While working with schools in Rajasthan, under a fellowship programme, in 2019, tier II educators and childhood friends Ajay Vishwakarma and Tanu Aggarwal realised that there was a serious dearth of skilled teachers and resources — both essential for quality education — for students. 

To bridge this gap, Vishwakarma and Aggarwal made it their mission to change the face of academics with a cost-effective solution that could play a key role in upgrading academic standards and ensuring quality education for all.

At the outset, the duo would record chapters in a creative and appealing fashion and share them with teachers on WhatsApp groups — a strategy that was a hit among students.

This vision paved the way for what many students today know as SunoKitaab. Launched in January 2020, the edtech startup provides academic content in the form of audiobooks and podcasts. On its website, it claims to have a compendium of more than 10K lectures in English and Hindi for students studying in Classes I to XII and the ones preparing for competitive exams.  

It is pertinent to mention here that just a few months after its launch, the startup received a major boost in its user base as Covid-19 wreaked havoc across the globe.

While on the one hand, the pandemic gave a significant thrust to many edtech business models, as everyone was forced to stay in the confines of their homes, it, on the other hand, unearthed many unique challenges for students.

For starters, the students with enough resources to study online were exposed to the harmful effects of longer screen time. In contrast, students hailing from the hinterlands of the country, or the ones with little resources to study online, lagged in their studies.    

At this point, the founders took inspiration from a music audio player, Caravaan, and launched an audio player for academic studies called ‘VidyaBox’ in 2022.

“Our academic audiobooks and podcasts bridge the gap between videos and written content, providing an accessible and engaging way to consume educational materials. We are helping students get access to valuable resources with zero screen time,” the cofounder and CEO of SunoKitaab, Vishwakarma, said.

The cofounders’ efforts to make education accessible have been well-received by both students and teachers. As a result, the startup today boasts having a user base of 2 Lakh students and 1,000 teachers. 

Not just this, SunoKitaab has successfully raised INR 20 Lakh from Startup India Seed Funds, Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE). Notably, the startup has also received immense backing from the Rajasthan government’s iStart initiative. 

“iStart programme has provided us with invaluable support, including mentors and essential infrastructure,” Vishwakarma said.

SunoKitaab’s Humble Beginnings 

At the outset, when the cofounders decided to embark on their journey to make available academic courses via audio means, they knew that the road they wished to take wouldn’t be a bed of roses as they lacked the technical skills to pursue their mission.

Another major pain point was a serious dearth of funds. However, the duo took a great leap of faith with just INR 1.5 Lakh in hand, and as they stepped forth into uncharted territory, they met Gurkaran Singh.

As the chief technology officer, Singh has played a pivotal role in building the SunoKitaab website and app.

Once the startup’s tech stack was ready, the cofounders leveraged platforms like Google and Facebook, along with content marketing campaigns to target its audience. 

“This increased our visibility and engagement, ultimately aiding in attracting and acquiring new learners for SunoKitaab,” Vishwakarma said.

Interestingly, Vishwakarma gives credit to the rise of non-music audio platforms for the success of SunoKitaab. The platforms that played a key role in inspiring the CEO to offer quality education to one and all are homegrown names like Audible Suno, Pocket FM, Khabr, and Kuku FM, just to name a few. 

In fact, Kuku FM is the closest competitor to SunoKitaab in the space. For context, Kuku FM has a range of educational content on various subjects on its platform.

A Deep Dive Into SunoKitaab’s Playbook

The non-music audio OTT approach has worked wonders for SunoKitaab to emerge in the edtech space. SunoKitaab offers a repository of audio content like recorded lectures and summaries. Their playbook has been to reduce screen time and internet dependency. 

This has made SunoKitaab a preferred platform for students who do not want to spend hours staring at computer screens for learning.

On the other hand, SunoKitaab’s VidyaBox has proved to be a game changer for students in the rural areas of the country. This is because VidyaBox is not only cost-effective but also gives access to offline learning in a creative vogue.

Vishwakarma claims that VidyaBox has been adopted by 70% of school students who do not have the internet, smartphones, or personal computers.  

The educational content provided via VidyaBox has been curated by 1,000 teachers and subject experts. The device helps students with ease of learning in different languages.

These teachers record their voices to provide educational content in VidyaBox. Post the first recording session, a team of audio editors and subject experts reviews the recorded content to ensure the sound and content quality before it’s made available on the platform/device.

Another aspect of ensuring content quality is to keep it relevant and up-to-date. For this, the startup takes regular student feedback and closely monitors school and state board syllabi.

All the recording sessions take place in the in-house studio equipped with the necessary audio equipment. This allows the startup to have full control over the content creation process.

The content can be tailored to suit the distinct needs and preferences of different students, with ongoing efforts to make it even more student-specific.

To customise the content in VidyaBox, the startup provides a form on the website to take the details of the academic needs of the students. Based on the input fed by the students, the curriculum is recorded and delivered to the students. It takes a maximum of seven days to deliver the device to the students and the costs for which are incurred by the startup. 

Vishwakarma claims that the platform has empowered many visually impaired students by providing them access to education through its audio content. He said, “Over 30,000 visually impaired students have benefited from SunoKitaab and more than 1 Lakh students in rural areas have gained access to quality education, showcasing the startup’s meaningful contribution to education.”

Moving on, the cofounders also started a fellowship in 2019 which continued after SunoKitaab’s inception. Fellows collaborate with schools to demonstrate the usage of VidyaBox across Tier II and III regions. Eligibility criteria for the fellowship require the candidate to be a graduate with strong communication skills.

The startup generates revenue by selling audio devices, app subscriptions and content creation.

What’s Next For SunoKitaab?

SunoKitaab is dedicated to expanding its audio content across various education boards in multiple regional languages. The startup’s objective is to optimise the learning journey by giving easy access to quality education.

“Audiobooks are gaining momentum as students and parents recognise their value in education. Audio offers quality content without the need for visuals,” Vishwakarma said.  

He believes that the country’s rural areas, including Tier II and Tier III cities and towns, represent a huge market for edtechs today. Not just this, even the quality of education in these areas will get a major overhaul if edtech founders shift their focus from Tier I towns and cities to these high-potential smaller regions. 

At a time when hybrid learning has become a buzzword in the edtech space, SunoKitaab is already catering to both offline and online learners. While we cannot ignore the strides that the startup has made since its inception a few years ago, there are areas that SunoKitaab can work on. 

For instance, its VidyaBox device is priced at INR 3,999, which is a lot of money for students hailing from the rural areas of the country and could defeat the founders’ vision to extend high-quality education in these regions. Realising this, the startup has partnered with Simpl for a buy now pay later option and also provides EMI options. 

As of now, it remains to be seen if the edtech will be able to secure a juicy chunk of the audiobook market, which is expected to touch $35 Bn by 2030, especially when a majority of edtech startups are looking to pivot to survive.

Disclaimer: This article is part of Inc42 and the Government of Rajasthan’s initiative to shine a spotlight on the state’s emerging startups.

The post How SunoKitaab Is Overhauling Education In India’s Tier II & III Towns With Its Audio Learning Playbook appeared first on Inc42 Media.

At a time when the adoption of electric cars and escooters has been well received in the realm of electric vehicles (EVs), electric motorcycles have yet to become a common spectacle – both on roads and race tracks.

While the earliest reference to electric motorcycles can be traced back to the late 1800s, internal combustion engine (ICE) motorcycles manufactured by Suzuki, Honda, Yamaha, Royal Enfield, Hero, BMW, Harley Davidson, and Ducati have continued to rule roads worldwide.

The situation is no different In India, where the EV market is more nascent than some of its peers like China, the US, and Europe. 

Though India’s electric two-wheeler adoption has jumped by almost 4-5X year-on-year since 2020, helped by hundreds of escooter OEM players entering the market, electric motorcycles have yet to receive this boost. This is because there are fewer players in the market that want to entertain the intricacies, complexities and costs associated with building top-notch products to rival traditional ICE motorcycles.

Amid this, Bengaluru-based Ultraviolette Automotive has emerged as one of the pioneering startups to begin the production of high-performance electric motorcycles in India.

Founded in 2016 by Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan, Ultraviolette took six years to launch their first flagship vehicle, F77.

Before embarking on their entrepreneurial journey, Subramaniam and Rajmohan served the automotive sector for almost a decade, working with global tech companies. Their tech backgrounds have played a crucial role in paving the way for Ultraviolette, which today boasts India’s first lineup of high-performance electric motorcycles — F77 Original and two special editions, F77 Recon and F77 Space Edition.

Ultraviolette’s Race Has Just Begun

From building the core IPs for most technologies used in F77, including the battery tech, drivetrain, and software to establishing a well-integrated servicing network, Ultraviolette’s vision since its inception has been to create ‘top-of-the-line mobility solutions driven by progressive design and energy efficient technology’.

“Our focus has always been on innovation,” said Subramaniam, the cofounder and CEO of Ultraviolette.

We were told that Ultraviolette draws inspiration from the aviation and aerospace sectors, which is evident in the design philosophy of its bikes. All the standard and special edition bikes under its F series showcase jet-inspired design. 

As per the founders, what sets Ultraviolette’s approach apart is its application of principles from aircraft engineering, encompassing mechanics, electronics, and architecture, in building emotorcycles.

Further, the F77 lineup has been built keeping the future needs of the users in mind — as they are expected to use the product for at least 7 to 10 years. Given that the EV technology is growing and changing at an unprecedented scale, the founders told Inc42 that they have tried to make their motorcycles future-proof by selecting components that are durable and deploying technology that doesn’t become obsolete soon.

In addition, to ensure quality control and affordability once rolled out, the startup has built the entire vertical integration, including battery technology, drivetrain electronics, the cloud-connected system, the architecture, vehicle chassis, and charging system over the years.

Ultravoilette’s F77s Get Ready To Race

The pivotal moment arrived in late 2019 when Ultraviolette introduced its F77 model with a range of 150 km. However, with the emergence of the pandemic in 2020, the company halted production and directed all its efforts towards enhancing battery technology.

Between 2019 and 2022, F77 underwent a whole revamp to achieve a range of 200 km for its Original model and later touched the 300 km mark for its F77 RECON limited edition. This transformation encompassed both architectural changes and the adoption of a new cell format to enhance the battery performance.

In November 2022, Ultraviolette finally launched its motorcycles in Bengaluru. 

But why did the startup choose the high-performance emotorcycle segment?

“In a diverse country like India, the first challenge is to make people excited about EVs. People still hold many misconceptions about this technology. So, we understood that if we had to change their mindset, it would be better to start with a segment that is exciting, engaging, and nuanced,” said Subramaniam, adding that it was a very calculated decision to start with the aspirational segment.

In the performance bike market, Ultraviolette bikes compete with quarter-litre or half-litre categories (300 to 500 CC) – a segment that alone witnesses sales of 1-2 Lakh ICE motorcycles per month in India.

So far, the startup has raised around $60 Mn in multiple rounds from Exor, TVS Motor Company, Qualcomm Ventures, Lingotto, and Zoho Corporation, among others. 

This financial support extends beyond capital infusion as many of these investors are actively engaged in augmenting Ultraviolette’s technological capabilities and expanding its market presence that would soon transcend beyond India.

Today, the startup’s emotorcycles run in six Indian cities — Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Kochi, and Hyderabad.

The startup believes that the pure D2C approach cannot work for motorcycles. Hence, the first step to expanding into these markets was establishing after-sales servicing facilities in each of these cities. These servicing stations are directly managed by Ultraviolette.

Taking On Global Players With Competent Price Point

Ultraviolette does not compete with players that offer commuter bikes in the range of INR 1 Lakh to INR 2 Lakh, but rather the players that offer high-performance ICE motorcycles. In its segment, the company counts players like Kawasaki, KTM, and BMW as its competitors.

Ultraviolette F77 starts from INR 3.8 Lakh onwards, ex-showroom. According to Subramaniam, Ultraviolette’s ebike may seem more expensive in comparison to its ICE counterparts, however, it costs quite less in the long run since it is an EV. 

“Also, if compared with the other high-end aspirational electric motorcycles in the global market, our bikes are at least 3-4X less expensive,” the CEO said.

However, when it comes to staying abreast of international players, the startup’s price point looks quite lucrative.

For example, US-based Zero Motorcycles, which is currently one of the global leaders in the electric motorcycles market, charges a minimum of $12,000 (INR 9.9 Lakh) for its ZERO FX dual sports variant that offers a range of approximately 145 km on a single charge and has a peak power of 46 HP with 106 NM torque. 

In contrast, Ultraviolette’s F77 Original offers a range of over 200 km with a peak power of 36 hp and 85 NM of torque — not much difference in power but a huge variation in range and pricing. 

(Note: While the two segments of bikes (ZERO FX and F77 Original) cannot be compared, we have picked the lowest-priced models of both companies)

Moving on, another example is Harley Davidson’s electric motorcycle LiveWire S2 Del Mar, which offers a 200 km range, 84 horses and a massive 260 NM of torque, is priced at around $15,499 (manufacturer’s suggested retail price), which translates to around INR 13 Lakh.

According to Ultraviolette’s cofounder and CTO Rajmohan, it is due to the company’s proprietary tech stack that they have been able to keep the pricing of their F77 lineup competent.

“There is always an additional cost associated when working with third parties because every player wants to keep their margins.

It is pertinent to note that players like Revolt, Oben Electric, Kabira Mobility, and Odysse, too, operate in the electric motorcycle segment, but they largely offer commuter vehicles.

Ultraviolette also unveiled its F99 Factory racing platform earlier this year at Auto Expo 2023, which comes with a peak power output of 65 horses and offers a top speed of over 200 km per hour. The startup plans to develop this technology further only for race tracks.

Ultraviolette’s In The Speed Lane

According to the cofounders, Ultraviolette is gross margin positive. The startup has a total headcount of around 350 employees with 200 of them dedicated solely to the R&D unit.

Ultraviolette recently launched a Space Edition of its flagship F77 as a tribute to India’s Chandraayan-3 mission and specetech development. The limited edition bike comes with aluminium, paints, and other materials used in spacecraft. It is available for only 10 bookings.

While Ultraviolette did not reveal the plans pertaining to its upcoming bike launches, the startup is expected to roll out a fast-charging network in various parts of the country soon.

Currently, the startup offers two chargers – a standard charger that takes around 8-9 hours to fully charge a vehicle and a boost charger that takes about 4 hours to fully charge an ebike. The startup is also coming up with a fast charger, which would take less than 2 hours to fully charge its ebikes.

As per Vahan portal data, Ultraviolette has seen the registrations of over 195 vehicles this year. The founders claimed that they project at least 1,000 Ultraviolette motorcycles to be on the road by the end of this year.

In the next 12 months, the startup plans to extend its footprint to 12-15 cities. Besides, it plans to jump the Indian borders starting next year, with eyes set on countries like Italy, Germany, Spain, the US, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, along with Southeast Asian countries.

Meanwhile, in India, the enthusiasm of EV players to enter the electric motorcycle market is growing. Recently, Ola Electric announced that it will launch four electric bikes next year. 

Bengaluru-based Orxa Energies is also preparing for the launch of its flagship all-electric high-performance motorcycle, the Mantis.

As per a report, the global electric two-wheeler market is set to grow at a CAGR of 19.1% between 2022 and 2030, reaching $121.08 Bn in 2030 with electric motorcycles expected to cherish almost half the market during this period.

Even though the pace of adoption of electric motorcycles has been slow in India, the entire domestic two-wheeler electric market is set to reach $6.2 Bn in size by 2030. 

Nonetheless, for Indian EV players like Ultraviolette, who have also set their eyes on foreign lands too, these are some of the most exciting times. 

However, as more established players will enter the high-performance motorcycle market with global collaboration, the road ahead could get a bit patchy for smaller players. While this is just an anticipation, it would be interesting to see how Ultraviolette’s high-performance playbook inspires other Indian EV OEMs to make a paradigm shift in a bid to stay abreast of their western counterparts.

The post Inside Ultraviolette’s 6-Year Electric Revolution: How The Emotorcycle Maker Is Ready To Race It Out With KTMs & BMWs appeared first on Inc42 Media.

As India is engrossed in celebrating the success of Chandrayaan-3’s Moon landing, it is pertinent to note that many homegrown spacetech startups have emerged as silent knights. 

India, which until a few years ago was seen as shying away from splurging on space missions, recorded a historic 2022 with its first private rocket launch by Skyroot and multiple other satellite launches, grabbing eyeballs the world over.

Not to mention, behind this is the government’s willingness and trust in the country’s private spacetech players, who have massive backing from the Centre in all key areas ranging from funding, technology access, and infrastructure support, among others.

In July, the GST Council set the launchpad for spacetech startups with a 0% GST regime. During the 50th meeting of the Council, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman highlighted that the initiative was aimed at fostering emerging startups in the rapidly growing spacetech sector.

The buzz in this burgeoning sector has been such that last year alone as many as 100 spacetech startups got registered with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Further, Microsoft joined hands with ISRO in January 2023 to fuel the growth of spacetech startups in India.

The growth has come on the back of approximately $205 Mn in funding raised by India’s spacetech startups across 30+ deals between 2014 and July 2023, according to data compiled by Inc42.

According to a study published by IBEF in December 2022, India accounted for 2.1% of the global space economy in 2020, with a market share of $9.6 Bn, comprising 0.4% of the country’s total GDP.

At a time when India is inching closer to unravelling the secrets of space and what lies beyond horizons, let’s take a closer look at the 15 Indian spacetech startups that are expected to write the next chapter of the Indian growth story in the nascent but ever-growing spacetech domain. 

(Note: The list is not meant to be a ranking of any kind and will be updated from time to time. We have listed the Indian spacetech startups in alphabetical order.)

Here’s The List of Spacetech Startups In India

1. Aadyah Aerospace

Founded in 2016 by Shaju Stephen, Aadyah Aerospace is a provider of aeronautics, space, and defence engineering and technology solutions. Headquartered in Bengaluru, this innovative aerospace startup aims to revolutionise computer vision, communication, and motion control through the integration of AI.

The startup operates in both the space and aerospace sectors, specialising in self-designing satellites, launch vehicle subsystems, and drones. 

The startup’s primary focus lies in manufacturing cutting-edge electro-mechanical actuators, control actuation systems, and electro-optic systems for missiles and launch vehicles. 

Notably, the spacetech startup has successfully developed a cube set dispenser that securely holds satellites in position during launches until they are deployed into Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

Within one year of its establishment, Aadyah Aerospace secured nearly $1 Mn from the US-based Keiretsu Forum.

2. Agnikul

Established in 2017, Agnikul achieved a significant milestone by constructing its own launchpad and mission control centre at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

Founded by Srinath Ravichandran, Moin SPM, and SR Chakravarthy, the spacetech startup has raised a total of $34.5 Mn across six funding rounds. Its most recent funding round in November 2022 was led by Rocketship.vc and Venture Catalysts.

The spacetech startup has garnered support from notable angel investors, including Sriram Krishnan of Andreessen Horowitz, Anand Mahindra, Nithin Kamath of Zerodha, and Naval Ravikant of AngelList.

Agnikul has secured a significant achievement as one of the first Indian private enterprises to forge partnerships with both ISRO and IN-SPACe for the development of its projects.

Operating in the fiercely competitive space industry, Agnikul faces competition from players such as Skyroot, Dhruva Space, Pixxel and Astrome.

3. Astrogate Labs

Headquartered in Bengaluru, Astrogate Labs is at the forefront of enabling high-speed communications for small satellites. The startup, established in 2017 by Aditya Kedlaya and Nitish Singh, is dedicated to unveiling its groundbreaking space-to-ground laser communications link. 

After getting an undisclosed amount of funding from Speciale Invest in 2019, Astrogate secured $200K from 9Unicorns Accelerator Fund in 2020. With a vision to address the challenge of high-speed communication in space, the startup initially planned to establish a comprehensive chain of optical communication systems. 

The spacetech startup’s strategy includes managing a network of optical ground stations and in-space relays to support the increasing demands of satellite downlink operations.

4. Bellatrix Aerospace

Spacetech startup Bellatrix Aerospace was established in 2015 by Rohan M Ganapathy and Yashas Karanam. To date, the company has successfully raised a total of $11.1 Mn in funding across four rounds, with the latest round led by ANIC-ARISE in 2022.

The primary focus of Bellatrix Aerospace lies in the development of advanced in-space propulsion systems and rocket propulsion technologies. The startup is dedicated to making space more accessible and affordable for various applications. 

One of its key areas of emphasis is the development of propulsion systems, or thrusters, for heavy (>2 ton), micro, and nanosatellite. The startup primarily targets satellite operators engaged in observation, imaging, navigation, and technology applications within the spacetech industry.

5. Dhruva Space

Established in 2012 by Sanjay Nekkanti, Dhruva Space is a spacetech startup based in Hyderabad. The startup specialises in providing integrated solutions for space-based applications by offering satellites, earth stations, and launching services as a comprehensive package.

In 2021, Dhruva became the first Indian entity to secure an order for the design and development of space-qualified solar arrays from inception. The startup claims that it stands as the sole private spacetech firm in India to possess both satellite and launcher interfaces.

The startup further successfully tested and space-qualification of its ‘3U and 6U Satellite Orbital Deployers’ and ‘Orbital Link’ in April 2023. These advancements were accompanied by a launch in April, where Dhruva Space independently constructed satellite deployment systems that are compatible with the PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) launch vehicle.

6. Digantara

Founded in 2018, the spacetech startup is focused on a sustainable space environment and working on developing a space debris detector.

Founded by Anirudh Sharma, Rahul Rawat, and Tanveer Ahmed, the Bengaluru-based startup aims to create an ecosystem for small satellites in India and has networked with local partners as well. This year, it launched the satellite Pushan-Alpha which will serve as a space weather testbed in a sun-synchronous orbit.

Digantara is also developing an end-to-end infrastructure to resolve the difficulties of space operations and manage space traffic through its Space Mission Assurance Platform.

Having closed its last funding round in August 2022, Digantara has raised a total funding of $2.5M to date.

7. GalaxEye Space

GalaxEye was founded in 2020 by Denil Chawda, Kishan Thakkar, Pranit Mehta, Rakshit Bhatt, Satyanarayanan Chakravarthy and Suyash Singh. Based out of Chennai, the startup provides multi-sensor imagery via satellites.

Since its inception, the startup has raised around $4 Mn from investors, including Speciale Invest, Artha India Ventures, Anicut Capital, Veda VC, Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath, EaseMyTrip’s Prashant Pitti, and Tracxn founder Abhishek Goyal, among others.

The startup claims that it can provide all-weather imaging at any time, without any atmospheric interference. It is also capacitated to produce high-resolution images using a small satellite constellation.

Equipped with its Drishti sensors, built in-house, the startup aims to launch its first-ever satellite in space in the second quarter of FY24.

In a bid to help insurance companies better scrutinise the damage from natural disasters and artificial crises on the insurance claimants, GalaxEye plans to empower them with its satellite data and images.

8. InspeCity

Founded in 2022 by Professor Arindrajit Chowdhury and Dr Tausif Sheikh, Mumbai-based and IIT Bombay-incubated InspeCity is a satellite servicing startup that offers satellite life-enhancing and deorbiting services, positioning itself as the ‘space mechanics’. 

The spacetech startup is working on developing an autonomous robotic platform on top of ISRO’s polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV) stage four’s module, the PSLV Orbital Experimental Module (POEM). This will allow InspeCity to service satellites in space and is a step towards a larger plan of building an orbital habitat around Earth’s orbit.

InspeCity is working towards a larger vision of building space-based cities – based on O’Neill cylinders – across major bodies of the solar system, capable of housing 1 Mn people at any given time. For now, the startup has set a timeline of 2030 to deploy an orbital habitat to demonstrate proof of concept of a technology, which would be scalable to house millions of people in the future.

The startup has raised $1.5 Mn in pre-seed funding recently from a clutch of investors, including Speciale Invest, Antler India, Veda VC, Anicut Capital and DeVC India.

9. Kawa Space

Founded in 2019 by Bala Menon and Kris Nair, Kawa Space builds critical earth observation infra. The Mumbai-based startup has raised a total of $1.2 Mn in four rounds. The latest round was announced in April 2023 and led by AWS Space Accelerator. It has brought on board 30 strategic suppliers, which contribute to manufacturing, payloads and rocket construction.

In the year of its inception, it had launched one satellite orbit, while 18 more were underway. Kawa Space aims to make satellite imagery accessible to all. The startup is focused on powering multiple use cases for our agriculture, infrastructure, and environment-focused customers.

10. Newspace Research & Technologies

Headquartered in Delhi NCR and Bengaluru, Newspace Research & Technologies is an aerospace startup that claims to be building next-generation aerospace technology, including unmanned air systems, collective robotics, GPS-denied operations, augmented reality, virtual reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence. 

Founded in 2017, the startup is run by a former IAF officer, Sameer Joshi. NewSpace raised $21 Mn in a funding round led by Pavestone Technology Fund in February 2022. 

The startup has also bagged a deal from the Ministry of Defence to develop a High-Altitude Pseudo Satellite (HAPS), which is an unmanned aircraft that operates at altitudes over 65,000 feet and is capable of conducting surveillance operations by staying airborne for months at a stretch.

The startup has bagged a total funding of $33 Mn to date. According to the company’s website, it is pushing for the use of cutting-edge solutions for aerospace in industrial UAVs, collective robotics, AI, and augmented & virtual reality simulations.

11. Omnipresent Robot Technologies

Omnipresent Robotech was launched by Aakash Sinha and Jyoti Sinha in 2010. The startup deals in robotics, electronic sensing and intelligent electronics. The startup develops drones for agriculture, defence and environment and software for operations. 

The startup uses computer vision, machine learning and virtual reality to cater to the various needs of its clients. It bagged an undisclosed amount of funding in 2022 from Gruhas Proptech’s Abhijeet Pai and Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath.

During the project planning of ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2, the startup presented a concept note on the orientation mechanism design of the Vikram Lander. Additionally, it also designed Perception Navigation Software to create 3D images from data collected by the rover’s cameras and help in navigation.

These images would help the rover to navigate across the lunar surface by allowing accurate assessment of distances from rocks, while also mapping the lunar landscape.

While Chandrayaan-2 was unsuccessful, Omnipresent’s tech is being used on Chandrayaan-3’s Pragyan Rover to map the lunar surface and enable the rover’s navigation via 3D imaging.

