Tag: 📄Company Profiles

  • MFine Success and Merger Story – Digitizing The Healthcare 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 mfine.

    The focus of healthcare has been shifting toward the patient for quite some time now. The expansion of the health-tech industry is being driven by the availability of inexpensive healthcare paired with sustainable mobility. The medical technology business is growing due to changing terrain, improved healthcare delivery and funding methods, and a changing patient profile.

    Even with all its flaws, India’s healthcare system has a lot moving for it on several fronts. Artificial intelligence can make accurate conclusions possible when it comes to patients’ data, thereby helping the patients achieve the healthcare quality they dream of. The government-led campaigns along with the companies like MFine are making the reach of healthcare broader and refining the healthcare practices to a huge extent.

    MFine is an AI-powered, on-demand healthcare startup that gives customers access to online appointments and hospital-based linked healthcare. Telemedicine and teleconsulting programs via the MFine app are allowing medical knowledge to reach people much more easily and conveniently.

    MFine merged with LifeCell International’s diagnostic arm on July 11, 2022, after being an independent company for over 5 long years. The new, merged entity will emerge as LifeWell.

    Here’s learning “What is MFine?”, MFine owner name, Founders of MFine, MFine Funding, MFine Competitors in India, MFine merger, and everything else about the MFine company. Follow below to get an insight into the company:

    MFine – Company Highlights

    Startup Name MFine
    Headquarters Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
    Industry HealthTech, HealthCare
    Founders Ajit Narayanan, Arjun Choudhary, Ashutosh Lawania, Prasad Kompalli
    Founded 2017
    Areas Served India
    Current CEO Prasad Kompalli
    Website mfine.com

    About MFine
    MFine – Industry
    MFine – Name, Logo, and Tagline
    MFine – Founders
    MFine – Startup Story
    MFine – Vision and Mission Statement
    MFine – Business Model and Revenue Model
    MFine – Funding, and Investors
    MFine – Growth and Revenue
    MFine – Competitors
    MFine – Challenges Faced
    MFine – Future Plans

    About MFine

    MFine is an AI-powered on-demand healthcare startup that gives customers access to online appointments and hospital-based linked healthcare. Users can contact paediatricians, gynaecologists, obstetricians, and physicians from leading hospitals of their choice through chat or video to acquire prescriptions and/or routine treatment using the company’s service.

    The doctors have exposure to a proprietary Assistive Intelligence platform that analyses symptoms and provides an accurate prediction for specialists to evaluate patients. This implies that now the doctor is aware of the patient’s condition even before they visit them, allowing for a quicker and more accurate diagnosis.

    MFine aspires to make obtaining reliable healthcare simple, quick, and preventative. MFine was created by keeping the customer experience in mind, using a combination of cutting-edge technologies and collaborations with the finest medical centres.

    MFine enables rapid and ongoing communication with the greatest doctors in the best hospitals. It makes use of cutting-edge technology to keep track of your health indicators and to keep all of your health data under your control and accessible. Digital wearables, smartphone apps, and at-home services provide much-needed ease and speed in bringing you the treatment you need when you need it. Furthermore, MFine also provides discounted health check packages in partnership with the hospitals.


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    MFine – Industry

    According to research, India’s health market is predicted to develop at 39% at CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) from FY2020 to FY2023, reaching 50 billion USD by 2033.

    The health-tech market is presently valued at over $2 billion, and it is divided into six segments: telemedicine, e-pharmacy, fitness, wellness, healthcare IT, analytics, home healthcare, and personal health management. This represents less than 1% of India’s total healthcare business.

    “The pandemic and adoption of technology in healthcare have brought a quantum shift in the sector. In recent years, we have seen some of the most significant deals, and the Indian health-tech sector has received close to $1.6 billion in funding since 2017,” said Rajeev Shah, MD, and CEO of RBSA Advisors.

    According to the estimates, the Indian health-tech industry would reach $5 billion in 2023 and $50 billion in 10 years. With $700 million in revenue in 2020, e-pharmacies were the most profitable segment of the Indian health-tech market, followed by B2B health-tech ($60.2 million), B2B medical supplies ($28.8 million), other health-tech services ($100 million), e-diagnostics ($70 million), and teleconsultation ($45 million).

    Machine learning, robotics, artificial intelligence, wearables, on-body gadgets, and blockchain, among other technologies, will have a significant impact on the future of healthcare. The use of cloud infrastructure in healthcare record management, as well as a greater focus on the digitalization of patient medical records, is expected to accelerate.

    MFine – Name, Logo, and Tagline

    MFine, as the name implies, shows what the firm does for its consumers, i.e., the patients. The mfine company makes it easy or patients to check up with physicians online and receive health tests at home, all with touch or the click of a button, thereby ensuring that they are fine.

    mfine Logo
    MFine Logo

    MFine’s slogan says, “MFine – one app for all your health needs.”

    MFine – Founders

    MFine was founded by Ajit Narayanan, Arjun Choudhary, Ashutosh Lawania, Prasad Kompalli in 2017.

    Founders of mfine - Ajit Narayanan, Arjun Choudhary, Ashutosh Lawania, and Prasad Kompalli
    Founders of MFine – Ajit Narayanan, Arjun Choudhary, Ashutosh Lawania, and Prasad Kompalli

    Ajit Narayanan

    Ajit Narayanan
    Ajit Narayanan

    Ajit is an electronics engineer with over 2 decades of experience in product development and organization building in e-commerce, consumer internet, mobile, healthcare, analytics, and integration platforms.

    As a Co-founder, CTO, and Product Office of MFine, Ajit is in charge of the company’s product and technology strategy. Ajit was the CTO of Myntra, India’s largest e-commerce shop for fashion and leisure items, in a prior life. Ajit began his career in mobile technology at SAP, where he developed solutions for offline and online mobile application development, as well as domain programming languages for User Interfaces and API administration.

    Arjun Choudhary

    Arjun Choudhary
    Arjun Choudhary

    Arjun Choudhary, an IIT Roorkee alumni with over 10 years of expertise in sales, revenue, and growth, is in charge of the company’s Strategic Business Expansion. Before joining MFine, he worked at Myntra as a Senior Director of Growth and Sales, where he helped the company grow by 50 times. He’s also worked as a global capacity planning analyst for Amazon. Arjun is currently serving as the Chief Business Officer at MFine, along with being a Founding Member of the company.

    Ashutosh Lawania

    Ashutosh Lawania
    Ashutosh Lawania

    Ashutosh Lawania is a software application developer and digital marketer with over 15 years of expertise. Ashutosh is known as one of the co-founders of the healthcare app MFine. He has also been the Co-founder and Head of Sales and Marketing at Myntra, an Indian e-commerce website where men and women can buy branded footwear, clothes, and accessories.

    Before joining Myntra, Lawania co-founded Bytedge Solutions, a product engineering firm that specializes in assisting product development firms and startups with their product engineering and go-to-market processes. Lawania graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur with a Bachelor’s degree.

    Prasad Kompalli

    Prasad Kompalli
    Prasad Kompalli

    Prasad Kompalli, the former CBO of Myntra and Senior VP of SAP Labs, believes in harnessing technology for innovation, and his area of expertise is business strategy. He was a member of SAP’s top 200 worldwide executives, holding positions in Strategy and General Management. He completed his Postgraduate studies in Business Management at the European School of Management and Technologies (Berlin), IMD Switzerland, and INSEAD France, and he possesses 7 patents in data and mobile technology. Kompalli is known as the CEO and Co-founder of MFine.

    MFine was last registered with a total count of employees ranging between 501-1000, on its Linkedin profile.  


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    MFine – Startup Story

    Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli, both former top executives of Myntra, chose to start from scratch at the end of 2016. They’d helped Myntra grow into a great e-commerce consumer brand, but they noticed something similar was missing in healthcare. That was how MFine’s idea came to their mind.

    MFine was founded in February 2017 as a healthcare platform. While they were not strangers to founding a business, MFine was a new experience for them. “It wasn’t easy persuading folks to join us and work with us when MFine was simply a notion on paper,” explains Kompalli.

    Conversations with hospitals revealed that the customer experience needed to be improved.

    “They needed an easy interface with limited typing, so we came up with a health keypad which collects data from reports without the user having to type. We ran a beta program and the results were promising,” Kompalli say

    It was difficult for anyone without a medical or healthcare background to break into the healthcare ecosystem. Catching the early adopters, according to the creators, was challenging. People, on the other hand, quickly adapt to accessibility and ease.

    The business accepts 100-120 cases every day from a variety of specialities. The business has collaborated with 20 hospitals in Bengaluru and has 70 doctors across ten specialities, offering voice, video, and chat support. The company’s founders are currently focusing on chronic illness management and the use of IoT to link medical equipment.

    MFine – Vision and Mission Statement

    MFine’s mission statement is to make quality healthcare available to consumers at scale.

    MFine’s vision has always been to make excellent health more accessible, dependable, and hassle-free for everyone, driven by a love for providing care, spurred by an uncompromising emphasis on quality, and guided by ground-breaking artificial intelligence.

    MFine – Business Model and Revenue Model

    Instead of collecting individual physicians on its platform, MFine uses a unique methodology of working with prominent and trustworthy institutions. MFine can provide high-quality treatment from trustworthy doctors via a digital channel because of its hospital affiliations.

    Gynaecology, dermatology, paediatrics, cardiology, and general medicine are among the app’s most popular specialities. Commissions from client consultations, lead-generation fees from hospitals, and corporate tie-ups are the main sources of revenue for the firm. It also has partnerships with local hospitals to provide accessible and dependable medical treatment.

    MFine earns money by acting as a digital extension of its healthcare partners. That is, it deducts a portion of consumer expenditure. The firm claims to deal with over 500 doctors from 100 “elite” institutions, with a strong emphasis on technology.

    MFine – Funding, and Investors

    MFine, to date, has obtained $94+ mn over the 7 funding rounds that it has received funding in. The last funding round of MFine was the Series C round that came in on August 31, 2021, which was led by BEENEXT and Moore that poured in $46.39 mn. The company has been valued between $450-500 mn after the completion of the last funding round.

    MFine has raised 7 rounds of funding. Check them out below:

    Date Round Amount Lead Investors
    Aug 31, 2021 Series C $46.39M BEENEXT, Moore Strategic Ventures
    Jan 18, 2021 Venture Round $16M Heritas Capital
    Aug 31, 2020 Series B $5.09M Caretech Pte Inc
    Jul 2, 2019 Debt Financing $4.5M Alteria Capital
    Apr 22, 2019 Series B $17.2M SBI Ven Capital
    May 17, 2018 Series A $4.2M Prime Venture Partners
    Sep 1, 2017 Venture Round $1.5M Stellaris Venture Partners

    MFine – Growth

    MFine’s on-demand healthcare platform allows users to obtain virtual consultations and linked care programs from a network of hospitals. It was founded in 2017 by former Myntra executives Ashutosh Lawania and Prasad Kompalli, who were subsequently joined by Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary.

    Over 3 million customers have used MFine services since its debut, with over 300,000 monthly transactions including medical consultations, diagnostic testing, e-pharmacy, and in-patient treatments. Mfine introduced a new layer to its virtual doctor consultations in October 2018 by connecting with laboratory and diagnostic services, giving its customers access to more than 700 diagnostic centres in 400+ locations throughout India. The company further has claimed to have a network of over 500 hospitals with 3000+ doctors.

    Every month, over 100,000 people utilize MFine to schedule diagnostic testing. More than 6000 physicians, including some of India’s best, spanning 35+ specialities, work in over 700 reputable institutions. They assist millions of people in over 1000 locations around the country. Instead of aggregating doctors, it works with hospitals, allowing customers to consult doctors from their favourite hospitals through chat or video and receive prescriptions and basic care.

    Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and a rise in the uptake of digital health among Indians, MFine has grown 15% month on month. MFine is substantially investing in technology to make the telemedicine experience much easier and more effective for providing high-quality treatment.

    During the Covid-19 in 2020, the firm claims to have provided teleconsultation for over a million people. To meet demand, the firm extended beyond cities to 1,000 villages throughout India, offering AI-powered self-assessment, long-term care programs for chronic diseases, and membership perks to both individuals and businesses.

    MFine Merger

    Mfine merged with LifeCell
    Mfine merged with LifeCell

    MFine has merged with the diagnostic business of LifeCell International, as per the July 11, 2022, reports. After looking for numerous merger and acquisition opportunities for the past months, MFine has ultimately successfully merged. This merger has brought forth a new entity that will be termed as LifeWell.

    As per the reports associated with the new, merged entity, LifeWell, it will stand as a full-stack digital health platform in the diagnostic space in contrast to the pure-play marketplace that MFine was. Besides, the joint entity has also raised $80 mn in a new round from OrbiMed. The total userbase of LifeWell has been combined to be estimated at over 6 mn users, which is growing at a rate of 100% Y-o-Y, revealed the companies in a joint press release. LifeWell is looking to serve more than 50 million users over the next 4 years.

    This merger is the third major consolidation that the Indian healthcare/healthtech ecosystem has seen during the past couple of years. It was already seen that the unicorn Indian startup, Pristyn Care acquired Lybrate in a distress sale in June, and prior to that, we saw the merger of DocsApp and MediBuddy.    

    MFine Heart Rate Monitoring Feature

    MFine unveiled its latest innovation by presenting the all-new heart-rate monitoring feature integrated with its app. MFine launched its heart-rate monitoring tool on its app on March 3, 2022, which is designed to help people keep a track of their heart rate without any external devices. As far as the latest news goes, nearly 700 people are using this tool of MFine to monitor their heart rate every day.

    MFine Pulse

    MFine developed an app-based SPO2 solution in early 2021, allowing users to monitor their oxygen levels without the requirement of separate equipment. Since then, the program has been utilized by over 250,000 people, with thousands more using it regularly. MFine will be adding heart rate and blood pressure monitoring to the product in the coming months.

    As of April 2021, MFine has released MFine Pulse, a mobile application that can check blood oxygen levels with just a finger and a flash.

    The technology, named MFine ‘Pulse,’ is now in beta testing for Android users and will be for iOS in a few weeks. Even though clinical studies for the tool are still ongoing, the tool looks to be promising, with an accuracy rate of 80%, according to a news release.

    Thousands of customers are using the tool in the company’s Android beta rollout, generating hundreds of assessments every day that are put into machine learning techniques, which CTO Ajit Narayanan believes will increase the tool’s precision in the months ahead.

    “For now, the goal is to make our SpO2 monitoring tool as accurate, if not more accurate, than pulse oximeters available at the pharmacy,” Narayanan said.

