Each Graduate can get Multiple Offers

    “Degrees are not the best way to filter out or judge a person’s ability. AttainU is filling the much needed gap in the industry” says Kapil Bharati , CTO, Delhivery

    “Most Companies are going towards skill based hiring. Coming through AttainU, you’ll definitely have an upper hand against normal candidates” says Devang Mundhra, CTO, KredX

    AttainU – Enrollment Process

    The enrollment process is designed in such a way that will help a person to figure out, if the course is actually their interest of study and will it be useful for them. With 1-on-1 personalised counselling session, the mindset of the applier is known.

    further the process helps a person to develop a coding mindset, In case he/she is from Non-Coding Background

    AttainU Enrollement/Application Process

    AttainU stands for ‘Attain Your Dream.’  

    AttainU Logo

    AttainU – Business Model and Revenue Model

    AttainU is one of the very few companies working on a deferred payment model for students to enroll in its courses. The business model is popular as an Income Share Agreement (ISA) where students pay the company money after course completion, only when they get a job within eight months, paying more than 5 Lakhs INR. The amount to be paid is 3L INR, spread over 36 months in easy EMIs.

    AttainU – Startup Challenges

    AttainU team has faced two major challenges along their startup journey. These are-

    • Building the right team – Early on, the founding team of AttainU has spent a lot of time internalizing the right kind of workforce who would be a strength to their company. Moving ahead, they have scientifically formulated the company culture document.
    • Ensuring learning outcome quality as the team intended – Data-driven iteration along with setting up simple to follow yet effective processes ensuring proper accountability, escalation, and visibility.

    Besides, as the company started off, they continued experiments to perfect their business plan-

    • They experimented with a few different course formats
    • Tested and perfected their enrollment and counselling model ensuring higher value for customers and more accurate selection for the startup
    • Evaluating many scalable processes to arrive at a solution that ensures timely high-quality, consistent learning outcomes
    • Assessing various models to identifying the most efficient processes around company-student interactions leading to a win-win situation for all

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    AttainU – Competitors

    In the past few years, several startups have gravitated towards this gap and there’s been plenty of innovation too. HRtech startups such as HackerRank, HackerEarth, Codlity as well as edtech startups such as Udemy, Unacademy, upGrad are some of the notable names moving to upskill India’s engineers and entry-level workers. These are some of the competitors for AttainU.

    AttainU – Funding and Investors

    AttainU has raised a total of $150K in funding over 2 rounds. Leetu Education Pvt. Ltd, which operates the software engineering focused education technology startup AttainU, has raised angel funding in September 2019 from a clutch of high-profile investors.

    Date Stage Amount Investor
    February 1, 2019 Seed $150K –
    September 16, 2019 Angel Undisclosed Shailesh Rao, Nikhil Rungta, Letsventure, Anil Gelra, Manish Kumar

    The investors included former Google India head Shailesh Rao and former Intuit India head Nikhil Rungta. Anil Gelra, the founder of financial technology firm SnapMint; and Manish Kumar, the founder of invoice discounting startup KredX as well as angel investing platform LetsVenture also took part in the funding round.

    AttainU – Growth

    AttainU approached profitability in October 2019. Currently, AttainU has 300+ students enrolled in its courses. In September 2019, AttainU has received 20,000+ student applications.

    “Some of our students from the first batch, which is graduating at the end of October, have already received pre-placement offers” – Divyam says.

    Over the next one year, AttainU aims to cater to 8000+ students

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    AttainU – FAQs

    Who are the founders of AttainU?

    Divyam Goel and Vaibhav Bajpai are the founders of AttainU

    How much Funding is raised by AttainU?

    AttainU has raised a total of $150K in funding over 2 rounds. Its recent round being on September 2019, raised angel funding from a clutch of high-profile investors.

    What is AttainU?

    AttainU helps you to completely rewrite your career with its Live and Online full stack development course.  A Full stack web developer is a master in many coding languages for the front end design and development of a website along with a backend coding language besides knowing how to manage and maintain a server.

    How much is AttainU fees?

    Fee Payment Options:

    Option 1 – Rs. 2,25,000 (Pay after Placement)

    Option 2 – Rs. 1,00,000 (Upfront Fee Payment)

  • The Growth Of Startup Ecosystem In India

    India is one of the fastest emerging startup ecosystem. The Indian technological landscape has seen a tremendous growth towards creation of innovative startups which has lead it to become the 3rdfastest growing hub for technology startups in the country. The current article analyses the India’s position as a global startup hub that is becoming attractive for investors startup, and corporates.

    From having just a handful of tech companies to couple dozens and now thousands of innovative new ventures, India’s startup ecosystem has grown immensely from the past decade. India now has 55,000 startups with more than 3200 startups raising $63 Billion in funding in the last five and half years alone.

    The internet has helped paved the way for thousands of startups to rise over the past decade, address unique problems, transform entire industries and create new segments. With deep data insights to influence strategic decision making in governance, investments, growth, and other core aspects driving the Indian startup ecosystem.

    Indian Startup Funding
    Indian’s Unicorn And Soonicorns
    Infrastructure And Resources That Help The Startups Growth in India
    Government And Regulatory Landscape
    The Main Hubs of Indian Startups
    The Indian Investor Landscape
    Fintech Boom
    The Growth of Innovation in India

    Indian Startup Funding

    Over the years the growth of startups has brought in more international investors and boosted their confidence towards India. Fundraising reported by SEBI registered ventured capital funds grew from Rs.326 Crore in 2014 to over Rs. 2,703 Crore in 2019 showing the increase which is up to 8 times more now. The share of actual capital raised to commitments in 2014 was 35% compared to 61% in 2019, indicating the growing investor interest towards investments opportunities in India.