12. Pixxel

Founded in 2019 by BITS Pilani alumni Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal, Bengaluru-based Pixxel is building a high-resolution hyperspectral imaging satellite constellation to offer its clients AI-powered insights that discover, solve and predict climate issues in real time.

Pixxel mainly operates in the hyperspectral imaging sphere that gives a better analysis of the Earth’s surface and captures high-resolution images for data analysis. It is looking to launch six commercial satellites, which will be the first set of satellites that will sell data commercially.

The startup launched its third hyperspectral satellite, Anand, in November 2022. The microsatellite weighs 15 kg and has a total of more than 150-plus bands that enable it to see Earth in more detail as compared to non-hyperspectral satellites, the cofounders said. The startup secured $25 Mn in March 2022, along with a strategic round in August 2022 from Accenture.

13. SatSure

Founded in 2017 by Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani and Abhishek Raju, the Bengaluru-based spacetech startup, SatSure, uses satellite data to offer ‘decision intelligence’ across the BFSI, agriculture, and infrastructure sectors.

The startup claims to be making space data easily consumable for all its users. It also offers a SaaS product that enables financial institutions to offer on-demand credit to farmers. 

This year, the spacetech startup has received investment from banking giants ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and HDFC, as part of its INR 120 Cr Series A funding round. It plans to use the funds to own a fleet of four high-resolution data-producing satellites by 2024.

14. Skyroot

Founded in 2018 by Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, Skyroot builds space launch vehicles.

Skyroot became the first private Indian company to launch a rocket into space on November 18, 2022, creating history. The startup successfully launched its Vikram-S rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The launch took place a year after Skyroot tested India’s first privately developed cryogenic rocket – Dhawan 1.

Skyroot has three different rockets in production, Vikram I, II and III. The startup claims that its rockets can be assembled and ready for launch within 24-72 hours, depending on the rocket and the size of the payload. The rockets can carry between 290 kg and 815 kg of payload, depending on the rocket’s size and the target orbit.

The startup has raised more than $66 Mn in funding so far, with $51 Mn coming in Skyroot’s Series B funding round in September 2022.

15. Vasundhara Geo Technologies

Founded in 2017 by Aditya Tekale, Vasundharaa is a data mining startup that specialises in the acquisition and analysis of data sourced from satellites, aerial platforms, and field sensors.

Employing cutting-edge proprietary deep learning algorithms, Vasundharaa navigates through vast and complex datasets, delivering swift and incisive insights. 

The startup boasts a dedicated ensemble of skilled data analysts, software developers, geologists, and business professionals, collectively driving the successful completion of over 75 projects since its inception.

The startup’s impact spans diverse sectors, including agriculture, environment, defence, disaster management, and urban development, effectively catering to the unique needs of its clientele. 

Last updated: August 24, 2023, 12:50 PM

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The user interface (UI) is the first point of contact between a product or service and its users. As such, it dictates the entire user experience for any app or website. Indeed, one of the ways that startups and small enterprises one-up competition is through innovative and delightful UI. 

At the same time, broken or clunky UI can create a damaging user experience. However, getting the right talent for frontend development (which is the technical term for UI development) is not exactly inexpensive. Startups, especially at the early stage, are limited by cash and talent resources, which results in UI/UX gaps.

While some have tried to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as image processing models (Midjourney, DALL-E, et al) to solve the UI problem, the results have been far from perfect. Most image-processing AI models are not as proficient as large language models such as ChatGPT or Bard in generating code, which is the foundation of great UI and therefore UX.

But former Mindtickle executives Dipanjan Dey and Abhijit Bhole want to change this with Kombai. Generative AI has opened up a whole range of new models, and the duo wanted to create a product that designs like humans and has the ability to write code accurately for frontend development.

Dey and Bhole set up Kombai in 2022 and since then it has been a 16-month journey to develop the right frameworks for the product’s generative AI model, from scratch. As the founders claimed, they wanted to ‘bring fun back to frontend development’.

Essentially, Kombai is a dev tool to automate mechanical frontend development tasks, which accounts for a lot of man-hours and cost. This allows dev teams to focus on writing the best code possible and making meaningful improvements to the product. 

Developers give Kombai visual input and prompts, which are converted into usable code for frontend and UI development. “We are building a generative AI model that understands design as humans do,” Dey told Inc42. 

Today, the Pune-based startup has announced the launch of its public research preview, along with its $4.5 Mn seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital, with angel participation from CTOs and SaaS executives. 

Coding With AI: The New Norm?

Kombai’s primary aim is to eliminate mundane, repetitive work that frontend and full-stack developers have to put themselves through to create UI. 

According to Dey, there are 5 Mn frontend developers and 15 Mn full-stack developers in the world. “Most of them are spending a disproportionate amount of their time, anything between 25% to 75%, on doing a bunch of really mundane mechanical stuff that they hate doing,” he claimed.

But Kombai employs the term “generative AI” with some creative freedom. While it does respond to prompts similar to ChatGPT and Midjourney, the startup asserts that it excels in generating frontend code that surpasses the accuracy and usability of larger language models (LLMs). 

According to Dey, tackling UI design complexity is challenging for vision and language models. This prompted the startup to develop its own AI model, tailor-made for UI development. 

UI design and development involves taking inspiration from existing work and frameworks. But developers cannot just translate visuals into code — they have to make hundreds of micro-decisions, which poses problems for existing generative AI models. 

“That’s the technology that we have built. We have those fundamental models that can hopefully interpret design files as a human being does. We are not doing this mechanically just based on the visual prompts, but adding that human intuition on top of this,” Dey claimed. 

Kombai is an ‘ensemble’ of deep learning and heuristic AI models, which enables it to understand various parts of the UI and generate code as a developer does. The deep learning component gives the system a wealth of data to build new code, while the heuristic rules are intended to increase Kombai’s probability of responding in the right manner. Plus, this helps the startup prioritise speed over accuracy to give several results. 

Dey said before starting up, the startup did not expect to build the entire algorithm from scratch. During the ideation stage, the founders were able to talk to large companies working in LLMs, including OpenAI and others, about addressing UI development with existing AI models.

However, their general-purpose solutions did not address niche problems very easily.

“So I think it has been challenging, but it has also been a very interesting exercise for us, to solve something that has not been done anywhere in the world. I don’t think anybody in the world has still sort of come up with a new model that can understand design,” CEO Dey claimed.

While there are tools such as Adobe XD and Figma that allow developers to translate design and visuals to code, Kombai is able to bring better accuracy and context in terms of different coding requirements and languages. However, developers need to have Figma accounts to import designs from the design software. 

Kombai competes with Locofy.ai, another Indian startup allowing customers to turn design to code. Other startups such as Sydney-based Relume are looking to take a similar approach to web design. 

The Next Leap

Having secured its seed funding, Kombai will look to improve the underlying models and focus on product development. The startup also plans to expand its team of 12 in the coming months.

According to the cofounder and CEO, most of the funding will be utilised for product development. “There are some specific areas of focus in terms of product development. The first would be developing, and improving the underlying models further,” Dey added.

The startup expects to learn a lot from its research review phase and implement the feedback in the foundational mode, more frugally than large model players such as OpenAI.

Kombai also plans to invest more in the product workflows around its fundamental model. 

Trailblazed by OpenAI and ChatGPT, generative AI has taken the world by storm since last year. India has also seen startups either launch generative AI products or make the tech their front and centre. 

The likes of SocialBoat, ZuAI and many others have placed their bets on generative AI, with major names such as Zomato, Swiggy, BYJU’S and Freshworks also experimenting with generative AI-based products. 

While there are no immediate plans for monetising the platform, Dey said the plan was to first accumulate feedback from the public research preview. “For individual developers, I think the research preview phase at least is not going to be monetised at least for the next six months,” said Dey, adding that Kombai will be enterprise-focused for the time being.

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At a time when commercially viable battery charging technologies worldwide take a minimum of 30 minutes to a maximum of 10 hours to fully charge electric vehicles (EVs), depending on battery capacity and vehicle types, Bengaluru-based Exponent Energy claims to have broken all records with its 15-minute EV charging tech, with the vehicle category no bar.

The startup has made 15-minute rapid charging an on-road reality with its patented ‘water-based’ off-board thermal management system.

But before we delve deeper into the technology and Exponent Energy’s journey in building its tech stack, it is pertinent to understand why such a technology is groundbreaking. 

In an attempt to make the usage of EVs more seamless, various players across the globe are working on curbing the EV charging time down to as low as 10 minutes.

However, so far, only a handful of players, including Tesla, California-based Enevate, and European tech giant ABB, have been successful in achieving this and that too for certain use cases, while many such technologies are still being championed in ultra hi-tech labs.

Amid this, India’s Exponent Energy’s tech innovation is applicable across use cases. The tech not only reduces charging time but also enhances the life of EV batteries, thereby making them cost-effective in the long run.

Spilling The 15-Minute Rapid Charging Beans

Former Ather Energy executives Arun Vinayak and Sanjay Byalal founded Exponent Energy in 2020, with the sole motive of building a tech enablement platform that can help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) across segments to go electric with unmatched agility.

According to CEO and cofounder Vinayak, the only hurdle in the path of EV adoption in India is the efficiency of these vehicles, which can be improved multifold.

“Our problem statement in focus was battery life, battery charging times, the charging network… this is where the energy stack was really broken, and we needed to make energy much faster, simpler, accessible, and affordable,” Vinayak said.

When it comes to rapid charging, the biggest hurdle is overheating of batteries and battery life degradation. A 15-minute rapid charging generates almost 256X more heat than a 4-hour charging, which is the industry average. 

Notably, lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are highly sensitive to extreme temperature conditions. Hence, battery thermal management systems are crucial for these battery packs as they help them function seamlessly even in extreme temperatures.

In most cases, various cooling systems such as air cooling, liquid cooling, and phase change material cooling are used worldwide to keep these batteries at their optimal temperature. 

However, according to Vinayak, liquid cooling systems, which are the most common solution for thermal management in EVs today, hardly solve this problem, particularly in countries like India where the ambient temperature is normally 40 degrees Celsius or higher.

To resolve this, Exponent has built an advanced heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, which is ‘off-boarded’ from the vehicle and is deployed at its charging stations, ‘e^pump’. 

EV players like Tesla, Lucid, and Hyundai also have advanced HVAC systems, but the only issue is that these systems are an integral part of their vehicles and make them heavier and more expensive.

To resolve this pain point, the startup has built chargers and charging stations that come with this technology, reducing the burden on OEMs to incorporate such technology in EVs.

Its charging station, ‘e^pump’, transfers refrigerated water through its charging connector, ‘e^plug’, preventing Li-ion cells in its batteries from getting overheated while charging. The technology ensures that the temperature of its battery packs, ‘e^packs’, doesn’t exceed 35°C in any climatic condition. 

Overall, Exponent Energy’s secret sauce of efficient 15-minute rapid charging is engrained in its tech stack that comprises ‘e^packs’, ‘e^pumps’, and ‘e^plugs’.

Making Batteries Last Longer

Besides reducing the charging time by controlling overheating, Exponent Energy has also been able to increase battery life by controlling lithium plating – the formation of metallic lithium around the anode of Li-ion batteries during charging.

Lithium plating is a phenomenon that degrades battery life and leads to battery malfunction. 

While newer and more advanced cell chemistries are being developed to change the anode itself at a fundamental level, they are not mainstream yet.

“We are using the same material science and same anode but using a more software and electronics-based approach to smartly push the same anode to do more without actually damaging it,” Vinayak said. He added that the startup’s BMS and charging algorithms have been able to address the problem of lithium plating at the grassroots level, increasing the battery life.

Building The Business

Since its inception, Exponent Energy has raised $18 Mn in total funding from the likes of Lightspeed India, YourNest VC, 3one4 Capital, AdvantEdge VC, Hero MotoCorp’s chairman and CEO Dr Pawan Munjal’s family office, and Motherson Group.

Enabling efficient last-mile deliveries being the startup’s major focus area, it partnered with one of the leading OEMs in the three-wheeler commercial vehicle segment, Altigreen Propulsion Labs, in 2022. It claims that EVs powered by its tech stack have already covered over 10 Lakh kms with more than 25,000 rapid charging sessions. 

However, the only catch here is that the startup sells its entire tech stack as a solution, and its ‘e^pumps’ can only charge ‘e^packs’. It has its ‘e^pumps’ at 30 locations in Bengaluru, which generate revenues on a subscription basis, based on the energy consumed per vehicle.

The startup’s ‘e^packs’ can be charged anywhere but they take at least an hour to fully charge. For maximum 15-minute efficiency, the battery packs need the company’s proprietary ‘e^plugs’ and ‘e^pumps’.

All of Exponent’s battery packs, which are also cell agnostic, come with a warranty of 3,000 cycle life, 3X the industry standard. They cost almost 30% less than other EV batteries in the market, as per the company.

Charging Ahead

After establishing its first set of charging networks in Bengaluru, Exponent Energy is planning to expand its operations to five more cities – Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Ahmedabad – by the end of the financial year 2023-24.

The startup has also set an ambitious target of deploying 1,000 ‘e^pumps’ and 25,000 Exponent-powered EVs by 2025 in the aforementioned cities, eyeing a revenue of around INR 600 Cr during the year.

Currently, more than 200 EVs powered by the startup are running on Bengaluru roads.

Vinayak says that as an energy company, Exponent is more focussed on high-energy value products, hence the startup is not looking to enable two-wheelers right now. After three-wheeler commercial vehicles, it would target the three-wheeler passenger vehicle market.

Besides, Exponent is all set to soon launch 15-minute rapid charging capabilities for intercity ebuses as well as etrucks by next year.

It must be noted that the ebuses market is slowly getting more mature in the country, with existing and new players launching intercity bus services with well-established charging networks. Currently, FreshBus and NueGo are the two main players in this market, with the likes of ZingBus expected to enter the market soon.

While Exponent currently faces minimal competition in India, more players could emerge with advanced cell chemistries and battery tech as the EV industry keeps growing. To substantiate this fact, Bengaluru-based EMO Energy has also launched 30-minute chargeable portable battery packs for various vehicle categories. 

Meanwhile, big players like Ola Electric are working on building their own cell and battery technology, though it remains to be seen if, and to what degree, the upcoming technologies would prove to be pathbreaking in the near future. 

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Ever since the centre liberalised the policy governing drones operation in India via the Drones Rules 2021, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ecosystem heaved a sigh of relief. 

A slew of positive announcements related to the segment. For example, the Cabinet’s approval of INR 120 Cr PLI scheme, a ban on the import of drones – intended to boost domestic manufacturing, and the drone certification scheme to ensure safety and quality requirements are a few positive steps. Besides, the establishment of digital airspace mapping for drones alongside announcements such as Drone Shakti and Kisan drones have been touted as a step in the right direction by experts.

All of these point in one direction – the developments will enable more jobs and help support an industry that has long been struggling due to bureaucratic hurdles. Finally, the segment can focus on building an investment-friendly ecosystem, as well as work with the government on programmes that incentivise local manufacturing.

In fact, India has witnessed a 34.4% surge in the number of drone or UAV startups between August 2021 (157 startups) and February 2022 (221 drone startups). 

Earlier, Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said that India has the potential to become a global drone hub by 2030 since a large number of industries will adopt drone innovation. Prior to this, he also estimated that the Indian drone industry would have a turnover of around INR 15,000 Cr by 2026.

In this article, Inc42 has compiled a list of 28 Indian drone startups, detailing their journeys – from what they do to their plans amid the booming deeptech segment.

The list below is not meant to be a ranking of any kind. We have listed the Indian drone startups in alphabetical order.

Aereo

• Founded In: 2013
• Founders: Vipul Singh, Suhas Banshiwala
• Funding Raised To Date: $748K
• Investors: GrowX, 500 Startups, StartupXseed, 3one4 capital, Valpro
• Headquarters: Bengaluru 

Launched in 2013, Aereo (earlier Aarav Unmanned Systems) offers end-to-end drone solutions. AUS is building commercial-grade drones and provides drone-based solutions for enterprise applications in Mining, Infrastructure, Urban Planning, Irrigation, Energy and Agriculture. 

It also offers integrated solutions for drone applications, providing the drone, an operator and a cloud platform for data analysis. It was also amongst the three companies that were shortlisted to map India’s 600,000 villages by the government.

In July 2022, it signed an MoU with Tata Steel to develop and offer integrated drone solutions for open cast mining operations.

Prior to that, it got into a lease financial deal worth INR 3.75 Cr with Grip to build new revenue streams by leveraging lease financing for more than 50 drones.

Aero360

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Pragadish Santhosh
• Funding Raised To Date: NA
• Investors: NA
• Headquarters: Chennai

Founded in 2017, Chennai-based Aero360 builds autonomous hybrid drones to enhance aerial surveying, surveillance and rescue applications. The startup has developed six unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for the aforementioned applications.

All its UAVs are equipped with multiple features like infrared sensors, thermal cameras, magnetometers, and fail-safes mechanisms such as return to home on communication breakdown.

It has also built an agricultural spraying drone – Agri – which features a 17 L storage tank for pesticides, fertilisers and other agrochemicals for precision spraying.

While the startup has yet to raise equity funding, Aero360 has partnered with Indian Coast Guard and Indian Army for surveillance purposes.

AOTOM TECHNOLOGY

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders: Krunal Kalbende
• Funding Raised To Date: $100K
• Investors: Krunal Kalbende
• Headquarters: Nagpur

Aotom Technology works in the field of drone technology, geophysical services, AI, data analytics, face recognition and blockchain technology.

The startup offers machine learning services, regression techniques, deep neural networks, pattern recognition, cognitive intelligence, NLP/text mining, visual/audio entity tagging, and text captioning, among others to examine a human face and the surface of the earth. 

Its expertise helps it select an appropriate algorithm based on the data structure, patterns and desired outcomes. Coupled with its experience in digital technologies, platforms and the business domain, the startup offers comprehensive solutions and services for business and technology teams of enterprises to apply AI/ML in various lines of business.

Asteria Aerospace

• Founded In: 2011
• Founders: Neel Mehta, Nihar Vartak
• Funding Raised To Date: INR 23.12 Cr
• Investors: Reliance Industries
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Asteria is a robotics and AI startup that offers drone-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions and builds drones for industries such as defence, agriculture, oil and gas, mining and construction, telecommunications, and energy.   

Its products include DGCA-certified micro-sized drone A200, small-sized multirotor drone A410, and a vertical take-off and landing aircraft drone AT-15. 

In December 2019, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries (RIL) bought 51.78% equity in Asteria for INR 23.12 Cr. During that time, RIL shared that it would infuse an additional INR 125 Cr in the startup to increase its stake to 87.3% by December 2021. 

In the financial year 2021, its operating revenue stood at INR 8 Cr and net loss was at INR 8.2 Cr. 

BharatRohan

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders: Amandeep Panwar, Rishabh Chaudhary
• Funding Raised To Date: $0.33K
• Investors: Upaya Social Ventures, Acumen Fund Inc 
• Headquarters: Hyderabad 

BharatRohan is a tech-enabled agri-enabler that provides drone-based advisory services to around 6K farmers across 30K acre farms in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The startup provides a four-part service that is intended to optimise input usage, minimise crop losses and maximise profit margins. 

The startup also enables a marketplace where farmers can collaborate with different companies via contract farming. While farmers can buy raw materials such as pesticides and seeds from sellers, the FMCG, retail and exporter companies can buy agri-commodities from the farmers’ fields.

While BharatRohan is categorically an agritech startup, the use of drones is the product’s USP. With a drone, the startup generates a detailed map of a farm that characterises specific agronomic issues including nutrient deficiencies, disease infections, as well as pest and weed infestations. 

Its drones and satellite-based remote sensing imagery of fields, along with the corresponding historical climate and weather records, helps BharatRohan provide value addition to farmers to optimise their outputs. 

In March 2022, it raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Upaya Social Ventures and Acumen Fund Inc.

Dhaksha Unmanned Systems

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Ramanathan Narayanan
• Funding Raised To Date: Undisclosed
• Investors: Dare Ventures 
• Headquarters: Chennai 

Dhaksha Unmanned offers seven drone-based solutions for sectors such as agriculture, mining, defence and surveillance. It manufactures battery-operated and petrol engine-based drones. 

In September, the startup received an undisclosed amount of funding from Coromandel International’s venture capital arm Dare Ventures. 

Prior to that, the Chennai-based startup along with 13 other drone companies got selected for the government’s PLI scheme that stimulates manufacturing drones and drone components in India. 

Interestingly, its drone named AgriGator has received ‘Type Certificate’ from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), according to its website.

It reported a revenue of INR 3 Cr while its profit stood at INR 2.3 Cr in the financial year 2020, according to Tofler. 

DroneAcharya Aerial

• Founded In: 2017
• Founder: Prateek Srivastava 
• Funding Raised To Date: NA
• Investors: Shankar Sharma, Aegis Investment Fund, Maven India Fund, Nav Capital VCC-NAV Capital Emerging Star Fund, Zinnia Global Fund
• Headquarters: Pune

DroneAcharya offers drone-based enterprise solutions to several industries such as oil and gas, mining, infrastructure, and agriculture. It also provides training for drone piloting, drone building, drone data processing, and using industrial drone applications, among others. 

In early December 2022, the listed drone startup secured INR 9.66 Cr in a pre-IPO round from Aegis Investment Fund, Maven India Fund, Nav Capital VCC-NAV Capital Emerging Star Fund, and Zinnia Global Fund. 

On the first day of its IPO, it saw a positive response and got subscribed 22.94 times. It was trading at INR 156.25 on the BSE as on 10 February 2023. 

EndureAir Systems

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Dr. Abhishek, Rama Krishna, Chirag Jain, Dr. Mangal Kothari
• Funding Raised To Date: INR 13.5 Cr
• Investors: Sangeet Kumar, Prateek Jain, Bir Singh, Satish Kumar Shukla, Amit Kumar, Jalaj Dani
• Headquarters: Noida

Endure Air Systems offers personalised unmanned drones that can be utilised for various functions including border surveillance, logistics and aerial mapping, among others. 

In July, the drone startup secured INR 13.5 Cr in its seed funding round from Jalaj Dani from Asian Paints and founders of Addverb Technologies.

During that time frame, it claims to have manufactured more than 10 products. The startup holds five patents in landing technology and vertical takeoff segments. 

Additionally, it has collaborated with various government agencies including Uttar Pradesh Police, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), among others to date. 

Enercomp Solutions

• Founded In: 2013
• Founders: Jatin Patel
• Funding Raised To Date: $660K
• Investors: ah! Ventures 
• Headquarters: Ahmedabad

AI drone startup Enercomp offers service with UAV ‘drones’ and a variety of sensors for efficient and reliable data acquisition and processing, providing high standards analytics to gain insights into the data. 

“We had around 90% of revenue coming from the B2B sector and from the drone services business. We are launching our drones and our GIS platform and in fact, we have booked orders of around INR 35 lakh for products. With our strong positioning in the survey/inspection business, we aim to achieve the target of INR 2.5 crore in the current financial year with an increased share in the B2G business as well (around 40% of target revenue),” said Jatin Patel.

With its proprietary tech, Enercomp’s solutions have capabilities to cater to diverse sectors ranging from agriculture to industrial services to defence. 

Enord

• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Muhammad Anas, Zain Saeed
• Funding Raised To Date: NA 
• Investors: NA 
• Headquarters: Delhi

Enord designs and develops an AI pilot drone, INSPECTOR, for B2B sector and government agencies. Its drone mainly conducts inspection of high-power transmission lines, telco-towers and thermal lines. Its drone also carries out inspections of day-to-day operations in various sectors.

Explaining its product offering, the startup shared that its AI drone INSPECTOR is operated in confined spaces without GPS or human intervention. It gives insights into how to improve operational efficiency of its clients. 

The startup is recognised by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and is being incubated at IIITD Innovation and Incubation Center, according to its LinkedIn profile.

FlytBase

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Nitin Gupta 
• Funding Raised To Date: NA   
• Investors: NA
• Headquarters: Pune 

FlytBase offers drone-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions for surveillance and security, public safety, and construction. It also offers cloud-based software solutions to manage drone deliveries.

In November last year, it partnered with avionics tech company Iris Automation to integrate Iris’ Casia G ground-based detect and alert system with FlytNow. 

In December 2020, it had secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from early-stage VCs and angel investors. 

Garuda Aerospace 

• Founded In: 2015
• Founders: Agnishwar Jayaprakash
• Funding Raised To Date:  $5 Mn
• Investors: Ocgrow Ventures, Mahendra Singh Dhoni
• Headquarters: Chennai 

Garuda Aerospace designs, builds and customises drones for multiple purposes such as event photography, agricultural survey, reconnaissance and surveillance. Its product offerings include agri mapping, surveillance (drone), solar panel cleaning, seed dropping, loudspeaker, UGV, and Fixed-wing VTOL drone, among others. 

Notably, Garuda is one of the four drone startups that have partnered with the foodtech unicorn Swiggy for drone grocery delivery trials in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR. Besides, it has received orders of more than 8,000 drones from several countries including Malaysia, Panama, and UAE. 

In 2020, it carried out sanitisation operations in PM Narendra Modi’s electoral constituency. Its drones and pilots were also employed for disinfecting hospitals, public spaces and societies in Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Chattisgarh. 

Earlier In June, Indian cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni invested in Garuda Aerospace. As a part of the deal, Dhoni joined its cap table and also became its brand ambassador. A month ago, the drone startup secured investment from Ocgrow Ventures along with a few angel investors from the banking sector. 

Recently, its founder shared plans of raising $100 Mn-$150 Mn in Series B funding in 2023 at a valuation of $500 Mn-$600 Mn. The startup also aims to sell 25K drones in the next eight months and export 10K drones to 100 countries in the next 12-15 months. 

General Aeronautics

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders: Abhishek Burman, Kota Harinarayana and Anutosh Moitra
• Funding Raised To Date:  INR 6.5 Cr
• Investors: Mela Ventures, Adani Defence 
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

General Aeronautics, which was incubated at the Indian Institute of Science, offers drone-based solutions for crop protection services, farming, and yield monitoring services in the agriculture sector. Besides, it also offers medical solutions to government agencies and private organisations. Its team holds decades of experience working in research and development organisations across the globe. 