    MFine Financials

    MFine had last recorded Rs 70 lakhs in operating revenue in FY19, which surged by 7.3X to become Rs 5.12 crore in FY20. The total earnings of the company have been recorded at Rs 12.23 crore during FY20.

    However, for the surge in its revenue, MFine also had to sacrifice a considerable amount of money because the losses of the company ballooned by 2.9X to become Rs 99.5 crore in FY20 from Rs 34.4 crore in FY19. The outstanding losses of the company were estimated in the FY20 fiscal to be Rs 140.2 crore.

    MFine expenditures surged rapidly from Rs 34.4 crore that it spent in FY19 to become Rs 99.5 crore in FY20. The Prasad Kompalli-led company spent Rs 21.87 to earn a single rupee during FY20.

    The losses for MFine further increased to Rs 102.7 cr in FY21, while its operational earnings went on to become Rs 12.9 crore during the same fiscal. The expenses of MFine were registered at Rs 116 crore.

    MFine Losses Y-o-Y

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    MFine – Competitors

    MFine’s top competitors include:

    • PristynCare
    • MediBuddy
    • SeamlessMD
    • Happytal
    • Helium Health
    • Doctor Insta
    • Ferrum Health

    MFine – Challenges Faced

    The platform includes a sophisticated web of hundreds of machine learning algorithms and techniques across vision, hearing, and language processing modalities, allowing the virtual doctor to interpret data from numerous sources and propose the best next actions to the doctor.

    According to Kompalli, the current problem is scaling innovation now that the prior hurdle of convincing people to switch to digital healthcare has passed. “We’re now facing innovative hurdles, such as how quickly we can scale up the ideas we made in the mobile and AI sector.”

    In addition, the corporation is putting a lot of money into the platform’s AI capabilities.

    They are working on inference capabilities to diagnose based on symptoms, patient history, and other data provided during the consultation, as well as computer vision capabilities to scan and automatically digitize diagnostic papers and interpret symptoms. Skills are being considered, such as determining the type of infection based on the sound of a cough, among other things.

    MFine Layoffs

    The Indian companies are seeing a spike in layoffs. MFine too announced its share of employee layoffs, where the company has laid off around 50% of its workforce, as of May 21, 2022. The BEENEXT-backed company has done away with 50% of its total workforce, and as per reports from close sources, a considerable chunk of the employee belongs to the operations, product, and marketing verticals.  The latest layoffs were done, as per the sources, to reduce burn and extend the runway for the company. Source also claimed that the layoffs can go up as high as 70%.

    Protests began within 2 days of the announcement of the MFine layoffs. Over 100 of the company’s employees started gathering outside the MFine Bengaluru office, demanding their full salaries for the month of May 2022, and an early release of their full and final settlement. People also claim that MFine has laid off the employees due to its inability to pay their salaries. The company has allegedly run out of funds. According to the employees, the pay cycle of MFine is from 20th to 20th, and they have served a full month that way and should be paid in full too. They were expecting an appraisal, added the employees, and had no idea about the company’s financial condition. The company, which had earlier announced to pay the employees 20 days’ salary for the month of May and said that it would credit the rest amount including that of the notice and period, and have their full and final payment settled, has now been pressurised by the employees to make the whole procedure fast and to credit the full month’s salary of May. The employees are also apprehensive about their salaries and mentioned that out of 3 offices, MFine has already closed 2, where only 1 office is currently operational, which might also be closed without clearing their dues.  

    Previously, Vedantu, Meesho, Cars24, Unacademy, and more have already laid off a considerable amount of their workforce due to the unstable financial grounds that they are standing on, and the fear of an impending recession.

    MFine – Future Plans

    MFine intends to treble its investment in Machine learning and artificial intelligence, mobile engineering, and device integration with this cash. Aside from that, it plans to grow its hospital network across the country and scale up newly released services like prescription delivery, preventative health screenings, and diagnostic testing.

    FAQs

    When was MFine founded and who founded MFine?

    MFine was founded by Ashutosh Lawania, Prasad Kompalli, Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary in February 2017.

    How is the MFine funding?

    Looking at the MFine funding, the company has raised a funding more than $94 mn to date, as of July 2022.

    How does MFine make money?

    Commissions from client consultations, lead-generation fees from hospitals, and corporate tie-ups are the main sources of revenue for the firm. It also has partnerships with local hospitals to provide accessible and dependable medical treatment.

    What is the use of MFine?

    Mfine is an AI-powered on-demand healthcare startup that gives customers access to online appointments and hospital-based linked healthcare.

    Which companies do MFine compete with?

    Mfine’s top competitors include SeamlessMD, Happytal, Helium Health, MediBuddy, Pristyn Care, Doctor Insta, and Ferrum Health.

    Has MFine been merged?

    Yes, MFine, which was looking for a merger, has finally merged with LifeCell’s diagnostic unit to bring about a joint entity LifeWell, as per the reports dated July 11, 2022.  

  • Wellversed: A Wellness Startup Helping in Creating and Scaling Consumer Brands

    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 Wellversed.

    The demand for health and wellness products is steadily growing. Research shows that an average Indian millennial spends over 3000 per month on their fitness and wellness. Digitalization has been quite influential in generating awareness of the common public about human wellness. The growing wellness industry has attracted many brands to come up with good and genuine wellness products. Entrepreneurs and startups are focusing on developing authentic wellness products that could contribute to the spectrum of human wellness.

    Wellversed is a startup that helps in building and scaling the business in the wellness industry. They help in accelerating the growth of wellness brands. Popular Indian cricketer Yuvraj Singh is associated with Wellversed in its startup journey.

    Listen to Aanan Khurma telling the story of Wellversed in an interview with StartupTalky on Epic Brands Podcast

    Read further to know about Wellversed, its founders, products & services, business model, and more.

    Wellversed – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Wellversed
    Headquarters Gurgaon, Haryana
    Industry B2C and Wellness
    Founder Aanan Khurma, Aditya Seth, and Ripunjay Chachan
    Founded 2019
    Total Funding Raised $3.2 Million
    Website wellversed.in

    Wellversed – About
    Wellversed – Industry
    Wellversed – Founders and Team
    Wellversed – The Idea and Startup Story
    Wellversed – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    Wellversed – Products & Services
    Wellversed – Business Model
    Wellversed – Customer Acquisition
    Wellversed – Challenges Faced
    Wellversed – Funding
    Wellversed – Competitors
    Wellversed – Recognition and Achievements
    Wellversed – Future Plans

    Wellversed – About

    Wellversed is a full-stack accelerator for wellness brands. Wellversed startup accelerate wellness brands from their infancy to building them into strong world-class brands that enable better wellbeing. They enable founders to build genuine wellness brands by accelerating sales growth, strengthening the product-market fit, improving the supply chain, providing investment support, building the brand story, and improving key metrics, and M&A opportunities.

    Short term goal of the startup is to accelerate 1000 wellness brands by 2025, invest in 100 wellness brands by 2025, and acquire 10 wellness brands by 2025. It has a long-term vision to maximize human wellness by enabling genuine wellness brands.

    Wellversed – Industry

    The global wellness market is at more than $1.5 trillion per year, with annual growth of 5 to 10%. In fact, the rate of growth of the wellness industry is in double digits in the developing economy. 60% of this market is contributed by wellness brands while the remaining is contributed by services.

    Wellversed – Founders and Team

    Wellversed - Founders with Yuvraj Singh
    Wellversed – Founders with Yuvraj Singh

    Aanan was a fellow at the Stanford Biodesign School in 2012. As an alumnus of Stanford Biodesign, Aanan Khurma used to conduct a lot of Design Thinking workshops to disseminate the ideology of Stanford D-School to college students. It was during the organization of one such workshop that Aanan met Aditya Seth who was an industrial design student inclined toward designing manufacturing assembly lines. Both of them launched a brand together called Unsnack which was one of the early D2C brands in the Indian ecosystem. Both of them were later joined by Ripunjay Chachan who was Aanan’s batchmate at Stanford Biodesign. Yuvraj Singh was a consumer of the products crafted and traded by Wellversed before he decided to invest in Wellversed and later become a part of the core team of Wellversed.

    Aanan is the CEO of the Company and is primarily responsible for Business Intelligence, Defining Long Term Goals, and probably one of the only CEOs who directly leads the Human Resources department. Aditya Seth leads the supply chain while Ripunjay Chachan leads Business Growth. Yuvraj Singh is the chief evangelist and flag bearer of the message of health and wellbeing.

    As of June 2022, Wellversed has a total of 150 employees.

    Wellversed – The Idea and Startup Story

    The company started out as a personal quest to maximize healthspan. The human body is designed to live up to 120 years of age but most people become dysfunctional by 65-70 years of age. Aanan Khurma realized that people can live a disease-free life of quality, vigor, and intensity if their lifestyle is right. He realized that consumer brands are not optimizing for the long-term well-being of human beings. This led him to launch his first brand called Unsnack. Subsequently, he launched several brands like Ketofy, Ovego, and Wellcore to cater to different use-cases of wellness.

    These brands were unified under the common umbrella of Wellversed Full-Stack Accelerator structure evolved to help great founders create genuine wellness brands.


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    Wellversed Logo
    Wellversed Logo

    There is a very interesting story behind the name of the Company. Aanan’s first startup – Hansure – was funded by Microsoft Ventures. When he was going through the journey of formulating what is now Wellversed he was exchanging ideas with the Director of Microsoft Venture Fund. The Director asked Aanan to send a small note about his startup in order to make a connection with a probable seed investor. As an interim thought, Aanan penned down the name Wellversed in order for this connection to be made and the conversation to proceed further. The Company was never renamed although the name is difficult to pronounce and several stakeholders have pointed out that it’s an awkward name. Since Wellversed platform is not primarily consumer-facing, they never thought it would be relevant to rename the Company.

    Wellversed – Products & Services

    Wellversed Product - Ketofy
    Wellversed Product – Ketofy

    Wellversed is a tech-enabled full-stack accelerator for wellness brands. They assist founders in their journeys to build and scale genuine wellness brands. A great consumer brand is built through only THREE things:

    • A solution that serves a need.
    • A product that is great.
    • A brand story to carry the message to the masses.

    In a typical scenario, running a brand has so many operational components to it that a founder is not able to focus on the core aspects of creating a brand. Wellversed relieves founders from all the operational hassle of selling their products. This includes eCommerce Operations, Performance Marketing, Listing Operations, Warehousing & Logistics, etc. This allows founders to build genuine products to solve a real problem and craft a story that resonates. Wellversed is accelerating 40 wellness brands as of June 2022.

    Wellversed – Business Model

    The business model of Wellversed is centred on accelerating brands and charging them a percentage of their growth revenue. Their EBITA margins are close to 18-20%.

    Wellversed – Customer Acquisition

    They didn’t have a website for 6 months after they started selling to end consumers. They primarily relied on third-party eCommerce channels like Amazon.

    Their only hack was discipline and diligence. Most companies talk about consumer centricity but Aanan and Aditya actually spoke to most consumers to whom they sold. Back then, sellers could access the phone numbers of consumers who ordered via Amazon.

    Wellversed – Challenges Faced

    They took a very unique approach to create a group of brands that maximise human wellness. When they started, this concept and way of building multiple brands were not well understood. The toughest part was the impact that people’s limited understanding had on their own mindset.


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    Wellversed – Funding

    As of 2022, Wellversed has raised 3.2 Million USD through Jubilant Foodworks, Yuvraj Singh, other entities, and angels.

    Wellversed – Competitors

    Some top competitors of Wellversed are:

    • Mensa Brands
    • Global Bees
    • Evenflow
    • Powerhouse91
    • Thrasio
    • SellerX
    • Perch
    • Heydey

    Wellversed – Recognition and Achievements

    Their achievement is the culture of the Company. They believe that great things are achieved through distributed intelligence and the first step to that is creating trust on an individual level. Systems like beehives, ant colonies, and the human brain are regarded as some of the most complicated structures in the universe. The commonality between these biological systems is that they do not have a single intelligence centre. The fact is that the most cooperative, intelligent, and admirable biological systems in the universe have been created by distributed intelligence. This is noteworthy because an individual needs to operate by a minimal set of rules in a distributed intelligence system.

    Wellversed – Future Plans

    The Future of Wellversed is to evolve into a City of wellness entrepreneurs crafting brands for true maximisation of human wellness.

    FAQs

    When was Wellversed founded?

    Wellversed was founded in 2019.

    Who is the founder of Wellversed?

    Aanan Khurma, Aditya Seth, and Ripunjay Chachan are the co-founders of Wellversed.

    Who are the competitors of Wellversed?

    Some top competitors of Wellversed are:

    • Mensa Brands
    • Global Bees
    • Evenflow
    • Powerhouse91
    • Thrasio
    • SellerX
    • Perch
    • Heydey

    Has Wellversed raised funding?

    Wellversed has raised funding of $3.2 Million.

  • testRigor – Empowering Manual Testers to Build Automation in the Era of AI

    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 testRigor.

    The industry of software testing is emerging dramatically with the evolution of automation in testing. It is estimated through market insights that the global Automation testing market size will reach $49.9 billion by 2026. The industry size was $20.7 billion in 2021 and is expected to generate huge revenue in 2022. testRigor is a startup in the software testing industry to help build automation without knowing to code.

    testRigor provides a Chrome plugin that helps in test creation and reduces test maintenance. With testRigor, a non-technical manual tester can build test automation and maintain it without fail. Read about the startup journey of testRigor, its founders, business model, customer acquisition, and more.

    testRigor – Company Highlights

    Startup Name testRigor
    Headquarters San Francisco, California
    Industry Software Testing
    Founder Artem Golubev and Enzo Carlos Biancato
    Founded 2015
    website testrigor.com

    testRigor – About
    testRigor – Industry
    testRigor – Founders and Team
    testRigor – The Idea and Startup Story
    testRigor – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    testRigor – Product
    testRigor – Business Model and Revenue Model
    testRigor – Customer Acquisition
    testRigor – Challenges Faced
    testRigor – Funding

    testRigor – About

    testRigor empowers manual testers to build test automation 15X more efficiently compared to QA Engineers and solves the test maintenance problem.

    They believe in the future where AI will improve the productivity of people many times over.