    The most beneficiary sectors are EdTech, fintech, online gaming and OTT, ecommerce and enterprise tech. But because of the covid 19 scenario in 2020, the total capital inflow in Indian startups expected to dip in 202 by as much as 36.2% compared to 2019 to reach $8.1 billion. The total capital inflow in Indian startups for the year 2020 is expected to be the lowest since 2017.

    Indian’s Unicorn And Soonicorns

    India only a single unicorn in 2012, but in 2016 the number increased 10. It is now the home to 34 well known Unicorns with a combined valuation of $115.5 billion, 52 Soonicorns with the potential to become unicorns by 2022. With an overall funding skyrocketing to $63 Billion from 2014 to 2020. In the past decade, India has shown a great appetite for technology, data and the internet.

    Some of the popular unicorn companies in India
    Some of the popular unicorn companies in India

    Excluding that India has 53 startups in India that have the potential to achieve $1 billion pus valuation by the end of 2022. Out of these numbers the fintech sector has 19 unicorn which is different from the unicorns where enterprise tech startups which have 7 unicorns

    Infrastructure And Resources That Help The Startups Growth in India

    India now has an estimated 100 plus startup incubators across the country, mostly housed in academic institutions; this number is likely to cross 300 by 2020. This means that there will be a startup incubator in every state, city and town in the country are enabling entrepreneurs to access resources and solve problems in their local areas. Next, we have Co- working spaces that are growing at an exponential rate and this helps entrepreneurs to have office spaces in their neighborhood.

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    Government And Regulatory Landscape

    Many states are coming up with policies in 2020, as the government at the central and state level have recognized the potential of startup as a driver for job creation and are hence enabling a better regulatory environment for starting up. The startup culture in India and other policies are looking at addressing the problems of B2C entrepreneur level.

    NITI Aayog is in the process of making the necessary infrastructure and resources available through the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM). AIM is adopting a more B2B approach by supporting in the scale up of the existing incubators such as NSRCEL, C-CAMP etc.

    The Main Hubs of Indian Startups

    In 2020, Bengaluru the silicon valley of India is still the startup capital of the country with a total funding amount of $28 Billion across 1,876 deals 2014 to 2020. It’s the startup hub in India for startups. In addition to that the other top hubs are Delhi and Mumbai, while the emerging hubs are Pune and Hyderabad as they have recorded an annual growth rate of 45% and 37% respectively.

    Top startup hubs in India as of 2020
    Top startup hubs in India as of 2020

    In the tier segment Jaipur and Goa have outperformed cities like Hyderabad and have earned their spot in top 10 startup hubs as of 2020 based on the number of funding deals.

    The Indian Investor Landscape

    From just a handful of investors and a few startups to over 49 thousand startups and over 2,000 Indian and International investors, the startup ecosystem have come a long way in past five years. The International investors now routinely come to India to invest in the burgeoning tech ecosystem. The frequency of participation by the existing investor is on the rise.

    The total count of unique investors
    The total count of unique investors every year

    Many corporations have played a major role in the funding trends, according to Datalabs by Inc42 analysis, 2019 was not one of the good year for venture capitalist. In 2020 however, there are approximately 4,640 active investors in India. Among these 59% (2,751) are angel investors and about 18.3% (849) are venture capital firms. Overall there is a downward trend in terms of unique investor’s participation similar to what has been observed in 2019.

    Fintech Boom

    The fintech sector continues to grow at rapid speed. Paytm can easily be called a pioneer in fintech as at gave the power of choice and how to spend to people who never had wallets or bank accounts. Following the success of Paytm, many other wallet companies have shown promise. We believe this sector will continue to attract investors’ interest in 2019 as the business ideas in fintech.

    The Growth of Innovation in India

    The interim budget conveyed the message that India youth should constantly innovate to drive the country growth. Towards this end, the government has pushed for the use of digital technologies through initiatives such as the National Program on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the establishment of nine centers of technological excellence.

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    Conclusion

    While the first decade of 21st century was all about bringing India’s cities and metros online, the past ten years have been about using the internet to create businesses and startups and take the digital torch to rural India. India is today the home to world’s largest working population and startups are expected to take full advantage of this in the next five years.

    The country has more than 500 million internet users. Which is why we can expect an active implementation of block chain, AI, IoT and data analytics across multiple technology sectors. For example the IoT in India has reached $15 billion by 2020. It will account for approximately 5% of the total global market. On the other hand, AI is predicted to become as big as $ 15.6 trillion by 2030.

    Nevertheless, 2025, the number of startups in India is expected to cross 100K, creating more than 3.25 Million jobs in the process. At the same time, the total funding in Indian startups is likely to increase to over $150 Billion and with the total value creation exceeding $500 Bn. Once the medium and long-term pandemic impact subsides, there’s no stopping Indian startups.

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    FAQs

    What does startup ecosystem mean?

    A startup ecosystem is formed by people, startups in their various stages and various types of organizations in a location (physical or virtual), interacting as a system to create and scale new startup companies.

    What is entrepreneurial ecosystem?