General Aeronautics provides an end-to-end crop protection solution that comprises agri drones named Krishak, an agri app and hub, as well as mapping and survey drones. Krishaks are employed for spraying agrochemicals, fertilisers and speciality nutrients. It sprays 50 droplets per sq cm and has the ability to cover 100 acres of land in a day. 

In May, Adani Enterprises’ subsidiary, Adani Defence Systems and Technologies acquired a 50% stake in General Aeronautics in an all-cash deal. Prior to this, the drone startup secured INR 6.5 Cr in its Pre-Series A funding round from Mela Ventures. 

ideaForge

• Founded In: 2007
• Founders: Ankit Mehta, Ashish Bhat, Rahul Singh, Vipul Joshi
• Funding Raised To Date: $38.4 Mn
• Investors: Blacksoil, Infosys, Qualcomm Ventures, Indian Army
• Headquarters: Mumbai

Drone manufacturing startup ideaForge makes UAV systems for inspection, surveillance and mapping. Its solutions are used across sectors such as defence, homeland security, mining, construction, agriculture, energy and utilities.

As per its website, ideaForge has 20 patents and has completed more than 220K end customer missions. Its customers include the Indian Army, Navy, Air Force, all CAPFs (CRPF, BSF, NSG, etc), state police forces and Indian Railways, Survey of India, TAFE, NTPC, DRDO and L&T.

It has designed its vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) UAVs to help the Indian Army to have access to clear airspace or a runway. As a part of its contract with the Indian Army, the drone startup shall deliver 200 systems soon to augment the Army’s surveillance capabilities.

Thus, its high altitude version has a service ceiling of 6,000 mtr therefore, can do high altitude missions across even the high tension borders in the north and west. Its flagship product is SWITCH UAV, a 6 kg VTOL that can fly for more than two hours on a single charge.

In April, it bagged $20 Mn in its Series B funding round from several investors including Florintree, Celesta, Infosys, Qualcomm, Infina and Exim Bank of India, among others.

As of Today (11 February, 2023), it reportedly filed its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with stock market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for an IPO. Its public issue will comprise a fresh issue of shares worth INR 300 Cr and an offer for sale (OFS) of approximately 48.7 Lakh shares.

Indrones

• Founded In: 2015
• Founders: Pravin Prajapati
• Funding Raised To Date: INR 7 Cr
• Investors: MapmyIndia
• Headquarters: Mumbai

Founded in 2015 by Pravin Prajapati, Indrones is a mapping startup that deploys drones to carry out topographic surveys, volumetric estimations, 3D modelling, and data collection.

Indrones manufactures three drones: the Sigma 25, Sigma 75, and Vector VTOL. The three drones have a flight ceiling between 400 m and 5,000 m, making them useful for different types of use cases, including construction, railways, disaster management, agriculture, mining and oil & gas.

Apart from manufacturing drones, Indrones also has a Drone as a Service (DaaS) platform. Indrones has raised a total funding of INR 7 Cr to date from MapmyIndia.

IoTechWorld 

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Anup Kumar Upadhyay, Deepak Bhardwaj
• Funding Raised To Date: $4 Mn 
• Investors: Dhanuka Agritech
• Headquarters: Delhi NCR

IoTechWorld is a drone Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that makes drones for applications in agriculture, survey and surveillance. The startup has four products – an Agribot (a-DGCA approved agri-spray drone); a Surveybot (a DGCA-approved drone with LiDar and high-resolution camera, typically useful for defence purposes, Drishti comes with a range of payloads including EOIR, thermals, zoom cameras, radars, LiDars and Heavybot is used for logistics. Heavybot can carry up to 10 Kg payload. 

IoTechWorld plans to encourage indigenous products under the ‘Make In India’ initiative. It intends to expand its sales network and company-owned service stations in 10 states in India. It has about 25 dealers across India and would raise the number to 100 in future. IoTechWorld would launch its high-endurance drone models which can go up to 50-100 km. 

Marut Drones

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Prem Kumar Vislawath, Sai Kumar, Suraj Peddi
• Funding Raised To Date: NA
• Investors: Kiran Darsi and Parusharam
• Headquarters: Hyderabad

Founded by three IIT alumni, Marut Drones is one of the pioneering agricultural drone manufacturers in the country. 

The startup has developed drone-based agri-intelligence and agri-automation solutions for precision agriculture and the early detection of crop disease. Marut has been extensively collaborating with the Indian government to further facilitate the usage of Kisan drones for better agricultural productivity and more sustainable farming.

The startup has so far built four different drone models – Agricopter, Seedcopter, Marut ZAP, and Hepicopter. Its DGCA Type certified Agricopter, AG 365, serves across multiple applications – from seeing to harvesting. The startup claims to have sprayed over 10K acres of land.

Meanwhile, its Seedcopter solution has been made for rapid afforestation. The drone has planted over 50 Lakh seed balls across three states. Recently, the startup launched drone seeding in and around Agra and Ferozabad districts in UP.

Besides agri drones, Marut has built ZAP – a mosquito eradication drone. Further, its Hepicopter is a Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) medical delivery drone.

NewSpace Research & Technologies

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Rajinder Rana and Sameer Joshi.
• Funding Raised To Date: $21 Mn
• Investors: Pavestone Capital
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Bengaluru-based NewSpace also has an office in Delhi-NCR. It has signed contracts with the Indian government for delivering products to the armed forces. The startup specialises in swarm drones and is associated with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited to develop products for surveillance and communications.

NewSpace has already delivered SWARM drones to the Indian Army. A swarm of 100 drones can be used for hitting targets at least 50 km into enemy territory.

The startup also plans to manufacture drones for civil uses. NewSpace uses technologies such as unmanned aerial systems, collective robotics, GPS-denied operations, augmented reality, virtual reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Omnipresent Robot Technologies

• Founded In: 2010
• Founders: Aakash Sinha
• Funding Raised To Date: NA
• Investors: Gruhas Proptech (Nikhil Kamath, Abhijeet Pai)
• Headquarters: Delhi

Omnipresent Robot Technologies is an industrial drone and robotics solutions provider that became the first drone company in the country to receive full clearance from the Ministry of Home Affairs to conduct trials for long-range BVLOS operations in 2020.

Operational since 2010, Omnipresent has developed drone solutions for varied use cases, including survey, surveillance, and inspection, automated mapping, and precision agriculture, as well as in ecommerce, food, and medical delivery. 

During the pandemic, it worked with some government bodies to deploy drones for ensuring social distancing.

Omnipresent has also become one of the beneficiaries of the Indian government’s Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for drone and drone components.

In 2022, the startup raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Nikhil Kamath and Abhijeet Pai’s investment firm Gruhas Proptech. The round also saw the participation of Kavin Shah and other high-net-worth individuals (HNIs).

As a robotics firm, Omnipresent has also worked on the Chandrayaan-2 project by developing navigation software for the Chandrayaan-2 rover.

Optimized Electrotech

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Anil Yekkala, Dharin Shah, Kuldeep Saxena, Purvi Shah, Sandeep Shah
• Funding Raised To Date: $2.8 Mn
• Investors: Starburst Accelerator and Venture Catalysts
• Headquarters: Ahmedabad

Defence tech startup Optimized Electrotech produces indigenous surveillance systems for security forces, national assets, defence and aerospace companies. 

It provides accurate, actionable and real-time insights about surroundings through autonomous, field-upgradable, secure platforms, as claimed by the startup.

The startup would like to design new-age surveillance systems, product innovations, and build more prototypes to be used in the railways sector, smart city and intelligent border projects.

Redwing Labs

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders: Anshul Sharma, Arunabha Bhattacharya, Rishabh Gupta
• Funding Raised To Date: $120K
• Investors:  Asymmetry Ventures and Techstars 
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Redwing Labs, the Bengaluru-based drone logistics system startup designs, manufactures and operates autonomous drone logistics systems. It aims at enhancing the last-mile healthcare supply chains. 

The initial idea behind the formation of the startup was to create drones for medical supplies and deliveries. Currently, the startup does around 80 deliveries a day. The last-mile delivery drone features climate control to enable temperature-sensitive deliveries such as vaccines.

According to the company’s website, the team has received a total of 15 awards in the United States of America and Asia-Pacific for best-performance drones and has been felicitated by key government agencies and industry giants in the US such as NASA, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Airbus.

Skye Air

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Swapnik Jakkampudi, Ankit Kumar and Chandra Prakash
• Funding Raised To Date: $1.7 Mn
• Investors: LetsVenture, Chiratae Ventures, Lead Angels, O2 Angels, Agility Ventures 
• Headquarters: Delhi

Skye Air is a drone delivery startup largely focussed on healthcare, ecommerce, quick commerce, and agri commodity sectors. Its first BVLOS flight took off in September 2021.

Skye Air operates across several Indian states, including Kerala, Maharashtra, Haryana, and Meghalaya, from its shared and dedicated hubs. Since 2021, it has done numerous trials with companies such as Dunzo, Flipkart Health+, Curefoods, Tata 1mg, and Redcliffe Labs.

In June last year, Aster DM Healthcare and Skye Air initiated trials for essential medicines and critical lab sample delivery using drones from Kozhikode to Areekode in Kerala.

The startup claims that its drones have taken 2,150 flights so far, covering a total of 11,500 km and delivering 7,500 kg of items.

In November last year, Skye Air raised $1.7 Mn in its seed funding round led by Chiratae Ventures. 

Skylark Drones

• Founded In: 2015
• Founders: Mrinal Pai, Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy
• Funding Raised To Date: $3 Mn 
• Investors: InfoEdge Ventures, IAN Fund, AdvantEdge Founders, Fowler Westrup, Redstart Labs, IKP, Vimson Group 
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Skylark Drones provides end-to-end drone-based solutions that offer insights to help businesses scale. 

Its drones provide business intelligence to enterprises and believe industries ranging from infrastructure, mining, agriculture, utilities to oil & gas could benefit immensely from the reach, efficiency and productivity that drones offer. 

Skylark aims to provide geospatial intelligence to enterprises with its product called Spectra and Drone Mission Ops. Spectra enables worksite intelligence, several platform integrations and API access. Drone Mission Ops, on the other hand, enables project and fleet management for large enterprises and individual operators to plan and execute drone missions. 

Skylark’s computer vision software analyses aerial imagery to offer industry-specific insights to its clients.

The startup plans to further enhance insights from its drone data, to aid and simplify superior business decisions and strategy for its clients. It also intends to spur international product expansion and development of its drone data analytics-based products. 

TechEagle Innovations

• Founded In: 2015
• Founders: Vikram Singh Meena, Anshu Abhishek
• Funding Raised To Date: $500K
• Investors: India Accelerator, Vinners Group, Sitics Logistics 
• Headquarters: Delhi NCR 

TechEagle is a drone logistics airline startup for last and mid-mile deliveries. To make its vision a reality, TechEagle has already received approvals from the government of India (MoCA) and the regulators (DGCA) to conduct package delivery BVLOS (beyond the visual line of sight) flights in various parts of the country. 

The startup plans to launch new indigenous products, scale operations in India, and hire across functions.

Throttle Aerospace Systems

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders: Nagendran Kandasamy
• Investors: Neosky
• Headquarters:  Bengaluru

Throttle Aerospace offers drone solutions to the mining and agriculture sectors. Besides, its drones are also employed for capturing aerial images, and surveillance purposes. Its team holds over 15 years of experience in designing, engineering, manufacturing, software development and supply chain in the aerospace and defence industries. 

As per the website, Throttle is the first DGCA-approved drone manufacturer for civil drones. It has also got a licence from the Ministry of Defense for manufacturing military drones. Its manufacturing facility is spread across 10,000 sq ft in Kolar, Karnataka. 

In May, RattanIndia Enterprises’ subsidiary NeoSky acquired a 60% stake in Throttle Aerospace for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition would facilitate Neosky in offering all types of drone solutions including drones as a product (DAAP) and drone as a service (DAAS) etc to customers.

TSAW Drones

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Kishan Tiwari, Rimanshu Pandey
• Funding Raised To Date: INR 2.5 Cr
• Investors: We Founder Circle, Soonicorn Ventures, Chandigarh Angels Network, POD World, Qubit Capital, Zypp Electric, PedalStart, Kartik Hajela
• Headquarters: Delhi

TSAW Drones is a drone manufacturing startup based out of IIT Delhi, which works with companies to enable logistics via drones. The startup participated in the recently concluded Aero India Show 2023.

TSAW Drones’ logistics arm, DRONECO, facilitates a point-to-point drone delivery supply chain in urban and remote or rural areas of the nation. Users can also track their deliveries in real-time.

The startup provides last-mile delivery services via its three drones – Adarna V2, Adarna Mini and Maruthi 3.1. These drones have a range of 40 to 120 km and a payload capacity of 2 to 20 kg.

UrbanMatrix

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Rishabh Verma, Ashutosh Kumar, Divyanshu Pundir, Chitransh Chauhan
• Funding Raised To Date: $497K
• Investors: Sara Elgi, Laxminarayana 
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Urban Matrix Technologies specialises in micro drones and enables industries to easily leverage the power of aerial data by building compliant drone hardware, with proprietary software solutions. 

The founders spotted a gap between the available drone options and industry requirements. Taking photos and videos was not enough, industries require seamless integration of aerial data with their ongoing workflow in order to make real-time decisions that can save time and cost. The startup addressed this by generating actionable data via a dedicated cloud-based platform – UMT Console.

“For a long time, drone technology was limited to military applications. But now, commercial drones are rising with industries adopting them. A time when drones will become an essential part of human civilisation is much nearer than you have imagined,” said Rishabh Verma, CEO of UrbanMatrix Technologies.

UrbanMatrix has expertise in designing and manufacturing industrial drone systems along with world-class proprietary software infrastructure. It allows enterprises to not only control and manage drones but also effortlessly draw functional insights using integrated aerial data processing tools. 

The startup plans to work towards strengthening research and development, deepening market penetration and delivering industry-oriented solutions across verticals. 

The startup lately set a record by flying a drone from a distance of 3,000 Km via 4G technology. It flew the drone in Bengaluru while controlling the whole flight from Dubai.

VECROS

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders: Besta Prem Sai, Sai Allu
• Funding Raised To Date: $68.49K 
• Investors: IIT Delhi, NSRCEL-IIMB, STARTUP OASIS, 100xVC, NVIDIA 
• Headquarters: Delhi NCR

Vecros is a drone tech startup. Its drones have embedded cameras and CPUs that can mimic human behaviour which help them achieve greater autonomy.

The startup that specialises in ML, aerial robotics, control system, robotics sensor tech, and autopilots began as a small student group working on drones from the IIT Delhi campus, where its first aerial robot was developed. Today, Vecros has developed JETPIX, an operating system for drones, that uses AI and computer vision algorithms to make intelligent decisions so that the drones can match the capabilities of a pilot.

Vecro’s solutions are intended for industrial AI applications that centralise around surveillance and optimising and providing enhanced stack or fleet management. It provides solutions to agriculture, mining, construction and oil and gas industries.

Vecros claims its drones can fly without any pilot input around complex environments. The drone startup aims to sell at least 1,000 drones by the end of 2022 and would expand its team and resources to help achieve its goal. 

Further, it is planning to establish a manufacturing plant and an R&D centre with the help of IIT Delhi and DST to boost further state-of-the-art technology in drones. 

This is a running article, we will keep adding more names to the list

Last updated on August 10, 2023.

The post Eyes In The Sky: 28 Indian Drone Startups Looking For A Major Pie appeared first on Inc42 Media.

With consumer preferences experiencing a significant shift, the popularity of ayurvedic products has been steadily rising, particularly in the beauty and personal care industry. The Indian herbal cosmetics market is expected to reach $4.7 Bn by 2026. Launched in 2021 by Shreedha Singh and Param Bhargava, a Gurugram-based D2C brand, The Ayurveda Co. (T.A.C) is looking at ruling this space and emerging profitable by the next financial year.

However, the journey of this D2C beauty and personal care brand has not been without twists and turns. Suffering severe skin allergies in 2014, Singh started looking for remedies and her search led her to Ayurveda, which healed her within six months. It was then the idea of floating an Ayurvedic brand first flickered in her head.

After years of research, the founders, Singh and Bhargava, started building The Ayurveda Co. However, much to their chagrin, the husband-wife duo witnessed a lot of scepticism along the way. Despite this, the couple remained hell-bent on changing the perception around Ayurveda as a remedy that takes time to show effects and is now old and obsolete.

To change people’s perception around the 5,000 years old science of healing, the couple made it a mission to make their brand appealing and affordable for all age groups. Thus, The Ayurveda Co. was born, giving Ayurveda direct entry into the lives of people who have now largely separated themselves from its benefits.

Presently, the D2C brand offers a diverse range of natural and ayurvedic beauty and personal care products such as face washes, cleansers, serums, moisturisers, hair care products, and makeup. All products are made from ayurvedic ingredients, which are clinically proven and derma tested for being free from sulphates, parabens, and other harmful chemicals.

T.A.C sells its products through its website and its kiosks, along with select retailers and online marketplaces like Nykaa and Amazon. The startup displays and sells its products at 30 departmental stores in Dubai, which it plans to scale up to 300 this year.

In India, The Ayurveda Co. has 20 exclusive outlets, while its products are available across 3,000-plus multibrand outlets across the country.

In terms of its financial performance, the D2C brand claims to have witnessed 4X revenue growth in FY23 to INR 45 Cr from INR 12 Cr in FY22. This growth can be attributed to the significant expansion of their customer base, which has grown 10X over the last two years, from just a few thousand individuals to an impressive 5 Lakh customers.

In FY24, the founders aim to generate revenues to the tune of INR 150 Cr. To fuel this, the D2C brand recently raised INR 100 Cr in a Series A round.

Brand Positioning Is Most Critical In The Early Days

For T.A.C, establishing trust and fostering brand recall with customers was paramount. As a D2C brand centred around traditional Ayurveda, it was crucial to align with the preferences of millennials and GenZ. To achieve this, Singh personally oversaw surveys and managed customer care, as the sole point of contact, during the initial 15-18 months.

The founders also realised that for T.A.C to truly disrupt the market, a shift in perception around using ayurvedic products was essential, and the young generation must spearhead this transformation.

“Listening to the customers helped us understand the core proposition we can offer. While Ayurveda is traditional, we positioned ourselves as a young and modern brand,” Singh added.

Unlocking The Omnichannel Route With Beauty Advisors (The ‘Snipers’) 

T.A.C targets individuals between 18 and 35 years of age. Among them, customers in the age group of 18 to 25 years buy mostly from online channels. This is why the brand was only selling online in 2021 and 2022 via its website and marketplaces such as Amazon, Nykaa, Flipkart, and Blinkit, and with the help of influencers on Instagram.

However, the founders soon realised that the TAM they were targeting was too small. As a result, in May 2022, the T.A.C team embarked on their offline journey to expand their market share. However, there were quite a few unforeseen challenges.

“To go offline, we first went to stores like Nykaa and Shoppers Stop, however, they demanded a 50% margin on our products and a monthly display rental of INR 20,000. It was a huge cost to bear,” Bhargava said.

This paved the way for three key strategies that the founders adopted: 

Setting Up An Experienced Team

The founders appointed a team of sales executives from companies such as  L’Oreal, HUL, ColorBar, Biotene, and Lotus, Colgate, and Palmer. The new team was experienced in offline strategies like sachet-size products, smaller price points, and larger distribution, giving the brand a much-needed penetration boost.

Exclusive Stores

Instead of putting the products directly on the shelves of retailers, the founders focussed on opening their exclusive stores in areas with heavy footfall. This not only created a buzz in the market but also helped them negotiate better deals with retailers as the brand name was already built.

Training ‘Snipers’ In-House

The founders also decided to appoint beauty advisors (BAs) and gave them training to help customers choose the right products according to their skin type and requirements.

“It’s a very sniper kind of approach. And for our teams to become proper ayurvedic snipers, we kept on brushing up their skills. Today, we have 20-plus T.A.C exclusive stores and 3,000-plus offline retail touch points across India, along with more than 600 beauty advisors building brand awareness and trust among consumers,” Singh added.

Quality Conscious Super Supply Chains

Speaking with Inc42, Bhargava highlighted the importance of supply chains for global expansion. He also cautioned founders against compromising product quality during business growth.

“T.A.C’s success can be attributed to three key strategies — Maintaining an in-house R&D team of doctors and experts; sourcing high-quality ingredients from the Himalayan region through partnerships with key retailers; and investing in machinery and quality checks at outsourced manufacturing units to ensure product excellence,” the cofounder said.

Although The Ayurveda Co. outsources its manufacturing, the founders are laser-focussed on investing in machines and quality-control processes at regular intervals. This allows them to stay abreast of new technologies. Also, the D2C brand’s quality-control teams make sure that their vendors are committed to maintaining high quality.

“Also, we are the first of the few brands that have been able to enter the Middle East in less than six months after completing all formalities. We were able to get the products approved and on the shelves in Dubai because we have been focussed on building a super supply chain that is quality conscious and scalable,” Bhargava added.

Is Profitability A Distant Dream?

In the financial year 2021-22, the D2C brand’s total expenses amounted to INR 16.6 Cr, resulting in a net loss of INR 2.7 Cr. Although the founders didn’t disclose the total expenses incurred in FY23, they could increase significantly due to a 4X rise in revenues and a strong focus on marketing and brand promotion. It is pertinent to mention here that T.A.C also serves as the title sponsor for reality shows like MTV Roadies and Splitsvilla.

However, according to Bhargava, these expenses are important for the growth of the company. He claims that the company maintains a positive contribution margin.

“We are investing in promotion and marketing and not incurring losses here. The losses primarily stem from our distribution and operations side as we work with an in-house team of 600+ beauty advisors engaged in direct selling with attached incentives. So, the losses are not on the selling side and we expect to recover with scale,” he added.

Interestingly, even though the primary goal of the founders is to thoroughly explore the beauty and personal care market by adding more products and categories to their portfolio, they have no plans to set up a manufacturing unit.

Meanwhile, the husband-wife duo are planning to make inroads into the health and wellness markets. The founders are looking to break even by the end of FY24 and turn profitable by FY25.

However, the segment which The Ayurveda Co. aims to become the leader in requires high cash burn and is crowded with deep-pocketed players. According to Inc42 data, there are approximately 130+ beauty, personal care, cosmetics and men’s grooming D2C brands in India.

Some of the notable names in this segment are Mamaearth, The Moms Co., mCaffeine, Biotique Nykaa, Sugar, Mamaearth, Wow Skin Science, JustHerbs, The ManCompany, MyGlamm, Skinkraft, Plum, and Beardo, among others.

While Nykaa has already become a listed beauty marketplace, others like Mamaearth, Wow Skin Science, Bombay Shaving Company, mCaffeine, MyGlamm have already established presence in many international markets. Therefore, it would be interesting to witness how The Ayurveda Co. cracks the profitability code by FY25 with its ayurvedic playbook and well-trained beauty ‘snipers’.

[Edited by Shishir Parasher]

The post How D2C Brand The Ayurveda Co. Grew Its Customer Base 10X In Just 2 Years  appeared first on Inc42 Media.

It may sound strange but in the ever-growing world of technology, robots have evolved to keep us well fed. With such technological advancements, it is possible to imagine being able to sit back and relax after a hectic day at work while a robot chef prepares your favourite meal as nutritious and tasty as home-cooked food.

Bengaluru-based startup Euphotic Labs, aka Nosh, is developing AI-enabled robots that can follow commands, cooking instructions, and prepare food, giving you a much-needed respite from your daily hustles. 

Founded in March 2018 by Yatin Varachhia, Sudeep Gupta, and Amit Kumar Gupta, Nosh is looking at serving the economically well-to-do migrant population of metropolitan cities to sell its cooking robots to make their life easier, bestowing them with the joy of home-cooked meals.

At a time when robots, equipped with different capabilities, are increasingly gaining popularity among restaurants, food chains, cloud kitchens, and homes, Nosh could emerge as one of the pioneering players in the highly lucrative robot kitchen market, which, as per a report, is expected to reach $4.4 Bn in size by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 12.6% between 2021 and 2028.

The Craving That Gave Birth To Nosh

The idea to build a machine that can cook food at home took shape a few years ago when both Varachhia and his wife were struggling to find time to cook at home due to their hectic work schedule and had no option but to hire help to prepare meals for them. 

The couple was surprised to find that several other families, too, were sailing on the same ship and struggling to find time to enjoy cooking and savour the true flavours of food cooked with love and care.  

Despite employing the help to cook meals for them, the only thing that was missing was the flavours to satiate their taste buds. This was another pressing issue as the Gujarati couple would often crave authentic Gujarati cuisine, but the flavours largely remained missing from their lives in Bengaluru. 

Unable to find a straight solution to satisfy their desire for authentic Gujarati cuisine, Yatin started building Nosh, a machine that can truly automate the entire cooking process, paving the way for Euphotic Labs.

Nosh allows users to load ingredients (veggies, oil, water, etc.) in the machine as per the requirement of a recipe. Once users command it to cook, the device starts cooking as per an individual’s taste and requirement.

It comes with a mobile app through which users can command Nosh’s cooking robot to customise any dish. The device comes with pre-loaded recipes and cooks over 100 of them in cuisines including Italian and Indian.

The device comes with a camera, which helps the AI-powered machine cook perfect meals and healthy treats. The Nosh machines are powered by the startup’s in-house AI and can cook anything that requires a pan or a pot.

Nosh’s Journey To Finding Product-Market Fit

In 2018, Nosh did its first proof of concept but there was a lot of scope for further improvements. Since then, the machine has undergone several tweaks and user trials — both in terms of hardware and AI. Currently, the startup is working on its seventh prototype.

Initially, Nosh built its product for the broader consumer market. However, in 2019, the startup joined hands with cloud kitchens listed on Swiggy and EatFit to automate their operations. 

Varachhia explained that with profitability becoming the major focus for these cloud kitchen startups, they adopted the cold chain method rather than cooking fresh food, which ended the use case for Nosh in the cloud kitchen space.

In mid-2020, Nosh reverted to building for the consumer market. “We have received a good response from the consumer market and have been able to pre-book 1,000 orders from across India while there are more than 4,500 people on the waiting list. We have been able to secure these orders with zilch marketing spends,” Varachhia said. 