    Selenium relies on details of implementation to build the test, here is how the performance of Engineer looks like in terms of a number of tests built over time with Selenium and testRigor:

    Performance of Engineer using testRigor
    performance of Engineer using testRigor

    testRigor – Industry

    They are in Software Testing/Software Development industry. They strongly believe that most of the end-to-end testing will be done using no-code tools within 5 years. If you save yourself 80% of the time building tests, why wouldn’t you do it?

    testRigor – Founders and Team

    Artem Golubev - testRigo
    Artem Golubev – testRigo

    Artem Golubev and Enzo Carlos Biancato are the founders of testRigor. Enzo is the CTO and Artem is the CEO of testRigor. They worked together at AppDirect at the time. Both were lead software engineers. testRigor has a team of 50+ people and growing really quickly.

    testRigor work culture motivates the team to do everything with as much quality as possible and make sure each and every customer is happy all the time.

    testRigor – The Idea and Startup Story

    They were shocked at how ineffective test automation was at the time! You have to hire engineers and the automation is so brittle that any minute changes in rendering will throw the test off the rails. Once they had an idea back in 2015, they ran it through some directors of QA and VPs of Engineering and everyone liked it.


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    testRigor Logo
    testRigor Logo

    They strongly believe in helping their customers to cover all their most important functionality rigorously. Therefore testRigor. What exactly they do comes 100% from their customers. Originally, they started with just autonomous testing, but their customers told them that this is not the most important value. They listened to their customers and just used their own words to describe what they do.

    testRigor – Product

    testRigor Test Case
    testRigor Test Case

    You can come in and immediately write tests in plain English. The way you describe things will just work out of the box. And, of course, you can define your own terminology by specifying how should it work.

    Test in Selenium
    Test code in Selenium

    This allows their customers to achieve 2 things:

    • Manual testers can create automation of any level of complexity
    • There is no maintenance related to HTML changes because tests are formulated purely from the end-user’s perspective with no reliance on details of implementation.

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    testRigor – Business Model and Revenue Model

    They charge for infrastructure to run tests. This was done intentionally to mimic the experience with open source products. Since they operate the huge infrastructure at the scale they can pass the saving they get from running things at scale onto their customers.

    For on-premise deployments, they only charge a monthly fee for servers that actually run the tests.

    testRigor – Customer Acquisition

    testRigor got its initial customers through word-of-mouth promotion. They talked to 10 friends, signed them up as customers, they liked it. They spread their feedback with their friends and network, and so on.

    testRigor – Challenges Faced

    There were a lot of learnings on how people express their steps in their tests in English and multiple iterations on building AI that would be both fast enough and reliable enough to execute the tests.

    testRigor – Funding

    testRigor raised a funding of $5 Million at different stages of funding.

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    June 2021 Seed $4 Million FlashPoint
    July 2020 Pre-Seed $718 K Switch Ventures
    February 2019 Angel $334 K Angel Investors

    FAQs

    When was testRigor founded?

    testRigor was funded in 2015.

    Who is the founder of testRigor?

    testRigor was founded by Artem Golubev and Enzo Carlos Biancato.

    Has testRigor received funding?

    Yes, testRigor has received a total funding of $5 Million.

  • ARATA – D2C Personal Care Brand for Healthy Skin and Hair

    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 ARATA.

    People around the globe are switching to chemical-free & non-toxic personal care products. The new trends in personal care brands show that over 40% of consumers are inclined to the products and brands that fit into their healthy lifestyle and contain wellness benefits without any chemicals.

    ARATA is an honest personal care brand that offers chemical-free, plant-based skincare products for healthy skin and hair. Read to know about its founder, products, and the startup story of ARATA.

    ARATA – Company Highlights

    Startup Name ARATA
    Headquarters New Delhi
    Industry D2C Personal Care
    Founder Dhruv Bhasin and Dhruv Madhok
    Founded 2018
    Website arata.in

    ARATA – About
    ARATA – Industry
    ARATA – Founders
    ARATA – The Idea and Startup Story
    ARATA – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    ARATA – Products
    ARATA – Business Model
    ARATA – Customer Acquisition
    ARATA – Challenges Faced
    ARATA – Most Successful Marketing Campaign
    ARATA – Growth
    ARATA – Funding
    ARATA – Competitors
    ARATA – Tools Used in the Company
    ARATA – Recognition and Achievements
    ARATA – Future Plans

    ARATA – About

    ARATA is a personal care startup that offers trustworthy and credible skin care and hair care products. The vision and mission of the Company are to make clean labels, high-performing, safe, and effective hair care solutions. Arata is an environment-friendly startup that uses not only non-toxic ingredients, for their products but its packaging is also 100% recyclable.

    ARATA – Industry

    The market and industry size is about INR 25,000 crores, which is a total addressable opportunity for hair care.

    ARATA – Founders

    The founders of Arata are Dhruv Madhok & Dhruv Bhasin.

    Dhruv Madhok

    Dhruv Madhok - Co-founder of ARATA
    Dhruv Madhok – Co-founder of ARATA

    He has completed his graduation from the University of Southern California – Marshall School of Business. Earlier he has worked with KPMG and PVR limited. He is the Director of ARATA.

    Dhruv Bhasin

    Dhruv Bhasin - Co-founder of ARATA
    Dhruv Bhasin – Co-founder of ARATA

    Dhruv Bhasin completed his Master’s in Management from the University of Surrey, and B.Sc in Business Studies from Lancaster University.

    ARATA – The Idea and Startup Story

    The idea for starting up came when (Dhruv) Bhasin’s mother was boiling flaxseeds to make a natural hair gel for him to use. He sent Dhruv Madhok a sample, and he loved it. And that’s how they realized there is an opportunity for safe styling products. They also discovered that the opportunity is significantly larger, not only limited to styling but in general hair care and other categories.

    Arata products belong in the beauty, personal care or FMCG CPG, and consumer packaged categories.

    ARATA Logo
    ARATA Logo

    ARATA means fresh and new in Japanese. The founders thought this was very apt for their brand personality.

    ARATA – Products

    ARATA Products
    ARATA Products

    The innovation and USPs are that the products are plant-based, non-toxic, vegan, cruelty-free, naturally derived, sustainable and inclusive, with a premium choice of ingredients and fragrances, product packaging, branding and design.

    ARATA – Business Model

    The business model is essentially selling the products online to the customer, directly to the consumers, on its website, and through different marketplaces.

    ARATA – Customer Acquisition

    The first hundred customers were all acquired from Google, Facebook, Instagram, and through advertising. And then, they scaled up through different marketplaces and through multiple online and digital campaigns.

    The most important thing that has worked for them to attract and retain customers is focusing on niches and having a set target audience and not being all over the place in terms of the product offering.


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    ARATA – Challenges Faced

    The biggest challenges they face can be divided into two parts.

    • One challenge was raising capital during the pandemic as it was very hard.
    • And two, essentially trying to break through the clutter of being a digital-only brand.

    So the challenge was how to look beyond performance marketing?

    And now, they are doing that by creating engaging content, having an engaging social channel, and focusing on customer retention, CRM, content creation and the likes.

    ARATA – Most Successful Marketing Campaign

    The most successful marketing campaign till now has been the launch of the Arata Advanced Curl Care range with Taapsee Pannu.

    ARATA Marketing Campaign with Tapsee Pannu

    ARATA – Growth

    ARATA revenue exceeds INR 2.5 crores per month. Its estimated annual revenue is INR 30 crores.

    And the repeats are looking strong, with more than 50% of customers coming back every year to buy for the second time and more.

    ARATA – Funding

    They have received multiple rounds of funding.  They received funding of INR3.5 crores in December, 2018. They raised INR 7 crores in 2021.

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    2021 INR 7 Crores
    December 2018 Seed INR 3.5 Crores

    ARATA – Competitors

    Some of the top competitors of ARATA are:

    • Plum Goodness
    • The Body Shop
    • MamaEarth
    • mCaffeine
    • Kama Ayurveda
    • Forest Essentials

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    ARATA – Tools Used in the Company

    They use multiple software, including marketing automation, Shopify for website, and MailChimp for marketing among some.

    ARATA – Recognition and Achievements

    They have got a few awards.

    • ARATA was awarded for being the eight fastest-growing startups in the country as a DTC brand.
    • One of their bestsellers, the Super Shampoo, received the Vogue Beauty Award for the best daily use shampoo.

    ARATA – Future Plans

    Their future plans include scaling up the startup across different products & categories and building a bigger team.

    FAQs

    When was ARATA founded?

    ARATA is a D2C brand founded in 2018.

    Who is the founder of ARATA?

    Dhruv Bhasin and Dhruv Madhok are the founders of ARATA.

    Has ARATA raised funding?

    Yes, ARATA has raised a funding of INR 105 million in two funding rounds.

    Who are the competitors of ARATA?

    Some of the top competitors of ARATA are:

    • Plum Goodness
    • The Body Shop
    • MamaEarth
    • mCaffeine
    • Kama Ayurveda
    • Forest Essentials
  • muvin: India’s Teen-centric Pocket Money App

    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 muvin.

    Neobanking services are revolutionising both the financial and Fintech sectors in India. Fintech ecosystem is gearing towards better usage of Artificial Intelligence and improving customer satisfaction with popular neobanks in India like- RazorPayX, Jupiter, and Kotak811, to name a few. muvin is an emerging startup that enables a seamless experience for teens which includes pocket money management, financial literacy, and understanding savings from a young age, amongst others. It is a pocket-money app that encourages children to learn to manage finances.

    Read the startup story of muvin and know about its founders, business model, challenges, and growth.

    muvin – Company Highlights

    Startup Name muvin
    Headquarters Bengaluru
    Industry Fintech
    Founder Mukund Rao and Vineet Gupta
    Founded 2020
    Total Funding Raised $4.5 Million
    Website muvin.in

    muvin – About
    muvin – Industry
    muvin – Founders and Team
    muvin – Startup Story
    muvin – Name, Tagline, and Logo
    muvin – Vision
    muvin – Products
    muvin – USP
    muvin – Business and Revenue Model
    muvin – Customer Acquisition
    muvin – Customer Retention Strategy
    muvin – Challenges Faced
    muvin – Funding
    muvin – Growth

    muvin – About

    As India’s teen-centric pocket money app, muvin, offers a safe & secure platform to conduct online & offline transactions in an effortless manner- through its wallet, physical prepaid card and industry’s first RuPay powered contactless keychain.

    While parents/guardians can create an account to enable their dependents/children with an independent wallet, muvin also empowers India’s college going students to set up their own wallets to conduct transactions.

    As part of their focus on amplifying financial literacy amongst India’s teens, the muvin app offers an exhaustive library of enriching content to demystify concepts related to managing finance. They have onboarded Monika Halan, an entrusted Author and Speaker to curate and address theme-based topics in an easy, fun, and simplified manner. From taxes to what banking truly is, muvin is covering the fundamentals and more via rich byte-sized video and short blogs that are relevant for teens.

    muvin – Industry

    With new players entering this space, teen-centric pocket money apps and neobanks have become a competitive digital banking landscape in a short period of time. The space has grown exponentially in the last five years. In terms of transaction value, the Indian Neobanking ecosystem is expected to clock US$47.94bn in 2022 setting the foundation for substantial growth potential in the coming years.

    muvin – Founders and Team

    Mukund and Vineet have known each other for over 20 years from their time at Mindtree in the early 2000’s. They share a passion for enabling access to banking services for the youth and believe that finance is a life skill that everyone should acquire by the age of 21.

    Mukund Rao, Co-founder

    Mukund Rao, Co-Founder, muvin

    Mukund is an accomplished business leader with experience across financial services and technology. Former Capital Markets Head at Mindtree, Mukund founded derivIT in 2007 and grew it across 7 countries with a team of 400+ employees. He subsequently exited derivIT to Luxoft in 2017.

    After graduating from Bangalore University, he pursued his MBA from Ecole des Ponts Business School.

    Vineet Gupta, Co-founder

    Vineet Gupta - Co-founder of muvin
    Vineet Gupta, Co-founder, muvin

    Vineet has over 25 years of experience spread across technology and financial businesses, driving innovation and digital business models. Vineet moved on from Mindtree in 2015 after building out their Digital Business and subsequently founded a tech enabled NBFC focussed on business credit.

    He graduated from IIT-Delhi and went on to pursue his MBA from IIM-Lucknow.

    While both co-founders are actively engaged in all aspects of the business, Vineet looks after the Product, Operations, Finance & Technology functions at muvin, while Mukund looks after Marketing, Strategy and Business Development functions.

    muvin – Startup Story

    Despite India’s adoption of digital banking and contactless payments, the digital native generation still conducts over 80% of their transactions in cash. Both the co-founders, Mukund and Vineet, have teenage children who were using cash or their cards while spending money. They found the process of opening bank accounts for their kids and teaching them how to operate it within the restrictions on bank ATM/debit cards, rather cumbersome. The most common resort for parents like them was to hand over pocket money to their children. No wonder, teens often end up entering adulthood with little or no knowledge of financial management.

    They saw an opportunity in enabling digital payments and offering financial products for this young consumer base- in an easy-to-understand, intuitive and friction-free manner. This is how muvin came into being.

    They validated the hypothesis by empanelling Ipsos to conduct independent primary research of children and parents across 8 cities.

    muvin logo
    muvin logo

    muvin is a play on the word “moving”, where they would like their target audience to get moving and keep moving. The co-founders of muvin believe that Gen-Z is always on the go and they would like teens to get moving with their financial lives as soon as possible. The tagline, “payments for students”, addresses their audience and the core functionality of muvin, thereby avoiding any ambiguity.

    muvin – Vision

    muvin’s vision is to empower India’s 250 million youth with digital financial inclusion and financial literacy. muvin is unwaveringly moving forward in positioning the management of personal finance as an essential life skill and the need to inculcate it from an early age. muvin believes that India’s teens must be empowered to experience independence in their financial transactions and decisions in their day-to-day life.

    muvin – Products

    Bolstered by the pandemic, there has been widespread adoption of digital banking and contactless payments across the country which led to a permanent shift towards wallets, contactless cards, digital payment apps and other financial products. However, over 250 million teenagers and young adults in India are still precluded from not just financial education but banking services as well, conducting the majority of their transactions in cash. Gen Z are becoming financially aware and independent a lot earlier than a few decades ago. Pocket money apps for the teens are ideal in addressing their financial needs.

    Deployment of new-age technologies like AI, big-data analysis and cloud computing is helping it to offer an easy-to-understand, intuitive, friction-free and education-powered experience to the teens.

    muvin has partnered with the parent community towards its larger vision of amplifying financial literacy amongst India’s digitally savvy teens. It has also understood some other critical issues that matter to parents, such as tracking of their household expenditure.

    Parents now have the freedom to transfer pocket money allowance (one time /scheduled weekly / monthly) directly in their child’s wallet who can then spend the money through the app or through their own prepaid card. Parents no longer have to stress over tedious banking roadblocks. Monitoring their child’s spending habits was never this easy.