    Entrepreneurial ecosystems or entrepreneurship ecosystems are peculiar systems of interdependent actors and relations directly or indirectly supporting the creation and growth of new ventures.

    What makes a good ecosystem?

    A healthy ecosystem consists of native plant and animal populations interacting in balance with each other and nonliving things, for example, water and rocks.

  • Blowhorn’s Journey to raising over $8.8 Mn funding in 6 years!

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Blowhorn.

    Logistics has been a challenge for this country ever since, especially when it comes to the first mile, middle mile, and last-mile logistics. To bridge this gap with an innovation, Mithun Srivatsa and Nikhil Shivaprasad founded Blowhorn in 2014. In this article, know about Blowhorn’s Journey & how it is growing its revenue 500% since Series A funding!

    Blowhorn is a tech-enabled intra-city logistics company that offers mini-trucks to transport goods across multiple cities of India. Blowhorn is offering a broad suite of services from the first mile, middle mile, and last-mile logistics for businesses and individuals that brings together a robust network of mini-truck owners and consumers. Also, this platform is handling goods from 1g to 1T.

    Blowhorn – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Blowhorn
    Headquarter Bengaluru, India
    Sector Logistics
    Founders Mithun Srivatsa, Nikhil Shivaprasad
    Founded August 2014
    Revenue Rs 37 crore (2017-18)
    Total Funding $8.8 Million
    Legal Name Catbus Infolabs Private Ltd.
    Website blowhorn.com

    Blowhorn – About and How it Works
    Blowhorn – USP and Innovation
    How was Blowhorn started?
    Blowhorn – Founders and Team
    Blowhorn – Startup Launch
    Blowhorn – Startup Challenges
    Blowhorn – Competitors
    Blowhorn – Funding and Investors
    Blowhorn – Growth and Revenue
    Blowhorn – Future Plans
    Blowhorn – FAQs

    Blowhorn – About and How it Works

    Blowhorn is a venture that works on the following module. Blowhorn provides a full-stack logistics service from an asset-light model via its tech-based platform. This platform connects the logistics service seekers with mini-truck drivers through its website and mobile app. It is intriguing to know loading and unloading of goods is a part of the service that Blowhorn provides.

    This platform’s algorithm works very similar to that of cab aggregators in the country like Uber and Ola. So ideally when a consumer requests a truck on this platform, the request is processed to match an existing mini-truck, and then consequently the vehicle driver is connected with the consumer. The time frame of this transaction can be as little as thirty minutes and could also go on to be scheduled for a later date and time.

    Blowhorn Logo

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    Blowhorn – USP and Innovation

    The unique selling proposition of Blowhorn is providing ‘full-stack logistics’ solutions to the vast user base in the country. Full-stack in this context refers to its excellent capabilities in all the three elements of the logistics value chain: warehouses, transportation, and tech-enabled systems.

    Blowhorn with its tech-based portal claims to have built new layers along with the transportation stack that drives margin expansion. Also, Blowhorn offers a very important feature to its users namely real-time tracking of goods.

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    How was Blowhorn started?

    Blowhorn started with an experience of one of the co-founder’s life. Mithun Srivatsa’s colleagues in Bengaluru were trying to move their bed and a few other home-related things to a different apartment in the same city and yet it became quite an exhausting process. His friends struggled the entire day going back and forth just to move a few goods from one place to another. Not just that, his friends had to take days off from work to do this which ideally should’ve taken just a few hours.

    Amongst this chaos, the key challenges his colleagues faced was mainly finding a truck driver to transport the goods, being able to communicate with the truck driver because none of his colleagues knew Kannada, and cross-checking the truck driver’s credentials because trust becomes a major factor while transporting valuable things.

    “I knew for a fact that the problem was certainly not the lack of supply of truck drivers,” says Srivatsa.

    Hence he started thinking of creating a common platform to solve this problem by aggregating and organizing the otherwise fragmented market of mini trucks. And that is exactly what he did. And one of the biggest insights that ran through his mind during this was that if an aggregator model could work for transporting people through cabs and autos then it could work very well for transporting goods.

    Blowhorn – Founders and Team

    The founders of Blowhorn are Mithun Srivatsa and Nikhil Shivaprasad.

    Founders Blowhorn
    Mithun Srivatsa and Nikhil Shivaprasad – Blowhorn founders

    Both these co-founders, Nikhil and Mithun studied together in college and have known each other for a long time, since 2001. When Mithun was pitching the idea of his newborn venture – Blowhorn to investors in the states, Mithun reconnected with Nikhil. Following that Nikhil took charge of building Blowhorn’s technology platform.

    • Mithun Srivatsa – Mithun has studied business management from Cambridge Judge Business School.
    • Nikhil Shivaprasad – Nikhil has a degree in MS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University.

    “I am a logistician, while Nikhil is a generalist technologist and we were good bringing together our capabilities in a market, which we think has a lot of potentials,” said Mithun.

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    Blowhorn – Startup Launch

    After the basic idea for Blowhorn was germinated, Mithun went around for analysis regarding the size of the intra-city goods transport market in the country. That’s when Mithun found out that the market was huge and also relatively untapped. And then to make the most of it, Mithun along with his batchmate, Nikhil Shivaprasad, launched their startup under the name of Blowhorn in August 2014.

    And since then, Blowhorn operates on a logistics marketplace focused on the intra-city movement of goods. Initially, the company started with a focus on retail customers and since then has expanded to cater to corporate clients as well.