Nosh has charged INR 40,000 per customer for its pre-orders, however, the machines (the cooking robot) are expected to cost INR 50,000 apiece once they are floated in the market. The startup is planning to first start with the delivery of its pre-orders from October this year.

While Nosh has taken the onus on itself to deliver the first lot of pre-orders to its customers, it eventually has plans to sell its cooking robots via various ecommerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon.

With just $1 Mn in seed funding raised so far, the founders claim to have kept their R&D costs low. Nosh’s cap table includes names like BITS Spark, SuperMorpheus, and a few other angel investors.

Besides, the startup’s working capital is largely driven by pre-orders. Further, the startup’s machines are made at different contract manufacturing facilities. 

What’s Next?

In 2024, Nosh aims to make and deploy 5,000 cooking robots but the projections are heavily dependent on the supply chain. The startup is not looking to raise any funding this year due to weak market sentiments. 

Meanwhile, Nosh is working on training its AI robots in more Indian recipes and adding a multi-cuisine menu to the already-impressive list of food items that it can make.

In the kitchen robotics market, Nosh competes with Bengaluru-based Nymble and its cooking robot Julia, and another startup Mechanical Chef. 

Besides, in the US and European markets, several players, including Samsung, HeroX, NVIDIA, Sony, Miso Robotics, and Moley have launched kitchen robots.

As per a report, North America and Canada are leading the markets for AI-powered kitchens and robotic chefs. Among South Asian countries, India, China, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore are leading the demand for automated chefs and cooking robots.

While there is a huge scope in the global market, it will be interesting to see if Nosh can play its cards right and capture a juicy chunk of this lucrative sector in the years to come.

The post How Nosh’s AI-Powered Robot Chefs Are All Set To Transform Indian Kitchens appeared first on Inc42 Media.

After two years of unmitigated growth powered by the rocket fuel of FOMO-driven funding, India’s startups are facing a reckoning. With startup funding plunging to 2020 levels, volatility in public markets and the US economy on the verge of entering a recession, the world is looking at similar conditions as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008.

However, the present moment might also be the best time to build a startup. Flipkart, Dream11, Policybazaar, EaseMyTrip and Zomato – all storied names in India’s startup ecosystem – were founded during the height of the GFC when global markets were facing an extinction-level event.

The crucible that is the current market will forge companies that will make headlines throughout the next decade. Startup funding is in a freefall zone and investors have tightened their purse strings significantly, making selective deals. However, the bullishness for early bets remains as high as ever.

We have always had the opportunity to discover the market leaders of tomorrow with ‘the 30 Startups To Watch’ column, and this endeavour holds more prominence right now.

Recognising the immense responsibility we have on our shoulders, we took a step back, talked with startups and investors backing them and reprioritised what kind of startups need the spotlight the most today.

After spending two months on the drawing board, we have returned with the 38th edition of ‘30 Startups To Watch’ with a sharp focus on sustainability, echoing the sentiment across global markets.

30 Startups To Watch: July 2023

No startup that was selected has raised more than $4 Mn in funding, with many securing less than $500K in investment and still turning a profit. While these 30 companies employ more than 650 employees cumulatively, 17 startups have 20 employees or less.

The list is loaded with fintech, ecommerce and enterprise tech ventures, with a total of 20 startups. We have also featured startups from the currently relevant fields of generative AI and semiconductors, with one startup each from the two red-hot industries.

More interestingly, the 38th edition of ‘30 Startups To Watch’ features 17 startups operating in the B2B space and only eight ventures making waves in the B2C segment. The remaining five startups hold the B2B2C flag.

In our most recent editions of this series, we have witnessed a growing wave of startups catering to other businesses. Usually, these startups are either already profitable or are about to turn a profit, which ensures better exit opportunities for investors who have burnt their fingers already and are looking to make safer bets.

For Indian startups, however, the present is anything but the time to play it safe.

With that, we bring you the 38th edition of the 30 Startups To Watch list by Inc42.

Editor’s Note: The list below is not meant to be a ranking of any kind. We have listed the startups alphabetically.

abCoffee

Stirring Up Indian Coffee Culture With Grab-and-Go Playbook

Coffee is undeniably one of the most beloved beverages in India, with coffee chains like Starbucks, Tim Hortons, and Cafe Coffee Day being quite popular. However, the prices at these chains have been notoriously high, with markups reaching as much as 1,700%. That remains true with the presence of local speciality coffee chains, even as India is the world’s eighth-largest exporter and the fifth-largest producer of coffee.

Having experienced European coffee for many years and after extensive research on Indian coffee varieties and roasting techniques, Abhijeet Anand started abCoffee in 2022 from a single outlet in Mumbai. The startup has nine tech-enabled, grab-and-go outlets in Mumbai, with one coming up in Delhi NCR soon.

abCoffee prides itself on its efficient service, claiming that customers can get their favourite beverage and be on their way in just 90 seconds, provided they place an order right before arriving at the outlet. 

The QSR coffee chain sources green beans from across the country and roasts per its in-house recipe. abCoffee has 95+ SKUs across five categories, including hot and cold beverages and ground coffee.

The startup has multiple revenue streams, including direct sales via its QSR outlets, online sales via delivery partners like Swiggy, Zomato, Magicpin and Dunzo and online orders via the website. So far, abCoffee claims to have sold 103K+ cups of coffee to more than 31,000 customers. It reported an ARR of INR 3.4 Cr as of July 2023.

In the short term, abCoffee plans to expand to major urban hubs of the country, with 323 outlets by 2024. By 2026, the startup plans to set up more than 6,650 outlets across India, with an ARR of INR 6,656 Cr.

Agrigator

Meet The Uber & Ola Of Farm Logistics

According to a 2021 report by the Standing Committee on Food, Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution, India lost around 412K metric tonnes of wheat and rice between 2017 and 2021, owing to poor transportation and logistics. For context, the amount of food grains lost in transit could have fed 82.3 Mn people for a month.

To alleviate the issues shrouding the sorry state of grain logistics in India, Udit Sangwan and Charu Chaturvedi founded Agrigator in 2019.

Similar to Uber or Ola, Agrigator acts as a platform that connects grain traders and small-scale millers with on-spot logistics services. Truck drivers can sign up on the platform to offer their services, similar to how ride-hailing companies operate. Since its inception, Agrigator has onboarded more than 2,000 truck drivers.

The startup offers multiple services to its customers, including guaranteed truck confirmations within an average of 28 minutes and freight discovery through its freight prediction model, which is patent-pending in India.

Agrigator has its supply network in four states to enable the pan-India movement of grain. In the last three months, the logistics startup has achieved significant milestones, including 9,000 trips and increasing its matching fees from 2.5% to 6%, amassing a user base of 24,000 clients. 

They have also joined hands with an NBFC to expedite payments.

Agrigator takes a certain percentage from the payment received by each truck through its platform, making way for the Bhopal-based startup’s core revenue stream. By 2024, Agrigator is looking to increase its revenue by 8% YoY.

CapitalSetu

Giving Small Businesses A Supply Chain Financing Boost

Per the Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises, there were 14.39 Mn MSMEs in India as of February 2023, with more than 99% being micro and small enterprises. These businesses have limited access to financing, which limits their growth.

Pankaj Goel, a chartered accountant, saw an opportunity in the supply chain finance segment for distributors, retailers and MSMEs, which inspired him to start CapitalSetu in 2020. Today, Goel runs the startup with his wife Ayushi and Yogesh Vaishnav, a family friend and the startup’s CTO.

CapitalSetu’s offerings comprise six products, three fintech and three SaaS. Its flagship product, SetuX, is aimed at providing supply chain financing to businesses. With SetuX, the startup helps MSMEs increase the pace of their cash flow by releasing ‘early payouts’ against their invoices.

Further, while the startup’s SetuPay is a peer-to-peer invoice discounting platform, which enables faster payment cycles, its SetuDyna solution offers a dynamic discounting platform through which MSMEs can offer early payment discounts to their respective suppliers.

CapitalSetu’s SaaS product SetuFi is a tally reports and dashboards mobile app. Similarly, its SetuTIP is an app-based trade intelligence platform that offers credit assessments, GST reports, ITR reports, banking reports, and bureau assessments. The startup also offers an order management system, SetuBiz.

CapitalSetu generates revenue through its supply chain finance operations by charging interest and through SaaS subscriptions. 

The startup has disbursed INR 250 Cr so far, a quarter of its 2024 target of INR 1,000 Cr loan book in supply chain financing for MSMEs. By 2026, CapitalSetu aims to take disbursals to INR 5,000 Cr across 1 Lakh MSMEs in India.

Centricity

Giving Private Wealth Management A Tech Boost

Traditionally, wealth management has been a mostly manual process with limited automation and outdated reporting methods. Due to the unavailability of tech-enabled solutions, the requirements of HNIs and UHNIs have often remained underserved in this segment. In addition, independent financial advisors (IFAs) today need help in scaling up their services amid a dearth of tech solutions. 

With India’s wealth management market set to reach $429.70 Bn in assets under management (AUM) in 2023, the lack of tech in the space is telling.

Having worked with single-family offices and UHNIs for over 20 years, Manu Awasthy founded Centricity. The startup offers plug-and-play solutions for IFAs looking to make the transition to the wealth management space or scale their businesses. For HNIs, UHNIs and single-family offices, it offers a suite of tools for efficient wealth management. 

Centricity primarily focuses on two products – OneDigital and Invictus. While OneDigital is a digital infrastructure platform for IFAs, Invictus is an insights-generating tool designed for single-family offices (SFOs).

OneDigital enables onboarding, KYC processes, multi-asset transactions, comprehensive investment product listings and comparison tools. Invictus, on the other hand, enables SFOs to assess investment risks, implement policy guardrails, and create asset allocation.

The startup’s revenue accruals come from commissions generated from asset management companies/product manufacturers and fee incomes on secondary bond trades with clients.

Centricity’s short-term plans for 2024 include scaling the technology team, expanding its physical presence, enhancing the product bouquet by adding more products and growing key metrics such as the number of digital partners, product penetration, AUM for OneDigital, and the number of families on the Invictus platform.

Evolved Foods

Switching To Plant-Based Protein Products

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 35% of Indians do not get enough protein. Further, the livestock industry is responsible for about 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, solidifying the case for plant-based alternatives for protein.

To bridge the protein gap and make the most of this opportunity, Roma Roy Choudhury and Pradeep Rao established their plant-based protein startup, Evolved Foods. The founders got the inspiration for the startup from their personal experiences, including a visit to Singapore in 2014 and the subsequent launch of their restaurant in Bengaluru.

Evolved Plant Meat, the flagship product of Evolved Foods, is a 100% vegetarian product that offers 15 gms of protein per 100 gms of serving, has zero cholesterol, and does not contain any animal-derived ingredients. The startup uses soy, coconut and rice protein to manufacture plant-based protein alternatives.

Recently, Evolved Foods also entered the heat-and-serve food category to celebrate the rich regional culinary heritage of India with dishes such as Hyderabadi dum biryani, Chettinad fry, dhaba-style tandoori tikka and Kashmiri rogan josh curry.

The startup operates on a B2B business model, selling its products to 25-plus clients in the food service industry. It is also finalising the launch of its products in the overseas markets and its short-term goal is to start exporting the products soon. In the long term, Evolved Foods aims to focus on developing more plant-based protein alternatives while immortalising Indian cuisine.

Fundly.ai

Funding Small Pharma Businesses

According to an IBEF report, India’s pharmaceuticals industry is expected to reach $65 Bn by 2024 in market size, further expanding to nearly $130 Bn by 2030. A significant chunk of the industry consists of regular chemist shops across India’s towns and cities. 

However, with the rise of online pharmacies, there is a need for financial solutions for small pharma business owners, retailers, and distributors to enable them to compete with major online pharmacies. Amit Chawla and Shreeram Ramanathan, having recognised the gap in the market, founded Fundly.ai in 2021 in Mumbai. 

Fundly.ai, which operates at the intersection of supply chain and MSME finance, empowers pharma distribution tail, speciality players and brands by providing them with affordable financial solutions. Fundly.ai’s platform streamlines the financing process, making it easier for retailers and distributors to access funds for their operations. 

Fundly.ai offers two products – invoice payment and InstaCash. The former allows small pharma distributors to pay the invoices in advance. InstaCash, on the other hand, is a direct line of credit offered by Fundly.ai to non-registered distributors and small pharma businesses.

The startup has empowered more than 2,000 retailers and 30-plus distributors across 9+ cities and has so far disbursed more than INR 140 Cr in credit. The company plans to deepen engagement with existing customers, invest in technology development, and introduce new product offerings in the short term, on the back of its recent $3 Mn seed fundraise.

GrowAgro

Empowering Farmers With Enhanced Livestock Care Solutions

According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, the veterinary healthcare market in India is projected to reach $1.86 Bn by 2028. Despite this potential, Indian farmers continue to face challenges in accessing healthcare services for their livestock, as only one government-certified veterinary professional is available for every 21,000 cattle.

This scarcity of veterinary care has resulted in a high animal mortality rate, decreased productivity, and significant negative impacts on the profitability of over 120 Mn farmers engaged in cattle rearing.

Having experienced the bleak realities of rural livestock healthcare while helping their families with livestock management during the Covid-19 pandemic, Harish Phalswalm, Naveen Shokeen, Prince Yadav and Krishna Sharma founded GrowAgro in 2022 to address the gap in the system.

The startup has developed a mobile app that offers farmers multiple healthcare services for their livestock. The app focuses on preventive healthcare, breeding assistance and nutritional consultation. It uses AI-based image recognition technology, which allows farmers to upload images of their cattle to detect potential health risks and get treatment recommendations.

Along with nutrition plans for animals, the app offers AI-enabled solutions for breeding healthier and more productive animals. GrowAgro’s app also facilitates consultations with experienced veterinarians and livestock experts when need be.

GrowAgro charges a consultation fee for personalised expert consultations and offers premium subscriptions to users. Further, the startup earns commissions from every transaction that happens on the app.

Currently, the startup is conducting a pilot in one district of Haryana and plans to expand gradually across North India soon.

HexoAI

Generative AI-Powered Creatives For Marketing Success

Creating high-quality marketing content can be expensive, especially if it involves hiring professional photographers or designers. While the pricing differs across categories and can cost heavily with images edited as per the style guides of various ecommerce platforms.

Hexo.ai, founded by Kunal Bhatia and Vignesh Baskaran in 2022, uses a proprietary generative AI engine trained on a massive dataset of images, creatives, and marketing data to help businesses solve these challenges. The AI engine allows the startup to generate customised, high-quality, and realistic creatives.

The startup’s product suite includes a product photography generator, a creatives generator, a personalisation engine, an expenditure strategist and a variations generator for all visual needs of an ecommerce brand.

These tools can help businesses save time and money on marketing while also creating more effective and engaging content. Hexo.ai’s generative AI can also help companies track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and make necessary adjustments.

While Hexo.ai is in the pre-revenue stage, it plans to monetise its product suite through a subscription model. Users will be able to subscribe to Hexo.ai’s services on a monthly or annual basis.

Kikibix

Seizing Growing Health Foods Market With Nutritious Snack Offerings

Over the past few years, Indian consumers have been increasingly incorporating healthier food options in their diets, given a steep rise in the cases of lifestyle-related diseases. That has helped the health foods market to expand at a CAGR of 20%, and according to a report by Avendus Capital, this sector will reach $30 Bn in size by 2026.

Increased demand for healthier snacking options enabled Dr Ridhi Kaur to launch Kikibix, a D2C brand offering healthy snacking options like cookies and peanut butter, in 2022. The Gurugram-based D2C startup has developed 12 types of cookies and three peanut butter flavours. Kikibix claims its cookies are baked using whole grains and don’t contain wheat, gluten, palm oil, refined sugar and artificial sweeteners.

So far, the D2C startup has served 20,000-plus customers, and its products are available on its website and major online channels, having recently boarded the quick commerce bus with Blinkit. With a team of 5-7 people, Kikibix claims to have grown 8X YoY.

The startup’s short-term plans include launching two new product lines – nuts and namkeens – and expanding the catalogue to 30-50 SKUs across five categories by 2024. In the long run, Kikibix aims to go omnichannel and onboard a brand ambassador by 2026.

Leumas

On-Demand Manufacturing For D2C Brands

In the burgeoning landscape of Indian D2C brands, the majority outsource their production due to the high investment required for in-house manufacturing. However, Leumas has emerged as a game-changer for D2C brands in nutraceuticals, health supplements, skincare, hair care, oral care and healthy foods.

Founded by Nitesh Kumar and Subhajit Biswas in Bengaluru, Leumas offers a unique solution that allows D2C brands to manufacture goods as per their demand. By leveraging Leumas’ scalable production capacity, brands can access flexible batch sizes and efficiently produce multiple products.

Central to Leumas’ offering is its innovative tech stack, integrated with its manufacturing facilities. D2C brands can now upload their product recipes to the cloud, enabling Leumas to manufacture precisely according to each brand’s demand.

At the heart of their services lies the flagship product, Leumasware, an on-cloud manufacturing suite that empowers D2C companies to design, develop, and manage new products. Additionally, it enables seamless production and quality control while maintaining a digital inventory that enhances supply chain visibility.

Not stopping there, Leumas goes the extra mile by offering expert assistance to D2C startups venturing into specific product classes, helping them bring their envisioned products to life.

Magma

Bridging Gaps In Indian Manufacturing

After China, India is on its course to becoming one of the largest manufacturing hubs in the world. Per World Bank data, India’s manufacturing gross value add (GVA) stood at $450 Bn during 2022, compared to China’s $4.98 Tn and Japan’s $1.02 Tn.

Despite this, manufacturing units in India continue to face a slew of challenges in areas like capacity utilisation, quality control and supply chain management, leading to high customer churn and challenges in exporting their goods. To bridge this widening gap between Indian factories and global markets, Neal Thakkar founded Magma in 2021.

A B2B manufacturing platform in the building materials space, Magma helps factories with procurement, manufacturing and sales to compete with their global counterparts. By leveraging Magma’s mobile app and its web-based platform, factory owners can streamline their operations, connect with and manage suppliers, optimise and track logistics, and enable a consistent energy supply.

The startup operates on a commission-based business model, generating revenue through margins earned on the products sold via its platform. Magma claims to have onboarded 110-plus clients across 12 states in India, making an annualised gross merchandise value (GMV) of INR 200 Cr in the past three months.

Magma’s plans for 2024 include expanding its product offerings by increasing the number of SKUs available on its platform and serving more factories.

By 2026, the startup aims to expand into verticals beyond construction materials.

Maya

Programming Made Easy

Programming is a complex and time-consuming task, and many who lack technical know-how may find it difficult to learn.

Bengaluru-based Maya Labs, founded by Sibesh Kar and Shubham Mishra in 2020, is solving this problem by developing a program synthesis engine called PAC-1 that can convert natural language instructions into computer codes.

This allows users to instruct machines to perform tasks without having to write codes. At the enterprise level, Maya Labs’ PAC-1 helps software engineers focus on more complex tasks such as developing new features or fixing bugs.

Maya Labs plans to monetise its product through a subscription model. Users can subscribe to the startup’s service and use PAC-1. The startup also plans to offer enterprise-level pricing for businesses that need to automate large volumes of tasks.

Mindgrove Technologies

Revolutionising Mid-Range Chip Market With Indigenous Systems On Chips

Throughout 2021 and 2022, the world witnessed a massive shortage of semiconductor chips, impacting industries across the globe. This came as a wake-up call for countries like India, which are heavily dependent on China and Taiwan for these chips. While the supply chain has stabilised in recent months, there is still a problem of overdesigned chips.

At a time when many global chip designers are looking to develop the next-fastest chip, there is a large section of engineers working on mid-range applications like IoT, computer vision and automobiles with outdated, inefficient and expensive tech.

Understanding the challenges faced by system engineers, Shashwath TR and Sharan Srinivas J founded Mindgrove Technologies in 2021 to provide SoCs (systems on chips) for mid-range use applications. The cofounders worked at IIT Madras’ Reconfigurable Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) Lab — while Shahwath was a systems engineer, Sharan was a PhD student at RISE Lab.

Mindgrove has been working on three primary SoCs – Secure IoT, Vision SoC and Edge Compute. While all of them are in the design phase, Secure IoT will enter production by late 2023 at fabs in the US and Taiwan.

These chips are powered by IIT Madras’ SHAKTI, an open-source initiative by the RISE Group, to develop state-of-the-art SoCs in India. Mindgrove also benefits from the Indian government’s push for self-sufficiency in chip design and manufacturing.

The startup claims its SoCs have several use cases across categories and segments, including IoT, edge computing, EVs, smart utility meters, and security equipment such as fingerprint locks and CCTVs.

Now&Me

AI-Enabled Mental Health Platform For GenZ

According to an Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) research report, the Indian population is facing a severe mental health crisis, with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorders constituting one-sixth of all health-related disorders.

Another research by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) finds that nearly 150 Mn Indians require mental health care services but fewer than 30 Mn are seeking care. Having witnessed this problem firsthand, Bani Singh and Drishti Gupta founded Now&Me, an AI-enabled startup focused on self-care for Gen Z. 

Their flagship product is an expert chat panel, which helps users connect with mental health and self-improvement experts via text, calls, or video calls. Unlike traditional therapy sessions, the platform caters to individual needs, allowing flexible session durations at as low as INR 7 per minute. The expert panel, which comprises professionals fluent in multiple languages, offers both therapy and coaching. 

Additionally, the startup provides a peer support community, enabling users to connect with like-minded individuals and express their feelings. The peer support community provides a safe space for users to share their stories openly, combating feelings of isolation.

Now&Me has adopted a freemium model, providing users with a free trial of therapy and expert services, followed by paid recurring sessions. The pay-per-minute approach allows users to pay for the duration of their sessions with experts. 

In the last three months, Now&Me has assisted over 7,000 individuals. The startup now aims to expand its reach beyond individuals and provide enterprise-level support. The plan by 2024 is to offer an expert chat panel for both B2C and B2B needs, enabling more individuals and organisations to access the necessary guidance and support.

Ohm Mobility

Dial Ohm For EV Financing

India has a 100% electrification target to decarbonise its transportation by 2030, and the homegrown EV market is likely to become a $206 Bn opportunity by that time, according to a CEEW-Centre for Energy Finance report. But the country will require investments worth $180 Bn+ to reach its green mobility goals.

Despite the sector’s rapid growth and great potential, financing for EV startups has been sluggish at home. Nikhil Nair, who earlier worked with SELCO and M-COPA for solar financing in India and Nigeria, was aware of how a capital crunch can affect the mass transition to EVs. So, the cleantech veteran launched Ohm Mobility in 2020, an EV financing platform connecting startups with FIs.

The Bengaluru-based EV fintech collaborates with multiple FIs, including banks, NBFCs and EV leasing companies, to ensure hassle-free lending and speedy disbursals. It claims to have disbursed loans worth INR 35 Cr in the past three months and charges a platform fee from the EV startups.

Short term, Ohm Mobility aims to help finance 30% of Indian EV companies by 2024.

OneDios

After-Sales Services Just Made Easier

While buying products, especially electronic items, vehicles and consumer durables, is fun, they can become a headache over time, especially when they start to wear out, demanding servicing. Getting after-sales service of any kind, be it appliances or vehicles, is a long process and demands maintaining a long list of contacts. Further, customers often face long wait times, while companies incur high costs in just registering requests.

Understanding that the country’s after-sales services sector required a disruption when it comes to offering better customer experience, Nitin Chawla, a former IBM employee, founded OneDios in 2019, along with a fellow IBMer, Amit Sharma.

The startup runs a mobile app, OneDios, which allows users to search and register a service request within 60 seconds. Its flagship product, the OneDios Request Booking System (ORBS), works as a gateway to connect customers with brands.

Customers can also upload their invoices and warranty cards to tag their products in the app to schedule after-sales services and register requests faster.

The solution can be integrated with any CRM, enabling brands to deploy ORBS within two weeks. OneDios has partnered with 90-plus major brands, including Daikin, Hitachi and Voltas. Partnerships with brands and dealerships not only allow the startup to sell extended warranties and register service requests but also acquire customers at the point of sale.

The primary revenue stream for OneDios is the commissions that it earns from service requests raised via its app. It also makes money by working with brands to sell extended warranties.

OneDios estimates that at least 1.6 Bn service requests are routed through call centres across India per year, giving it a large TAM. This TAM has allowed OneDios to register more than 800K users and 60K service requests per month. The startup’s revenue during FY23 was INR 1.35 Cr, up 20X from FY22.

In FY24, OneDios aims to sell 50K extended warranties, deliver 10 Lakh service requests and onboard 500K new customers, with hopes to become profitable by FY26.

OneGreen

A One-Stop Shop For All Natural Products

While there are numerous brands in India claiming to offer ‘natural’ and ‘green’ products, determining the authenticity of these claims can be challenging. Additionally, many brands that offer genuine products often fail to grab consumers’ attention as they primarily sell through their websites.

Seeking to adopt a more mindful lifestyle, when they became parents for the second time, Abhijit Bhattacharya and Neha Gahlaut faced similar difficulties. They realised that finding genuine products, which are no green sheen, from various websites and platforms was quite a challenge.

This led Bhattacharya and Gahlaut to found OneGreen, a one-stop shop for all green and mindful products, in 2020. The platform offers products across categories such as baby care, food and beverages, home and dining, clothing, fashion and pet supplies, among others. In just three years, OneGreen has grown to become a horizontal ecommerce platform that offers over 20,000 products from 500-plus brands across more than 85 categories.

OneGreen has developed a three-step quality and credibility measurement model, OneGreen Index, to mitigate green-washing in the market. The algorithm validates and confirms claims made by a brand and testifies its presence and popularity, rating it on a scale of 1 to 10 — the higher the score, the better the product. 

OneGreen operates on a commission-based revenue model. The startup has managed to reduce its burn rate by 90% in the past six months and grow its GMV by 10% MoM. The startup also claims to have a 20% repeat rate over 90 days.

By 2024, OneGreen plans to cut down its costs even further, increase repeat customers and improve average order value.

ONWO

Simplifying Cross-Border Food Trading For Indian SMEs

According to an IBEF report, India recorded $50.2 Bn in total agriculture exports during 2021-22, up 20% from $41.3 Bn in 2020-21. However, cross-border trade of food products faces several challenges, including complex ecosystems and middlemen, limited access for SME buyers and a lack of price transparency.