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    muvin – USP

    These are early days for teen-centric apps and they are in the first lap of a marathon. It is a new category and competition helps in both, creating and growing awareness about the product’s relevance and need amongst the key target user base. All the market players are addressing varied gap areas through their products, services and customer experience.

    muvin is the first pocket money app to offer a RuPay co-branded keychain targeted at India’s teens. The keychain presents the most convenient and secured contactless payment mode with a simple ‘tap and pay on-the-go’ feature. The contactless keychain can be used across all RuPay NFC enabled merchants for fast processing and seamless transaction experience each time.

    muvin also offers chat based banking on their website and whatsapp without the need of downloading the app. This allows customers to check their balance, view recent transactions, block their card etc.

    muvin – Business and Revenue Model

    There are no charges levied on customers for using the muvin services. muvin makes money from the interchange fees incurred by the merchant for card based transactions. Within the first six months of its product launch, muvin witnessed over 150,000 installs. Currently, the figures stand at approximately 50k app downloads every month.

    muvin – Customer Acquisition

    muvin’s journey started with the launch of its app and the ‘muvin card’ for teens in October 2021. In the same month, muvin onboarded Ace cricketer Hardik Pandya as their brand ambassador to propel its multi-channel marketing campaigns- a move which helped the brand to garner immediate attention and much-needed impetus from its target customers.

    Teens need validation and approval from their parents/guardians and since its inception, muvin is consistently engaging with the parent community. Parents need to be assured on the trust front. muvin’s partnership with industry prominent players like RuPay has also helped it to strike a trust-worthy chord with the parents. Imparting financial responsibility as a trait has to be a consistent and an on-going approach. Parents are appreciating the educative, short videos and blog format content for their children which muvin offers on its digital platform. The early adopters of the muvin app have played an important role in expanding its reach amongst newer adopters.

    muvin has adopted a multi-pronged approach in reaching out to potential customers. Developing a strong presence on social media has been key to building the muvin brand, as this is where Gen-Z spends a high percentage of their time. muvin is building itself out to be a young brand that teenagers can approach as an elder sibling or friend. They have also curated financial content in byte sized formats that is easy to understand and comprehend in under a minute. They have also partnered with multiple brands to serve their customers with offers and cashbacks relevant to their age group.

    muvin – Customer Retention Strategy

    To drive retention, muvin has partnered with multiple brands to serve their customers with offers and cashbacks relevant to their age group. They also run engaging contests and offers on the app which are refreshed on a weekly basis to keep their customers and audience engaged consistently. Through their insights led customer engagement platform and social media channels, they keep their users updated on the latest happenings on the app.

    muvin – Challenges Faced

    Neobanks and teen-centric pocket money apps like muvin have carved a niche category to address crucial consumer pain points which had not been addressed before. They have consistently channelised their energies to get their key consumer audience to shift from cash to digital transactions- which still continues to be a challenging affair.

    Players like muvin get to interact with their customers digitally only which makes trust building especially amongst digital-savvy parents, a tedious and slower process. This requires utmost transparency and in this regard, muvin’s partnership with RuPay has helped them tremendously.


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    muvin – Funding

    Date Stage Amount Investors
    January 2022 Pre-Series A $3 Mn Alteria Capital and Krishna Bhupal, Co-Founder, Rational Pricing Technologies and board member of GVK Power & Infra
    April 2021 Seed $1.5 Mn HNI’s Krishnakumar Natarajan (Managing Partner, Mela Ventures), Ambar Maheshwari (CEO, IndiaBulls Asset Management), Gani Subramaniam (Partner, WRVI), Shajikumar Devakar (Executive Director, IIFL Asset Management Limited), Sandeep Jethwani, and others

    Earlier in January 2022, muvin raised USD 3 million in a pre-Series A round which was led by WaterBridge Ventures, with participation from India’s largest Venture Debt fund Alteria Capital and Krishna Bhupal, Co-Founder, Rational Pricing Technologies and board member of GVK Power & Infra.

    Prior to that in April 2021, muvin raised a seed round of $1.5+ million from HNI’s Krishnakumar Natarajan (Managing Partner, Mela Ventures), Ambar Maheshwari (CEO, IndiaBulls Asset Management), Gani Subramaniam (Partner, WRVI), Shajikumar Devakar (Executive Director, IIFL Asset Management Limited), Sandeep Jethwani, and other prolific angel investors from the financial services industry.

    muvin – Growth

    muvin’s platform caters to India’s teens spread across leading cities in India. The brand is gearing towards engaging with one million registered users in the next 12 months. Its ambition is to enable 100 million financially literate students in the next 10 years- prepare them to confidently make the right financial choices by the age of 25 years.

    With regular communication and feedback from their early adopters, muvin team plans to steadily enhance its product and introduce new features over the next two-three quarters that will substantially upgrade their users’ experience. To achieve additional scale, muvin is open to raising an additional round of funding towards the later half of this year.

    FAQs

    When was muvin founded?

    muvin was founded in 2020.

    Who is the founder of muvin?

    Mukund Rao and Vineet Gupta are the founders of muvin.

    Has muvin raised funding?

    Yes, muvin has raised a funding of $4.5 million.

    Is muvin app available on Google Play store?

    Yes, muvin app is available on the Google play store and Apple app store.

    Who is the brand ambassador of muvin?

    Hardik Pandya is the brand ambassador of muvin.

  • Vanity Wagon – A Reformative Platform for Natural and Organic Beauty Products

    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 Vanity Wagon.

    The love for organic beauty and personal care products is increasing in India. With people becoming aware of the long-term damage that chemical-containing beauty products can cause, the demand for organic and natural products is increasing like never before. This has instigated the emergence of many organic and natural care brands that claim to be chemical-free.

    In the presence of too many choices, it has become tough for consumers to choose genuine products. To solve this confusion and to ensure that the consumers choose only genuine organic beauty and personal care products, Vanity Wagon was started. The vanitywagon.in picks and collects just the best organic beauty wagon and personal care products for you.

    Company Highlights

    Startup Name Vanity Wagon
    Headquarter Gurugram, Haryana
    Founder Naina Ruhail, Prateek Ruhail & Sahil Shrestha
    Sector Natural Beauty & Personal Care
    Founded 2018
    Website vanitywagon.in

    Vanity Wagon – About
    Vanity Wagon – Organic / Online Beauty Industry in India
    Vanity Wagon – Founders & Team
    Vanity Wagon – Name & Logo
    Vanity Wagon – How It All Started?
    Vanity Wagon – Business Model
    Vanity Wagon – User Acquisition
    Vanity Wagon – Growth
    Vanity Wagon – Funding & Investors
    Vanity Wagon – Startup Challenges
    Vanity Wagon – Competitors
    Vanity Wagon – Advisors & Mentors
    Vanity Wagon – Future Plans

    Vanity Wagon – About

    Vanity Wagon Slogan

    The vanitywagon.in is a Gurugram-based startup founded in the year 2018. It is a one-stop platform to buy genuine organic beauty products for beauty and personal care. Vanity Wagon offers the products included in the platform that are toxin-free, harmful chemical-free, cruelty-free, and completely safe.

    Our belief is to create a shopping experience that is not only par satisfaction but also through an informed choice. We impart a large amount of information on our products and also on the general adoption of organic products in one’s life. We want to grow as a platform that is informative, trustworthy, and fun.

    What is Vanity Wagon?

    Vanity Wagon app is India’s First Natural Beauty Market with its headquarters in Gurugram. It offers all categories of products like Bath and body, skin-care, hair-care, makeup, men’s care, mom and baby care, beauty products, wellness products, and gifting options. The best part is that all the products available in Vanity Wagon are organic and natural.

    According to some Vanity Wagon reviews has also established itself as an informative platform, where they share detailed information about various beauty products, beauty advice from experts, and the various benefits of switching to organic products.

    One of the experiments that we did was with our own forum wherein we interact with individuals daily and not only reply to their queries but also post some legitimate–core information on organics and the natural personal care industry. The forum started as a pilot project but with the response, we realized how many information gaps existed in the market and decided to take it on as a long-term project.


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    Vanity Wagon – Organic / Online Beauty Industry in India

    According to Red Seer Consulting, the Indian online beauty market is currently pegged at $150 million. The market size is growing 10 times per year and is expected to reach $1.6 billion by 2025.  The Vanity Wagon tracking and interface are easy to use on both the website and app.

    The market size of organic beauty wagon products is currently $42 million. The global market value for natural cosmetics and beauty products is expected to make shift from 30 billion dollars in 2021 to 50.5 billion dollars by 2027. Vanity Wagon believes in sustainable beauty and stands firm in its mission to educate the audience and deliver what’s best for them in the long run.

    Vanity Wagon – Founders & Team

    Naina Ruhail, Prateek Ruhail & Sahil Shrestha
    Naina Ruhail, Prateek Ruhail & Sahil Shrestha

    Vanity Wagon’s founders are Naina Ruhail, Prateek Ruhail, and Sahil Shrestha.

    Naina Ruhail is an established media influencer and professional make-up artist in India. She completed her MBA in 2012 and then went on to specialize in beauty & skincare with her education at the London School of Styling and the London School of Makeup. She has 7 years of professional experience in marketing and brand building.

    Prateek Ruhail is an MBA from the University of Oxford with a Dean’s Commendation Award. He has 3 years of Project Finance (Legal) and 4 years of Business Management experience. His area of expertise is business strategy and core management. He also has led mega infrastructure project financings, thereby understanding the nuances of financial management in India.

    Sahil Shrestha has an educational qualification in management and technology. Post completion of his MBA in 2012 he went on to work in different facets of operations. He is one of the main Vanity Wagon founders, as he leads the operational vertical, bringing the best of his experiences onboard.

    The idea was thought of by Naina post her stint in London, UK. The market research and study showed tremendous industry growth and also a promise for a brand like Vanity Wagon to create a niche space for itself.

    That being said Prateek and Naina went on to initiate the set-up of Vanity Wagon India when Sahil Shrestha (the operational team leader) jumped in and went on to complete the founding team.

    Vanity Wagon Logo

    The team wanted the startup name to focus on two strong points – ‘An Indian woman’s beauty box’ and ‘pan India coverage’. The initial names were around beauty and organic and natural. Several names came up, however, nothing was strong enough to focus on our two strong points – ‘An Indian woman’s beauty box’ and ‘pan India coverage’.

    The Vanity Wagon logo and name are based on a beauty box that holds a Woman’s care needs and we want to build the whole personal care space of a Woman’s life with organic–natural products. Hence came the idea of the Vanity Wagon website.

    Most often women in India would refer to their beauty arsenal by the term Vanity Kit. Further, the Wagon symbolizes the team traveling from household to household, city to city, and reaching every nook and corner of India, while servicing the personal care needs of an individual.


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    Organic food is the new buzz in the food and health industry. Organic food refers to the items produced without the use of chemical fertilizers,pesticides, animal antibiotics, etc. With growing awareness about the harmfuleffects of using pesticides and chemicals in agriculture, the demand for org…


    Vanity Wagon – How It All Started?

    The idea was taking form while Naina was learning beauty & skincare at the London School of styling and London School of Makeup. She noticed that in the UK shopping for organic and natural beauty care products was easy, as dedicated platforms were offering just organic and natural beauty and personal care products. However, in India the beauty and personal care market is fragmented.

    Besides, the market research and study showed tremendous industry growth and also a promise for a brand like Vanity Wagon India, to create a niche space for itself. The idea was validated when the first stage of research was conducted about the beauty market in India.

    The organic beauty market with the fast growth of over 52% proved that the consumers of India were making the switch and a marketplace like Vanity Wagon would just make it easier.

    With the idea in place, the question in mind was how to go about launching the market, which brands to keep initially, which products and categories to target, and what consumer base to work on.

    With several social surveys, A&B testing, and market research the team went on to finalize all these and a point to start from. Assembling the tech team, the base work for the portal – tech, design, graphics, was put in place and the idea was executed with a turnaround time of 4 months.

    The launch of the Vanity Wagon website was led across all metro cities in India simultaneously with all the buzz that could be created. With a launch event for the media, blogger collaborations, and social media launch strategy in place, Vanity Wagon went live for India in 1 go and started servicing over 10000 pin codes on Day 1.  

    Vanity Wagon – Business Model

    Vanity Wagon’s business model works on an upfront discount – inventory-driven model. There are many ways that you can avail Vanity wagon coupon code and offers.

    Vanity Wagon – User Acquisition

    Vanity Wagon Homepage
    Vanity Wagon Homepage

    The first 10 customers came in very early for Vanity Wagon. With a pre-launch plan in place, the company gathered tremendous traction before it went live and the first 10 customers were acquired fairly quickly (in 2 days).

    Vanity Wagon heavily relies on customer-centric promotions. It uses social media platforms and also paid and owned media to reach out to the target audience. As said by Prateek, owned media is working remarkably well for Vanity Wagon India.

    One of the first campaigns we did worked well for us, owing to the team’s approach to it and the concept – ‘What Organic Means to You’.  We did this campaign with bloggers, a few household women, and the real users out there. The idea was to understand what we need to do to make organics popular and the whole campaign was really helpful. With over 100 ideas on what organics can mean we knew which notes to hit and doing so earned great success in the short term post the campaign.

    Vanity Wagon – Growth

    Vanity Wagon operates out of Gurugram (Corporate Office) and warehouses at present in Delhi With revenue growth of 100% month on month, the company is destined for great success in the long term.

    Starting with a limited brand base, it now boasts over 151 brands including some top players in Natural Beauty such as MyGlamm, Ruby’s Organics, Indulge Essentials, Raw Nature, and Biotique.  

    The User-base continues to grow steadily at 50-70% month on month and is driven by multiple sources online and offline Vanity Wagon works closely with every customer and runs to create a communal feeling wherein every user freely converses with our experts and benefits in every possible way even if there is no transaction involved.

    Vanity Wagon – Funding & Investors

    Vanity Wagon funding is bootstrapped and is working towards raising early-stage investment in FY 19-20. The shareholders at present are the founding members.

    The cash flow for the vanitywagon.in funding has been fairly consistent with great support from our family and friends too. We have managed to create the right buzz in the market and are getting rewarded for that each day with our growing user base and repeat customers – Prateek

    Recently in January 2021, the company raised over $200,000 in a seed round that included investors like Agility Venture Partners, Alfa Ventures founder Dhianu Das, actress Anita Hassanandani and angel investor Sanjay Nagi. The most latest funding was raised in October 2021 by the seed round.