    “The volume of business and margins in the ‘individual’ segment weren’t sufficient to sustain our business. So, we shifted our focus to enterprise customers—both traditional and modern businesses, to provide them with efficient and reliable logistics services,” says the co-founder and CEO of Blowhorn – Srivatsa.

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    Blowhorn – Startup Challenges

    The biggest milestone for this Bengaluru headquartered startup Blowhorn was getting through the bureaucratic paperwork and bringing truck drivers on board.

    “The biggest challenge we initially faced was the red tape in getting our company registered and opening a current bank account. Also, truckers were reluctant to trust a startup whose founders were working out of coffee shops,” says Srivatsa.

    While the co-founder’s duo couldn’t do anything much about the red tape, acquiring a Regus membership helped them get trucker drivers on their robust platform. This Regus membership cost them about INR 2,000 a month provided them with access to the common area of Regus properties. And that’s how vehicle owners and drivers assumed that the co-founders had a great office at Regus and then became open to the idea of doing business with them.

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    #delhivery #courier #pickup
    StartupTalkyRishabh Rathi

    Blowhorn – Competitors

    Blowhorn’s top competitors are BlackBuck, Shiprocket, RailYatri, LalaMove, LetsTransport and Porter. It also faces competition from the bigger players in the market namely DTH, FedEx, Gati to name a few.

    Blowhorn – Funding and Investors

    To date, Blowhorn has raised a total of $8.8M in funding over 5 rounds.

    Its recent funding came on May 2020 as Debt Financing led by Trifecta Capital Advisors for an Undisclosed amount.

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    November 2014 Seed Round – Unitus Seed Fund, Tim Draper
    March 2017 Series A $3.8 Million Draper Associates, IDG Ventures India, Chiratae Ventures, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
    January 2019 Venture Round – InnoVen Capital
    June 2019 Debt Financing $5 Million –
    May 2020 Debt Financing – Trifecta Capital Advisors

    Blowhorn is funded by investors Trifecta Capital Advisors, Chiratae Ventures, Dell Foundation, Venture Catalysts, James Lee Sorenson and Japanese VC firm, Dream Incubator, InnoVen Capital, Unitus Ventures, and Draper Associates.

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    Blowhorn – Growth and Revenue

    • Operates in five cities—Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi-NCR
    • Has a team of 160 employees
    • Grown its revenue 500% since Series A funding
    • It generated Rs 17 crore in revenue in 2016-17, raising it to around Rs 37 crore in 2017-18
    • Presence in 30 cities
    • Has over 25,000 driver-partners
    • Caters to clients like Flipkart, Amazon, and Urban Ladder

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    Blowhorn – Future Plans

    Srivatsa recently said, “Now, with a strong core team in place, we are expanding rapidly and are seeing significant growth in our recently launched verticals. Our goal is to be active across more than 100 cities across India by 2021, and we are on track to achieving that. We are also in the final stages of executing our first international foray, and we are very excited about it. Our margin profile remains healthy and has grown 30% over the last quarter.”

    Blowhorn – FAQs

    Who are the Founders of Blowhorn?

    The founders of Blowhorn are Mithun Srivatsa and Nikhil Shivaprasad.

    How much Funding has Blowhorn raised?

    Blowhorn has raised a total of $8.8M in funding over 5 rounds. Its recent funding came on May 2020 as Debt Financing led by Trifecta Capital Advisors for an Undisclosed amount.

    What is the USP of Blowhorn?

    • Full-stack logistics solutions to the vast user base in the country.  (warehouses, transportation, and tech-enabled systems)
    • Real-time tracking of goods

    Who are the Competitors of Blowhorn?

    Blowhorn’s top competitors are BlackBuck, Shiprocket, RailYatri, LalaMove, LetsTransport and Porter. It also faces competition from the bigger players in the market namely DTH, FedEx, Gati to name a few.

  • CamfyVision Innovations- Making Lives Better with Artificial Intelligence

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

    CamfyVision is an artificial intelligence-driven product based company proficient to solve extremely complex problems.

    The company’s mission is to create the world a safer place by one identification ‘Face’. While its vision is to establish CamfyVision as a global leader in facial recognition technology.

    CamfyVision – Company Highlights

    Startup Name CamfyVision
    Headquarter Bengaluru
    Founder Vedpal Singh
    Sector Artificial Intelligence
    Founded 2018
    Parent organisation CamfyVision Innovationd Pvt. Ltd

    CamfyVision – About
    CamfyVision – Industry Details
    CamfyVision – Founders and Team
    CamfyVision – The Idea and Starting Up
    CamfyVision – Name, Tagline and Logo
    CamfyVision – Product
    CamfyVision – Revenue Model
    CamfyVision – Customer Acquisition
    CamfyVision – Challenges
    CamfyVision – Competitors
    CamfyVision – Achievements
    CamfyVision – Advisors and Mentors
    CamfyVision – Future Plans

    CamfyVision – About

    CamfyVision is an artificial intelligence-driven product based company proficient to solve extremely complex problems. The company is working on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence/ machine learning/ deep learning and computer vision. CamfyVision team has expertise in product development in the same domain with industry experience in India & abroad.

    Camfyvision has developed an intelligent facial analytics solution ‘FacEAI-PRO’ based on deep learning, which is highly scalable, better performance, ready-to-deploy solution for schools/pre-schools and corporate sector. The company is looking to file patent for the same.  