Having faced these challenges while working in the international sourcing division at Flipkart, Bipul Kumar founded ONWO in 2022 to ease the cross-border trading of food products.

ONWO is an exporter of rice and sugar. The startup’s curated platform offers overseas SME buyers a range of products from Indian producers, including multiple variants of rice as well as processed and raw sugar.

The platform simplifies the procurement process by offering quality-assured, low-touch pre and post-order experiences. ONWO provides its services across both online and offline channels, allowing customers to reach the platform via all avenues.

The platform also provides contract manufacturing and private label solutions, quality assurance and risk management and complete order fulfilment. ONWO has 15-plus partner mills located primarily in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Haryana. So far, the startup claims to have delivered more than 10,000 metric tonnes worth of produce to regions such as North America and the Middle East.

ONWO generates revenue through multiple streams. It charges a commission on the price of the products sold on its platform. Additionally, it earns fees for fulfilment services and value-added services provided to manufacturers and buyers.

Recently, the startup claimed to have achieved a 90% repeat order rate, turning EBITDA positive in the process. ONWO also claims to have $10 Mn in ARR in FY23 and plans to hit $1 Bn in revenue by 2026.

Papa Pawsome

All-Natural Grooming Products For Furry Friends

Keeping the four-legged, furry companions squeaky clean can be tricky. But more worrisome are the ingredients used in off-the-shelf grooming products that can be extremely harmful if licked or swallowed by dogs and cats. The market needed a Mamaearth for pet care – brimming with the goodness of natural products – and Mumbai-based Papa Pawsome has created that niche. 

Nishita and Nikita Agarwal (unrelated), the digital-first D2C pet grooming brand offers a wide range of holistic wellness products which use plant extracts instead of harmful chemicals like sulphates, parabens, silicones and artificial fragrances. These include wet and dry shampoos, detanglers, itch creams and medicinal ointments for ticks, fleas and infections, paw and skin creams, spa kits and more. Pet parents can also choose products from dog breeds.

Papa Pawsome sells through its dedicated website, quick commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto, and marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart and BigBasket. It claims a user base of 20K+, a 60% rise in repeat customers and an ARR of INR 4 Cr in FY23, including month-on-month revenue growth of 20%.

The D2C brand plans to launch new products, including dog toothpaste, hemp oil and pet wipes in the short term.

PensionBox

A Power Planner To Secure The Golden Years

Elderly poverty in India can be quite alarming in the next decade or two. As per the National Statistical Office, the country’s aged population will reach 194 Mn in 2031 from 138 Mn in 2021. And more than 90 Mn of them will not have financial security, according to a 2021 report by the Agewell Foundation.

Although the Vision India@2047 document considers (post-retirement) gainful engagement for the active and healthy, brothers Kuldeep and Shivam Parashar wanted to do more. They were alarmed by the inadequacy of the US retirement system when they worked there and planned for their parents’ golden years. The viability of the Indian pension system is also under the scanner. For instance, a 2022 report by The Print estimated that around 300 Mn would be without pension benefits by 2050. So, the Parashars launched the PensionBox app in 2021 to help people plan their retirement.

The Bengaluru-based fintech uses AI solutions to generate pension plans based on the contributions made to the National Pension Scheme (NPS). It further takes into consideration a person’s age, salary/monthly income, desired retirement age and place and whether they have a business plan for post-retirement years. The platform allows complete control over contribution schedules so that users can put the money in at their convenience.

In case there is no NPS contribution during the one-year period the user has for matching their contribution target, the app adjusts the goal within the selected retirement age accordingly.

It has also come up with a B2B2C vertical, partnering with private-sector companies to ensure pension benefits for their workforce. It has teamed up with five such companies so far. PensionBox claims to have onboarded more than 1.5 Lakh users, tracking INR 250 Cr in pension savings. The platform takes a 0.5% cut on every NPS investment as recurring revenue. In other words, PensionBox charges a small percentage on each transaction happening on its platform.

It also charges users a one-time fee for opening an account with the NPS.

PensionBox aims to onboard 2 Mn users and 100 B2B clients by 2024. It plans to bring in 10 Mn users and 2K companies by 2026 and wants to emerge as the country’s first pension tech unicorn. It will also apply to patent its AI-powered dynamic pension planning engine.

Powerbot

Improving Power Efficiency With Custom-Made Power Filters

Despite waves of technological advancements, a majority of Indian enterprises are still operating on low PF circuits, which results in a lot of electricity wastage. For the uninitiated, the PF or power factor expresses the ratio of actual power used in a circuit to the apparent power delivered. 

Another challenge for Indian enterprises is that the ones that pay more than INR 50,000 in electricity bills are charged differently. This is because authorities believe that they induce disturbances in power lines. These were two of the major headwinds that Anand Teke faced during his previous stint as the founder of a rooftop solar startup, HelioKraft. 

To address this, Teke joined hands with Hemant Shinde and founded Powerbot in 2020 to arrest runaway costs by improving efficiency. The startup examines the electricity data of enterprises through its proprietary smart analyser, which is designed to analyse power quality on 100-plus parameters. 

Next, the analyser, installed at the premises of users, sends the data to Powerbot’s cloud. The data is then analysed by Powerbot’s proprietary algorithms to design filters aligned to the client’s power needs, which are then installed at their respective properties. 

The smart meters and power filters are the primary revenue generators for Powerbot, which operates on a B2B business model. With 50-plus clients onboard, the startup claims to be on the course to generate 8X more revenues this year compared to last year.

The founders have plans to expand to 15-plus states by next year. It recently also struck a distribution deal with a well-known Indian brand.

Rehook.ai

Automating Customer Promotions And Loyalty Programmes For B2C Companies

Every customer-facing company, especially B2C companies, have several promotions and loyalty programs in place to drive customer retention and improve sales metrics. However, this process is complex, expensive, time-consuming, and disrupts internal workflows.

To resolve this complex web of problems, Akhil Suhag, Akshay Suhag, Mukul Anand and Tushar Dhara founded Rehook.ai in 2023.

The startup offers a full-stack platform that automates the entire user promotion stack and saves time, money and resources required to build promotional strategies and loyalty programmes, including coupons, bonuses, leaderboards, action-based rewards, referrals, streaks, gift cards and more.

It has developed an in-house rule engine, which enables companies to create rules and tailor promotional campaigns based on user actions. This approach also allows for high-impact and personalised campaigns that can be optimised and targeted for maximum impact.

One of Rehook.ai’s unique selling propositions is its platform-independent, API-first, and event-driven architecture, which ensures scalability and eliminates any tech dependency post-integration.

This allows brands to build hyper-personalised promotions at scale while having complete control. Clients can edit, pause or modify any campaign at any time and set conditions for budget, time frame, reward validity, and recurrence.

Rehook.ai operates on a SaaS subscription and pay-as-you-go revenue model. Having onboarded its first 10 customers, the startup aims to achieve $1 Mn in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) by 2024 and targets $5 Mn ARR by 2026.

SheerDrive

Using AI/ML To Unleash True Potential Of Used Cars

The used car market is known for its complexity and fragmentation, leading dealers to invest significant time and resources in sourcing, grading, and pricing pre-owned vehicles. While various startups, such as Cars24, CarDekho, Droom, and Spinny, have entered the segment, persistent challenges remain.

One notable newcomer is SheerDrive, a digital platform cofounded in 2020 by Siddharth Panikar and Ravisen Mehra. The primary goal of SheerDrive is to assist both new and used car dealers in efficiently procuring and remarketing used vehicles.

The platform boasts a range of AI and ML-enabled features designed to streamline the car evaluation and pricing process. Among these is the Vehicle Scan tool, which utilises AI and ML algorithms to analyse a vehicle’s condition based on a photograph, identifying any potential damage or issues.

Another noteworthy feature is Intelligent Computation, a web dashboard that allows dealers to review and grade various vehicle parts, thereby gaining valuable insights into the car’s overall condition. Armed with this information, dealers can proactively address any damages or necessary repairs before putting the car up for sale.

Assured Pricing is yet another critical component of SheerDrive, offering an algorithm that generates fair market values for used cars. By considering factors such as the vehicle’s condition, mileage, and location, the algorithm provides dealers with an accurate and guaranteed fair market value for each car.

Lastly, the Robust Remarketing platform serves as a valuable intermediary between car retailers and web aggregators. By connecting used cars with potential buyers, this platform also offers insights into the optimal timing and location for marketing a particular used car.

SheerDrive operates on a subscription-based revenue model, with dealers paying a monthly fee to access the platform’s robust features. The fee structure is determined based on the number of vehicles each dealer sells, ensuring a fair and scalable pricing system.

Shipturtle

Transforming Marketplaces Into Asset-Light Digital Bazaars

Marketplaces are one of the most popular ecommerce formats nowadays. But traditional platforms still struggle with vendor onboarding, inventory cataloguing, order processing and fulfilment, resulting in longer processing times and hindered growth. Sharad Kabra, a second-time entrepreneur, faced similar issues when he built myBageecha, a multi-vendor online marketplace offering garden products. 

To make life easy for online sellers from every nook and cranny, Kabra set up Shipturtle in 2021. The ecommerce SaaS suite can transform any run-of-the-mill marketplace into an asset-light digital bazaar where shoppers can search through a huge catalogue or directory of brands, and businesses can sell their offerings to a much larger user base.

Its plugin can be easily integrated with the store formats of Shopify (WooCommerce and Magento frameworks are also getting developed) for vendor syncing, cataloguing, order automation, fulfilment, tracking, commission generation and reconciliation.

The Ahmedabad-based startup recently launched a host of website and app-building tools to create vertical markets and extend digital commerce scope beyond Amazon and Flipkart. It has also partnered with logistics players, such as Shiprocket, Amazon Shipping and Delhivery, to provide various delivery options.

The ecommerce enabler has multiple revenue streams in place, including subscription fees for its website and app-building toolkits, customisation fees and a one-time logistics carrier integration charge. It has onboarded 30 B2B clients so far.

By 2024, Shipturtle will build a directory for D2C brands to help them cross-sell to similar companies without third-party intervention, with plans to hit $1 Mn ARR by 2025. It also plans to roll out a social commerce arm by 2026, where content creators will boost brand credibility and drive their sales.

SuperAPI

Supercharging APIs For Efficient Coding

When a request is made to an API, it can take a few seconds to fetch responses. This can be a problem when developing a web or mobile app that needs to make frequent API requests. As such, slow and unreliable APIs can cause poor user experience, increased bounce rate and loss of revenue.

Often, using a caching solution is the only way out, which helps store the responses from APIs for faster response rates. Integrating the best of both worlds, Aditya Agrawal and Adithya Kavuluru founded SuperAPI in 2022, making APIs instantly cacheable with their solution.

Under the hood, SuperAPI does everything an app developer does to make APIs cacheable. The startup offers HTTP caching, in-memory caching, database caching and stale-while-revalidate caching. SuperAPI also offers API monitoring, validation and compression, allowing data transfer to remain manageable within a limited bandwidth and keep API data up-to-date.

These features ensure a better user experience with improved responsiveness and reliability. Since the startup does everything in one place, it helps save a lot of money, which developers would have spent buying solutions to make their APIs cacheable.

SuperAPI is free to use for up to 100 requests per month and hits a subscription paywall after that. The subscription fee starts at $10 per month for 1,000 requests and goes up to $100 per month for 1,00,000 requests.

Swytchd

Switching To EVs Now Made Easy

Between June 2022 and June 2023, India registered nearly 8.27 Lakh two-wheeler electric vehicles (EVs), according to data from the government’s Vahan portal. Despite this, the price of a two-wheeler EV could burn a hole in the pockets of a large chunk of the Indian population, which can lead to stagnation in EV demand.

Having worked in the vehicle leasing department of Jaguar Land Rover, Sameer Arif came up with the idea of launching a similar product for EVs, which led to the inception of Swytched in 2021, which offers two-wheeler EVs on a monthly subscription.

Like popular subscription models, the startup provides customers with a complete package, covering everything from vehicle to servicing. Customers can choose from Swytched’s diverse range of brands such as Ather, Ola and Revolt. Once subscribed, the startup takes care of all the necessary support and services.

At the end of each month, customers can decide whether to renew the vehicle subscription, switch to another model, or discontinue the service. Swytched’s pricing structure accounts for the vehicle, insurance, servicing, breakdown support and charging refunds. Over the past three months, Swytched has gained more than 300 active monthly subscribers.

Swytched’s short-term plan for 2024 is to double its fleet size. By 2026, the startup aims to expand its operations beyond Bengaluru and establish a presence in multiple geographies with a fleet of over 2,000 vehicles on the road.

Togai

Simplifying Pricing And Billing Processes For B2B SaaS Companies

India has become the world’s SaaS hub, with companies like Zoho and Freshworks building for the world. However, almost all B2B software companies face challenges with pricing and billing in their operational workflows.

SaaS products are typically billed as per usage, along with other billing models such as subscriptions. However, managing large-scale data in real-time for usage-based pricing can be challenging. Similarly, offering tailored pricing strategies can also be a roadblock, when businesses rely on traditional subscription billing platforms that may not provide the flexibility required.

To uncomplicate complex billing processes in the enterprisetech space, Abhishek Rajagopal, Aravind Sriraman and Tholkappiyan Velavan founded Togai in 2022.

Togai’s flagship product is a billing platform that focuses on addressing the limitations of traditional subscription billing platforms. The platform excels in handling metered billing, allowing businesses to price their products based on customer usage, though it also offers SaaS companies to design subscription models, be it usage-based, subscription or hybrid pricing.

Togai’s event-based architecture enables SaaS companies to create and adjust pricing models quickly, catering to the specific needs of their customers. The platform also integrates with existing tools such as CPQ, CRM, billing systems, usage analytics and revenue recognition, ensuring smooth and efficient pricing updates across all systems.

Enterprises can avail of Togai’s solution for free, up to the first $50K in billing per month. After a company crosses the free limit threshold, it can choose from either its growth plan (with 100/1,000 invoices worth $25K/$250K) or its custom-made enterprise plan.

TransBnk

Transactional Banking Tech Stack For Banks & NBFCs

According to a 2019 McKinsey report, global transaction banking pulls generate nearly $1 Tn in annual revenue across segments such as trade finance, cash management and working capital products, including overdrafts and deposits. However, much of this work happens manually, which slows down the entire value chain.

Having worked in the banking sector, Vaibhav Tambe, Lavin Kotian, Pulak Jain and Sachin Gupta witnessed the tech and functionality challenges in setting up transaction banking infrastructure. As such, the quartet built TransBnk, a plug-and-play solution which digitises the escrow process for banks, NBFCs and other companies that engage in lending and supply-chain financing.

The startup has digitised the onboarding process and the post-onboarding transactions via its TrustHub platform, reducing the time it takes to onboard users to an escrow account from 45 days to hours. Further, it also offers banks pre-onboarded anchors (companies offering lending solutions via banks) via the DEBS platform, simplifying the escrow journey.

TransBnk also offers a plug-and-play co-lending solution for banks and startups looking to set up lending operations. The startup’s APIs provide access to multiple banks and manage the entire process, from escrow opening to transaction management. The startup has also developed a tech stack to handle recurring payments.

The startup monetises its tech stack by taking a small percentage of the value of transactions that happen via its platforms. In the short term, TransBnk is looking to expand its tech and product teams and product line to triple its clientele by 2024.

Vaaree

A Curated Marketplace For High-Quality Home Décor

India is rich in arts and crafts, weaves, colours and designs. And the creative minds from every niche bring forth their offerings through multiple home décor platforms. But these are either too expensive or the affordable ones often lack the quality. Also, most of these premium products are exported directly and similar products are unavailable in the domestic market to retain ‘product exclusivity’. 

When setting up a new home shortly after their marriage, Varun Vohra and Garima Luthra also started searching for exquisite home décor at pocket-friendly pricing. Although digital commerce has effectively done away with all borders, creative or otherwise, they were unable to find their choice of products, and the prices were not to their liking.

Eventually, the duo, along with Garima’s cousin Pranav Arora, launched a B2C curated marketplace, Vaaree, in 2022 to cater to the connoisseurs at home.

The Bengaluru-based ecommerce startup has developed a curated marketplace and operates on a manufacturer-to-consumer business model where quality remains the soul of creation. Before onboarding, manufacturers have to undergo a 32-step quality control checklist put together by Vaaree to assess quality and process control. Surprise monthly checks are also carried out at production units for maintaining and improving quality standards.

The platform has tied up with 100 Indian manufacturers and has listed 20K+ SKUs across 75 categories, including bedding, furnishings, kitchen, dining, décor, bath and garden. Additionally, its team of experts offers personalised curation services for free to cater to shoppers’ requirements. Vaaree’s platform has an ‘Inspiration’ section, where users can talk with the startup’s team to select designs and colours best suited to their tastes and budget.

The marketplace earns commissions from manufacturers on products delivered.

Vaaree claims 40% month-on-month growth in GMV and says it shipped more than 50K products in the first year.

Volt Money

Unlock Secured Loans With Mutual Funds

According to a report by the Association of Mutual Funds in India, the average assets under management for the Indian mutual fund industry for June 2023 stood at INR 44.82 Lakh Cr. Most of this value is locked away in long-term investments, and redeeming mutual funds means closing the account and losing returns.

To address the emergency demands of customers and their unwillingness to withdraw from mutual funds, Bharat Lamba, Lalit Bihani, and Ankit Agrawal launched Volt Money in 2022, offering secured loans against mutual funds. Customers can avail loans from INR 25,000 to INR 2 Cr, depending on the size of their mutual funds.

The fintech startup’s interest rate starts at 9.95%, much lower than personal loans. With flexible lending terms compared to the rest of the industry, Volt claimed it is yet to see a default.

The startup earns revenue by charging a commission from the interest paid by the borrower and through direct processing fees. Since Volt operates in the B2B2C business model, Lamba claims it has nearly zero customer acquisition cost (CAC).

The startup is working on expanding its loan book and hiring resources to improve its tech stack. However, the long-term vision for Volt Money remains to diversify beyond mutual funds and leverage all financial assets for secured lending.

[Edited by Shishir Parashar and Sanghamitra Mandal. With inputs from Chetan Thathoo]

The post 30 Startups To Watch: Startups That Caught Our Attention In July 2023 appeared first on Inc42 Media.

A few years ago, one of the biggest pet peeves of Vinay Kamal Sharma, the erstwhile zonal head of a Mumbai-based coaching institute JK Classes, was the way students got evaluated on the examinations they took. According to him, just scoring students on what they wrote in their exams or tests did not add any value in terms of enhancing their learning. However, as a teacher, he was also aware of the fact that giving constructive feedback on every answer, written by hundreds of students, was not humanly possible, no matter how brilliant or efficient a person (teacher) is.

With two major pain points at hand — a) providing students with a valuable, insight-oriented analysis of their answer sheets; b) streamlining the marking process to reduce the burden on teachers — Sharma started working on a solution.

To address these challenges, he envisioned a tech platform that could transform the examination landscape for both students and teachers. 

Staying true to his vision, Sharma launched TestnTrack in 2020, a SaaS platform that provides comprehensive end-to-end solutions to coaching centres and teachers. The platform streamlines the entire examination and evaluation process — from curating question papers to generating suggested answers.

While embarking on his entrepreneurial journey, Sharma joined hands with Priya Soni, who was then the cofounder of Examkul, an online examination platform. Interestingly, Soni and Sharma already shared a student-teacher relationship, when the former was aspiring to crack the CS (company secretary) exam. 

Onboarding Soni helped Sharma understand the perspective of students, allowing him to create a solution that caters to all key stakeholders — students, parents and teachers — to achieve the common goal of academic excellence.  

“We strive to make examinations stress-free for all stakeholders while fostering academic growth and success,” said Sharma.

The AI-powered TestnTrack platform not only checks the answer sheets of students but also provides automated real-time audio feedback. Additionally, the platform generates a report for students based on their performance, highlighting key areas of improvement.

The platform also enables teachers to provide gap analysis reports to students, pinpointing areas where they may be lagging or need a brush-up. Furthermore, the platform offers parents data-driven insights into the academic progress made by students over time.

To further push the startup’s vision, TestnTrack received INR 15 Lakh from the Rajasthan government’s iStart programme. It has helped the startup onboard 8K students from 112 institutions across three states and six cities.

TestnTrack’s Growth Story

Sharma’s entrepreneurial journey has not been a bed of roses, as he did not have the technical prowess to pursue his mission full throttle. This proved to be a major hurdle for the startup, which could only start its online operations in January this year, despite being founded three years ago.

“Due to a lack of technical skills, we outsourced the work of building the platform to a company, which turned out to be a fraud. It was then we decided to develop the tech in-house,” Sharma said.

During this time, the most impacted sector was offline education, even as many edtech startups rose to fame during the pandemic to compensate for offline learning. 

However, as luck would have it, TestnTrack’s tech solutions were a work in progress when it was raining the proverbial riches (funding) for many new-age tech startups. But, once the Covid waned, the founders, determined to make up for the lost time, started pitching their solution to coaching centres and ended up onboarding 63 of them as their clients.

The startup has also grown in revenue, it clocked INR 5.4 Lakh in FY22 and aims to generate INR 1.8 Cr in FY24, its ARR is INR 46 Lakh.

What’s The Monetisation Plan?

Unlike many startups that deploy social media and brand marketing teams to create brand awareness, TestnTrack has largely relied on reaching out to its potential clients in person. 

Additionally, TestnTrack leverages a community of book publishers in Jaipur, which endorses its product, helping the startup get access to a wider audience. 

“Under our B2C arm, DOT100, which is featured on our website, we hold an exam hunt programme annually to showcase our platform’s capabilities. We conduct engaging activities to enhance awareness among our target audience,” Sharma said.

Not just this, DOT100, which is a revenue-generating model, offers students and parents free access to basic features like assessing answer sheets under a freemium model. For more advanced features, the tech platform requests users to pay a fee of INR 9 per sheet. The platform also generates ad revenues from DOT100 by displaying the ads of other coaching centres and teachers.

Meanwhile, it offers annual subscription-based services to coaching centres to access its features and tools, such as customisable assessments, tracking and analytics, reports and other educational management functionalities. 

What’s At The Core Of TestnTrack

TestnTrack onboards coaching classes and individual teachers with a unique institute code generated by the platform. Following this, separate batches are created to register students. Institutes can access custom test papers for specific subjects or chapters with a single click. 

The startup also assigns two relationship managers to every coaching class for round-the-clock assistance via WhatsApp. These managers promptly resolve queries related to papers or results within five minutes, thereby enhancing user experience.

TestnTrack’s AI-enabled exam paper creator customises a personalised exam paper with an answer key to the questions. Teachers can conduct exams at will and provide personalised feedback. The automated audio feedback gives timely insights into students’ performance.

This helps in identifying knowledge gaps of students in specific subjects, allowing teachers to work on students’ weaknesses by creating micro-study plans. Students can also leverage the audio feedback system for self-learning.

TestnTrack handles subjective and objective exams. For subjective exams, digital copies of the answer sheets are available on Testntrack’s Market place made for evaluators. Around 1,180 evaluators are associated with the startup for assessment. 

“Students’ progress reports and answer sheets are shared in a PDF format to their parents’ WhatsApp numbers,” Sharma said.

The startup implements client feedback to upgrade its tech. “Our one-on-one interactions with clients enable us to deeply understand their upcoming challenges and obstacles, allowing us to provide effective and tailored solutions,” Sharma said.

The approach of giving personal attention has helped the startup achieve a 96% client retention rate and a 70% conversion rate in the past six months of operation.

Sharma said that through its diverse revenue channels, the startup has demonstrated its ability to adapt to market demands and generate sustainable income while catering to B2B and B2C segments.

How TestnTrack Is Empowering Tier II and III Cities

According to Sharma, today, Tier II and III cities require edtech solutions more than Tier I regions of the country. Students and teachers in these areas (Tier II, III and beyond) have immense potential but lack the necessary tech to harness it. 

He added that with the increasing interest of Tier 1 edtech SaaS startups in Tier II and III educational institutions, it is getting challenging for the local players to establish themselves in the market and compete with them.

“Fortunately, we have the support of the Rajasthan government, and the state’s iStart initiative helps us stay ahead of the competition curve,” Sharma said.

He added that ever since the startup registered itself under the iStart initiative, the startup has grown by leaps and bounds. For instance, the startup emerged as one of the top six startups selected in the Global Startup Challenge that was held in Jaipur in December 2022. The founders showcased their project to international investors like TiE SoCal through this opportunity. 

Not just this, TestnTrack was selected as one of the top five startups in the Rajasthan Startup Challenge in January 2023, which helped it create its brand visibility in the edtech ecosystem. 

“Since we are a registered startup with the government’s accelerator iStart, we received INR 15 Lakh from the state government, enabling us to grow our business,” Sharma said. Additionally, the startup also receives time-to-time guidance and mentorship from industry experts.

“These initiatives have helped us increase our user base 7X from 1100 students to 8,000-plus students in  6 months. This indicated the adoption of our tech by coaching centres,” said Sharma.

The Road Ahead

In the next 12 months, the startup aims to expand to 25 cities across six states. It is also looking to grow its user base 8X by penetrating deeper into the Indian edtech market. To achieve this, the founders will raise funding from a prominent angel network in India.

Further, TestnTrack plans to utilise the funding to improve its tech stack. To expand its B2B play by onboarding schools, the startup is looking at upgrading its audio chatbot Nivaa and the audio feedback API.

Sharma believes that the demand for personalised learning in edtech has escalated over the past years, and there has been a noticeable shift from offline to online and now hybrid learning and teaching methods, even in Tier II and III cities. 

According to Sharma, AI-powered SaaS solutions in the edtech space are steadily redefining the sector, especially in Tier II and III cities.

Notably, Edtech SaaS solutions are today addressing the diverse learning needs of students and providing them equal access to high-quality education, with an increasing number of educational institutions using audio chatbots to remove all kinds of learning barriers.

TestnTrack has captured the attention of investors at a very opportune time, especially when it is catering to students across age groups and segments, with the K-12 category alone is anticipated to reach a market size of $15 Bn by 2030 and the test preparation segment is predicted to become a $9 Bn market opportunity by then, according to Inc42’s Q1 2023 Edtech Report.