    The total amount raised by Vanity Wagon is $934k.  The Vanity Wagon funding is said to be used to expand its global footprint, onboard more brands, and fulfill a larger consumer base.

    Vanity Wagon – Startup Challenges

    According to Prateek, the biggest challenge for the Vanity Wagon app is to make the users switch. With so many nice-smelling, beautifully packed chemical products on the market, the majority of the user base is content with buying products that a celebrity endorses. Natural products are comparatively newer to the space of mainstream beauty and are slowly making their place in the market.


    Wellnessmonk Story, Founder, Funding, Revenue Model, Products, Competitors
    Wellnessmonk – Startup Success StoryStartup NameWellnessmonkHeadquarterKanpur[https://startuptalky.com/kanpur-startups/]FounderGyaan DixitSectorE-PharmacyFounded2017Parent organizationDreamz Nutrition & Pharmaceutical Private LimitedWellnessmonk – IntroductionWellnessmonk – Industry DetailsWel…


    Vanity Wagon – Competitors

    There are many platforms offering beauty and platforms online. Some of the Vanity Wagon competitors are the Nykaa platform, Purplle platform, and Dermstore platform.

    While all other platforms offer all sorts of beauty and personal care products that may or may not be natural, Vanity Wagon’s USP is a dedicated platform for just natural and organic products.

    Vanity Wagon reviews talk about the platform creating a space where an individual only has natural options be it in makeup, skincare, bathing essentials, or wellness. Everything on the portal is non-harmful chemical driven and makes it easy for a consumer to get hooked on clean beauty.

    All our competitors motivate us primarily being Nykaa, having done so well in the last few years. They have gone on to create a community for beauty and we look to do that for natural beauty.

    Vanity Wagon – Advisors & Mentors

    Vanity Wagon India has advisors from different fields and tangents including – tech, marketing, and business strategy.

    Col. A S Ruhail (Retd.) with a distinguished career in the Indian Army went on to successfully establish an educational venture. His core being strategy and business implementation, the Vanity Wagon website closely associates with him on major strategy standpoints and benefits in every way possible.

    Mr. Mayank Kumar (IIM Lucknow) has a successful enterprise and advises Vanity Wagon on the technical growth plans and strategies.

    Mr. Vaibhav Jain is a successful entrepreneur – marketer and angel investor. He offers his support in marketing and brand-building initiatives for Vanity Wagon.

    Vanity Wagon – Future Plans

    The platform claims to have sold over one lakh products and registered 5 times more growth since 2019. Vanity Wagon has great plans for growth in the future-

    • The company wants to serve customers through an omnichannel strategy, thereby aiming to open 15 stores by the end of 2022.
    • Vanity Wagon are targeting to have more than 200 brands associated with them by the end of 2022.
    • The company is planning to ship Indian Organic beauty products to 5 offshore territories and they are currently planning to start with Singapore and then move forward with other APAC countries.
    • The company is also planning to take over several brands to increase its business. The brands that are unable to fit the market due to money issues but have great potential in their products are on the target list of vanity wagons.

    Story of Fizzy Fern- Ayurvedic and Natural skin care products makers
    Fizzy Fern HighlightsStartup NameFizzy FernHeadQuarterFaridabadFounder NameRobin ChopraSectorCosmeticsFounded2018Parent organisationPristle Products Pvt LtdFizzy Fern -IntroductionFizzy Fern – Industry DetailsFizzy Fern – The TeamFizzy Fern – The Idea and Starting UpFizzy Fern – Name and Logo…


    Conclusion

    Vanity Wagon is a platform started by three individuals for the betterment of people. Vanity Wagon is a platform that promotes the growth and sale of nontoxic products. They promote the clean beauty marketplace. The beauty products that are available on their site all fulfill the criteria set by the Vanity Wagon team. Some of the basic information about vanity wagons is shared above.

    FAQs

    What are clean beauty brands in India?

    Clean beauty brands sell products that are in harmony with our body and health and does not have any toxic chemical in them. Some of the most well-known clean beauty brands in India are Butterfly, FAE Beauty, Blur, etc.

    Does Vanity Wagon sell original products?

    As per the reviews collected by Vanity Wagon, the products sold by them are 100% original. Vanity Wagon is also known as the best platform to sell clean beauty products that do not cause any toxicity to the body and health.

    Is brand Myglamm chemical-free?

    Yes, the products made by Myglamm consist of no toxic chemicals in them. They are made with 100% free toxic formula.

    Is MartiDerm cruelty-free?

    Yes, all the products made by Martiderm are cruelty-free as they are not tested on any animal as well as there is no harm done to any animal in their production.

    Who are the competitors of Vanity Wagon?

    The competitors of Vanitywagon are Nykaa, Purplle, and Dermstore.

  • MoonPay – Democratizing Cryptocurrency Through Its Investment Platform

    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 Moonpay.

    The Public’s faith in crypto has exploded in the meantime. It’s a major topic not only among investors but also in mainstream culture, owing to everyone including long-time investors like Elon Musk to that youngster from high school on Twitter.

    Merchants may accept crypto-based payments for a variety of goods and services thanks to technology-based crypto payments and fraud protection solutions. For debit and credit card transactions, it also has a worldwide monetary onramp. It allows businesses to accept cryptocurrency payments for a variety of products and services.

    MoonPay is a fintech startup that develops a cryptocurrency payment system. Its on-and-off-ramp line of products allows users to modify between government-issued currency and cryptocurrencies using different payment methods, including credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and local bank transfers, MoonPay accepts payments, fights fraud in over 160 countries, and is used by 300+ prominent wallets, websites, and applications. The firm was created in 2019 and is situated in Miami, Florida.

    Read this article further to read more about MoonPay.

    MoonPay – Company Highlights

    Startup Name MoonPay
    Headquarters Greater Miami Area, East Coast, Southern US
    Industry Financial Services, FinTech, and Mobile Payments
    Founders Victor Faramond and Ivan Soto-Wright
    Founded 2018
    Launched March 2019
    CEO Ivan Soto-Wright
    Website moonpay.com

    MoonPay – About and How it Works?


    MoonPay – Industry
    MoonPay – Name, Logo, and Tagline
    MoonPay – Founders
    MoonPay – Startup Story
    MoonPay – Vision, and Mission Statement
    MoonPay – Business Model
    MoonPay – Catering Celebs
    MoonPay – Funding, and Investors
    MoonPay – Investments
    MoonPay – Growth
    MoonPay – Competitors
    MoonPay – Challenges Faced
    MoonPay – Future Plans

    booming NFT sector. MoonPay was founded in 2019 with a single goal in mind: to accelerate the usage of cryptocurrencies. Only with 2 young co-founders – Ivan Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond – the firm set out to design a secure and very simple software solution that would allow individuals from all around the world to engage in the largest tech transformation since the world wide web.

    MoonPay is a popular solution among both ordinary investors and celebs because of its ease. As per the company’s website, the platform has over 10 million active users in 160 countries and has processed about $3 billion in transactions.

    When non-fungible tokens or NFTs first became popular, MoonPay was the go-to payment provider. Users might buy their favourite NFTs without having to worry about cryptocurrency. When celebrities began purchasing artworks from the renowned Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, the platform acquired even more traction.

    In a traditional exchange, you’d need to first get a wallet, then add an appropriate amount of cryptocurrency, and then complete the transaction – a simple but time-consuming operation. The procedure is significantly simpler using MoonPay. All that is required of the user is to set a budget. MoonPay then calculates a baseline price for the digital asset using its uncommon tools.

    MoonPay takes care of purchasing the needed cryptocurrency, then purchasing the tokens and billing the consumer.

    “We’ve tried to make it as similar as a process as you would be interacting with your private bank,” says Ivan Soto-Wright, the CEO of MoonPay. “You basically generate an invoice, you wire money for that invoice, and then we settle the transaction,” he explained.

    MoonPay – Industry

    One of the names used most frequently for research in the finance sector nowadays is “financial technology.” FinTech, or financial technology, is the application of cutting-edge contemporary technology to the world of money. It mostly makes use of disruptive and creative technologies to deliver financial services. By offering innovative and safe financial services, fintech startups met the demand for increased security from investors. The desire for more economical financial services that offer accessibility and a faster speed might be cited as the second factor in the development of financial technology.

    In 2021, the market had a value of USD 112.5 billion. By 2028, the scope of the global fintech market is predicted to be USD 332.5 billion, and it is projected to expand at a 19.8% compound annual growth rate over that time.

    The market is primarily driven by growing connectivity with the ecosystem of the financial services industry, growth in the market cap of cryptocurrencies, and ICOs. This technology facilitates quicker transfers and lowers operating costs. Uncertainty over the regulatory frameworks and standards enforced by the system is the main constraining issue for the fintech market. Furthermore, the financial sector’s use of digital technologies is expanding quickly.

    The globe has seen the emergence of new financial technology innovations including mobile money, peer-to-peer or marketplace financing, insurance technology (insur-tech), Robo-advice and crypto-assets. Markets might become more varied, fair, effective, and equitable as a result of these advances, but concentration levels could also rise. Especially in developing and transition countries, innovation has boosted inclusiveness and brought about competitiveness.


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    MoonPay – Name, Logo, and Tagline

    MoonPay Logo
    MoonPay Logo 

    MoonPay’s tagline says, “Crypto just got easy.”

    MoonPay – Founders

    MoonPay was founded by Victor Faramond and Ivan Soto-Wright in March 2019.

    Victor Faramond

    Victor Faramond - Co-Founder of MoonPay
    Victor Faramond – Co-Founder of MoonPay

    Victor serves MoonPay as its co-founder and chief technology officer. Victor has extensive experience in developing both front-end and back-end systems for cutting-edge websites. He has previously worked in Apple, Merck KGaA, and Skello.

    Ivan Soto-Wright

    Co-Founders of MoonPay - Ivan Soto-Wright
    Co-Founder of MoonPay – Ivan Soto-Wright

    Ivan is the co-founder and chief executive officer of MoonPay. Ivan is an investor, entrepreneur, and early adopter of financial technology. Ivan graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in Economics with Special Honors. At St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, he also studied philosophy, politics, and economics. Ivan used to work for Redington.


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    MoonPay – Startup Story

    With just one goal in mind in 2019, Ivan Soto-Wright and Victor Faramond, the company’s two co-founders, set out to build a simple and secure software solution that would allow users from all over the world to take part in the largest digital revolution since the internet, which resulted in the foundation of MoonPay.

    Just two and a half years later, in November 2021, MoonPay completed its Series A investment round with a valuation of $3.4 billion, making it the largest and most valued Series A for a bootstrapped cryptocurrency startup. The firm is using this financing to continue in international expansion and top-tier personnel, as it maintains its extraordinary rate of growth.

    Investment in the start-ups driving the sector is flourishing in venture capital as the price of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin has recently reached all-time highs. After the massive cryptocurrency exchange’s successful IPO in April, investors are searching for the next Coinbase.

    The “portal” to digital assets was the selling point of MoonPay to investors. For the time being, this entails bitcoin, ether, and other electronic coins like NFTs. However, Soto-Wright intends to broaden the platform’s scope to cover anything from tokenized equities to digital clothing. People are referring to them as PayPal for cryptocurrency, he added.

    According to Soto-Wright, the business has robust controls and checks in place to combat corruption. Regulators are being more cautious as a result of illegal activities in the industry.

    Since the platform’s introduction in 2019, according to MoonPay, it has been profitable. After transaction volumes soared 35-fold from 2020, the company is on target to generate $150 million in revenue this year. More than 7 million users already utilise its service.

    MoonPay – Vision, and Mission Statement

    MoonPay’s mission has been clear from the start: provide the next billion people access to cryptocurrency.

    The goal of MoonPay is to provide the next billion people with access to cryptocurrencies, which we believe will ultimately have a greater impact on people’s lives than the internet.

    Because they firmly believe in the potential of cryptocurrencies and their ability to democratise finance, everything they have done in their first two years has been focused on achieving that aim.

    MoonPay – Business Model

    MoonPay, a Miami-based company that was founded in 2019, offers software that enables users to purchase and trade cryptocurrencies using standard payment methods including credit cards, bank transfers, or mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

    In a business model CEO Ivan Soto-Wright refers to as “crypto-as-a-service,” it also offers its technology to organisations like non-fungible token (NFT) exchange OpenSea and cryptocurrency website Bitcoin.com.

    Processing fees, payment fees, and a concierge service for affluent customers are how MoonPay generates revenue.

    • Processing and Payment fees – The processing and payment fees that MoonPay’s institutional and retail customers pay to make up the majority of its income. Every time a customer buys or sells a cryptocurrency, a processing fee is levied on the consumer side. It charges a 4.5 per cent fee for card purchases. Fees are 1 per cent for both purchases and sales when using bank transfers. Users will furthermore be responsible for paying the corresponding gas fees imposed by the blockchain network they use to conduct their transactions. Similar to that, it assesses firms with a 4.5 per cent card payment fee and a 1 per cent bank transfer cost. However, depending on several variables, such as everyday transactions, rates for larger partners may be negotiable. Although these costs can seem high, it should be recognised that MoonPay does not keep the entire charge. It is required to split the money for credit card transactions with the MasterCard or Visa card issuer. Additionally, it collaborates with several custodians and fraud detection services, both of which charge extra fees. Numerous comparable services, including Shakepay, have also emerged. All of them advertise themselves as simple ways for regular people to obtain cryptocurrency.
    • Concierge Service – MoonPay also makes money from its custodial services for wealthy people, albeit this portion of their revenue is probably lower. On behalf of its customers, it will use this service to buy and store cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Celebrities including Post Malone, The Weeknd, Lil Baby, and Jimmy Fallon have received such service from the firm. Although nothing is known, it may be inferred that MoonPay charges a management fee in the form of a percentage for such services.

    MoonPay – Catering Celebs

    Since November 2021, celebrities have used MoonPay to buy products from some of the most well-liked and pricey NFT collections. Just a handful of the rising list of celebrities who have used cryptocurrency firm MoonPay to facilitate purchases of exorbitantly priced non-fungible tokens includes Jimmy Fallon, Post Malone, Diplo, DJ Khaled, and Justin Beiber. Rapper Snoop Dogg joined the crew as the newest member on December 22, 2021. On Twitter, he displayed four brand-new items from the Bored Ape Yacht Club line. He praised MoonPay and its CEO Ivan Soto-Wright for their assistance with the transaction in a different tweet. A significant majority of the NFT transactions MoonPay has arranged on behalf of celebrities are for Bored Apes.

