Early Stage funding comes full circle

This year saw an unprecedented early-stage funding boom but as investors pull back, many

fledgling ventures are either folding up or getting acquired. Given the discernible slowdown in financing over the past few months, it’s time for young companies to start prizing profits over scale and growth

Back in June, Sumit Mehta (name changed) quit a cushy job at a tech firm in Singapore, decided to return to India, and start a consumer internet company. With personal funds, Mehta and his co-founders hired a core team and began pitching to investors to raise $2 million in seed money. It's been four months since, but he hasn't found any backers. This is in stark contrast to how quickly startups were able to shore up capital at never-seen-before valuations just a few months ago. Over the past year, ventures some of which were not even incorporated as companies, scored $3-5 million as investors took early bets in search of the next unicorn - those billion dollar valued companies which are not so mythical anymore.
But it's decidedly different now. "Seed funding materializes only if the investors can see a path to series B and further. Given that our business model is untested in India, and is inventory-led, investors have been wary and our financing plan has hit a roadblock. Perhaps, it's time to go back to the job market," says Mehta.

Raising funds was never so easy

The number of seed and early-stage deals exploded in the first part of this year as valuations of these fledgling companies ratcheted up without any significant business to show. Aggressive fund-raising ability of founders was greatly valued as they went from one round to another in no time. According to startup data collector Tracxn, seed rounds were up almost 90%, while Series A rounds jumped 100% this year compared to 2014. "Traditionally, it used to take weeks and often months to raise a seed or Series A round. However, in mid-2015, when early stage funding boomed driven by easy availability of low cost capital, we saw some of these rounds being done in a matter of days. Some companies got a series A term sheet from investors even before their seed round was closed. There was never a better time to start up. But the reality is that building a real business was and will always remain extremely hard," says Tarun Davda, MD at Matrix Partners India, a VC fund that has backed companies like Ola, Quikr, Practo among others.

What happened in the past year is that many VC funds took dozens of bets in the range of $1-2 million, not wanting to miss out on businesses that could potentially become unicorns. Aiding them was an upcoming cohort of entrepreneur-turned-angel investors who seeded a big chunk of early-stage companies.

Seeing a burst of activity in late-stage investments in their portfolio companies, investors became more confident of their ability to pick winners. Entrepreneurs did their part too, by shopping for deals and using funds to lock out competitors. Besides pure play VCs, New York-based investment firm Tiger Global doubled down on Series A rounds, which further heated up the market. Says Mukul Singhal at SAIF Partners, one of the most prolific seed investors in India, "We'll keep doing these early investments but the pace will slow down now. We have to be conscious that the next round of financing may be tough to come by. In the last one-and-a-half years, we did 17 seed deals - out of this 10 raised a next round of capital; four got sold off and three are work-in-progress. We are fairly satisfied with this. However, the right ratio should be judged in the three-four year time frame and across business cycles." Three of SAIF's portfolio ventures — food delivery app Spoonjoy, deals and discovery platform Niffler and healthcare venture Qikwell — were sold recently.

Series B & beyond hardest to raise

With a prodigious amount of Series A funded companies in the market, investors now had a much larger pool of companies to pick from for later rounds. VCs say doing a Series B round is still the hardest since this is the first stage where the funding is done on the basis of performance and not just promise. Says Sahil Barua, co-founder & CEO of e-commerce logistics firm Delhivery, "The age of having 150 startups doing the same thing is over. Which means that really poor businesses with a million dollars in funding have hit the end of the road. Strategies will converge to the best assets in an industry and attempt to invest in them. Many others will die."

Delhivery has been active in picking stakes in newer startups in the delivery space like Parcelled and Opinio. Other well-funded internet companies like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Practo, Paytm, Quikr, Grofers, among others have also been aggressively acquiring or taking strategic positions in smaller startups. Many of these deals are acqui-hires, done largely to pick up teams, with no cash or equity being exchanged, and only stocks given to people who come on board. Investors typically do not clock any returns on these acqui-hires.