    CamfyVision – Industry Details

    With the help of artificial intelligence, the manufacturers are getting many benefits such as- automated and fast production, innovation of many AI based consumer products, quick decision making etc. Consumers also get benefits like more personalized products, online product suggestions based on buying pattern and on time services. Owing to these benefits, Artificial intelligence is being used more and more in Consumer goods industry.

    Thе mаrkеt ѕіzе оf AI ѕоftwаrе аnd ѕуѕtеmѕ is expected to reach $38 million by 2025. Facial Recognition Market is expected to garner $9.6 billion by 2022, registering a CAGR of 21.3% during the forecast period 2016-2022.

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    CamfyVision – Founders and Team

    CamfyVision was founded by Vedpal Singh

    CamfyVision Founder, Owner
    CamfyVision Founder – Vedpal Singh

    Vedpal Singh was born in a middle-class farmer family in village Radour, located in Saharanpur, Western Uttar Pradesh. Prior to starting CamfyVision, he worked with Mindtree as a technical lead in computer vision & artificial intelligence. Vedpal has done his B.Tech from UPTU and M.Tech from Kurukshetra University. He did Ph.D. from Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS in Malaysia.

    CamfyVision is a team of 9-passionate team members ready to take any challenges with excellent technical and business development skills.

    CamfyVision Team

    CamfyVision – The Idea and Starting Up

    I got this idea while I was discussing with my friend who is associated with one boarding school.  

    Vedpal’s friend asked him about any possible solution to create a safer environment in boarding schools to avoid any mishappening without human intervention. Vedpal started to research about the possible issues in schools/pre-schools related to child safety. The research concluded that plenty of incidents are happening on regular basis in India and rest of the world related to sexual harassment, mental abuse, physical abuse, depression and kids’ infighting, murder and many more. That’s when the idea stuck Vedpal and decided to work and solve above-mentioned issues through facial recognition. The product was launched in Oct 2018.

    In the early stage, Vedpal himself used to meet people and collect feedbacks, which helped in product improvement a lot. Currently, the Company’s channel partners help in growing the business.

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    CamfyVision name consists of two words Camfy & Vision, which means camera based visualization. As we can understand the name entirely justifies what they are do.

    CamfyVision’s tagline is ‘welcome to innovate’ indicates the research-oriented foundation of CamfyVision.

    CamfyVision Logo

    CamfyVision – Product

    CamfyVision is a facial recognition based analytics company. It has developed facial recognition & analytics solution ‘FacEAI-PRO’ based on deep-learning & computer vision. It can detect faces with higher accuracy and track them using developed algorithms, which are highly compatible with every IP camera in both indoor and outdoor environments. FacEAI-PRO can also generate alarms, reports in real time and needs minimal training to operate.

    Some other products of the company are – Intelligent Traffic Management System which detects red light violation, over speed, e-challan generation, wrong way,No Parking detection, Congestion detection and vehicle classification.

    Video Precis, which helps in watching hours of videos in minutes and Critical Infrastructure protection services.

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    CamfyVision – Revenue Model

    CamfyVision provides customized solution for customers. Therefore, the company has estimated separate costing according to the customer requirement. The revenue model is based on annual subscription of software and hardware costing of the product.

    CamfyVision – Customer Acquisition

    The major attraction of our product is higher accuracy and suitable cost.

    CamfyVision realized that channel partners are the best way to acquire customers in a short span of time rather than establish their own marketing and sells team. CamfyVision collaborated with various channel partners in India, which proved to be quite helpful in growing CamfyVision faster.    

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    CamfyVision – Challenges

    The major challenge faced by CamfyVision team was in sales. To overcome this obstacle, CamfyVision conducted various live demos and free trials for potential customers. Another big challenge faced by CamfyVision was to make a team of the right innovative persons with one collaborative goal.

    CamfyVision – Competitors

    CamfyVision’s considers Panasonic facial recognition system ‘FacePRO’ as its major competitors. They have added some additional features with great impact and is ready to strongly compete with Panasonic.

    CamfyVision – Achievements

    CamfyVision got selected in NASSCOM. The company is developing and growing under the great incubation of NASSCOM-CoE-IoT, Bangalore.

    CamfyVision – Advisors and Mentors

    CamfyVision is working and growing under the great guidance of Mr. Rajiv Kumar, a partner in one of the leading CA firm M/s NDA & Associates having offices in Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore. rajiv has more than 25 years of experience in corporate handling entire finance division.

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    CamfyVision – Future Plans

    CamfyVision is under the process of deployments of their product in India and abroad at the same time. In the coming years, the Company is planning to establish its customer base in Southeast Asian countries.

  • Docttocare – Making Healthcare Accessible

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

    Gone are the days when one had to rely on word of mouth to find a good doctor, or when one had to stand in queues to book an appointment with the doctor. Thanks to the online appointment booking platforms, finding the best doctors is now easier than never before. Through these platforms, one can find doctors specific to one’s health problem and book appointment in clicks.

    One such platform that is simplifying the process of booking an appointment with the doctor and diagnostic centers is Docttocare. Moving a step forward this Bangalore based startup even arranges for transportation of the patient to the clinic if required, thus making good quality health care services more accessible.

    StartupTalky interviewed Docttocare founder Sugandha to learn further about this startup.