    They are A-list celebrities in addition to being some of MoonPay’s more than 60 new investors. The Chainsmokers, Drake, Matthew McConaughey, Eva Longoria, Kate Hudson, Paris Hilton, Jason Derulo, Mindy Kaling, Questlove, and Shawn Mendes are just a few more famous people that have invested.


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    MoonPay – Funding, and Investors

    MoonPay has received a total funding of $642 million from investors in 3 rounds of funding.

    Date Round Amount Lead Investors
    Apr 13, 2022 Series A $87M
    Nov 22, 2021 Series A $555M Coatue, Tiger Global Management
    Mar 1, 2021 Funding Round

    MoonPay – Investments

    Date Organization Name Round Amount
    May 20, 2022 UnicornDAO Seed Round $4.5M
    Mar 22, 2022 Yuga labs Seed Round $450M
    Sep 26, 2021 Yellow Card Series A $15M
    Jun 25, 2021 Moon Pre-Seed Round $2.8M

    MoonPay – Growth

    Having only existed for three years, MoonPay has:

    • processed transactions worth more than $2 billion.
    • seen a surge in transaction volume of more than 35 times.
    • consistently attained monthly sales growth of greater than 30%
    • accumulated a clientele of more than 7 million users.
    • more than five times its partner ecosystem.
    • provided support for more than 30 fiat currencies and 90 cryptocurrencies.

    MoonPay – Competitors

    The top competitors in the competitive set of MoonPay are

    • Coinbase
    • Wyre
    • Ramp Instant
    • Mercury.io.
    • Simplex
    • Transak
    • Banxa
    • Paywithmoon
    • Changelly
    • Ffnews
    • Bitmart

    MoonPay – Challenges Faced

    Difficulties include access to different currencies and custodial limitations, regulatory and compliance constraints, and fraud concerns among traditional payment providers. These are the same problems that MoonPay focuses on and helps its partners with.

    “We are excited about the opportunity in crypto, but one of the challenges to mainstream adoption is offering the same seamless experience that users have come to expect from modern internet products. MoonPay has impressed us with its product, infrastructure, and execution.”  – Kris Fredrickson, managing partner at Coatue.

    “We think that the crypto economy today is growing faster than the internet was at a similar stage of its development and that MoonPay is well-positioned to serve crypto-native innovators and those in traditional finance.” -Kris Fredrickson, managing partner at Coatue.

    People all across the world now have an easy and safe method to join in this new economy thanks to MoonPay. Beyond cryptocurrencies, MoonPay’s non-fungible token solution has been gaining ground in the NFT market, which has lately experienced spectacular development.

    MoonPay – Future Plans

    MoonPay intends to use the funds received in the future to expand and develop new products. According to Soto-Wright, the company already has plans to go public.

    Moonpay will begin an expansion phase with the financing, hiring additional engineers for its staff and preparing to offer more features to its network. A range of tools for consumers is the company’s main emphasis. Cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets must abide by several standards, including Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering legislation, to offer fiat on-ramping services.

    By offering a third-party solution, Moonpay says it can let enterprises focus on their core competencies while it handles KYC, payment processing, cryptocurrency liquidity and delivery, fraud protection, regulatory licencing, ecosystem identity verification, and customised checkout processes.

    FAQs

    What is MoonPay?

    MoonPay is a digital platform for buying and selling cryptocurrency.

    When was MoonPay founded?

    MoonPay was founded in 2018 in Greater Miami Area, East Coast, Southern US.

    Who is the founder of MoonPay?

    Victor Faramond and Ivan Soto-Wright are the co-founders of MoonPay.

    What is the amount of funding raised by MoonPay?

    MoonPay has received a total funding of $642 million.

    Who are the competitors of MoonPay?

    The top competitors of MoonPay are:

    • Coinbase
    • Wyre
    • Ramp Instant
    • Mercury.io
    • Simplex
    • Transak
    • Banxa
    • Paywithmoon
    • Changelly
    • Ffnews
    • Bitmart
  • Instagram – Giving People Power To Build Their Own Community

    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 Instagram.

    With a focus on sharing photographs and videos, Instagram is a well-known social media software. Since its launch in 2010, it has grown in popularity by including cutting-edge new features like Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels, shopping, and others.

    Everyone who registers for an Instagram account has an account and a news feed, much as on Twitter or Facebook. It appears on the account when you upload a picture or a clip to Instagram. Your updates appear in the feeds of other people who follow you. You also receive updates from persons you follow.

    Similar to other social media platforms, you may communicate with other users by following them, allowing others to follow you, commenting and liking their posts, tagging, and sending private messages. Furthermore, photos uploaded on Instagram can be saved.

    There is a lot to learn about Instagram, so here is some helpful information to help you know more about this social networking platform.

    Instagram – Company Highlights

    Startup Name Instagram
    Headquarters Menlo Park, California, United States
    Industry Social Media
    Founder Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger
    Founded 2010
    Valuation ~ $100 billion
    Revenue $47.6 billion (2021)
    Total Funding Raised $57.5M
    Parent Organisation Meta
    Website instagram.com

    Instagram – About and How it Works?
    Instagram – Industry
    Instagram – Founders
    Instagram – Startup Story
    Instagram – Name, Logo, and Tagline
    Instagram – Vision and Mission
    Instagram – Features
    Instagram – Business Model
    Instagram – Acquisition By Facebook or Meta
    Instagram – Funding, and Investors
    Instagram – Acquisitions
    Instagram – Competitors
    Instagram – Future Plans

    Instagram – About and How it Works?

    In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Instagram, a social media platform for sharing photos and videos. Facebook Inc. eventually purchased Instagram.

    Users of the app may upload media that can be altered using filters, arranged by hashtags, and categorised by location. Public or pre-approved followers may share posts. Users may examine trending information, like photographs, follow other users to add their data to a personal feed and browse other users’ content by tag and location.

    When Instagram first launched, it set itself apart by restricting content framing to a square (1:1) aspect ratio of 640 pixels, which matched the width of the iPhone’s display at the time.

    With an upgrade to 1080 pixels in 2015, these limitations were loosened. Additionally, it included messaging capabilities, the ability to upload multiple photographs or videos, and a feature called Stories that was comparable to Snapchat’s major rival and let users publish information to a feed that was sequential and viewable by others for a 24-hour period. 500 million people a day are using Stories as of January 2019.

    In the Instagram space, “handle” is a phrase for “username” or “account name.” The name of an Instagram account is what is meant when someone mentions an “Instagram handle.”

    Instagram – Industry

    Users of social media can exchange images, videos, and audio files. Revenues from advertising and sales of other services provided on social media platforms are included in this market. At a compound annual growth rate of 39.7%, the size of the worldwide social media industry is anticipated to increase from $159.68 billion in 2021 to $223.11 billion in 2022.

    The companies’ reorganisation of operations and recovery from the COVID-19 impact, which had previously resulted in restrictive containment measures involving social estrangement, remote work, and the closure of commercial activities that created operational challenges, are primarily responsible for the growth. At a CAGR of 39%, the market is anticipated to reach $833.50 billion in 2026.

    44% of users use Instagram on a weekly basis to shop utilising features like the Shop tag, according to findings from an Instagram for a business study conducted in 2022.

    To enable direct transactions within their platforms, other social media businesses like Snapchat and Twitter have also incorporated shopping ads. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, and LinkedIn are significant players in the social media sector.

    Instagram Revenue
    Instagram Revenue

    Instagram – Founders

    Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced the Instagram app on October 6, 2010. In just one day, the software attracted 25,000 users.

    Kevin Systrom

    Kevin Systrom, Instagram Founder
    Kevin Systrom, Instagram Founder

    American computer programmer and businessman, Kevin Systrom, was born on December 30, 1983, in Holliston, Massachusetts. Systrom learned how to code while he was a student at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts.

    On the 2016 list of America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 was Systrom. As of September 2017, Instagram had 800 million monthly users and was experiencing rapid growth under Systrom’s leadership. On September 24, 2018, he handed in his notice as Instagram’s CEO.

    Mike Krieger

    Brazilian-American businessman and software engineer Miachel Krieger (born March 4, 1986) worked as Instagram’s CTO and co-founded the social media platform with Kevin Systrom.

    Krieger relocated to California in 2004 to attend Stanford University after being born in So Paulo, Brazil. He met Kevin Systrom while studying symbolic systems at Stanford. While Krieger was CTO, Instagram grew from a few million users to 1 billion active monthly users. Krieger and Systrom’s resignation from Instagram was announced on September 24, 2018.

    Instagram – Startup Story

    A recent Stanford University graduate, Kevin Systrom was employed by the travel advice business Nextstop in 2009. Systrom had previously interned at Odeo, a business that would ultimately become Twitter, and served as a corporate development associate at Google.

    While working at Nextstop, Systrom learnt to code on the side because he had no professional experience in computer science. In the end, he created a web app prototype named Burbn, which was influenced by his preference for premium whiskey and bourbon.

    Users of the Burbn app may check in, share their activities, and exchange pictures. Even while location-based check-in applications were relatively common at the time, Burbn’s photo-sharing function stood out.

    A pivotal moment occurred in March 2010, when Systrom went to a party for Hunch, a Silicon Valley-based business. Two venture investors from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz were introduced to Systrom at the event.

    They agreed to meet for coffee to continue their conversation after he demonstrated the app’s prototype to them. Systrom made the decision to leave his job and concentrate on Burbn after their initial encounter. Within two weeks, he had secured $500,000 in initial money for his business endeavour from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

    Systrom was able to begin recruiting a team to support his endeavour thanks to this initial investment; the first person to do so was 25-year-old Mike Krieger.

    After Krieger joined, the two reevaluated Burbn and chose to concentrate mostly on images acquired particularly with mobile devices. The Hipstamatic app caught the attention of Krieger and Systrom due to its popularity and intriguing features that could be applied to photos, such as filters.

    Systrom and Krieger recognised possibilities in creating an app that connected Hipstamatic and social media sites like Facebook because it lacked social media-sharing features.

    Burbn was reduced to only its photo, commenting, and “liking” features as a step backwards. They changed the name of their programme to Instagram at that moment, fusing the phrases “instant” and “telegram.” They also started concentrating on enhancing the photo-sharing process.

    The software was created with the idea of being simple and requiring as little user interaction as possible. They distributed the app to pals for beta testing and performance evaluation after eight weeks of finalising it. They brought the software to launch after fixing several bugs.

    Instagram – Name, Logo, and Tagline

    Burbn, a web application that served as the initial version of Instagram, was motivated by Kevin Systrom’s passion for premium bourbons and whiskeys.

    They refocused their app on photo-sharing, which had grown in popularity among its users, after realising that it was too similar to Foursquare. They gave it a new name—Instagram, a combination of the words “instant camera” and “telegram.”

    Instagram Logo
    Instagram Logo

    The contemporary curved square and circle continue to stand in for the vintage Polaroid camera as the logo of Instagram. This Instagram logo represents attentiveness, experiences, youth, and nostalgia.

    The slogan of Instagram is “Capture and Share the World’s Moments,” and that is exactly what it is all about.

    Instagram – Vision and Mission

    Instagram’s vision statement says, “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

    Instagram’s mission statement is, “to capture and share the world’s moments.”


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    Instagram – Features

    Instagram’s business structure is dependent on the variety of tools and features it provides, which include:

    • Stories – Using this tool, users may share films and photographs for a full day. The shared content vanishes after 24 hours. Using this capability, anyone may also go live.
    • Pictures – The primary function of Instagram is taking pictures and sharing them across many networks.
    • Videos – Instagram began as a simple photo-sharing software. Later, users were able to post films up to 60 seconds long.
    • Filters – Instagram users may edit their photographs using a variety of filters available on the platform.
    • Explore Tab – Instagram users may find anything and anything utilising the Explore tab. To find what they’re looking for, people can utilise hashtags and usernames. In addition, customers may just click the tab to view the featured material. Additionally, they may view recent activity from the persons they follow.
    • Instagram Direct – Instagram Direct enables users to speak with their followers while sharing photographs and videos. Requests for messages can also be sent to those who are not following you.

    Instagram – Business Model

    Instagram’s primary revenue sources include online advertising, Instagram shopping, and creator tools.

    Advertising

    Instagram’s oldest and main revenue source is digital advertising. Instagram freely displays advertisements across the stories, feed, Explore Tab, IGTV, and Reels. The advertisements are available in a variety of forms, including photos, videos, carousels, collections, and shopping advertising.

    Instagram Shopping

    Instagram originally introduced Shoppable posts at the tail end of 2016, allowing businesses to tag items in posts just the way users tag friends. Shoppable posts reduced friction in the purchasing process by assisting consumers in learning about and evaluating the purchase loop. However, they were routed to the brand’s website to complete the transaction.

    Instagram would receive a portion of the transaction in exchange for less friction and higher conversions, much like an affiliate.  Instagram expanded the functionality of Shoppable posts in March 2019 by enabling users to complete their purchases directly from the Instagram app, thereby decreasing the friction associated with the purchasing process. Instagram charges businesses a fee, just like the Shoppable posts feature.

    Creator’s Tool

    Content is the foundation of user participation and development, while creators are the vital element of content. Therefore, if an application relies on user-generated content, paying users to create content might encourage them to create more material and do so more frequently.

    In addition to sharing ad income, Instagram allows artists to earn money via badges, which fans can use to support a creator during a live broadcast.

    During a live stream, individuals who buy badges get a heart icon next to their name in the comments. During the live session, queries posed by users who have purchased badges are emphasised. Instagram doesn’t take a commission of the money earned through badge sales. Instead, creators get their whole share.

    Instagram – Acquisition By Facebook or Meta

    Facebook acquired Instagram in April 2012 for an extraordinary $1 billion amount. Instagram had only 25 million registered users at the time of the purchase, a meagre number when compared to Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users. Instagram was still expanding quickly. Additionally, Instagram was just two years old, operated by 13 people, and did not generate any profit.

    Even Twitter had tried its hand at pursuing Instagram before Facebook sealed the deal. But the founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger chose to continue working with Facebook since, in addition to the enormous monetary base, Zukerberg offered them independence.

    In exchange for accepting Facebook’s offer to buy it, Instagram would be given the freedom to continue operating as an independent business in addition to avoiding the Facebook threat and gaining access to Facebook’s engineering resources. The independence would soon fade, though, and was a major factor in both of the founders of Instagram leaving Facebook.

    Instagram’s growth path to 1 billion+ monthly active users is intertwined with the gradual loss of founders’ freedom.