Consolidation in overcrowded sectors

Food tech, hyperlocal and on-demand services saw a deluge of early investments this year and this is where the first wave of consolidation is taking place. "If many companies operate in the same space, you will see a lot of smaller-sized funding happen as people start taking bets on the space itself," says Albinder Dhindsa, cofounder & CEO of express delivery firm Grofers. The food ordering and delivery market became the hottest category for VCs in the past year. However, with growing cash burn due to high user acquisition costs and operational bottlenecks, it's seen a major cooling off in the past few months. Even the larger players like Zomato, Foodpanda, and TinyOwl have found the going tough.

"Consolidation is a good thing as it puts more smart people into the same company and they get a real shot at becoming big businesses. In the short term though, it might seem brutal — but investors understand that when they invest in these high risk ventures," Dhindsa says. Grofers recently acqui-hired SpoonJoy and Townrush, a delivery startup.

While the fund crunch is palpable at early stages, even later rounds haven't been coming easy for the bigger players. E-commerce majors like Flipkart and Snapdeal raised a single round of financing this year unlike last year which saw them shore up billions in funds across multiple rounds.

Valuations of these more mature companies will further get muted as growth fizzles out and investors become chary. "With late-stage deal activity also slowing down, investors are not willing to back many new companies. The key remains to stay lean and carefully use the money you raised to acquire real customers," says Davda.

(Times of India 30-Oct-2015)

Flipkart Sells 500,000 handsets in 10 Hours

E-commerce major Flipkart today said it has sold half a million mobile handsets within 10 hours as part of its The Big Billion Days sale.“This sets a record for the highest number of mobile phones sold in India in a short period of ten hours in any platform, either online or offline,” Flipkart said in a statement.Flipkart’s Big Billion Days festive sale started on October 13 and will end on October 17. The sale of mobile phones opened on midnight last night.While metros like Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai led in terms of the sales, Flipkart said it saw a huge surge of interest from tier II cities with Nagpur, Indore, Coimbatore, Vishakhapatnam and Jaipur leading in sales.The Bengaluru-based firm said the platform also saw huge sales of 4G-enabled devices.“75 per cent of the phones sold during the ten hours period were 4G phones,” it added.“It has been a blockbuster beginning for our mobile category sale. The half a million mobile handsets sale record is truly a testament to the growing demand for smartphones in India,” Mukesh Bansal, Head of Commerce Platform, Flipkart said.

On the first day of sale, Flipkart had sold 10 lakh products in the first 10 hours with six million visits from across the nation and 25 items sold per second.“Bengaluru, Delhi and Chennai have emerged as the chart toppers in terms of visits from metro cities, and Ludhiana, Lucknow and Bhopal from the non-metro cities,” Flipkart said had in a statement.

Flipkart offers over 30 million products across more than 70 categories, including books, media, consumer electronics and lifestyle.The company employs 33,000 people, has 50 million registered users clocking over 10 million daily visits and enables delivery of over eight million shipments a month.

(http://indianbizparty.com/news/)

India emerges as the third-biggest start-up market worldwide, with 4200 startups; attract $5 bn in 2015

India’s technology start-up landscape, which has seen phenomenal growth this year, has resulted in the country moving up to the third position globally in terms of  investments secured and number of start-ups. The total funding attracted by Indian  start-ups is estimated to grow by 125% to $4.9 billion in 2015 as compared to $2.2 billion last year. India overtakes Israel as third-biggest start-up market in the world, just behind US and UK, stated a report prepared jointly by Nasscom and consulting firm Zinnov. The number of start-ups in the country will cross the 4,200 mark, a growth of 40% by the end of 2015,  said R Chandrashekhar, president, Nasscom, on Tuesday while releasing the report. Cumulative funding between 2010 and 2014 was just $3.2 billion, showing how significant this year has been for the start-up scene in India.

“India is the youngest start-up nation in the world as 72% of the founders are less than 35 years old. There has been a 50% rise in share of  female entrepreneurs in 2015 over 2014. Overall, 9% of all start-ups are founded by female founders and co-founders. Nasscom has been partnering with the governments for start-up warehouses to create a micro-ecosystem where starts-ups and entrepreneurs can work together,” said Ravi Gururaj, chairman, Nasscom Product Council. NCR, Bengaluru and Mumbai account for over 93% of the total investments, and 66% of all starts-ups are concentrated in these three cities. Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Jaipur and Ahmedabad are the major upcoming start-up locations.