    Docttocare – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Docttocare
    Headquarter Bangalore
    Founder Sugandha Agarwal
    Sector Healthcare
    Founded 2016
    Parent Organization Doctto Online Healthcare Innovation Pvt. Ltd.
    Website www.docttocare.com

    About Docttocare and How it Works
    Global Appointment Scheduling Software Market
    Docttocare – Founder and Team
    Docttocare – Name and Logo
    Docttocare – USP and Innovation
    Docttocare – Revenue Model
    Docttocare – Funding and Investors
    Docttocare – User Acquisition
    Docttocare – Startup Challenges
    Docttocare – Advisors and Mentors
    Docttocare – Growth
    Docttocare – Future Plans

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    About Docttocare and How it Works

    Docttocare is an online healthcare service provider. Docttocare provides its users information about the best doctors, clinics, hospitals and diagnostic centers. The platform also offers virtual walkthroughs of the ambiance to showcase hospitality and their facilities. It makes booking appointments super easy and assures the confirmation of online appointment through call, SMS or email. Docttocare launched its services in 2018 at NASSCOM Bangalore.

    Docttocare is one of the leading healthcare online portals that enable users from non-metro cities to access and book an appointment with doctors and hospitals located in major cities. Docttocare app handholds the users through the entire process of identifying the right doctors/hospitals and scheduling appointments on the desired date. Docttocare covers everything from dentist, gynecologist, dermatologist, ENT, ayurvedic and homeopathy.

    Docttocare is making lives easy for doctors too. Docttocare helps the doctors increase the visibility of the services provided by them, and also provides facilities such as seamless integration with online payment. It also lets the doctors view patient records from anywhere, remind the patients about the appointment and manage the clinic through Docttocare dashboard.  

    Global Appointment Scheduling Software Market

    The global appointment scheduling market was valued at 160 million USD in 2017 and is expected to surpass 360 million USD by the end of 2023. Again, the doctor’s appointment booking software market alone is expected to grow at a rate of 16.56% for the next five years, i.e. till 2023.

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    Docttocare Founder, CEO and Team

    Sugandha Agarwal is the founder and CEO of Docttocare

    Sugandha Agarwal is CEO & Founder of Docttocare
    Founder & CEO of Docttocare

    Docttocare is a single female founder company. Sugandha Agarwal is the founder and CEO of Docttocare. An electrical, electronics & communication engineer by qualification, Sugandha worked with reputed organizations like Infosys, Oracle and Google Maps before starting Docttocare.

    I do everything except writing codes. Jokes apart, driving partnerships with hospital brands, building end-user acquisition strategies, spending time with product positioning, etc are key responsibilities, says Sugandha Agarwal.

    Docttocare has 15 members of team right now and looking for expanding in a couple of months.

    The name Docttocare has been derived from ‘Doctor to care’.

    Docttocare Logo

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    Docttocare – USP and Innovation

    Some USPs of Docttocare are-

    • Instant online ambulance booking – This feature allows the users to book an ambulance online instantly. Once booked, the user can track the live status of the fleet, the arrival time of the ambulance the expected time it will take to travel.
    • Blood Bank Facility – Lets users track the availability of bold groups with the hospital.
    • Manages health reports – Docttocare lets the users search, compare, evaluate and also share health record and prescription with doctors, thus making the platform user-friendly.
    • Simplifies the process of shortlisting a doctor or medical center – Docttocare allows the users to choose the best of doctors and clinics or hospitals based on ratings and helps the users in making an informed decision. It also provides a virtual 3D panoramic tour of the hospital thus making the users get a fair idea of the hospital or clinic even before visiting the place.
    • Docttocare also offers free cancellation and re-scheduling of appointments.  

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    Docttocare – Revenue Model

    Docttocare has a simple commission – based revenue model. While the services are free for the patients, it charges a 10% commission from the hospitals.

    Docttocare – Funding and Investors

    Docttocare raised seed funding worth INR 4 Crore in May 2019.

    Funding Date Funding Stage Funding Amount Investor
    May 2019 Seed INR 4 Crore Krishna Kumar Devnally

    Docttocare – User Acquisition

    Getting the initial set of customers required great effort. The Docttocare team roamed around Bangalore and enrolled the small clinics.

    “We used to visit at least 20 clinics per day. After some time when we started getting revenue from appointments then we realized Tier 2 cities people are more keen to get treated by reputed doctors, and they need transport as well, which we tried to solve”, recalls Sugandha.

    Currently, Docttocare is focusing on tier 2 and tier 3 cities to provide access to prime hospitals and connecting them with ambulance service and proving stay also.

    Docttocare – Startup Challenges

    Docttocare | Team Hustle
    Docttocare | Team Hustle

    “Startup journeys are full of challenges, which to be honest, I didn’t realize before taking the plunge. Thanks to the media, who always show the shiny side of it.  Keeping professional and personal life separate & fulfilling is one of the biggest challenges and I had to let one of them go for a few years.” said Sugandha.

    Building the team, acquiring an initial set of customers/partners, honing her selling skills were part of the early days’ challenges for Sugandha. Besides, though she had a brief coding background and was able to keep up with the engineering/product team but being in sync with them fully took her some time.

    Challenges like customer acquisition, revenue were there since day one, but Docttocare now has a qualified team to take care of these aspects. Another major problem was raising funds.