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    Instagram – Funding, and Investors

    Date Round Amount Lead Investors
    Apr 5, 2012 Series B $50M Sequoia Capital
    Feb 2, 2011 Series A $7M Benchmark
    Oct 6, 2010 Seed Round $500K

    Instagram – Acquisitions

    Acquiree Name About Acquiree Date Amount
    Luma.io Luma (formerly Midnox) allows you to record and share beautiful HD videos with real-time video stabilization, filters and zoom. Aug 23, 2013

    Instagram – Competitors

    Top competitors of Instagram are :

    • Twitter
    • Snapchat
    • Pinterest
    • WhatsApp
    • Quora
    • Tiktok
    • Vine
    • Triller

    Instagram – Future Plans

    Instagram wants to put more emphasis on reels and videos, freedom and power. The photo-sharing app wants to provide Better features for shopping. The app is focusing on technology that completes search that goes beyond usernames and hashtags and put emphasis on Instagram is maintained. The app is also planning on additions to the AR filters for Instagram stories.

    Instagram – FAQs

    Who is the founder of Instagram?

    Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram in 2010.

    What is the revenue of Instagram?

    Instagram generated an estimated revenue of $47.6 billion in 2021.

    When was Instagram acquired by Facebook?

    In April 2012, Facebook Inc. acquired Instagram for approximately $1 billion.

    What is the valuation of Instagram?

    Instagram is estimated to be valued at over $100 billion.

  • AAIBA Design – Creative Solutions for Businesses to Build Their 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 AAIBA Design.

    Design industry is the most emerging industry in the world in the digital world. Creative design and arts play a crucial role in advertising industry, public relation, and marketing companies. Creative designs and visuals help in creating great impact on the audience and thereby helps in brand communication. Creative visuals, beautiful designs have an excellent ability to translate your brand to public. AAIBA Design Private Limited is a brand design agency that provides advertising services and helps your brand to communicate creatively to the public.

    Read the startup story of AAIBA Design, its founder, offered services, and more about it.

    AAIBA Design – Company Highlights

    Startup Name AAIBA Design
    Headquarters Mumbai
    Industry Brand Design and Brand Consultancy Agency
    Founder Saurabh Chandekar and Rasika Chandekar
    Founded 2013
    Instagram Page aaibadesign

    AAIBA Design – About
    AAIBA Design – Founder and Team
    AAIBA Design – The Idea and Startup Story
    AAIBA Design – Name and Logo
    AAIBA Design – Services
    AAIBA Design – Business Model
    AAIBA Design – Revenue Model
    AAIBA Design – Customer Acquisition
    AAIBA Design – Achievements
    AAIBA Design – Work Culture
    AAIBA Design – Competitors
    AAIBA Design – Tools Used in the Company
    AAIBA Design – Advisors and Mentors
    AAIBA Design – Awards and Recognitions
    AAIBA Design – Future Plans

    AAIBA Design – About

    As the name ‘AAIBA’ suggests, they give their client’s communication the right voice it needs. They are very passionate about what they do and the kind of communication they build around it. They help guide their clients through the advertising world offering expert insights on the market, quality, the estimated budget, etc. They ensure that the client benefits from the association and solutions they provide.

    AAIBA Design – Founder and Team

    Saurabh Chandekar – Co-Founder of AAIBA Design

    Saurabh Chandekar and Rasika Chandekar are the co-founders of AAIBA Design. The shares of the company are distributed 50-50 between the co-founders.

    Saurabh Chandekar is the Creative Director/ Aaiba Design private limited. He has completed his graduation from Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalay, Pune. He was born into an art driven family. His father, Late Mr. Sadanand Chandekar was a famous stand-up comedian of his time. It is only right to say that art has always been in his DNA and has always been something that excited him right from the very beginning. His love for art made me choose advertising as a career.

    They are a team of 20  people and the majority of the team consists of women which further makes the workplace more empowering.

    AAIBA Design – The Idea and Startup Story

    Saurabh started his career working at advertising agencies. Working with corporate helped him hone his advertising skills for which he also won a lot of accolades. This helped him gain the confidence to start his own agency. It was easier to win the trust of the clients with the credentials he had with his previous work experience and he knew, he could do much more with his own brand. Hence, AAIBA was born in 2015 and he was able to put his passion and skills to best use and serve its clients with the best advertising and creative solutions.

    AAIBA Design Logo
    AAIBA Design Logo

    They haven’t illustrated too much into the making of the logo, it is simply an ode to the founder’s Aai and Baba, his inspirations and pillars of strength. Hence the name, AAIBA.

    AAIBA Design – Services

    They offer a variety of services in their advertising agency. Research and Analysis are our strong points. They make sure that every solution offered to each client is customized according to their brand’s needs. They offer deep-rooted insights, psychological aspects are taken into consideration and then they walk their clients through the process offering consultations that could help their brand further.

    AAIBA Design – Business Model

    AAIBA Design provides all kinds of design services to its clients right from the crafting of their company name to designing their first logo to positioning the brand in the market, they explore all kinds of value additions in terms of manufacturing, vendor management, etc. They are a design consultancy company that provides the best solutions for all our clients.

    AAIBA Design – Revenue Model

    They are not a manufacturing unit selling a tangible product, they are a service company with a revenue model fluctuating and changing all the time. The cost of IPs ( Intellectual Properties) run the whole show. There is no fixed cost involved because there is no specific rate card for the services they offer since services differ according to the project. They are a bootstrapped business. Bootstrapping is the best business model one can opt for because it is easier to drive a company without the involvement of investors. It is easier to have things play out the way you want and thus do justice to your visions and goals.


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    AAIBA Design – Customer Acquisition

    One of the highlights of AAIBA design is that they never had to hire a marketing manager or business developer to promote their business. They believe that credibility plays an important role in acquiring customers. The more real you are the better. They ensure that they put their best foot forward and deliver the best services. It is important to be genuine and consistent with clients throughout the time together. Perseverance and sincerity is the key to success.

    When AAIBA Design first started they had only 3 accounts and fast forward to today they cater to 35 clients. It is not an easy task to start an agency, especially a creative one which has immeasurable parameters to consider. It is a vague process but it is not rocket science. Getting the confidence of your clients and being genuine in what you do is what keeps the business running and growing. Basically, you are selling your soul but in a good way.

    AAIBA Design – Achievements

    AAIBA Design FOOD FESTIVAL
    AAIBA Design FOOD FESTIVAL

    Some recognition attained by AAIBA Design are:

    • They are working on one of TOP 3 clients in the world – Capapie Sports, they are a sports equipment brand for shooters participating in various world games.
    • They also executed notable campaigns for D’lecta Foods – FETA Cheese range. The consumer communication carried out was aiming to introduce the audience to a new category of cheese i.e the FETA cheese or the healthier cheese. A cheese specific to salads, the campaign ‘ The Perfect Salad Cheese’ promoted the range through various retail store promotions, print promotions, social media, etc. For social media, the AAIBA team came up with original healthy recipes for the audience. The team leaned towards highlighting the nutritional facts of the products as opposed to typical ‘delicious cheese’ appeal that is used.
    • One of the highlights of my career was conducting this art exhibition in Mumbai, earlier this year, which was inaugurated by Aaditya Thackeray – #MumbaiInFrames.  It was so well received by the audience and definitely something I am very proud of.
    • In 2020, AAIBA was felicitated with the  Grand Jury Award at NYX Marcom Awards. We designed a campaign for the Isuzu X Food Festival bringing local hidden flavours and rare delicacies from different regions under one roof, taking guests on one of a kind food adventure. As a visual language, the illustrated versions of food were derived so as to create interest around the food. The colours and style of the illustrations were designed to take the audience closer to the regional culture. The entire illustrated campaign was conceived as a mood setter for the festival.
    AAIBA Design FOOD FESTIVAL - STUDIO NYX AWARD-08
    AAIBA Design FOOD FESTIVAL – STUDIO NYX AWARD-08

    AAIBA Design – Work Culture

    AAIBA is a family with no hierarchy in the company. They do not encourage toxicity at the workplace and Saurabh Chandekar himself makes it a point to stay connected with employees at the family level. They have always promoted a friendly atmosphere in the company.

    They are always looking to empower the workplace by hiring more and more talented individuals and making the workplace more comfortable which is why there is no hierarchy present in the organization. This gives individuals room to grow and bring in their best creative selves.

    AAIBA Design – Competitors

    Many colleagues and friends of founder are working in the same industry but he have never seen them as competitions nor has he ever been threatened by their work. It is imperative to have so much faith in yourself that you shouldn’t be distracted by others’ success and that’s what AAIBA Design abide by.


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    AAIBA Design – Tools Used in the Company

    Some tools AAIBA Design uses are:

    • Illustrator
    • Photoshop

    AAIBA Design – Advisors and Mentors

    Saurabh Chandekar considers his Aai and baba as the primary mentors, personally and professionally. In the Advertising world, he have always looked up to Ex Ogilvy NCD, Nipun Salvi and  sir, Piyush Pandey, Ogilvy.

    AAIBA Design – Awards and Recognitions

    In the year 2013, AAIBA Design won the prestigious ‘Cannes 2013’ for the Lifebuoy Roti Campaigns.

    Awards won by AAIBA Design are:

    • AFAQS Foxglove 2019 – Best social media campaign
    • AFAQS Foxglove 2017 – Best print campaign – Silver
    • INDI POOL Magazine Nominated amongst India’s top 3 Best Graphic Design Studios
    • IDA Design – Los Angeles – International award for poster design category – Bronze Metal
    • AFAQS Foxglove 2018 – Best print campaign – Silver Meta
    • AFAQS Foxglove 2018 – Best non traditional media campaign – Gold Metal
    • Design Thinking Conclave 2018 – Best design thinking organisation.

    AAIBA Design – Future Plans

    In the next 5 years, they plan to take ‘AAIBA’ overseas and expand globally. Going global and offering their services to international clients has been our mission for the longest time and fulfilling that would certainly be a dream come true for me just like any other entrepreneur.

    FAQs

    When was AAIBA Design founded?

    AAIBA Design was founded in 2013 in Mumbai.

    Who is the founder of AAIBA Design?

    Saurabh Chandekar and Rasika Chandekar are the founders of AAIBA Design.

    What does AAIBA Design do?

    AAIBA Design is a Mumbai based design studio that provides solutions for advertising and brand communication strategy & design.

  • WhiteHat Jr – Success Story of the Byju’s-owned Coding Startup

    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 WhiteHat Jr.

    Coding, as we know, is the language of computers.

    The world has changed today for good and coding drove a significant part of the change. From a set of instructions to the machines called computers, coding has now turned into something familiar, a language that is similar to the other languages we can speak or write, one of our native languages.

    Technology, computers, and coding sprawl along such a large and significant part of the human civilization that we simply cannot imagine us living without our dear machines.

    Nowadays, we not only use coding to make the computers understand what we think but with it, we innovate, invent and demystify the world of riddles we are living in!

    If coding interests you, then there is WhiteHat Jr. It simply reveres coding.

    WhiteHat Jr. is an online coding platform specially designed for kids between the age group of 6 to 14 years. The company also extends numerous trials for its students for free app design. With WhiteHat Jr, kids can now sit back at their homes comfortably and learn from the demo classes. WhiteHat Jr was acquired by Byju’s in August of 2020, but even after that, the company has been operating as an independent entity.

    Let’s go through the WhiteHat Jr. success story and know about the Whitehatjr, its founders, Whitehat Jr fees, competitors, revenue, business model, funding & more here in this article.

    WhiteHat Jr – Company Highlights

    Company Name WhiteHat Jr
    Headquarters Andheri, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
    Sector EdTech
    Founder Karan Bajaj
    Founded 2018
    Total Funding $387.3 million
    Revenue $63.39 million (INR 483.9 crore in FY21)
    Parent Organization BYJU’S
    Website whitehatjr.com

    WhiteHat Jr – About
    WhiteHat Jr – Startup Story
    WhiteHat Jr – Mission and Vision
    WhiteHat Jr – Founder And Team
    WhiteHat Jr – Name, Tagline and Logo
    WhiteHat Jr – Business Model
    WhiteHat Jr – Revenue Model
    WhiteHat Jr – Funding And Investors
    WhiteHat Jr – Growth and Revenue
    WhiteHat Jr – Partnerships
    WhiteHat Jr – Advertisements and Campaigns
    WhiteHat Jr – Challenges and Controversies
    WhiteHat Jr – Competitors
    WhiteHat Jr – Future Plans

    WhiteHat Jr – About

    WhiteHat Jr is the leading computer programming learning website for kids to code. It is a platform that connects kids with the top coding teachers. The fundamentals of coding reasoning, algorithmic and structure thinking are taught to the kids for creative outputs at WhiteHat Jr.

    WhiteHat Jr – Startup Story

    Though WhiteHat Jr was there as a company it got known to almost all of us when its present parent company, BYJU’S acquired it for $300 million in an all-cash deal on August 5, 2020.

    Moving to the startup story of the brand, WhiteHat Jr. Founder and Former CEO, Karan Bajaj, traced the foundation of WhiteHat Jr. to one of his deeply personal experiences with which he wanted to bring a change to the world.

    Bajaj was a father of two daughters back then, and he felt that technology, truly, is bringing paradigm shifts in every possible industry, and therefore, his daughters also need to rein in the power of technology to absorb the upcoming shifts in their workplaces and their lives. Therefore, he wanted his daughters to be always at the centre of creating technology and coding. Besides, he also went through research that claim that if kids are used to coding from an early age, they tend more experimentative and creative. All of these factors worked at the back of Bajaj’s mind and propelled him to create an organization that will act as an institution for coding for children and adults.

    Karan had MIT and TUFTS in his mind but founding one such organization was certainly difficult, with his passion and dedication, he finally founded WhiteHat Jr in 2018

    This company was founded in 2018 by the former Discovery Networks CEO (Karan Bajaj). This platform was planned to empower children. When Karan approached the investors to raise funding for his brand, they were surprised as he was pitching without a working product. Then, he explained to them that the investment thesis had already changed since 2015.

    WhiteHat Jr – Mission and Vision

    The mission and vision of WhiteHat Jr are to “empower a whole generation to become creators versus consumers of technology.”

    WhiteHat Jr – Founder And Team

    Karan Bajaj is the founder of the company WhiteHat Jr. and had also been the CEO of the company before announcing his resignation on August 4, 2021. He also led Byju’s Future School, a key element of the company’s international expansion for a year, after WhiteHat Jr. was acquired by the Edtech giant, Byju’s on August 5, 2020. Bajaj had served as the CEO of Discovery Networks India before he stepped down in 2018 to fully focus on WhiteHat Jr., which he founded in the same year.

    Aside from his professional career associated with his company, he is also a renowned Indian author, whose first two novels, Keep Off the Grass (2008) and Johnny Gone Down (2010), have been best-sellers.