In 2015 alone, around 1,200 new starts-ups have been set up and a majority of them are B2C, primarily present in three segments such as e-commerce, consumer services and aggregators. The report has highlighted that there has been a 2.3x growth in number of active investors, growing digital consumer base, mobile first population, improving political environment and high interest from global investors. Global investors are betting big on the India market with Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Softbank, Warburg Pincus and Alibaba being the top investors, participating in deals worth over $500 million. Investors have access to more exit opportunities with more than 65 M&A deals in 2015, worth close to $800 million.

While overall VC/PE funding has grown by 2.2x over 2014, seed stage funding has grown by an incredible 6.5x. This year more than 390 starts-ups have received funding as compared to 175 starts-ups in 2014, the report revealed. The number of incubators and accelerators grew by 40% from about 80 in 2014 to about 110 in 2015. Nearly 50% of the incubators/accelerators are set up outside NCR, Bengaluru and Mumbai, providing an opportunity to entrepreneurs from non-metro cities, the report said.

(http://indianbizparty.com/news/india-emerges-as-the-third-biggest-start-up-market-worldwide-with-4200-startups-attract-5-bn-in-2015/)

Ola Launches Ola Share

Taxi hailing service Ola on Tuesday (13th October 2015) launched a new feature called ‘OLA Share’ on its app that will allow its users in the city to share rides. As an introductory offer the service will be available at a flat fare of Rs 50, Ola said in a statement. Ola has also introduced the concept of social groups on its app. Riders can create their social groups and share the rides with their colleagues for a safe and comfortable ride. Initially the feature will be rolled out to select users in Bangalore, will be made available across 5 cities over the next three months.

“A user can join multiple groups or simply choose to share a ride with anyone. As soon as a user requests a ‘Share’ ride on the Ola app, they will be matched with other users from their groups along their way,” OLA said. “This will also contribute towards significant reduction of traffic, congestion and pollution in our cities,” Ola Share Head Ishan Gupta said. A maximum of three people can share a cab together via Ola Share. Driver-partners get an option to log into the Share platform, getting instant access to increased revenue of up to 50 per cent, through continuous fulfillment of booking requests, it said.

Cisco acquires Pawaa

Networking equipment giant Cisco has acquired the Banaglore –based IT Security firm Pawaa Software Pvt. Ltd for an undisclosed amount. It’s the first acquisition of Cisco in India. As part of the deal the entire Pawaa team will join Cisco’s Software Platform Group and the founder Prakash Baskaran will be appointed as Chief Technology Officer for Cisco’s security solutions division. Prakash, a serial entrepreneur who founded five tech companies viz, eResults, Turbo Career Software Services and Springtel in the areas of VoIP services, HR/CRM solutions and B2B marketplaces founded Pawaa in 2007. Prakash holds an MS from University of Akron and an MBA from Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Pawaa was part of Cisco Entrepreneurs in Residence (Cisco EIR) in 2014, an incubation programme supporting early-stage business-to-business companies. It supports entrepreneurs working on disruptive technology ideas in the fields of Big Data analytics, cloud computing, enterprise security and smart cities. Cisco executive vice-president and chief development officer Pankaj Patel was quoted by The Hindu Business Line as saying: “Security is a bigger opportunity for India than IT. “There is a shortage of hundreds of thousands of security professionals globally and India can solve that problem,” he added.

(http://www.thestartupjournal.com)

Parenting Services-New Startup Trend

With rapid globalization and urbanization, parents no more adhere to the traditional strict disciplinary way of raising children. Today’s parents allow their children to express their views and explore their passions, making them more independent. Parents desire to give their children better care, education, and exposure to the worldly activities, thus they often turn to online with a hope to get a valid source of these services. Unfortunately, they are left with information asymmetry. However, a handful of startups in the past couple of years have come forward to address this market by providing parenting tips from all aspects of a child’s life.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the innovative startups which enable parents to choose the right service for themselves and their children.

KIDSS (Kid Social Shell): Founded in June 2015, KIDSS is a digital-age platform offering solutions for both parents and kids. It brings together parents and providers in parenting-related fields such as experts, bloggers, kid edutainment, and other service providers. It has four million cumulative downloads and two lakhs per day impressions. Since inception, it has witnessed about 300 percent growth per month. The startup has also raised $500,000 from strategic investors.