    “Raising funds was the other (good) problem we solved. While starting up, I did not realize that I’d have the inherent disadvantage of being a solo female founder. I got my reality check, when one of the prominent angel investors with a massive following on social media, mentioned this fact bluntly to me. They didn’t even delve into business and rejected the deal outright. But being a female founder gives you additional strength (in terms of team management and creativity), which not many investors realize. Incidentally, I met with our investor/mentor a year ago and he decided to support us” narrates Sugandha.

    HealthifyMe Success Story – Founders | Funding | Revenue | Business Model
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    Docttocare – Advisors and Mentors

    Along with being the investor of Docttocare, Krishnakumar also plays the role of a mentor for the company. He is the Director of M-Power Solutions.

    Docttocare – Growth

    Through its excellent services, Docttocare has been successful to slowly gain trust from doctors and patients alike.

    • The company has enrolled all the major hospitals like Apollo, Manipal, Medanta and many more.
    • Docttocare is now getting around 300 + appointments per day.
    • 4000+ medical tests have been done through Docttocare.
    • 500+ clinics, 100+ hospitals and 2000+ doctors are registered with it.  

    Docttocare – Future Plans

    Docttocare is planning to bring many positive changes in the healthcare scenario of India.

    Emphasizing on Docttocare’s future plans, Sugandha said “I want to take healthcare in India to a much higher level. We have a dearth of doctors in this country and the patient count is undoubtedly increasing. People often ignore their minor health-issues, either due to lack of healthcare service or because of effort/cost that may go into addressing it.”

    Awareness of health issues would be their next goal. How can they help you to be healthy without investing much? Something as simple as cutting refined sugar & unhealthy fat from the diet, eating your dinner early in the day, etc can go a long way in improving the fitness standard.

    Making quality healthcare accessible to masses has been the company’s dream and they are very early in solving it. Currently, they have to move people to let them enjoy the benefits of high-quality services, but the eventual goal would be to send services wherever they are. Training local people on healthcare services, equipping them with the right tools and making them work under the supervision of qualified practitioners is the way forward.

  • Arzooo – Retail Tech Platform Empowering Small Retailers in Electronics Space!

    Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

    Founded by Ex-Flipkart colleagues and IIT Kgp alumni, Arzooo.com is a Retail Tech company, committed to integrate over 3,00,000 fragmented retail stores and enable them to compete and grow with its retail tech platform, Arzooo Go Store.

    Arzooo Go store is India’s fastest growing Integrated Retail Network for consumer electronics with over 1300 stores powered by its technology and growing fast. Arzooo enables a partner store to offer its customers the largest selection universe, without them having to invest in inventory. This creates the most competitive price and innovative payment solutions to drive up in-store sales conversion.

    Arzooo – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Arzooo
    Headquarter Bengaluru, India
    Sector Retail Technology
    Founders Khushnud Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore
    Founded 2017
    Legal Name Sterne India Pvt Ltd
    Website arzooo.com

    About Arzooo and How it Works
    Arzooo – Target Market Size
    How was Arzooo Started?
    Arzooo – Products/Services
    Arzooo – Founders and Team
    Arzooo – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Arzooo – Startup Challenges
    Arzooo – Funding and Investors
    Arzooo – Recognition and Achievements
    Arzooo – Future Plans
    Arzooo – FAQs

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    About Arzooo and How it Works

    Founded by ex-Flipkart colleagues and IIT Kharagpur alumni Kushnud Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore, Arzooo.com is a Retail Tech company enabling brick & mortar retail with technology to compete online with its flagship and unique “Go Store” platform.

    Arzooo’s short term goal is to integrate 300,000 retail stores with technology by 2020. And they are focusing on an extensive expansion of markets in Northern and Eastern India by the end of this year following which they will also plan a deeper market penetration in West India. The company is also looking at launching an extended warranty plan for the buyers.

    arzooo.com Logo

    Arzooo Go store is India’s fastest growing Integrated retail network with over 1300 stores already powered by technology and growing fast.

    Arzooo enables a partner store with its technology platform equipping them to offer the largest selection to customers without having to invest in Inventory, creating the most competitive price, and offering attractive payment solutions to improve sales conversion in-store. This apart from expanding category portfolio for stores with cross-category opportunities.

    Arzooo – Target Market Size

    Indian Consumer Electronics Retail market is pegged at a whopping $40 billion and Arzooo.com aims to grab a bite of 20% by 2022. The goal is to empower over 300,000 physical retail stores with technology and brand identity, enabling them to compete with e-commerce giants and help them grow with it’s “Go Store”.

    How was Arzooo Started?

    Online B2B retail in India, until recent times, has been associated only with listing directories (Ex. TradeIndia, IndiaMart). The wholesalers/manufacturers and retailers did not have a single technology platform, where they could discover and transact directly and conveniently. The founders realized consumers still go to a physical store to get the touch and feel of the product before making a purchase even with a large online presence.

    To merge the best of online and offline retail, Arzooo was born. The startup aids retailers maintain inventory and reduce unnecessary expenditure in terms of stock and helps them compete with the likes of Amazon and Flipkart.

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    Arzooo – Products/Services

    Arzooo Go-Store

    Arzooo Go Store is India’s fastest growing Integrated Retail Network for consumer electronics with over 1300 stores powered by Arzooo. It enables a partner store to offer its customers the most extensive selection, best price, and fastest delivery, without them having to stock everything, backing this with attractive payments and financing solutions to drive up sales in-store.