    Bajaj initially got a BE degree in Mechanical Engineering from The Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra and then went on to pursue an MBA in Marketing from The Indian Institute of Management(IIM), Bangalore. He started off his corporate career with The Procter and Gamble Company, where he served as an Assistant Brand Manager. He assumed various leading positions in a range of distinguished companies including Ariel India, Herbal Essences, Kraft Foods, Boston Consulting Group, and more before he founded WhiteHat Jr. in 2018.

    Karan Bajaj was born in 1979 in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, and spent various stages of his childhood in different places, owing to his father’s transferable job.

    Karan Bajaj, CEO, WhiteHat Jr
    Karan Bajaj, CEO, WhiteHat Jr

    Karan Bajaj quit WhiteHat Jr. on August 4, 2021. The founder and CEO of WhiteHat Jr., has made way for Trupti Mukker to take his position. Trupti had served successfully as the head of the customer experience and delivery in BYJU’S and is declared the CEO of the company.

    After the acquisition of WhiteHat Jr. by Byju’s in 2020, Bajaj continued to be the CEO of the company and resigned exactly after 1 year.

    The company founder and ex-CEO Karan Bajaj previously mentioned that the company had 400 employees and 1,500 teachers in 2020 and disclosed the company’s plans to double its employees and teachers.

    “Your Own Personal Teacher Live, Online Classes” is the tagline of the company.

    WhiteHat Jr - Logo
    WhiteHat Jr – Logo

    WhiteHat Jr – Business Model

    The business model of the company is particularly based on teaching coding to young kids. The Edtech startup has now extended the students’ grades and is now accepting students from grades 1st to 12th grade. The company targets children and guardians to offer various programming courses for a better future in this digital environment. The teaching format of WhiteHat Jr. is live 1:1 online classes. Furthermore, the company also offers free trial classes.


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    WhiteHat Jr – Revenue Model

    WhiteHat Jr’s portal has got more than 700,000 registrations and around 7000 classes are conducted daily routine for kids. Each class conducted costs around INR 600 to 700. There are different course levels, which are priced at Rs 5,999, Rs 29,999, Rs 89,999 and many more. The student resurrection rate for the paid classes is around 75%. Suddenly, the refund fee has become 3% which is very low for an Indian Edtech company.

    WhiteHat Jr – Funding And Investors

    The company has raised a total amount of $387.3 million in funding over the 3 funding rounds it has seen.

    Date Transaction Name Money Raised Lead Investors
    August 3, 2021 $376 million Byju’s
    September 9, 2019 Series A $10 million Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network
    April 16, 2019 Seed Round $1.21 million Nexus Venture Partners, Omidyar Network

    The company is funded by 3 investors. Byju’s infused $376 million in its latest towards its acquiree on August 3, 2021.

    WhiteHat Jr – Growth and Revenue

    Before the lockdown began, WhiteHat Jr. went from Rs 1 crore to Rs 10 crores in revenue. Since the lockdown, the value started doubling. When BYJU’s approached in June, the revenue of the company was running at $75 million. The revenue run rate was reported at $150 million as soon as the acquisition was completed. Then, in August, the first month after the acquisition, the rate was again reported to be $220 million. The revenue of the company has surely seen quite a growth over the years. The company had listed revenue of INR 19 crore from its operations in FY20, which stood at only INR 6.7 lakh in FY19.

    Byju’s had owned WhiteHat Jr. in a deal worth $300 mn in August 2020, which made FY21 a special year for WhiteHat Jr. Apart from the Byju’s acquisition of WhiteHat, the startup also witnessed a surge in its revenue under the ed-tech juggernaut.

    WhiteHat Jr. Revenue Breakdown

    The revenue from operations in FY21 was recorded to have surged by 25.5X to be INR 483.9 crore. Around 99% of its revenue came from the course fee it charges from the students, which increased 25X from INR 478.3 crore during FY21 from INR 19 crore in the previous fiscal. Apart from that, WhiteHat Jr. obtained INR 3.36 cr in revenue from the sale of goods or course materials that it offers students whereas another INR 2.27 cr in income was received from other operating revenues. Also, WhiteHat Jr. received INR 74 lakh as interest income.

    WhiteHat Jr. Revenue Verticals FY21 FY20
    Course Fee INR 478.34 cr INR 19.01 cr
    Sale of Goods INR 3.36 cr
    Other Operating Revenue INR 2.27 cr

    WhiteHat Jr. Expenses Breakdown

    WhiteHat Jr.’s expenses also surged along with its scale, which witnessed a 31X increase to INR 2175.2 cr in FY21 from INR 69.7 cr in FY20. Looking at the expense verticals, the company lost quite some money to arrange for the employee benefits, which contributed 42.9% of the total WhiteHat Jr. expenditure during FY21.  The costs for the employee benefits witnessed a 27X rise from INR 33.5 crore to INR 932.4 crore. The costs for the advertising and promotions of the company rose by 43.6X to INR 891 crore from INR 20.42 crore. Nearly all of its expenses verticals saw a rise including support services, IT and communication costs, legal, professional, and recruitment fees, and more. Here’s a brief look at the expense breakdown of WhiteHat Jr:

    WhiteHat Jr. Expense Verticals FY21 FY20
    Employee Benefit Expenses INR 932.37 cr INR 33.50 cr
    Advertising and Promotional Expenses INR 890.93 cr INR 20.42 cr
    Support Service INR 110.54 cr INR 2.28 cr
    IT and Communication Expenses INR 81.39 cr INR 2.69 cr
    Legal and Professional Fees INR 44.23 cr INR 3.80 cr
    Recruitment Expenses INR 39.76 cr INR 2.71 cr
    Other Operating and Admin Expenses INR 75.98 cr INR 4.30 cr

    WhiteHat Jr. Financials

    Looking at the overall financials of WhiteHat Jr. in FY21, the company operating revenues surged by 25.5X, and its total expenses jumped by around 31X, which made the losses jump too. The annual losses of WhiteHat Jr. soared by 34.5X from INR 48.95 crore to INR 1690.5 crore. The unit economics of the company states that WhiteHat Jr. had spent INR 4.49 to earn a single rupee of revenue in FY21. The EBITDA margins of the company worsened too, which was recorded at -338.31% in FY20 and became -235.17% in FY21.

    WhiteHat Jr. Financials FY20-FY21 Comparison
    WhiteHat Jr. Financials FY20-FY21 Comparison

    WhiteHat Jr – Partnerships

    WhiteHat Jr has witnessed a number of partnerships throughout the years of its existence. Here’s a review of some of the most noteworthy collaborations of the company:

    • WhiteHat Jr. partnered with software giant Microsoft to offer a “Code with Minecraft” course for the students on December 23, 2021. This association of Microsoft and WhiteHat will ensure that the students master important coding concepts with the help of a highly curated curriculum based on Minecraft.
    • WhiteHat Jr. collaborated with FutureSkills Prime, which is a combined initiative for digital skilling of students by Nasscom and the Electronics and IT Ministry on September 2, 2021.
    • The company, in partnership with 500+ schools, declared on 3rd August 2021, that it would extend the coding curriculum to the students, the number of whom are expected to be around more than 1.25 lakh.

    WhiteHat Jr – Advertisements and Campaigns

    WhiteHat Jr has been quite infamous in terms of the advertisements it has encouraged all the while since it came into being. The advertisements of the Byju’s-owned startup were allegedly based on imaginary kids and their unreal geniuses after they attain WhiteHat Junior’s academic programs. For example, in one of its advertisements, a 7-year-old has been projected as an app developer and a TedX speaker. This has largely been condemned by all including the ASCI, who had processed around 15 ads from WhiteHat Jr and has identified that 5 of these ads are in potential violation of the ASCI Code, which eventually led to the pulling off of such ads.

    Furthermore, there also have been numerous aggressive claims of Whithat Jr via its social media platform. However, when they came on the radar of ASCI, they were already very old and most of them were already taken off. However, ever since BYJU’S acquired WhiteHat Jr, Byju Raveendran himself has ensured that the advertisement and the messaging of the brand would be proper and would address the mass as well as the kids properly.

    Refreshing its promotional efforts, Whitehat Jr. has seen to be concentrating on the real kids and the real apps they are capable of building. The campaigns that WhiteHat Jr launched under #RealKidsOfWHJr and #YoungAchieversOfWHJr focused on the real-world applications of coding featured by real kids. The coding platform that was acquired by Edech giant Byju’s also demonstrated a change in its social media activities, where Whitehat Jr now started posting the feats of real children. Furthermore, Whitehat Junior also collaborated with multiple celebrities including Hrithik Roshan, Mahesh Babu and R Madhavan after its Coding Seekho Duniya Badlo campaign went live on TV in the first week of November 2020.

    The latest advertisement that Whitehat Junior launched featured Hrithik Roshan. Promoted as #PickItUp, the popular Bollywood actor was seen picking up the guitar. This Whitehat Jr ad is designed to wipe off the notion that age is a bar along with encouraging the students and others to choose music classes from Whitehat Jr and make music.

    #PickItUp Campaign

    WhiteHat Jr – Challenges and Controversies

    WhiteHat Jr has seen its fair share of challenges since it was founded, which were associated with the scaling and growth of the company. WhiteHat Jr came under the radar of the Advertising Standard Council of India (ASCI) after the startup made false claims of imaginary kids who learned coding from WhiteHat Jr and landed jobs at Google and other organizations, became TedX speakers, and more. WhiteHat Jr also sued Pradeep Poonia, who shared posts against Whitehatjr.

    Pradeep Poonia Defamation Case

    Pradeep Poonia claimed that WhiteHat Jr.’s advertisements are all false and based on imaginary characters like Wolf Gupta, who the company has shown landing a job at Google after learning to code from the Karan Bajaj-led startup then. Poonia also referred to the startup’s instructors as “uneducated” and “housewives”. Though the company later had to remove the advertisements involving Wolf, WhiteHat Jr. filed a defamation case worth Rs 20 crore against Poonia’s statements and later withdrew the same. In the last court hearing, the court prevented Pradeep Poonia from:

    • Telecasting and transmitting any information received by hacking the servers of WhiteHat Jr.
    • Helping others take down the content of WhiteHat Jr.
    • Using his social media handle WhiteHat Sr. on Youtube
    • Using the URLs using the name “WhiteHat”
    • Keeping the tweets posted on September 12, 2020, that contains defamatory comments on WhiteHat Jr.
    • Keeping the tweets posted on September 5, 2020, where Poonia has called WhiteHat Jr.’s business a “pyramid scheme” and other tweets he shared in September and October of 2020

    In another case, the company also filed a defamation suit against Dr Aniruddha Malpani. All of these had already cost the company much in terms of its revenue and reputation.

    Employees’ Resignation

    More than 800 employees dropped their resignation letters in around 60 days’ time after the company asked them to join work from the office within a month. Employees from across teams including the coding, sales and math department resigned from the office after being asked to join offices from their respective locations. On March 18, 2022, WhiteHat Jr. sent an email informing them to join their offices within April 18, 2022, which is why the employees have voluntarily put down their papers. Employees termed this decision of the company as a cost-cutting exercise.

    Yes, it surely can be a method of cutting costs where we have already seen the bad market conditions that the ed-tech companies are dealing with. Unacademy and Vedantu, two other unicorns from the ed-tech space together have already laid off close to 1200 employees. Lido Learning is another ed-tech company that has laid off around 150 employees recently.

    WhiteHat Jr. Layoffs

    Byju’s-owned WhiteHat Jr. has laid off somewhere close to 300 employees in its recent batch of layoffs, as confirmed on June 29, 2022. The layoff exercise, which went through the whole of the 3rd week of June has led to the trimming of the WhiteHat Jr. workforce that was engaged in code-teaching and the sales team of WhiteHat, where some of them even worked in Brazil. The sales, operations and marketing team was mainly affected by this round of job cuts. Reports claim that the total count of laid-off employees can also go as high as 600. Business restructuring is sighted as the reason behind these layoffs. The laid-off employees were asked to submit their office laptops and IDs on the same day, as the reports went.

    The edtech sector, importantly, has been hammered lately by the layoffs in the post-Covid-19 period. The Covid-19 period, however, has seen problems like the Great Resignation. Apart from the edtech companies of India and various other companies and startups laying off their employees in huge chunks fearing a funding winter in the country, many other companies, which feature among the top companies of the world, have also pronounced their layoffs in 2022.  


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    WhiteHat Jr – Competitors

    The top competitors of WhiteHat Jr are Coding Blocks, Coding with Kids and Camp K12.

    Coding Blocks Pvt Ltd

    It is the top #2 competitor of WhiteHat Jr. The company is headquartered in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 2014. It operates in the Educational Technology industry.

    Coding with Kids

    It is also one of the competitors of WhiteHat Jr. The company is headquartered in Redmond, WA. It was founded in 2013. It conducts classes and camps for kids between the age of 5 to 18.

    K12

    It is the top #3 competitor of WhiteHat Jr. Headquartered in the US, K12 was founded in April 2000. It is a company that offers online schooling and curricula. It is an organization that provides education designed for the people searching for it online.


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    WhiteHat Jr – Future Plans

    The company is currently ramping up its women-only teacher base in India. Presently, the platform is having over 7000 educators and is actively recruiting teachers for all its core disciplines and music from all around the country. The company is eyeing to make its teacher-base to 20,000 shortly. The continuous ramp-up base is aiming towards matching the growing base of students across countries like India, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the UK.

    FAQs

    Who founded WhiteHat Jr?

    Karan Bajaj founded WhiteHat Jr., who was also the CEO of the company before he resigned on August 4, 2021. He is an Indian author and technology entrepreneur.

    What is WhiteHat Jr Business Model?

    The business model of the company is on teaching coding to young kids. The Edtech startup has now extended the students grades to 12th from grade 1. The company targets children and guardians to offer various programming courses for a better future in this digital environment. The teaching format is a live 1:1 online class. It also offers free trial classes.

    Who are the Top Competitors of WhiteHat Jr?

    The top competitors of WhiteHat Jr are Coding Blocks, Coding with Kids, and Camp K12.

    How much is WhiteHat Jr Revenue?

    WhiteHat Jr. recorded a revenue of $63.39 mn in FY21.

    What are Whitehat Jr fees?

    The WhiteHat Jr. fees start from around Rs 6500 only and go up. The Whitehat Jr fees per month depend on the duration and the complexity of the course it offers.

    What are Whitehat jr free courses?

    Whitehat Jr has free/trial classes that give the students an opportunity to test the kind of classes/lectures they receive before going for WhiteHat Junior.