BabyChakra: Founded in the year 2014, the startup claims to have helped more than 250K Indian parents connect to over 5500 quality local services. Focused on the $20 billion maternity-child market, BabyChakra helps the 30 million moms (and dads) online make crucial decisions on doctors, hospitals, and cord blood banks. It also claims to have 10,000 unique visitors and more than 45,000 page views. Recently, the startup has raised $600Kfrom Mumbai Angels, Patni Family Office, and Singapore Angel Network.

ZenParent: Funded by Venture Factory (by i2india), ZenParent aims to provide a one-stop-solution to parents with hands-on answers to help resolve any parenting query, and be on top of all aspects of their child’s life – be it personality, interests, or life skills. Since August 2014, the venture has created nearly 80 percent of content and plans to expand to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities soon.

My Child App: The app was launched on the Play Store on January 26, 2015. The app takes inputs from the parent like height and weight of the child and asks some ‘yes or no’ questions. After that, it displays the result informing about the area of concern in a child and suggests the action to be taken. The app has witnessed more than 1000 downloads. It was also selected in the FbStart bootstrap program and received $25,000 online credits. In the next 10 years the app is likely to touch 50 million parents.

The Uolo: Launched in 2013, the startup has replaced the traditional diary system and panic phone calls with a smartphone application that reports a child’s location, attendance, and progress. The company’s flagship platform, KonnectEz, is deployed in more than 150 pre-schools in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. The Bengaluru-based company raised seed funding through early-stage investors last year.

KnitApp: Founded by four final-year students at IIT-Bombay in 2014, KnitApp is a parent–teacher communication app which helps parents to access information from the child’s school. KnitApp is a part of Trumplab that has raised seed round investment from a group of investors, including Rohit Jain, Co-founder of Mexus Education; Amit Rambia, Founder of Vardhaman Technology, and others. Trumplab targets 20,000 schools and about 20 million parents and teachers and aims to reach to 50 lakh user base in the next two years.

ParentCircle: It is a one-stop web and mobile platform that brings together parents, educators, and experts across fields to share and collaborate on various aspects related to parenting and child development. The platform, built on state-of-the-art technology, allows users to explore, create, curate, and share knowledge and experiences in the form of visually engaging multimedia ‘ClipBooks’.

MySchoolApp: This app allows parents to plan vacations and get an overview of the activities happening in the school by tapping their mobile. It displays complete profile of the student, including their photo, parent details, class teacher details, address, and emergency contact number.

Parentune: Parentune.com is a pro-parent community. It supports parents through relevant advice, insightful blogs, and useful tips to help them do more for their child. Parentune has been the recipient of HOT100TECH in 2014 and is also among the chosen few under the NASSCOM 10,000 startups.

The need for a social networking platform to enrich parenting skills

Today, social media covers almost every aspects of one’s daily life escalating the connections and sharing of experiences. It is very natural that parents too enjoy the advantages of social connections. ParentCircle facilitates a social platform where parents and experts can exchange ideas and information on raising happy children.

Nalina Ramalakshmi, Founder, ParentCircle

Nalina Ramalakshmi, Founder of ParentCircle, says, “For any social platform to survive in this market, it needs to actively engage with its community. We are initiating local campaigns in three cities over the next three months, starting with Chennai and Bengaluru. We are reaching out to schools, activity centers, and corporates.”

 

engagement with the parent community

BabyChakra has so far received an overwhelming response from parents across the world starting from Asansol, Bhubaneshwar to UAE, Hong Kong, Jamaica, and more.

According to Naiyya Saggi, Founder of BabyChakra, some parents have written to them stating that with the help of BabyChakra tips, they have been able to find great local doctors for their children, realized the importance of breastfeeding, and more.

Speaking about the challenges, Naiyya says, “The three main challenges that we face include: (a) hiring, motivating, and retaining the best talent, (b) maintain the relevancy and quality of information, and (c) consolidating our offering along with being agile enough to pivot our business model if required.”

KIDSS offers gamification of learning content as well as parenting tools. The app has one section of “Parenting” in which parents are provided with professional experts who address all the queries of the parents like child behavior, nutrition, and dietary management, etc. Parents leave their queries in “Expert Chat” section and the expert addresses them over chat.