The post How TestnTrack’s AI Solutions Are All Set To Change How Students Take Exams appeared first on Inc42 Media.

It was July 3, 2023, and probably one of the busiest afternoons at Leverage Edu’s Noida office. The news of the company’s $40 Mn Series C funding round got leaked, piquing media interest, and the founder & CEO, Akshay Chaturvedi, who wanted to keep a low profile, couldn’t avoid his phone that kept ringing back-to-back.

The milestone, as many would say, was truly remarkable, considering the state of a majority of the Indian edtech players post-pandemic. Despite this, Chaturvedi managed to secure funding twice, totalling $62 Mn, in the last 18 months, with the company’s valuation now soaring to $150 Mn.

However, the journey wasn’t without its challenges. Launched in 2017, Leverage Edu is a study abroad platform that helps students apply to universities abroad. During the first 10 months of the pandemic in 2020, the startup faced a significant setback when people were forced to stay in the confines of their homes. This particularly hit Leverage Edu, as travel restrictions gave the startup’s revenue stream a sudden death.

Against all odds, the company persevered, retaining its 80-member team and forming valuable alliances with international universities, which laid the foundation for the success that was yet to come.

With his passion for travelling and forging new partnerships, Chaturvedi has been able to join hands with over 700 universities across the globe since the inception of Leverage Edu. Some of the key universities in the startup’s portfolio include University of Liverpool, Queen Mary University of London, University of Illinois Chicago, Macquarie University, St Lawrence College, Nipissing University, among others. Notably, Canada Apply Board stands as the only other platform, which boasts more than 1,200 universities in its network.

Other notable companies in the sector are Leap Scholar, which offers end-to-end solutions to students ranging from personalised guidance on top universities, IELTS coaching, and visa services, among others, and Eruditus, which is mostly focussed on executive education from top business schools.

With a dedicated team of over 950 members, of which 200 people hold ESOPs, and an impressive 0.7 Mn downloads across three apps – Study Abroad With Leverage Edu, LeverageIELTS, and the recently launched LeverageTOEFL, Leverage Edu claims to serve a strong community of 8 Mn-plus students aspiring to study abroad.

Like many other edtech startups, Leverage Edu did incur losses at the outset and until a major part of the financial year 2023. However, the tides seem to be turning now as the company claims to have turned profitable in the fourth quarter (Q4) of FY23 (January to March 2023). The company is yet to get its filings audited for the quarter. Furthermore, the edtech plans to double its revenues, setting its eyes on a full year of profitability in FY24 (April 2023 to March 2024).

Chaturvedi’s Humble Beginnings

Speaking with Inc42, Chaturvedi said, coming from a lower-middle-class family, his parents wanted to see him excel in studies and become fluent in English to secure a good job, which he did.

Before starting his career, Chaturvedi was involved in many side hustles, and it’s hard to imagine a single field that he may not have pursued before commencing his Leverage Edu journey.

Chaturvedi has tonnes of experience under his belt, ranging from working with two of the Big Four accounting firms, KPMG and EY, to being a writer, a mentor, a researcher and an investor with multiple firms.

However, Leverage Edu came into being only after he left his job at EY in 2014 to pursue MBA, setting his eyes on Oxford University. Even though he got selected, he did not have the funds to embark on Oxford avenue to pursue his plan, adding much to his chagrin.

As a result, the undeterred young Chaturvedi took a parallel route that led via the Indian School Of Business (ISB) to quench his thirst for higher studies (MBA) from a top-notch business school. Since then, he has not looked back.

Although what nudged him to pursue MBA is a story worth listening to from the horse’s mouth.

“During my stint at EY, I learnt that one out of every four Chinese kids in America studied with New Oriental Education, a Nasdaq-listed company worth a staggering $22 Bn-$23 Bn. The founders also have a movie on their journey — ‘American Dreams in China’. This moment proved to be a turnaround of a lifetime, as somehow I was able to connect with the idea of establishing a venture that would someday be worth millions of dollars if not billions,” he said.

The Point Of No Return

Two pivotal events unfolded while Chaturvedi was pursuing his MBA at ISB. First, he built ISB’s internal app, Leverage, where students could connect with higher-education experts for advice. And hardly did he know back then that the app will one day mature to become a full-fledged edtech business.

Second, his dream of studying abroad turned into reality when he received an offer letter from Draper University in the US, granting him a fully funded scholarship for the DFJ Fellowship program, a prestigious entrepreneurship boot camp.

But, the only roadblock was that he did not have sufficient funds to sponsor his travel and accommodation.

“I was puzzled and instinctively wrote a cold email to Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal. Surprisingly, he replied with an INR 85K cheque,” the founder reminisced with a smile. “Moreover, TiE supported with INR 1.25 Lakh that took care of my accommodation.”

Chaturvedi Still Had Miles To Go…

The fellowship programme fuelled his desire to create something impactful, something that can add value. It was then he realised how challenging it was to study abroad. With his experience, he was able to relate to the headwinds that many students, who do not have adequate resources, face in their pursuit to study in foreign lands.

Back then (2015-2017), the industry was highly unorganised, and there was a notable absence of a strong brand dedicated to serving students aspiring to study abroad.

Furthermore, there were glaring gaps in this space, crying to be fixed. While many students lacked access to proper guidance on higher education choices, several others received misleading bits of advice that led them astray. And then, there are unscrupulous agents in this sector who take advantage of students.

Loathing how the sector operated, Chaturvedi envisioned a structure that can be trusted to provide accurate career advice to students, the vision that eventually gave birth to Leverage Edu in 2017. Interestingly, the seed of his vision had been sown during his ISB days with Leverage.

After saving up INR 8 to 10 Lakh, he launched the ‘Study Abroad with Leverage Edu’ mobile app.

“I kickstarted my journey from there. Although I never intended to be an entrepreneur, I landed up becoming one because I understand the student DNA,” he said.

Leverage Edu’s Playbook To Stay Ahead Of The Curve

Chaturvedi claims Leverage Edu to be the third-largest player globally in sending Indian students to the UK for higher education. In FY24, the founder is aiming to up the ante and has his eyes set on entering the US and bagging Series C funding. The startup is also looking at strengthening its product portfolio by adding loans and English language training courses to the startup’s overall kitty.

“Since we have started to build our channels, the costs have come down. However, it takes time to see a visible effect, and we are hopeful of seeing some of these having a positive impact in our FY24 financials,” the founder said.

The biggest learning for Chaturvedi has been to understand his customers and build the right value proposition for them at the right cost.

“We have done everything in the last six years and we believe we have only scratched the surface as we still have miles to go. And now, we are focussed on building and rebuilding our corporate culture. In addition, my goal is to create incremental cash flows because being profitable is not enough,” the Leverage Edu founder said.

A Paradigm Shift: From Burning Cash To Curbing CAC 

Until a larger part of FY22, Leverage Edu burnt a lot of cash. The efforts were towards acquiring 2-3% of the approximate 1.1 Mn students aspiring to study abroad every year from India and investments towards building value-added products and content machines for future organic acquisitions. However, just before the funding winter kicked in, a mentor flagged the amount of cash the company should be burning to acquire new users.

Following this, the edtech startup shifted its focus towards a more sustainable data-led approach. The strategy that it adopted is as follows:

Identifying The Core Serviceable Market: In a matter of months, the team pinpointed 144 micro markets with the lowest cost per lead, highest conversion rates, and strong brand recall.

“We understood that we did not want to win the entire country but only certain micro markets. This helped us in keeping customer acquisition costs at bay,” the founder said.

Enhancing Processes On The University Front: To do this, the Leverage Edu team launched Univalley, an OS for universities to streamline payments and manage applications. Additionally, value-added products like Univalley Admit, Univalley Pay, and Univalley Cred were introduced, aiding quick conversions.

Fixing Loopholes On The Student End: To bring more transparency to their work, the startup created UniConnect, an online student community that engages in open discussion forums involving universities, alumni, and applicants. The startup also employed data analytics to effectively match students and universities.

“Today, we have over 120 Mn visitors on Wings, a content platform, and receive 3K to 4K posts/comments daily on study abroad with Leverage Edu mobile app community with prompt responses from university representatives,” Chaturvedi said.

Building Multiple Value Propositions On Both Supplier and Demand Side: Recognising the comprehensive needs of students going abroad, Leverage Edu developed a range of in-house products catering to various requirements.

Some of these products include Fly Finance (Fly Loans and Fly Forex), Fly Homes (student accommodation), LeverageLive (live learning platform for international edtest prep and English language learning, hosting 1 Mn-plus hour of classes every month), and Ivy100 (boutique premium consulting services for Ivy-league & equivalent universities), among others. This helped the company increase the conversion rate and reduce conversion costs at scale.

“In 2021, we provided loans worth about INR 30 Cr. In 2022, the loans reached INR 270 Cr, facilitated through banks, lending partners, and NBFCs. With an RBI license to remit, our credibility increased, and this year we expect loans to reach almost INR 700 to 800 Cr,” he added.

Ensure Team Productivity: The entire student journey is divided into 36 touch points, each equipped with multiple FAQs answered through the Leverage Launchpad feature. This enhances the student experience, reducing effort throughout the process. The company heavily invests in training and assessment, ensuring team members spend at least six weeks on soft and hard skill training and gaining expertise on multiple universities. This has armed Leverage Edu’s content team of 60 to serve a large student pool with unmatched efficiency.

Leveraging The Market Opportunity

According to Chaturvedi, 15 months ago they would spend about INR 6 Cr a month on performance marketing, which today has come down to nearly INR 15 Lakh. “When you talk about non-variable expenses that we kind of make in the usual day-to-day, I can confirm that we are building the company out of the cheapest place in Noida compared to Bengaluru, Mumbai, or Delhi,” he said.

“Even our marketing costs in hindsight have gone down from $2,400 to $800 per student against the $4,200 we make on each student. Also, now 66% of all our acquisitions are organic/non-paid and 21% are referrals. This led to profitability from December 2022, and the reason we’ve been able to raise funds in the ongoing funding winter is because we were profitable,” the founder said.

Chaturvedi has many plans for the current financial year, and he is hell-bent on boosting the market share of his venture. However, more important for him is to create incremental cash flows as just being profitable is not enough to become a one-stop destination for millions of students who aspire to study abroad.

The post How Leverage Edu Cracked The Profitability Puzzle In Cash Guzzling Edtech Market appeared first on Inc42 Media.

In 2023, the oldest millennials turn 40, while the oldest Gen Zers have already entered their mid-twenties. This dynamic demographic represents those who witnessed technology’s rise and those who practically grew up with it. And both have also adeptly leveraged emerging technology to improve their lives.

With an active presence in the Indian workforce, those in the 23-45 age group continuously seek ways to enhance their financial well-being.

Factors such as rising discretionary spending, increased financial literacy and the Covid-19 pandemic have encouraged younger Indians to overcome their aversion to risk and explore alternative income sources. Interestingly, NSE (National Stock Exchange) data shows that the number of active retail investors in stock markets rose from around 30 Lakh in January 2020 to 78 Lakh by March 2023 — clocking a 160% increase in two years.

However, it is not the growing risk appetite alone that has contributed to the rise of retail investors in capital markets. The transition from traditional broker models and agents to online platforms and smartphone apps has made trading simple, user-friendly, and accessible to a large user base.

“The trading culture is going through a fast-paced evolutionary process. The temptation to participate in the Indian growth story has not only made the investors trade in stocks but also trade in derivatives,” says Sidhavelayutham M, founder, & CEO of investment tech platform Alice Blue.

Sidhavelayutham M, who holds a degree in business administration, started discount broking platform Alice Blue in Tamil Nadu’s Erode 16 years ago and moved its headquarters to Bengaluru in 2017, at a time when investment tech was growing as a niche category within fintech.

Since 2006, the company has scaled its physical footprint across 20 Indian cities and has served more than 4 Lakh investors.

In 2017, the startup launched its trading app ANT(Analyse and Trade) to improve the user experience and simplify online trading across various segments, including equity, currency, and commodity. The app also enables users to trade in F&O (Futures and Options) and invest in initial public offerings (IPOs) and mutual funds.

For context, a discount broker platform allows individuals to buy and sell various financial instruments including stocks, bonds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), at a reduced cost compared to traditional full-service brokerage firms. Such platforms offer online trading tools, including real-time market data, charts, and analysis tools to help users make informed investment decisions.

As opposed to the industry standard brokerage fee of INR 20, Alice Blue claims to charge INR 15 from its retail investors for intraday and F&O trading, besides offering free equity, IPO, and mutual funds investments.

Despite the macroeconomic headwinds and stock market crashes in the past year and a half, Alice Blue said that it witnessed an 18% YoY growth in trade volumes in 2022. This signals the retail investors’ confidence in the stock market and other investment assets.

Fostering Trust, Creating Awareness Around Retail Investment

Sidhavelayutham M entered the investment tech space even before the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Although that crisis was primarily caused by a downturn in the US housing market and a lack of regulatory oversight, its repercussions were felt in India as well.

The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that reducing brokerage fees isn’t sufficient to earn the trust of investors, a lesson that India’s investment tech platforms have taken to heart. Beyond the allure of big bucks and exhilarating bull runs, there lies a harsh reality — without adequate knowledge and carefully calculated risks, no substantial returns can be achieved.

Even the past year has seen investors suffer big losses on their public market bets as the usually-reliable tech stocks crashed in a major way.

Recognising the importance of awareness and investor protection, investment techs have also added an educational component to their platforms. These aim to help individuals make well-informed investment decisions, something Alice Blue has also added in recent years.

For instance two of India’s prominent discount brokerage startups and Alice Blue’s notable rivals – Zerodha and Upstox — offer a wealth of resources including articles, videos, and glossaries focussed on stock markets, mutual funds, and more.

Commenting on Alice Blue’s educational mobile app ANTIQ, Sidhavelayutham M said, “We offer a wide range of webinars and seminars to ensure that young investors have the option of learning the nuances of the markets before investing. We always urge them to exercise caution and learn the ropes of the markets before plunging in.”

Educating investors is one thing, but converting potential leads into active retail investors is another.

According to Sidhavelayutham M, digital marketing has served the company well in reaching its target audience. Having physical offices across the country also helps build brand awareness and deepen the reach, he added.

However, nothing has worked as well as word-of-mouth marketing. Like its counterparts, Alice Blue has implemented a referral programme that allows users to receive a percentage of cashback on the brokerage fees they pay to the company.

By harnessing the power of referrals, investment tech platforms can not only acquire new users without overspending on marketing but also gain trust among them rapidly. Plus, the rewards programme is an incentive for existing users to stay loyal to the platform, since it reduces the fees even further.

This strategy works particularly well outside the metros that thrive on community networks and the trust inherent in one’s social circle.

In fact, a report by international research firm YouGov showed that millennials and those residing in Tier 2 cities are most likely to increase their investment in mutual funds. According to its June 2022 report, 26% of millennials increased investing activity in mutual funds as compared to Gen Z (23%) and Gen X (23%).

Likewise, people from Tier 2 cities (30%) increased their mutual fund investments more than Tier 1 and 3 cities.

“We have been noticing a lot of people from smaller towns and even villages coming to our platform. The Covid lockdown was of course a big contributing factor towards growing the investor base from far and distant towns,” adds the founder.

Enhancing The Trading Experience

It’s no surprise that novice investors are attracted to digital investment platforms due to the convenience and affordability they offer, plus these platforms do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of account creation and payouts of the returns in a timely manner.

Unlike full-service brokers, who usually impose a brokerage fee of 0.25%-0.75% on every transaction, discount brokers charge a minimal amount which is definitely more appealing for a first-time or novice investor.

However, in order to effectively compete with traditional counterparts, discount brokerages must consistently enhance their offerings to align with SEBI (Stock Exchange Board of India) regulations, while also maintaining a bug-free, seamless trading experience and a high level of user security.

Alice Blue has NSE (National Stock Exchange) and BSE (Bombay Stock Exchange) licenses.

Besides this, the company aims to constantly innovate and upgrade its tech stack, which is a key competitive moat in the investment tech space.

“We place paramount importance on hiring and retaining top-tier tech talent. Our team consists of industry leading professionals specialising in software development, data analysis, cybersecurity, and AI,” says Sidhavelayutham M, adding that customisable and conversational trading bots and AI-driven platforms are key to simplifying trading for beginners.

The platform also offers robust trading which enables traders (who manage large trade volumes on behalf of investors) to integrate third party applications that provide additional utilities. This helps them track multiple orders placed on a daily basis and enables seamless access to historic & real-time market data, trade execution and account management functionalities.

Platforms such as Alice Blue and its ilk also use secure servers, networks, and storage systems, while employing strong encryption protocols such as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) to protect user data.

Besides, it has support for two-factor authentication as an additional layer of security, requiring users to provide a secondary verification factor (such as an OTP) along with their login credentials. In addition, Alice Blue also employs fingerprint login for enhanced security and is currently exploring blockchain technology to decentralize data, making it more secure and harder to tamper with.

What Are Millennials Looking For?

According to Inc42’s estimates, the investment tech industry is experiencing rapid growth, and its market size is expected to surge from $9.2 Bn in 2022 to $74 Bn by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 30%.

This growth can largely be attributed to millennials joining the retail investor pool. A report by management consulting firm Zinnov indicates that over 55% of investment app users belong to this demographic.

Given the dominance of millennials in the user base, it is unsurprising that investment tech platforms are targeting this segment. However, it is worth noting that a substantial portion of millennials exhibit a preference for low to medium-risk investments and more than 44% of all retail investors opt for systematic investment plans (SIPs), as per the report.

But Sidhavelayutham M believes this trend is changing. “A lot of our users have been steadily investing in the IPO bouquet. We are also seeing a lot of excitement around forthcoming IPOs from the likes of LIC & Anuras, Craftsman, EaseMyTrip & Suryoday,” he says.

Goldman Sachs analysis says new IPOs may add up to $400 Bn of market cap by 2024, making India the fifth largest market by capitalisation by 2024. The expected entry of new-age tech companies in the public markets is also exciting as these are the companies that young Indians have seen grow and flourish within their lifetimes.

Sidhavelayutham M adds that investment tech platforms have the potential to bring on-the-fence hesitant Indians to the retail investor fray as these platforms remove the entry barriers. Plus as fears of a volatile market and long-term recession act as headwinds, the education component is vital to retain new and experienced investors and create trust in the system.

Retail investor participation is often seen as an analog for the economic development of a country, and by enabling easy participation, platforms such as Alice Blue are accelerating India’s economy.

The post From Simplicity To Security: Why Millennials, GenZs Are Riding The Investment Tech Wave In India appeared first on Inc42 Media.

It was 2017 and a team of young BITS Pilani engineering students were competing at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition in Los Angeles — the only team from Asia at that edition. While they missed out on the winner’s trophy, the seed of innovation had already been sown in the mind of Awais Ahmed, a BITS student at the time. The seed has germinated to become Pixxel, one of India’s promising spacetech startups today.

Ahmed, cofounder and the CEO at Pixxel, was always intrigued by the mysteries of outer space. At BITS, he was exposed to various space-related projects and the Hyperloop competition only solidified his ambition to work in this field.  

“While we were there in Los Angeles at the SpaceX HQ, they took us on a tour of the SpaceX factory. Looking at those rocket engines being built… the Falcon 9 booster, it crystallised in my mind that I want to work in spacetech for the rest of my life,” Ahmed told Inc42.

It took months of studying the space industry, the possibilities that were waiting to be unlocked before Ahmed pitched an idea to batchmate and friend Kshitij Khandelwal over a video game session. 

Ahmed recalls that when Pixxel was founded in 2019, his primary thesis was that the extant satellite data was not enough for advanced applications. Pixxel’s focus was therefore on solving for such applications with hyperspectral imaging satellites. 

Simply put, hyperspectral imaging is a remote sensing technology where an imaging spectrometer collects images at different wavelengths that go undetected in single-bandwidth imaging sensors. 

While it was developed as early as the 1980s, the tech was restricted by the large size of high quality cameras and therefore the imaging was not high resolution enough in most cases. Plus, spacetech in general has come several generations ahead in the past 40 years. 

With the India space sector just opening up for private-sector participation around 2019, Pixxel pitched its hyperspectral imaging satellites which should be able to detect events and phenomena such as the otherwise invisible gas leaks, underground oil leaks, crop diseases and infestations, soil nutrient quality, and much more. 

Hyperspectral imaging (sample below) is able to mark out areas on a satellite map using distinct colours in real-time and identify a wide spectrum of patterns. Four years after Ahmed and Khandelwal decided to build Pixxel, the Bengaluru-based startup is now close to deploying what it calls the “world’s first hyperspectral satellite constellation” comprising 24 satellites. 

Building A Global Business From Day One 

Pixxel’s cofounders began work on the startup in the last years of college. In 2019, the startup was selected for the Techstars accelerator programme in Los Angeles, where Ahmed and Khandelwal got to work on projects alongside veterans from NASA, the US Air Force and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin among other industry majors.

This not only gave Pixxel a place to test innovative ideas and great mentors, but also their first major external investment besides a $500K previous investment at a BITS event in the US. The Techstars experience was also pivotal in helping the company establish important connections in the US, which is currently Pixxel’s biggest market.

“Our business had to be global from day one. You can’t possibly ignore the fact that the US is the largest market and the second largest is Europe. I think that participation in Techstars early on helped us realise this fact,” Ahmed recalled. 

The likes of growX Ventures also joined Pixxel’s cap table in that $700K pre-seed funding round in 2019. But building in spacetech at the early stage requires a lot more capital. On the tech side, Pixxel’s team had managed to build and demo small earth-imaging satellites. But the Covid-19 pandemic was a setback for bigger launch plans.

Even as the company was perfecting its technology during this time, it raised a seed round of $5 Mn led by Blume Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, and growX Ventures and later it raised $2.3 Mn from Omnivore VC and Techstars. 

The startup was riding the highs of the buzz around spacetech. Using the capital raised, the company had built its satellite platform and also enough traction in the market. In 2021, Pixxel launched its first demo satellite with SpaceX and in April and November last year, two more satellites were launched, including one with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Currently, the startup’s focus is on launching the first six of the 24-satellite constellation — named Fireflies — by next year. Over the course of four years, Pixxel has already raised $71 Mn in total funding. Its latest major round was in June 2023 when it bagged $36 Mn in a Series B round led by tech giant Google and existing investors.

Headquartered in Bengaluru, Pixxel has another office in Los Angeles. From an employee count of 15 people in 2021, Pixxel today has grown to a size of around 140 employees. While a majority of its business today comes from the US and Europe, Ahmed did not indicate any interest in shifting the company’s headquarters outside India.

What Sets Pixxel’s Tech Apart

“Instead of being able to look at information in 10 or so wavelengths that most other satellites do today, our hyperspectral satellites can do it in 300 wavelengths, and that’s what leads to the wealth of information we provide,” explained Ahmed

He claims Pixxel’s imaging capabilities are 10X more than some of the other known names working in hyperspectral imaging today that deal with around 30 wavelengths. This allows the Indian company to capture data with more granularity and with a higher level of accuracy. 

While the company has launched 15 Kg demo microsatellites so far, the first six satellites of the Fireflies series set to launch in 2024 will weigh 50 Kg. The startup plans to launch bigger satellites in the near future — even as large as 150 Kg — to capture more data and cover wider use cases.

Today, the biggest use cases for Pixxel are related to hyperspectral imagery for the agriculture fertiliser makers, oil and gas companies, mines as well as groups and organisations working in the environment sector. Pixxel sells both data and analytics insights from the data to these clients, which include the mining giant Rio Tinto and Australian precision agriculture company DataFarming.

“With mining companies, we work on monitoring existing and closed mines because there are a lot of regulatory restrictions that come with mining. If someone is mining near forested land, we need to make sure of the need for reforesting it somewhere else. We need to make sure that their operations are not causing havoc on biodiversity,” explained Ahmed.

Pixxel also works with fertiliser companies in Central Europe where it surveys farmland before sowing season and creates a soil utility map. The tech can identify levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the soil to inform farmers and companies on the best areas for use of fertilisers and the kind of fertiliser to be used. 

How does the company earn revenue?

For instance, a customer has 100 square kilometres (sq km) of land to monitor. Pixxel might charge the client $10 per sq km per day of monitoring. Each such day would bring in $1,000 in revenue. If the customers want such data for 24×7 use for 365 days, the annual contract would run up to $365,000.

The India Spacetech Story

Pixxel started off at a very important juncture in the Indian spacetech story — the central government had launched the nodal agency Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) in 2021 to boost private sector participation.

Before 2020, private players could build satellites in India but not launch them and had no way of obtaining the requisite permissions to launch satellites.

Today, India has caught up on the regulatory front and rules are more favourable for startups. But that doesn’t mean there are no disconnects.

“There is still a little bit of a gap in the aspirations in terms of completely liberalising and opening spacetech to actually executing it. For example, I think there needs to be a very clear laying down of what timeline it would take for someone to approve an application, and then so on and so forth, which still is not existing. However, the intent is there,” Ahmed said.

Besides private organisations, Pixxel works in collaboration with various governments around the world. In India, the startup signed an MoU with the Union Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare (DA&FW) to collaborate on the development of geospatial solutions for the Indian agriculture sector. In this collaboration, Pixxel’s hyperspectral dataset will be used to develop solutions focused on crop mapping, crop stage discrimination, and crop health monitoring.

Even as India grows into a more mature market, Pixxel’s focus, like most other domestic spacetech players, is on the global market to keep scaling up and raking in revenue to build the tech. However, the fact that the entire tech integration and satellite construction takes place in India is still key for Pixxel in competing with western giants. 

The Collaborative Efforts For The Growth Of Spacetech

While startups such as Pixxel can be considered pioneers of the new-age Indian space ecosystem, such innovation would largely struggle to attract large customers without partnerships with tech giants.

Pixxel categorises its partnerships into four buckets. Besides component manufacturers of solar panels, batteries, reaction wheels, and others who contribute in building satellites, the startup has tie-ups with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft who have ground stations.

Meanwhile, the likes of SpaceX and ISRO have come to the aid of Pixxel with launch pads and launch vehicles. Pixxel also has partnerships with data resellers and distributors in various geographies in South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia who help in selling its satellite data in these regions.