    Physical stores remain a popular destination for Consumer electronics shoppers globally, and in India, they thrive on their unmatched reach into every neighborhood and acquire the trust from consumers. Arzooo is equipping physical retail stores to compete and grow in the age of Amazon & Flipkart. Enabling them with 10X bigger selection, competitive pricing, and financing solutions to convert every walk into sales.

    Arzooo Credit

    Arzooo recently announced the launch Arzooo Credit, a digital credit lending product. It is for offline retailers that offers working capital to Arzooo’s partner stores. With Arzooo Credit, the company claims that retailers will be able to avail of INR 1-10 lakh credit on the Arzooo platform.

    Currently, the service is open to over 5,000 retailers across 10 cities.

    Arzooo – Founders and Team

    Arzooo is co-founded by two ex-Flipkart colleagues and IIT-Kharagpur alumni, Khushnud Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore in 2018.

    Founders Arzooo.com
    Khushnud Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore – Founders, Arzooo

    Khushnud Khan, Co-Founder & CEO – In his career spanning over 10 years, Khushnud has been part of some of India’s path-breaking start-up business journeys like the launch of Tata Sky as foundation team and set up retail & distribution network. Flipkart, where he set-up and launched Large Appliances Categories, Akash Tablet, launched a $35 Tablet PC and with IFB Appliances as Business Head where he led sales marketing for the region.

    Khushnud brings rich experience in consumer electronics and e-commerce space, in his last role as Associate Director at Flipkart, he headed up the large appliances category and scaled. He then went on to start Flipkart’s hyperlocal delivery segment for grocery and food deliveries.

    Rishi Raj Rathore, Co-Founder & COO – An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, Rishi has worked with Flipkart as a product manager, leading hyperlocal grocery and logistics platforms on the product front. He has built hyper-local logistics products and scaled it. Rishi also features in Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs list of 2020.

    Arzooo team
    Arzooo team

    According to LinkedIn, the company has a team size of around 50-60 employees.

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    Arzooo – Business Model and Revenue Model

    The startup works on the following business model. Arzooo offers free adoption of its technology platform to its partner retailers. It generates revenue from the sale proceeds when the partner stores buy inventory using its platform.

    Arzooo – Startup Challenges

    The biggest challenge that the company faced was convincing retail store partners on how this technology could help them. But as e-commerce companies continue to push for a larger chunk of the retail pie, they are slowly beginning to understand the need to adopt something like Arzooo.

    In every new city that Arzooo ventures into, it takes at least two-three meetings to get a retailer on board, largely because this is unheard of in this industry, and requires time and effort to educate the retailers on how such a platform could be fruitful for them in the long term.

    “When you are one of it’s kind players, a first mover in a space, the biggest challenge is to always get your business partner excited about the product and making them believe that it’s something that’s going to change the way they do business. Even today when we enter a new market, we enter with that challenge in our minds and we approach prospects accordingly”, says Arzooo founder Khushnud Khan.

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    Arzooo – Funding and Investors

    Arzooo.com has raised $7.3M + in funding over 4 rounds. Its most recent funding was on November 16, 2020. It was led by Zoom Founder, Eric Yuan and Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist, Bill Tai for an undisclosed amount.

    The company plans to scale its forte in technology, operations and quality of service. It will also channelize funds to ramp its B2B platform – Go Store.

    Funding Details are as follows:

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    November 16, 2020 Undisclosed Eric Yuan, Bill Tai
    October 27, 2020 Series A $7.5 Million WRVI Capital
    June 13, 2019 Pre-series A $1 Million Jabbar internet group
    May 24, 2018 Seed Round $300K Omphalos Ventures India

    Arzooo has proven its ability to create massive efficiency for operators across thousands of stores by leveraging data to create network effect efficiency in supply chain, distribution, and logistics for their network of retailers. The result is better selection and pricing for customers throughout the system. This investment should fuel a 10X growth for Arzooo as it accelerates strongly.- Says Bill Tai.

    Arzooo – Recognition and Achievements

    Arzooo with it’s founder is recognized by Forbes for it’s 30 under 30 Asia 2020.

    Arzooo – Future Plans

    The company aims to achieve a growth of more than 10-fold in gross merchandise volume (GMV) in the next 12 months from 2020.

    The company plans to scale its forte in technology, operations and quality of service. It will also channelize funds to ramp its B2B platform – ‘Go Store’.

    Arzooo – FAQs

    Who founded Arzooo?

    Arzooo is co-founded by two ex-Flipkart colleagues and IIT-Kharagpur alumni, Khushnud Khan and Rishi Raj Rathore in 2018.

    How much funding has Arzooo raised?

    Arzooo.com has raised $7.3M + in funding over 4 rounds. Its most recent funding was on November 16, 2020. It was led by Zoom Founder, Eric Yuan and Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist, Bill Tai for an undisclosed amount.

    What is Arzooo Go Store?

    Arzooo Go Store is India’s fastest growing Integrated Retail Network for consumer electronics with 1300 + stores powered by Arzooo. It enables partner store to offer its customers the most extensive selection, best price, and fastest delivery, without them having to stock everything, backing this with attractive payments and financing solutions to drive up sales in-store.

    What is Arzooo Credit?

    Arzooo recently announced the launch Arzooo Credit, a digital credit lending product. It is for offline retailers that offers working capital to Arzooo’s partner stores. With Arzooo Credit, the company claims that retailers will be able to avail of INR 1-10 lakh credit on the Arzooo platform.