Hemant Soni, Founder of KIDSS, says,

In India, we have 240 million population of two to eight-year-old kids and 30 percent tech savvy parents. While in the US, more than 50 percent of children aged between three to eight years used tablets as educational tools or digital play dates. We are looking to increase our global footprints as well as deepen our existing customer base in India, Europe, and the US.

According to Supriya Hiremagalur, Founder of ZenParent, they receive queries around education, behavioral issues and physical and emotional child development. ZenParent provides tips around all aspects of a child’s life, be it school life, after school activities, weekend and holiday classes, safety-related info, and health or nutrition.

She says,

We strive to ensure that our articles are not just informational in nature but also actionable. We have addressed issues that are often not talked about openly in India such as bullying, identifying stress or depression in kids, CSA (child sexual abuse), learning difficulties and how to talk to kids about the birds and bees among other things from an Indian context.

 

Availing end-to-end strategic tools from investors and incubators

Venture Factory by i2india builds venture by providing them end-to-end strategic, operational, administrative, and marketing support to its portfolio companies. This model uses quality processes that help startups minimize risks and scale up the businesses once they enter the market.

Vinay Rao, Partner of i2india, says,

Venture Factory has helped ZenParent to show a growth of over 100 percent month-on-month in terms of user acquisition. In a short span of six months, we have built a very strong operations and marketing team.

Karan Maheshwari, Deal Lead for Mumbai Angels, which invested in Baby Chakra, says,

We backed the team at BabyChakra for two reasons. First, BabyChakra is a truly innovative product that solves a real need for young parents today: making better and more informed care decisions for their families. Second, the team has, in a short span of time, executed fast, shown strong traction and loyalty in users, and is set to scale rapidly. We are excited to join BabyChakra on their journey to being a game-changing Made-in-India venture.

Growth ahead

India has 100 million active Internet users aged between 26 and 55 among which majority are parents. This indicates that there are clear opportunities in the space of parenting and knowledge sharing. Supriya from ZenParent estimated the market size for parenting resources at about $6 billion.

With children products and services market in India exceeding $20 billion, growing at a CAGR of at least 20 percent and parents discovering such services (parenting tips), making online bookings and comparing baby products, startups in this domain are very bullish about the future growth.

(http://yourstory.com/2015/09/parenting-services-startups/)

Truck Aggregator oLog is clocking revenues of Rs.1 Crore

The friendship of Vasanth Immanuel and Jay Panneerselvam goes back to college days when they were studying at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, (NITIE) Mumbai. The course finished and they parted ways, Vasanth went on to head the supply chain and administration for Asian Paints in Chennai, whereas Jay (Vasanth’s junior) handled IT and marketing for a global company and was based out of Singapore.

This seemed like a normal discourse, however, little did they know that their paths shall meet again. Vasanth wasn’t really happy with the technology interventions being followed for supply chain management. He believed in the power of technology, and that it could disrupt this space.

Thus, after spending close to seven years in the supply chain, Vasanth chose to start Store N Move in 2012, which functioned as a warehousing and logistics service provider.

However, it was early 2014 when Vasanth thought that for most customers (majorly B2B companies which move goods) logistics is one function which still hasn’t gone online. Thus, Jay buckled up to join the business in December 2014 and OLog saw its inception.

OLog, standing for online logistics, is an e-market or marketplace for inter-city trucks, aiming to integrate all logistics providers directly with the clients (B2B) thereby building transparency in the system. Bootstrapped, the venture currently operates out of Chennai.

Vasanth says, “Somewhere trucking was something which was needed to be taken forward. Thus, through creating a market place, there is complete visibility and transparency in the system.”

How does it work?

Starting operations in June 2015, OLog works on a similar concept of cab bookings, where customers just put in a request and the transporter responds to it.

However, the co-founders tell us that there is a catch to the same. As opposed to the cab aggregator market, the truck aggregator market works on categorisation. There are 30 different types of category vehicles used depending on the needs and dimensions of the shipment.

Moreover, a minimum of four hours of lead time is required prior to the pickup. The pool of transporters doesn’t just include vendors owning a fleet of trucks but also individual truck owners who can sign up on the platform.