This has allowed the company to maximise its revenue potential while continuing to build from India. Plus Ahmed believes that the hyperspectral satellite imaging space is relatively untapped so Pixxel has a huge white space to fill. 

The execution, the cofounder said, is the biggest challenge.

“So, there’s a series of different challenges, all related to execution. We have proven the concept, we have proven the technology, can we now just take it at a commercial scale and become a profitable company? Because, in space, you can continue to spend but if you can’t sustain yourselves with revenue, then it becomes tougher,” said Ahmed, adding that the supply chain is currently very complex for a startup like Pixxel.

While Ahmed did not reveal Pixxel’s net revenue figure. In its press release for the Google-led funding round, Pixxel claimed its customer base grew by 5x in 2022. As per the startup’s financial filings, in FY21, it earned INR 7.6 Cr as against INR 1.5 Cr in the previous year. In FY21, it also reported a profit of around INR 81 Lakh.

Pixxel competes with the likes of global players like Planet Labs, Orbital Sidekick. While the startup believes that no one in India is working at its current scale, Pixxel could see serious competition from the startup including AgniKul Cosmos and GalaxEye in the future.

Meanwhile, the current focus for the startup is to realise the promise of its Fireflies satellite constellation and develop the infrastructure to support the range of applications it will enable. Pixxel is also building Aurora – an AI-powered geospatial analytics platform to make hyperspectral analysis accessible to its customers.

The post From Idea To Space: Inside Pixxel’s Mission To Transform Earth Observation With Hyperspectral Imaging appeared first on Inc42 Media.

With the advent of AI language models and their rapid evolution, researchers and academicians today have access to several tools to ease their work. Despite this, literature reviews remain a challenging task, eating into much of their time and energy.

To resolve this, two Indian founders Saikiran Chandha and Shanu Kumar are determined to build solutions, using the power of generative AI, to automate the task of decoding and understanding research papers for the scientific research community.

Chandha, who is a product of Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), and Shanu Kumar, an IIT Kharagpur alumni, first met at a hackathon.

“At the Stanford Ignite program, we were trying to figure out the problems that we face daily and find a solution that could be viable from a business point of view. As researchers, we both clearly understood the pain points that the scientific community and academicians go through in their daily work. The resolution of this problem was up our alley,” said Chandha, the cofounder and CEO of SciSpace, a Bengaluru-based software development startup.

According to the company’s website, SciSpace was founded in 2016 and specialises in creating SaaS platforms for academic and scientific research. However, according to the CEO, the startup went through a major transition with the advent of generative AI, and the launch of its flagship product, Copilot, three months ago. SciSpace’s Copilot is an AI research assistant that empowers researchers to decode any research paper effortlessly.

An AI-Powered Research Assistant At Your Service!

Speaking with Inc42, Chandha, said that while there are several platforms, including Google Scholar, which help researchers with multiple links to research papers, a lot of human effort and time is still required to figure out if they are relevant to one’s research.

With its tool, Copilot, SciSpace not only provides academicians and researchers with relevant links to research papers but also summarises them to save time and effort. Moreover, users can add papers of their own choice to extract data. In the chat box, users can ask the tool to specify the content of the documents, and explain certain paragraphs, the whole paper, or specific portions.

SciSpace breaks down any complex problem into sub-tasks and sub-problems and helps build models for each sub-tasks or sub-modules by using open AI and Anthropic as foundational models. To top it up, the startup has its proprietary models that help to fine-tune these results.

These proprietary models have also facilitated SciSpace in building capabilities beyond just providing summaries. For context, if users are unable to understand a math problem or an equation, the SciSpace Copilot comes in handy.

Right now, the platform has 250 Mn open-access research papers on its platforms. Moreover, it launched a Chrome plug-in a month ago. Going forward, the generative AI startup wants to expand its capabilities beyond research papers.

“We will start indexing white papers, case studies, podcasts, and videos. We want to cater to users beyond the research community,” Chandha said.

Banking On The Perks Of A Freemium Model

The startup, which claims to have 4,00,000 active researchers on its platform and 1,00,000 users on its recently launched Chrome plug-in, does not charge a single penny from its users, as it wants to solidify its data repository. 

“The decision is helping us to collect data and fine-tune our model,” Chandha said. However, plans are afoot to make way for a revenue stream for a sustainable business. Further, the startup is also looking to charge organisations involved in a significant amount of R&D work. 

Currently, the startup is involved in doing pilots with two life sciences companies in the US. It also plans to utilise its expanded capabilities for monetisation.

SciSpace has raised an undisclosed funding amount from VC firms such as Inventus Capital and Silicon Valley Quad.

Moving on, the startup counts academic search engines such as Google Scholar and ResearchGate and citation managers Zoreto and Litmap as its competitors, which cater to the same audience. However, none of these platforms offers data extraction from research papers right now.

Amid the generative AI boom, SciSpace stands at a sweet spot as it reduces the time and effort of its users but its business viability still very much depends on how users will respond to monetisation plans. 

Moreover, big tech players are evolving quickly to respond to the emerging demand of users, reaping the maximum benefits of generative AI. It is this breakneck evolution and adoption of AI that could increase competitive headwinds for smaller startups such as SciSpace going ahead.

The post How SciSpace Has Become The ChatGPT For Researchers & Academicians appeared first on Inc42 Media.

After more than a decade at Bank of America and HSBC, Bharat Lamba wanted to take the entrepreneurial plunge in 2022. It was the era of the great resignation. But for Lamba, it was about the opportunity to innovate in the fintech segment, particularly disrupting the lending space, which was booming in the post-pandemic era.

Lamba teamed with long-time friends Lalit Bihani and Ankit Agrawal to launch Volt Money in 2022, joining India’s colourful digital lending landscape. But the trio knew they needed to differentiate themselves from the host of personal loan apps.

So, unlike the unsecured loans being offered by these apps, Volt dove into the secured lending space. It was also in 2022 that the RBI was pushing for more innovation in the secured lending space, so Volt Money’s bet had the advantage of market timing.

But secured lending is not new as such – gold, real estate and fixed deposits (FDs) linked models already abounded. There was one asset class that the trio identified as being untapped, and that was mutual funds.

“We were the first ones to identify the opportunity in mutual funds,” Lamba told Inc42, adding that while the startup has leveraged this first-mover advantage, the larger vision is to venture into other asset classes.

Essentially, Volt Money ties up with network participants, including the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL), DigiLocker, Computer Age Management Services (CAMS) and the Central Registry of Securitisation Asset Reconstruction and Security Interest of India (CERSAI), alongside several folio management firms such as Edelweiss and ICICI to offer secured loans.

“From the lender’s angle, secure lending is what they love. On the depository side, the process was improving, and on the customer side, traction could be gained by spreading awareness. All of this, together, developed into a superb idea that we used to build this business,” Lamba explained.

Having recently secured $1.5 Mn in a pre-seed round from the likes of Titan Capital, All In Capital, Praveen Jadhav (Raise Ventures), Aditi Kothari (DSP Adiko Holdings), Gemba Capital, Kunal Shah (CRED), Ashish Kehair and Rahul Jain (Nuvama Wealth), Volt looks set to disrupt the secured lending market with a new asset class.

The Hidden Value In Mutual Funds

Indeed, today, many players are looking at mutual funds as a potential asset class for secured lending.

Per a report by the Association of Mutual Funds in India, the average assets under management for the Indian mutual fund industry for June 2023 stood at INR 44.82 Lakh Cr, growing more than 5X in 10 years. With nearly 150 Mn folios in India, mutual funds have become less of a long term savings scheme and more of an investment opportunity.

However, most of this value is locked away in long term investments, and redeeming mutual funds means closing the account and risking losing years of progress. To address the emergency demands of customers and their unwillingness to withdraw from mutual funds, startups such as Volt Money disburse secured loans against the user’s folio.

According to the startup, customers can avail loans from INR 25,000 to INR 2 Cr, depending on the size of their mutual funds. Per RBI’s guidelines on loan against securities (LAS), a lender can only lend up to 50% of the total value of the securities. Hence, a user has to hold at least INR 50,000 in mutual funds to avail of a loan from Volt Money.

As part of the loan agreement, the mutual funds’ holder has to add a lien in favour of the lender, though Volt reverses this as soon as the lender has repaid the borrowing.

The fintech startup’s interest rate for loans starts at 9.95%, much lower than a personal loan in today’s environment, and this is one of the advantages secured lenders are banking on.

The borrower only has to pay interest on the amount withdrawn from the total sanctioned amount, which makes this a credit line rather than a lump sum loan. This automatically makes for lower risk for the lenders partnering with Volt. 

Volt even allows borrowers to pay just the interest for very-short term loans, significantly reducing the chance of a default on payment. Given these flexible lending terms compared to the rest of the industry, Lamba claimed Volt is yet to see a default. However, Inc42 could not verify these claims independently.

In case there is a default, Lamba explained that the lender retains the right to sell the mutual funds to recover the loan amount. The cofounder said lenders can only recover the amount borrowed, which in most cases means the borrowers still hold 50% of their mutual fund assets,  in the scenario of a default.

To reach potential customers at every touch point, Volt has developed web and app software development kits (SDKs) to allow easy integration with any platform offering mutual funds.

The startup earns revenue by taking a commission from the interest paid by the borrower and through direct processing fees. Since Volt operates in the B2B2C business model, Lamba claimed it has nearly zero customer acquisition cost (CAC), enabling it to operate on razor-thin margins.

The company has not yet filed its financials for FY22 or FY23, and Lamba declined to comment on the revenue for the past two fiscals. 

Is Secure Lending The Future?

But mutual funds are just the start. As India’s retail investors diversify their assets, the company will expand into other asset classes, including equity stocks and insurance policies. To be clear, some of these avenues are already available at most large lenders, such as banks, but Volt offers these lenders a distribution advantage due to its tech-driven acquisition funnel.

“The vision is to leverage all financial assets; it’s not just mutual funds,” Lamba said.

With the RBI pushing for secure lending to reduce non-performing assets (NPAs) in India’s banking system, there is a clear push by digital lending startups into secured asset-linked loans. 

For instance, several startups are in the gold loan space, including Ruptok, Oropocket, Rupeek, Yellow Metal, and others. Even Paytm and other larger apps offer gold loans. Fintech startup 50Fin also offers loans against securities, though this is against actual stocks held by a potential borrower, not the mutual funds’ portfolio. 

While some large lenders offer loans against life insurance policies, India’s low insurance penetration makes it a difficult market to address. Plus, the value of most life insurance policies in India is on the lower side, which makes it harder to scale this vertical. 

Therefore, with a potential total addressable market of 150 Mn mutual fund folios and growing, Volt has the opportunity to scale rapidly. Here, the big challenge for Volt Money is to create a meaningful moat in the segment, even though Volt has the first-mover advantage.

Pairing up with mutual fund depositories and NBFCs to ensure smooth integrations proved to be time-consuming in Volt’s experience. Companies looking to enter the segment might also face the uphill battle of creating a robust credit risk assessment model specific to mutual funds.

There is also the problem of the lack of historical data and standardised valuation methods for existing mutual funds. This can hinder a company’s attempts to accurately assess borrower creditworthiness, severely limiting its moat in this field. 

Volt Money got around these hurdles by developing algorithms to analyse fund performance, volatility and investor behaviour. It will be interesting to see if the competition enters this space in the near future given that unsecured lending has so much competition.

Volt’s Lamba believes that customer trust is the biggest challenge of them all. Mutual funds, although widely popular, are seen as investment vehicles, not collateral for loans. While the startup has achieved significant scale over the past year, scaling up the model and reaching a larger share of the 150 Mn folios will be its biggest challenge going ahead.

With inputs from Nikhil Subramaniam

The post How Volt Money Is Unlocking The Value Of Mutual Funds With Secured Lending appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The rise of generative AI has brought forth new opportunities for innovation on a global scale, including its integration into our healthcare system. In addition to its applications in chatbots, personalised assistants, and ecommerce, AI’s positive impact can be seen in our daily lives.

At a time when so many market-disrupting innovations are happening, two visionary founders from Gurugram are utilising generative AI to improve the lives of women with PCOS and PCOD.

As per a Statista report, about 16% of women between the ages of 20 and 29 years suffered from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in 2020.

To provide effective solutions for women dealing with the hormonal imbalance of PCOS/PCOD, a Gurugram-based startup is developing an AI-led product. And at the helm of this mission are Swapnil Vats and Rahul Jain, both second-time entrepreneurs, who have created SocialBoat, a menstrual wellness startup to help women align their lifestyles with their menstrual cycles.

Founded in 2022, SocialBoat is betting on AI to cater to problems related to menstrual health, PCOS, and thyroid, among others. The founders are building this product leveraging the power of Open AI’s ChatGPT 3.5.

According to the founders, around 300 Mn women are in menstruation phases in India, and among them, close to 90-100 Mn show symptoms of PCOS.

“But what we are doing around it is not enough. Currently, health and fitness programmes also don’t cater to these problems. Moreover, women do not have access to the right kind of information and knowledge around this,” Vats said.

In January this year, the founders raised $200K in an angel funding round led by Plan B Capital. Abhijit Kane of Postman, Videt Jaiswal of Airblack, OfBusiness’ Bhuvan Gupta, and Prateek Sharma of AheadVC, among others, also participated in the round.

Femtech Gets A Generative AI Tweak

Leveraging OpenAI’s GPT tool, SocialBoat has developed an AI chatbot named Sakhi, which the founders proudly describe as the first generative AI for menstrual health. Sakhi is designed to provide immediate answers to queries concerning menstrual health and is accessible in 20 Indian languages.

While there are several platforms that offer information on such topics, Sakhi stands out by providing personalised recommendations based on user-provided information within the app.

When users sign up on SocialBoat, they are prompted to answer several questions regarding their body weight, height, period information (such as cycle date and duration), presence of PCOS symptoms, and workout habits. With this information, the chatbot delivers personalised answers tailored to the individual user’s lifestyle.

To build this solution, SocialBoat is incorporating a memory layer into the GPT tool. While the GPT tool itself provides access to historical data on menstruation and PCOS, the additional memory layer created by SocialBoat adds valuable context to enhance its functionality.

“All that information we get from users and we create a context based on that, and provide it to GPT. Context gets updated as users use the app more. Hence, our GPT gets more and more accurate,” Jain said.

What’s In SocialBoat’s Business Model

While the app provides AI-led free diet and fitness solutions to users, it also consists of premium subscription plans, which connect users with gynaecologists, dieticians, and yoga trainers.

SocialBoat has three subscription plans — monthly, quarterly and annual, which are priced at INR 3,000, INR 5,000, and INR 9,000, respectively. The startup, which targets users from Tier 1 cities, currently has a free to paid user conversion rate of 5% to 8%. The founders are looking to scale this rate to 20% by adding more human-led programmes.

As claimed by Vats, the startup is focussing on its unit economics from the beginning by targeting a lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) against lower average revenue per user. Currently, SocialBoat’s CAC per user is zero on the back of organic growth. However, this cost is expected to go up to INR 1,000 once the startup begins marketing its product. As the average revenue per user is at INR 4,600, the founders feel optimistic that the venture will remain profitable going forward as well.

In future, the startup may look at placing ads and brand partnerships on AI-led free models. Moreover, as it is training its model with more data, SocialBoat may also look at adding more services, such as predictive diagnosis, to diversify its revenue streams.

Operating In The Highly Competitive Femtech Space

The startup is trying to build an impact in a segment where several startups are proliferating. Recently, there has been a noticeable rise in women’s awareness of their health, leading to a growing trend of constant tracking and monitoring of their health, lifestyle, and exercise routines using technology.

Capitalising on this trend, numerous health-focussed startups have emerged, providing guidance and support to women in their pursuit of a healthy lifestyle.

Although the founders count startups such as Veera Health, Proactive For Her, and Ava, among others, as their competitors, which too are focussed on PCOD, menstrual health, and women’s health, SocialBoat is trying to cause disruption with its AI-based offering. According to Vats, unlike other apps in the market, SocialBoat plans are synced with the user’s menstrual cycle.

Given that the women’s health space is highly competitive, SocialBoat will need to bring more diverse features to stay relevant to its users. The more generative AI becomes mainstream, there are high chances for other startups to bring such AI-led recommendations in a market that is projected to reach $4 Bn by 2024.

The post How SocialBoat Is Harnessing Generative AI To Help Women Take Control Of Menstrual Health appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The way the world snacks has been changing in post-Covid times. Of course, people will continue to purchase snacks in 2023 and the markets will be booming. But snacking for instant gratification, for comfort, or out of boredom is no longer the trigger as it was in the Covid days. Coming to India, the country’s snack market is expected to reach $23.7 Bn by 2028 at a CAGR of 12%.  As a country which has a vast domestic market and a consumer base that is always eager to try new flavours and ingredients, snacking brands thinking out of the box can easily tap into new opportunities.

To drive innovation and growth across snacking startups in India, US-based multinational Mondelēz International, announced the launch of its startup accelerator programme CoLab in India earlier this year. The 12-week virtual programme will kick off in August this year in collaboration with startup accelerator and VC fund Huddle. 

With the aim to provide the necessary skills and to accelerate these businesses to their next phase of growth and impact, CoLab India will soon announce the selected startups that will receive an equity-free grant of $20K and will also get an opportunity to raise between $500K and $1.5 Mn in seed to Series A funding from Huddle and other potential investors by the end of the programme.

 “CoLab is a very strong reiteration of Mondelez International’s commitment to consumer-centric innovation in shaping the future of snacking in the country,” said Sonali Mitra, director strategy, Mondelez India.

Regarding the applications, Mitra said that the programme received a fantastic response from India’s early stage snacking startups. Overall, Mitra claimed that CoLab received 250+ applications in two months. She added that the interest spanned start-ups from the snacking spectrum, including baked snacks, chocolates, confectionary and savoury snacks. A significant number of applications came from female-led startups and from cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad and more.

In addition to capital, the shortlisted startups will receive one-on-one mentorship, access to virtual and in-person workshops and extensive guidance from a network of Mondelēz leaders and industry experts. 

“We are thrilled to witness the impact of CoLab India 2023. Collaborations like these enable new age brands to emerge through tailor-made support. Additionally, we have been tracking fundamental trends in the consumer ecosystem which these brands are aiming to target,” said Sanil Sachar, Huddle’s founding partner.

It is also worth noting that the accelerator is set to bring more than 35 industry leaders from India and abroad as mentors for the shortlisted startups. The list of mentors includes, from Huddle and Mondelez, Vishesh Khurana (Shiprocket), OmPrakash Muppirala (Fountain India), Anand Shankar (Sharrp Ventures), Ashwin Bhadri (Equinox), Ankita Balotia (Fireside Ventures), Mohit Satyanand (Teamwork Arts), Amit Dutta (LeMarche), Anurakt Jain (Klub), Arjun Vaidya (Verlinvest) and Roma Priya (Burgeon Law). 

Mentors from Mondelez India include Varinder Jaswal, sr director R&D (chocolate); Sonali Mitra, director strategy; Tejas Mehta, VP, finance; Sree Patel, executive director, Mondelēz International & chief counsel and Punit Modi, commercialisation & supply planning lead.

What The Cohort Can Expect From The Curriculum

Building a thriving FMCG D2C brand in the snacking space is not easy. It requires a perfect mix of many ingredients, from insights into consumer mindset to creating a unique playbook in sync with the fast-evolving trends. 

To help the cohort seamlessly navigate the challenges of operating and scaling a D2C brand, CoLab mentors will delve deep into themes like product manufacturing, packaging, designing and logistics. 

The speakers will also conduct virtual and in-person one-on-one sessions as well as workshops, aimed at providing the cohort with guidance on how to fuel their journey from an early-stage startup to a high-growth snacking brand. 

During the sessions, the mentors will offer their insights into how startups can build sustainable and successful businesses. This will include topics like team building, finance management, corporate governance, cap table management and much more. 

Through a structured curriculum spanning 12 weeks, shortlisted startups can expect to gain a comprehensive learning experience and embark on their next phase of growth. 

From Demo Day To Raise Funding

And finally, the stage will be set for the early stage D2C snacking brands to pitch their business ideas to investors for funding. 

Now that the storied MNC Mondelēz International, with 75 years of experience behind it, has joined hands with Huddle, to usher in the third iteration of CoLab in India, all the right boxes have been ticked. And the accelerator programme may soon pave the path for indigenous brands looking to whip up taste and nutrition to reimagine snacks, the ultimate comfort food.

The post Mondelez India’s 12-Week Accelerator Programme CoLab Aims To Shape Indian D2C Snacking Brands In A $23.7 Bn Market By 2028 appeared first on Inc42 Media.

It was early 2015 when Mastercard acquired ElectraCard Services, a global payment solutions firm based in Pune. The takeover also prompted five senior employees of ElectraCard to quit their corporate jobs and venture into the world of entrepreneurship. India was already flooded with creative startups.

But the five of them – Jose Thattil, Tushar Shankar, Anil Sharma, Rajesh Londhe and Ramkumar Subbaraj – decided to explore the fintech space further and came up with Phi Commerce to democratise digital payments and make them seamlessly accessible across the country.

It was a bold step, as India was still a robust cash-based economy, and neither ‘demonetisation’ nor the subsequent influx of digital payments had swept the country at the time. But during their 15-year stint with ElectraCard, the founders deployed digital payment solutions to as many as 23 countries and knew that Indians would soon follow suit.

“We also realised that payment platforms and payment processors continue to work in silos almost everywhere. There was no one-stop solution for organisations to process, reconcile or track payment transactions from multiple channels,” said Thattil.

Identifying The Pain Points Of India’s Digital Payment Ecosystem

India’s digital payment industry is estimated to become a $10 Tn opportunity by 2026, according to a joint report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and PhonePe. From prepaid instruments and credit/debit cards to NEFT/IMPS/RTGS, UPI, QR code, PoS and Aadhaar-based payments – more than 15 digital payment systems are now active in India, as per the RBI’s 2022-23 annual report. These systems allow businesses to receive payments through multiple channels, be it online, mobile or in-store transactions.

By and large, such diverse payment options have benefited both customers and businesses. But enterprises are still struggling to incorporate and integrate all available payment options in a simplified, cost-effective way.

Moreover, businesses today are increasingly adopting an omnichannel approach (an online-offline hybrid model) to maximise their reach and RoI, while tech-savvy customers are leveraging the same to cash in on best deals and other benefits. However, keeping track of multiple payment touchpoints and locations via a single dashboard remains a key pain point, especially for mid-to-large enterprises without any core expertise in digital payment technologies.

“No business can become big by solely focussing on the developed cities, particularly in India. They must go across the length and breadth of the country, serving a wide range of customers. And digital payments will be the backbone for such seamless operations,” emphasised Thattil.

Pune-based Phi Commerce aims to solve these glitches with its end-to-end digital payment processing platform and full-stack omnichannel solutions for businesses, banks and payment networks like Visa, Mastercard and UPI. It currently caters to more than 10 industry sectors, including fuel, telecom, utilities, real estate, education, retail, ecommerce, logistics and travel, among others.

In simple terms, Phi Commerce aggregates all payment systems available in India and provides access to merchants across sectors, with several value additions.

The platform has so far onboarded close to 1,200 mid to large institutions, which has helped the company to build a network of 16K merchants and facilitate 4 Bn transactions. Thattil also claims that the startup has partnered with the top three private sector banks in India and recently bagged a contract from the Bengaluru airport. Phi Commerce will manage the payment operations of all airport businesses as part of its integration and deployment services.

Finding A Blue Ocean For Go-To-Market

When Phi Commerce was launched in late 2015, Thattil knew that building an omnichannel payment stack for enterprises would take at least four to five years.

“But we could not wait that long as the opportunity cost was too high. So, we decided to find a blue ocean for our go-to-market strategy. To be precise, it was cash on delivery (CoD),” he chuckled.

At the time, more than 80% were CoD orders on major ecommerce platforms, and customers were paying in cash after doorstep deliveries. Again, companies like Amway, specialising in direct sales and multi-level marketing or MLM, were bound to accept cash payments. Overall, it was quite chaotic, and for months, the founders travelled with sales and delivery executives across cities to understand the key issues enterprises faced while handling CoD orders.

“A key issue was the non-availability of customers who should be present to pay for their CoD orders. Sometimes, people forgot to keep the money at home as orders were expected later. Others forgot their credit/debit card PINs even when delivery executives had card machines with them for convenience. In most of these cases, orders were returned to the companies concerned,” explained Thattil.

It turned out to be a golden opportunity for Phi Commerce.

By December 2016, the team introduced PayPhi Doorstep Payments and empowered delivery executives with a software kit that allowed them to generate payment links even at locations with no mobile internet connectivity.

Subsequently, the PayPhi platform was enhanced to cater to other payment methods like wallets, credit and debit cards, dynamic UPI QR codes, biometric, netbanking, IMPS, RTGS and NACH for a truly seamless experience. For the first time, all fragmented payment options were consolidated into a convenient, user-friendly interface.

With the UPI rollout in 2016 and the demonetisation drive in November of that year, the module was further improved, and another API was added to generate dynamic QR codes. This allows delivery executives to collect doorstep payments digitally without an internet connection.

Fast forward to 2023, and one will find more feathers in Phi’s cap. It has now expanded to a 120-strong team and rolled out seven products for the doorstep and B2B payments, subscription, lending, tokenisation, split collect, split settlement and more.

In FY22, the startup clocked an operating revenue of INR 27.54 Cr, more than a 5x rise from INR 4.28 Cr in the previous financial year, according to company filings. Phi Commerce has not filed its FY23 financials yet.

How The Payment Platform Of Phi Commerce Works

The fintech startup’s payment platform helps enterprises in three major areas: Payment collection across online and offline channels, payouts and reconciliation. As most businesses have adopted an omnichannel approach, they need to manage and monitor online and offline payments around the clock. To ensure a seamless experience across channels, payment options must be consistent across all channels and implemented appropriately. It will be unfair if online shoppers have exclusive access to BNPL/EMI options, but in-store customers fail to benefit from these schemes.

When it comes to collecting payments from distributors or dealers, enterprises deal with the added complexity of split payments and matching with against invoices, among other activities.

“Tracking and reconciling payments is a big pain point for businesses. That’s why we wanted to create a platform which would be flexible enough to not only cover all payment modes and channels but also provide value adds like APIs for accounting thereby creating huge efficiencies for our customers” said Thattil.