Another major change OLog was vying for was converting the truck transportation marketfrom cash to online. With initial hesitance from the truck owners to migrate from the cash system, the venture introduced the seamless payment system that OLog had built with SAP.This back-end technology integrated with some of the banks helped build the trust with the partners. Now online payments have completely replaced cash and the truck owners on the platform are now comfortable with online payments.

Team size

Having an active squad size of 25 members, OLog’s team comprises supply managers, customer care operators, and IT operations. With a backend team of 15 members at present, the venture is all set to grow this number to almost 100.

 Growth metrics

Within three months of functioning, OLog has roped in 20 clients including big names like Samsung, Philips, Perfetti, and Britannia. They have an active vehicle inventory of almost 1000 transportation vehicles with 100 vendors having an average of 10 trucks each. Currently present in only three cities, Bangalore, Chennai, and Kolkata, the venture is looking to set foot in other cities by the end of this year.

The road ahead

Moving forward, the startup is all set to aggressively capture the market with plans to expand to 20 cities in the coming months. They are placing their presence in Mumbai, Cochin, Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Ranchi, Coimbatore, and Madurai to name a few.

The founders are also planning to grow their vendor network to 900 in the coming few months taking their vehicle inventory to 10,000 vehicles.

On the revenue front, the firm is scored revenue of one crore last month and is aiming to secure 10 crores in revenue by June 2016. The firm also caters to e-commerce startups such as Urban Ladder and Myntra, for their intercity transportation. They are in advanced talks with some investors and might close their first round of funding soon.

While looking at the technology purview, the venture seems to have a few plans up their sleeve.  They are looking at methods to see if paperwork for shipments could be done digitally and are on a pilot with Philips around the same.

They are also looking to launch ‘Truck IoT’, which will include introducing a mobile device on the truck. This mobile device will collect data from the truck and send it to a vendor’s platform. Thus, helping the vendor manage all his trucks and resources, and understand the whereabouts of each resource.

(http://yourstory.com/2015/09/olog/)

Hyderabad-based Zify grabs $190K

Hyderabad based ZIFY, which lets people share rides on the go via its platform, has raised $190K in a angel round of funding from Sean O’Sullivan of SOSventures and two Hyderabad-based angel investors. Sean was also an early investor in Netflix & Guitar Hero.

The Hyderabad-based investors have further committed to invest a similar amount in the near future.

ZIFY aims to solve the raging issue of traffic in India which affects almost every working professional in metropolitan cities. It provides a social platform to car-owners to recover their car-ownership cost and meet new people daily. With their “Smart Route-Matching” algorithm, ZIFY is able to provide intermediate pickup and drop off enabling instant-booking on their platform. The startup also has its own wallet for cashless transactions.

The startup competes with BlaBlaCar, Tripda, Ryde by Ibibo and Carpool by Meru. According to Anurag, “I believe the competition is helping us in a lot of ways. Carpool as a concept is still very much new in India and the marketing efforts are helping in educating the users about the alternate mode of transportation that is affordable & more social. Even though we have a sizable chunk of users sharing city to city rides, but our focus is more on within the city travel. Once we create a large enough user network for intra-city travel, the inter-city segment would be extremely easy for us to tap into.”

The raised funds will go in improving technology & marketing.

ZIFY was founded by Anurag Singh Rathor (a Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology graduate & ex-Wells Fargo Technology Specialist) andPramod Kumar (IIT Kharagpur alumni & ex-Yatra.com Tech Lead) in 2014.

Currently operational in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Gurgaon, ZIFY has over 11,000 registered users of which 8000 customers were acquired within the last 60 days. On an average, ZIFY is enabling over 500+ (1 car with at-least 1 passenger apart from the driver) rides on a daily basis. Till date, 1 Mn KMs of rides are shared on ZIFY.

The company is targeting to expand across all the metro cities with at-least 10,000 daily rides in the next six months.

ZIFY had previously secured $15K from Srini Koppolu (Ex-CMD of Microsoft India), 50K Ventures, Parampara Funds and CIE – IIIT Hyderabad.

“What impressed me about ZIFY was their technology & their understanding of the problem. Moreover, they have done their ground-work really well and it is clearly visible in their traction so far,” said one of the investor.

The startup is now process of raising over $3 Mn its Series A round.

ZIFY was among the top 5 startups that were part of Inc42’s StartupPulse Bangalore edition.

The 35 Startups Selected For The First India-US Startup Konnect In Silicon Valley

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message of “Start-up India, Stand Up India” was loud and clear from the ramparts of the Red Fort, and still echoes in the Indian startup ecosystem. In order to keep the spirit of this message alive, NASSCOM, TiE, and IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE India are hosting the first India-U.S. Startup Konnect in the Silicon Valley on September 27, to highlight the strengths of the Indian startup ecosystem. This day-long event will be on the sidelines of the Prime Minister’s visit to the Silicon Valley. He will be visiting the exhibition where more than 30 Indian startups selected for this program will exhibit their products, prototypes, and achievements to investors and other potential Valley partners.

Speaking about Startup Konnect, PM Narendra Modi, said, “An event that I am enthusiastic about is the ‘India-US Start-up Konnect.’ India is emerging as a hub of start-ups in a wide range of areas and we aspire to take this further. We want the world to see our innovation capabilities in the startup sector. At this event, a group of Indian startups will showcase their innovations and forge partnerships with the vibrant American startup industry.”

The startups have been selected from among various sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, energy, financial inclusion, and biotechnology. The selected startups are:

Healthcare

Aakar Innovation: It’s a Navi Mumbai-based startup that provides commercially viable solutions for production, distribution, marketing, and sales of affordable and environment-friendly sanitary pads by local entrepreneurs in areas where these products would otherwise not be available.

Achira Labs: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that builds medical diagnostics platforms based on the principle of microfluidics to make medical tests accessible, fast, accurate and affordable for patients around the world.

Consure Medical: It’s a California and New Delhi-based emerging medical device company focused on developing and commercializing novel critical care technologies. Its flagship product is used for the management of fecal incontinence in bedridden patients.

Curadev Pharma: It’s a Noida-based drug discovery company that conducts research in preclinical space to make investigational new drugs.

Forus Healthcare: It’s a Bangalore-based technology-led innovation startup that focuses on preventive ophthalmic care. Its flagship products, 3nethra Classic and 3nethra Royal, can pre-screen for five ophthalmic ailments.

Innoflaps: It’s a New Delhi-based startup created by a team of speech therapy professionals and engineers that specialize in the field of speech products. It offers home-based therapy devices for speech impaired people.

Mother Diagnostic Systems: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that deals with medical equipment and devices and their supplies in rural India.

Navya Biologicals: It’s a Hubli, Karnataka-based startup that deal with bioprocess and biologics. It’s technology platforms (YeXtreme & ItensiMAb)  brings together pathway engineering, custom media development and flexible high intensity manufacturing processes, enabling low cost production of high quality biologics.

POC Medical Systems: It’s a California-based medical devices and equipment startup that offers low-cost portable breast cancer screening systems.

Pradin Technologies: It’s a Bangalore-based technology startup specializing in providing innovative solutions for value healthcare, green power and lighting for the rural areas. It also provides consultation for product design, develop product concepts, build working prototypes and offer technical guidance for manufacturability.

Sattva Medtech: It’s a Bangalore-based medtech startup that manufactures fetal healthcare equipment.

Sohum Innovation Labs: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that develops market-driven solutions to improve the health and incomes of people living in resource-poor settings. It conducts front-line research and develops technology and strategies that create self-sustaining value chains among the underserved.

Agriculture

Barrix Agro Sciences: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that develops technology enabled cost-effective solutions to reduce the use of pesticides in crop production, thereby increasing pre and post-harvest yield.

Khethworks: It’s a startup belonging to the MIT Tata Center ecosystem. It builds reliable, solar-powered irrigation systems that enable their customers to farm through all three seasons, and already has multiple pilot sites on the ground.

Sickle Innovations: It’s an Ahmedabad-based farming solution company with core focus on improving conventional farming practices through design intervention. It works closely with farming communities to identify the problems and challenges facing our agricultural sector and offer unique solutions.

Surya Power Magic: It’s a Coimbatore-based startup that delivers solar irrigation solutions to farmers in power deficit regions.

Energy

Boond Engineering: It’s a Delhi-based social enterprise that offers affordable and clean energy to rural India. Boond designs solar power centers and its products include solar light systems, solar light bulbs, biomass gas stoves, solar AC inverter systems and solar water pumps.

GIBSS: Green India Building Systems and Services (GIBSS) is a Mumbai-based zero net energy building systems company, helps businesses reduce costs and raise productivity through compelling “triple bottom line” energy efficiency products and solutions in their buildings.

Gram Power: It’s a Jaipur-based startup that enables villagers to produce and store renewable energy. It helps them integrate and generate energy out of biomass, solar or wind on-site.

Greenway Grameen: It’s a Mumbai-based startup that focuses on cooking energy solutions for rural consumers and manufactures fuel efficient cooking appliances that emits lesser smoke as compared to the traditional cooking stoves used in rural India.

Promethean Energy: It’s a Mumbai-based startup that focuses on developing solar thermal products for industrial use.

Technology And Others

Aquas Technologies: It’s a California-based startup that offers nano-tech based water purification solutions. The company’s proprietary system design when combined with the novel nano-technology based high surface area aerogels results in a solution for a range of feed water quality.

BleeTech: It’s a Pune-based startup that develops wearable tech. Its product – Blee is a wearable device that lets you synchronize with your music, through vibrations. Dance is a great medium of expression for people with hearing impairments. However, owing to their physical limitations, they face several problems. Blee adds a new dimension to music by giving a unique sensorial experience. It aims to make these artists completely independent.

Design Innova: It’s a Delhi-based startup that deals in all kinds of biotech instruments and innovative gadgets. It has expertise in the field of low power portable embedded instrumentation solutions, including LED applications, industrial automation, biotechnology research and downstream processing.

Eco-BLAC Bricks: The Eco-BLAC bricks have been created by a group of MIT students at MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design as part of a bigger project to develop low-cost, low-emission housing for India’s inner city slums. The bricks are 70% boiler ash from paper mills mixed with sodium hydroxide, lime, and a small amount of clay.

Eko India Financial Services: It’s a Gurgaon-based financial service company that offers branchless banking services to the common man. It offers business correspondent (BC) service for State Bank of India (SBI), ICICI Bank and Yes Bank. Customers can walk into any Eko counter (retail outlet) to open a savings account, deposit and withdraw cash from the account and for other such services.

Inventrom: It’s a Goa-based IoT startup that also focuses on robotics. Its product NetPlug allows users to control their electronic and electrical devices via an exclusive smartphone app and social media.

Leaf Wearables: A Delhi-based startup that has built a safety pendant for women in distress situations called Safer.

Mukunda Foods: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that manufactures automated food equipment the Indian food retail segment. It builds food-making machines for hotels, restaurants, eateries ad even homes. Its product called DosaMatic can automatically make dosas.

NextGen PMS: It’s a Bangalore-based technology enabled CSR and sustainability management startup.

Prakash Lab: Is a research group in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. They design and build precision instruments that would enable people to undertake scientific exploration even in resource-poor settings. Their products include $5 microfluidic chemistry lab; Foldoscope – a research-grade microscope made of plastic-impregnated paper, costing a measly 55 cents; and the Oscan – a 3D-printed smartphone add-on that helps diagnose the oral carcinomas.

Ready Bytes Software Labs: It’s a Bhilwara, Rajasthan-based startup offers Open Source Joomla products and ecommerce Solutions. This web-based application and software development company enables revenue growth, productivity improvement and cost reduction by leveraging technology to enhance the quality, context and flow of information between clients and their key constituents.

SenesTech: It’s a Flagstaff, Arizona-based biotech platform and research company that has developed an innovative technology for managing animal populations by fertility control.

SocialCops: It’s a Singapore-based data company that aims to power decision making through better data sourced from the grassroots to solve problems facing humanity.

Team Indus: It’s a Bangalore-based aerospace research team that won a major prize in the Google Lunar XPrize – a global competition to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon by December 31, 2016.

Apart from the above mentioned startups and research groups, incubators like IIT Bombay and special initiatives like TiE Smart City Initiative also exhibited their achievements.

(http://inc42.com/startups/35-startups-india-us-startup-konnect/)