Service-oriented framework: The team has built the platform aligned to a service-oriented framework. Thus, instead of hard-coding the application and feature set for each payment mode, services can be configured across payment flows to ensure uniformity in solution offering across channels and payment instruments, without impacting the platform’s core code base.

Payment reconciliation via Phi Commerce NEFT: National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) is a popular mode of online transfer introduced in November 2005. But Thattil identified a critical information gap as payee names, purpose of payment and other details are rarely available when merchants receive the money via NEFT.

“This can be confusing, especially when you receive several NEFT payments every day. Most merchants use a manual reconciliation process, which is often error-prone and time-consuming,” said Thattil.

Phi Commerce launched its unique virtual account number (VAN) solution to address this problem and ease out operations and reporting challenges for such transactions.

As the VPN generated is unique for each customer, the startup can automatically track and update all related payments in real time due to its seamless integration with merchant systems. This eliminates the need for manual payment reconciliation, while customers/payers are no longer required to provide their unique reference numbers (URNs) as proof of payment. Phi Commerce also provides summary settlement reports, which can be used to reconcile payments.

With built-in dashboards offered by Phi Commerce, merchants can also easily and efficiently track settlements.

On the revenue front, it follows a typical payment aggregator model, with the merchant discount rate (MDR) serving as the primary source of revenue. Additionally, its platform technology is deployed to businesses as a white-label solution, and Phi Commerce charges an annual subscription for the same.

Can Phi Commerce Outshine Competition, Iron Out Regulatory Glitches?

The fintech’s closest competitor is Razorpay, which provides a similar suite of enterprise payment solutions. However, several other players like Lyra.com, MONEI, Fiserv, Pinelabs, FSS Tech, Airpay, Cashfree, CCAvenue and Instamojo also offer a few services, which match some of Phi’s offerings.

Nevertheless, Thattil is confident about the fintech’s cutting-edge offerings.

Phi Commerce has strategically designed its platform architecture to offer cost-effective solutions, adding significant value to existing payment systems and helping resolve the challenges many businesses face today.

For instance, it will soon introduce Soft PoS, allowing merchants to use their mobile phones as PoS devices.

“Usually, merchants have to pay a monthly rent of INR 500-600 for a PoS terminal. Therefore, this all-new feature [soft PoS] is bound to disrupt the digital payments space, particularly in Tier II and III locations,” said Thattil.

Phi Commerce plans to expand globally in two to three years, starting with Southeast Asia and eventually moving to the Middle East and the EU. The fintech aims to process 5 Bn transactions via its platform in FY24 and triple the value of transactions from the previous year.

As the world marches towards a less-cash society, payment rails will be pivotal in driving innovative enterprise solutions and widespread financial inclusion. The ultimate in this value chain could be the blockchain technology and decentralised finance (DeFi), guaranteeing data fidelity and secure operations.

But this is easier said than achieved as the sector struggles to cope with regulatory compliance and funding crunch. According to Inc42’s Fintech Report (Q2 2023), payments startups raised $213 Mn or 25.4% of the $838 Mn funding in fintechs in Q2 2023, while lendingtech startups bagged the most – 67.1% or $562 Mn, to be precise.

Moreover, the RBI introduced a series of stringent measures for prepaid and credit card players, and nearly every fintech sub-sector has been under its scanner ever since. Not without reasons, though. According to the central bank’s 2022-23 annual report, Indian banks saw the highest number of fraudulent transactions in the digital payment space in FY23.

Additionally, the rollout of a government-backed digital currency (CBDC) instead of validating in-circulation private cryptos or the growing popularity of neobanks with advanced technology features may force payments startups to rework their playbooks to avoid roadblocks.

Although Phi Commerce aims to lead India’s digital payment revolution, ever-growing regulatory challenges can be a big hurdle going forward.

It is pertinent to note here that the company burnt its fingers in 2022 when it was about to go live with a large business prospect. The RBI had then introduced a new policy mandating all payment data to necessarily reside within the country, giving Phi Commerce a surprising blow and putting its plans on the back foot.

“One of our partners was a multinational company, which processed payments from its data-centre in Europe. Just a week before the big launch, we went back to our customer, took him into confidence and we were able to convince them to push the launch by a month to enable compliance with the mandate. Our transparency with our customer ensured that our relationship, built on this foundation of mutual trust, prospered in the years to come,” recalled Thattil.

Thattil is optimistic, though, about the road ahead. After all, a vast segment of India’s 1.4 Bn population remains outside the digital realm, although individuals and businesses in this space must be empowered with secure and efficient tech solutions. But given the size of this still untapped market, no single player can capture it all, and there will be enough growth opportunities for Phi Commerce and its ilk.

The post How Phi Commerce Aims To Power 5 Bn Transactions Via Its Omnichannel Payment Platform For Enterprises appeared first on Inc42 Media.

After completing his graduation in marketing and finance from the US, Ashok Shastry returned home and started working as an operations analyst with homegrown cab aggregator TaxiForSure in 2013.

Following TaxiForSure’s acquisition by Ola in 2015, Shastry almost moved back to the US in search of opportunities, but destiny wanted Shastry to take a plunge into the world of startups.

Given his experience with an Indian cab aggregator and car rental startup, he knew the pains of finding a sweet parking spot for vehicles in Indian metros and Tier I cities. It was then he decided to set up India as his base to solve the problem of parking issues in the country, which even today has more vehicles than infra to provide support.

He thought of leveraging technology to help car owners book parking spots before they leave home. Eager to create disruption, Shastry spoke with his father Ramprasad ‘Rahm’ Shastry, and Amulmeet Singh Chadha to book parking spots online in cities like Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Hyderabad.

In the next few months, the trio realised that the opportunities in online parking spaces were fraught with challenges. As a result, they went back to the drawing board to revisit their plan.

“The idea of a startup to offer pre-booked parking spots to vehicle owners appeared minuscule, as the total addressable market was highly unlucrative and small, and an aggregator like us had little chance of building a sustainable revenue stream despite burning cash,” said cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO) of DriveU Ashok Shastry said.

Over the next few months, the startup junked the original idea and pivoted to the new idea of offering drivers to car owners. Therefore, the father-son duo, along with Singh, started working on an app from where car owners can book drivers on an hourly basis.

Founded in 2015 and operated by Humble Mobile Solutions, DriveU is a one-stop platform that enables users to hire drivers online on an hourly basis in a hassle-free manner. The startup also offers other services to simplify car ownership for Indian customers.

Initially, DriveU had three cofounders, the Shastrys and Singh, however, Singh moved on after serving the startup as a cofounder for nearly two years.

However, Much Was Still On The Cards

Looking at their peers, the cofounders realised that there was a much larger market to bet on, and DriveU, as an app, was capable of doing much more than merely offering drivers for hire.

The startup also offers services such as insurance renewals, car washing, vacuuming and dry cleaning, along with vehicle servicing and FASTag recharges.

“Even though we have created a super app for car owners of the country, all our offerings revolve around the sticky case of drivers for hire,” the cofounders said.

The startup’s super app is currently operational in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR and a few other cities.

It claims to host more than 65,000 drivers on its platform, who have completed 50 Lakh-plus rides so far.

But, What’s The Revenue Model?

The startup generates revenue by charging a commission of 20% from drivers on the total booking amount. The app charges INR 129 from customers for the first hour to book a driver, after which they are charged by the clock.

DriveU also has a membership structure in place, starting from INR 299 a month, under which it enables users to avail discounts on rides, prioritise members for services, give dedicated customer support and provide complimentary insurance on rides.

Additionally, DriveU earns money by offering allied services such as doorstep car wash, which starts at INR 399. It also earns commissions from the sale of FASTag recharges and insurance renewals, which further spruces up the bottom line of the company.

Moreover, the startup claims to operate a B2B vertical, which caters to enterprises looking to hire drivers in bulk. Under this arrangement, it has so far worked with used car marketplaces such as Cars24, Spinny, and CarDekho, among others.

DriveU also caters to used car marketplaces, enabling them to move vehicles from warehouses to the end-user or to workshops.

The startup’s B2B arm accounts for 30% of its total number of bookings, which, however, contributes a mere 15% to its total revenue stream.

“But, this does not make us a B2B business. We rather like to call ourselves a B2C-focussed company. This is purely because of higher ticket sizes and a wider use case in the customer-facing space,” the CEO said.

DriveU has so far raised $5.9 Mn through equity infusion and another $2.2 Mn in debt across multiple funding rounds. The startup is backed by names such as Unitus Ventures, Stevens Creek Ventures and Singhal Foundation.

Speaking with Inc42, the cofounder said that the platform is focused on cross-selling its offerings and has seen heavy traction emerge on the servicing side of its business.

How To Stay Efficient And In The Green?

At a time when the Indian startup ecosystem has come under fire for lack of focus on profitability and unit economics, DriveU’s Shastrys said that their startup has laid stress on sustainable business practices since Day 1.

“We are always trying to make things more efficient. Our current customer acquisition cost is less than INR 200. This is because we run a significant amount of performance marketing campaigns as against full-fledged branding campaigns. Besides, if we feel that something is going wrong, we re-evaluate and pivot quickly,” the cofounders asserted.

We were told that the company has 135 employees on its rolls, guided largely by the philosophy of being frugal without compromising on quality. The company claims to give precedence to products and features that have a positive return on investments (RoI) and sets effective key performance indicators (KPIs) for its small but efficient team.

According to the founders, the startup reported a full quarter of EBITDA profitability in the first quarter (Q1) of the financial year 2023-24 (FY24). It also saw a 40% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) jump in revenues during the same period. The startup claims to have closed FY23 at INR 61 Cr revenue, which it projects to nearly double in the range of INR 100-120 Cr by the end of March 2024.

The company reported 50,000 monthly transacting users (MTUs) across all its operational cities in June 2023, with nearly 75% of its B2C business coming from just two cities — Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

A majority of these users, nearly 78%, are repeat customers, while the remaining 22% are new, according to the CEO. The startup claims to have more than 3 Lakh monthly active users (MAUs) and more than 10 Lakh downloads on Google’s Play Store.

Speed Bumps Ahead!

According to the cofounders, the startup’s ‘driver-for-hire’ service is popular among the younger demographic, who largely use the service for running errands and commute.

Overall, the startup caters to the niche segment of users who have higher purchasing power and can afford to hire a driver. And this could pose some challenges, as, according to government data, car ownership in India was less than 8% in 2019-20, which further narrows down the total addressable market for the company.

Further, in terms of competition, the driver-for-hire space is still in its nascent stages and is populated by an entire brigade of unorganised drivers and small players that cater to a small geographical area.

In this segment, DriveU competes with the likes of Ezi Drive, Hire4drive, Top4 Call Drivers, Drivers India, and Driver On Hire, among others.

However, the biggest challenge comes from the ‘super app for car owners’ segment where it locks horns with deep-pocketed and heavily funded players like Park+. While Park+’s sticky case is offering parking solutions online, it also offers a gamut of auxiliary services such as car wash and car service, just like DriveU.

On Inc42’s question of any potential challenge from new players and incumbents, the DriveU CEO told us that the startup has built a robust tech stack, which would continue to provide it with an edge over its peers.

He also believes that the company’s sticky use cases, product-market fit, streamlined unit economics and right pricing place it ahead of the curve in every sense.

On a side note, DriveU is part of the growing list of Indian customer-facing startups and works directly with gig workers. In the recent past, many Indian new-age tech startups have faced protests for unfair working conditions and lower wages.

On this, the CEO said that drivers are at the core of the DriveU ecosystem, and all facilities are provided to their partners from the very first day.

The consumer internet space is also plagued by issues such as a lack of standardisation across all its services. In this instance, drivers could lack adequate training, good communication skills and basic mechanical skills.

Besides, recent times have seen the Rajasthan government introduce a Bill to regulate the gig economy, and many such plans are already afoot at the central level.

The regulatory overreach could mandate specific requirements for platforms dependent on the gig economy.  Growth and early stage startups could be forced to ensure higher compliance — both on the financial and the regulation front — which could likely hit the bottom line of these emerging companies.

So far, DriveU has treaded cautiously, shying away from blitzscaling, and focussing on sprucing up the venture sustainably. As the disposable income of Indians rises, the company’s super app is expected to see a spurt in the number of users, unless its competitors emerge with a similar and more potent playbook to disrupt the market that DriveU today claims to have under its belt.

The post How DriveU’s Super App Is Simplifying Car Ownership With On-Demand Drivers appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Global warming is one of the biggest challenges affecting the planet, with countries looking at finding solutions to the problem. Not only governments but companies and startups will also have to play a major role in tackling this issue. The Indian startups will have a key role in this as the country has the third largest number of startups in the world after the US and China.

As vehicular pollution is among the major causes of global warming, clean mobility will play a big role in tackling the issue. Many Indian electric vehicle (EV) startups such as Ather Energy, Altigreen, BOLT, and Baaz Bikes are now sustainable solutions. The Indian EV market houses various small as well as large EV startups and is estimated to reach $15,397 Bn by 2027.

Indian EV startups offer services such as sustainable mobility, energy infrastructure, commercial mobility and battery management system, among others, to the general masses and enterprises. Besides, they are also helping reduce carbon emissions and offering a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels.

Let’s take a look at some of the Indian startups that are helping keep the earth healthy and green through their technology and products. The list below is not meant to be a ranking of any kind. The Indian EV brands have been listed in alphabetical order.

Startups In The EV Segment 

1. 3EV Industries

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Peter Hartmut Voelkner, Suman K. Mishra
• Funding Raised To Date: $2 Mn
• Investors: Credence Family Office
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

3EV Industries was founded in association between RUGGED Solar Products Pvt Ltd and ReBatt Limited in 2019. It offers last-mile hyper-local connectivity to customers across India. 

In November 2021, 3EV Industries raised $2 Mn in its seed funding round from several family offices including Credence Family Office. The startup originally aligns with the Indian government’s ‘Make in India’ ambitions.

It manufactures vehicles across cargo and passenger segments, along with kits to convert conventional vehicles to electric. It aims to use renewable energy and off-grid power systems to optimise last-mile logistics. 

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2. Altigreen Propulsion Labs

• Founded In: 2013
• Founders: Amitabh Saran, Shalendra Gupta 
• Funding Raised To Date: $40 Mn 
• Investors: Reliance New Energy Limited, Xponentia Capital, Accurant International and Momentum Venture Capital
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Altigreen offers last-mile transportation through two-wheeler, three-wheeler and four-wheeler EVs for commercial use.

In February 2022, Altigreen raised INR 300 Cr ($40 Mn) in a Series A funding round led by Sixth Sense Ventures. The round saw participation from Reliance New Energy Limited (RNEL), Xponentia Capital, Accurant International and Momentum Venture Capital.

The startup has a presence in 60 countries, along with 26 global patents. It had a turnover of INR 1.04  Cr in FY21 against INR 61.62 lakh in FY20.

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3. Ather Energy

• Founded In: 2013
• Founders: Tarun Mehta, Swapnil Jain
• Funding Raised To Date: $225 Mn
• Investors: Hero Motocorp, Department of Science and Technology, IIT Madras, Binny Bansal, Sachin Bansal, Tiger Global, NIIF Limited
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Ather Energy offers sustainable mobility and energy infrastructure solutions. It manufactures two-wheeler electric vehicles, 450X and 450 Plus, that are sold on its website and offline retail stores. 

In May, Ather secured $128 Mn in its Series E funding round from sovereign fund NIIF Limited and existing investor Hero MotoCorp. With this round, it also closed its Series E round.

The startup claims to have installed more than 1,000 charging stations across 80 cities in India. It aims to have around 2,500+ charging stations by the end of 2023.

It was earlier reported that the EV startup had set up its second manufacturing plant in Hosur to meet the demand for electric scooters. In October 2021, its annual revenue rate (ARR) rose by 12X to $100 Mn.

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4. Baaz Bikes

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Karan Singla, Abhijeet Saxena, Shubham Srivastava 
• Funding Raised To Date: $2 Mn
• Investors: Kalaari Capital, AdvantEdge, 9Unicorns, Sumant Sinha
• Headquarters: New Delhi

Baaz Bikes, a subsidiary of ElecTorq Technologies, offers micro-mobility solutions to gig workers. It helps gig workers earn money by using its electric scooters for deliveries for companies such as Zomato, Amazon and Grofers.

Baaz Bikes raised $2 Mn in Pre-Series A funding round from Kalaari Capital along with the participation of AdvantEdge, 9Unicorns and Renew Power’s Sumant Sinha.

The EV startup’s scooters can cover a distance of 60 km on a single charge. It also has built battery swapping infrastructure in India. It claims that its swapping infrastructure is live in two zones in Delhi.

As per its website, its tech stack includes Baaz, Baaz Swap, Baazigar Platform and Baaz VU.

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5. Battery Smart

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka
• Funding Raised To Date: $43 Mn 
• Investors: Blume Ventures, Orios Ventures, Green Frontier Capital, TradeCred, Baring Private Equity India, Srinivas Anumolu, K Ganesh, Niraj Singh, Amit Bhasin  
• Headquarters: New Delhi

Battery Smart allows customers to swap their EV batteries at its stations, called Swap Stations. It currently offers its services to e-rickshaw owners. 

Battery Smart claims to operate more than 100 Swap Stations across Delhi-NCR and says it has completed more than 3 lakh battery swaps. Currently, it has 1200 active vehicles on its platform and makes 5,000 swaps on a daily basis.

In November 2021, Battery Smart raised $7 Mn in a Pre-Series A funding round led by Blume Ventures and Orios Ventures. The round saw participation from investors including Green Frontier Capital, TradeCred, Baring Private Equity India, and angel investors such as Bluestone’s Srinivas Anumolu, and GrowthStory.in’s K Ganesh, Spinny’s Niraj Singh and GoMechanic’s Amit Bhasin.

Prior to this, Battery Smart raised an undisclosed amount of investment in a seed funding round from Orios Venture Partners in February 2021. The startup has further raised $25 Mn in its Series A round in June 2022 led by Tiger Global, Blume Ventures and Orios Ventures and two debt rounds from Stride Ventures and BlackSoil.

Battery Smart claims to have completed 10 Mn swaps, set up 550+ live swap stations across 18 cities and works with 18,500 vehicles.

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6. BGauss

• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Hemant Kabra
• Funding Raised To Date: $7 Mn
• Investors: Darshan Patel
• Headquarters:  Mumbai

BGauss, which is promoted by RR Global, offers sustainable mobility solutions. The startup manufactures two EVs – BGauss B8 and BGauss A2 – which are sold on its website as well as in offline stores. It is currently expanding its product portfolio by launching two new EV scooters in 2022. 

According to an Inc42 report, BGauss’ new EV scooter D15 will be launched in May 2022, while the other scooter will be launched later this year. The startup claims that these scooters will be 100% ‘Made in India’ at its production facility located in Chakan near Pune.

Recently, the EV startup got $7 Mn in funding from Vini Cosmetics’ Darshan Patel to expand retail and manufacturing capacity in India, perform R&D and develop in-house products across various EV components. It claims to have 100 dealer networks across India and is planning to enter Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities by the end of 2022. It is further looking to scale up operations and focus on the export market.

As per its website, it has a presence in more than 85 countries. It also has 13 manufacturing facilities and over 25K retail stores. ______________________________________________________________________________________________

7. BluSmart 

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Anmol Singh Jaggi, Punit K Goyal
• Funding Raised To Date: $67 Mn
• Investors: Stride Ventures, Alteria Capital, BlackSoil, UCIC, BP Ventures, Green Frontier Capital, Mayfield India Fund, 9Unicorns, Suvan Partners,  Mumbai Angels, Inflection Point Ventures, Venture Catalysts
• Headquarters: Gurugram

BluSmart offers electric ride-hailing mobility services through its mobile-based app. It primarily provides sustainable mobility solutions to urban customers.

In May, BluSmart secured $25 Mn through equity and debt financing in its Series A funding round. Investors who participated in the round include BP Ventures, Green Frontier Capital, Stride Ventures, Alteria Capital, BlackSoil and UCIC.

Recently, it started intercity EV services from Delhi NCR to Jaipur and Chandigarh. It has also scaled EV services at Delhi IGI Airport. It is currently looking to expand its EV charging hubs across Delhi NCR and expand its fleet to over 5,000. 

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8. BOLT

• Founded: 2017
• Founders: Jyotiranjan Harichandan and Mohit Yadav
• Funding Raised To Date: $4 Mn 
• Investors: ITI Growth Opportunities Fund, SUN Mobility, Union Square Ventures, Prime Venture Partners
• Headquarters: Bengaluru 

BOLT, previously known as REVOS, is an AI-based IoT platform that helps people operate EVs. It essentially tracks and monitors motor controllers as well as batteries on the platform. 

In September 2021, BOLT raised $4 Mn in its Series A round led by Union Square Ventures (USV) and Prime Venture Partners. It claims to have sold about 1,000 devices, including EVs and chargers in 30 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), across India, China, Nepal, Egypt and Vietnam to date. The startup claims it has installed 10,000 EV charging stations in India in the past six months. 

BOLT is reportedly aiming to deploy 100K charging stations in the coming six months to meet the demand in cities like Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Nagpur, Nashik, Chandigarh, Surat, and Bhubaneswar, among others.

Recently, BOLT also partnered with the Delhi Capitals cricket team for the IPL.

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9. Cell Propulsion

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Nakul Kukar, Paras Kaushal, Supratim Naskar
• Funding Raised To Date: $4 Mn
• Investors: growX ventures, Micelio, Endiya Partners, CIIE.CO, Sangam Ventures
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Cell Propulsion offers sustainable mobility solutions and charging infrastructure. The startup develops high-voltage powertrains technology for commercial vehicle applications. Besides this, it manufactures electric commercial vehicles – Oryx Electric and Beluga Electric. While Oryx Electric is available for sale, Beluga Electric has not been officially launched yet by the startup. 

As per its website, GrowX Ventures, Endiya, Micelio and CIIE.CO and Sangam Ventures are among its investors. It has covered over 200K emission-free distance and onboarded five fleets to date. It is currently managing over 10 fast-charging stations.

In 2021, it reportedly secured $2 Mn of funding from a cohort of private equity investors including Endiya Partners, GrowX Ventures, Huddle Accelerator and Micelio. Prior to this, it raised $1 Mn in a pre-Series A funding round in September 2020. 

In 2019, it was also a part of Huddle and growX Ventures’ EV accelerator program.

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10. CHARGE+ZONE

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders: Kartikey Hariyani and Pavan Bakeri
• Funding Raised To Date: $17 Mn
• Investors: Venture Catalysts, Mumbai Angels, Keiretsu Forum, Ramakrishnan Family Office
• Headquarters: Gujarat

CHARGE+ZONE offers an OEM charging network through its app-based charging stations. Its app provides an array of services to EV drivers, such as finding charging points, and booking them in advance. 

In December 2021, CHARGE+ZONE raised $10 Mn in a bridge funding round led by Venture Catalysts. Prior to this, it raised $4 Mn in the same round. CHARGE+ZONE currently aims to raise another $50 Mn in a Series A funding round in 2022. 

In November 2021, CHARGE+ZONE raised $3 Mn in a Pre-Series funding A round led by Venture Catalysts. The round saw participation from Mumbai Angels, Keiretsu Forum and Ramakrishnan Family Office. Earlier in May 2021, it raised an undisclosed amount from Mumbai Angels. 

CHARGE+ZONE is reported to have started the distribution of AC-Type2 EV charging networks and intercity fast DC charging networks for 1,500 new points over the next 150 days.

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11. Chargeup

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Varun Goenka and Ankur Madan
• Funding Raised To Date: $2.5 Mn
• Investors:  Capital A, Anicut Capital, MapmyIndia,  Sameer Mehta, Aman Gupta, Tiger Shroff, Shraddha Kapoor  
• Headquarters: New Delhi

Chargeup offers battery swapping services for three-wheeler EVs in India. 

In February 2022, Chargeup reportedly raised $2.5 Mn in Pre-Series A funding round led by Capital A and Anicut Capita. 

The round also saw participation from angel investors including boAt’s Sameer Mehta, Aman Gupta, Tiger Shroff and Shraddha Kapoor. The startup claims to have expanded to 100 stations and onboarded 800 drivers on its platform. It further says that it has 100 dealers working with the platform.

As per its website, Chargeup has an AI and ML-based platform that provides services such as subscription-based usage, delivers 5,000 MwHr, forecasts demand hotspots, predicts energy demand, and operates 10K charging stations. The startup claims to have 800 satisfied users and 100 dealers associated with it. It also aims to power 1 Mn EVs by 2027.

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12. Corrit Electric

• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Mayur Misra
• Funding Raised To Date: $9 Mn 
• Investors: SphitiCap
• Headquarters: Noida

Corrit Electric offers sustainable mobility solutions to consumers and B2B customers. It sells three electric bikes – Hover 1.0, Hover 2.0 and Hover 2.0+. The company has recently launched an electric bike, Transit, for B2B deliveries. It has a top speed of 70 kmph and payload capacity of 200 Kg. 

In November 2022, it secured $9 Mn in funding from venture capital fund SphitiCap to ramp up its production facility and manufacture electric bikes to resolve issues related to last-mile connectivity.

Earlier, it had shared plans to build 1.5 Lakh electric bikes in the next three years.

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13. ElectricPe

• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Avinash Sharma, Raghav Rohila
• Funding Raised To Date: $8 Mn
• Investors: Blume Ventures, Micelio Fund, Anshuman Bapna, Anupam Mittal, Arjun Ravi Sheth, Ashish Goel, Bhuvan Gupta, Green Frontier Capital, NB Ventures, Anchorage Capital Partners, Supermorpheus, and Climate Angels
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

ElectricPe offers charging infrastructure to customers. Through its app, EV owners can locate charging stations near them.

In November 2021, ElectricPe raised $3 Mn in a seed funding round led by Blume Ventures and Micelio Fund. The round saw participation from Terra.do’s Anshuman Bapna, Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal, Anchorage Capital’s Arjun Ravi Sheth, Urban Ladder’s Ashish Goel, and OfBusiness’ Bhuvan Gupta, among others.

Recently, Hero Electric partnered with ElectricPe to set up charging points pan-India for its customers. The charging infrastructure would be built in residential complexes, offices, malls, and other establishments. The partnership aims to strengthen the charging network and support EV adoption across India.

Prior to this, NoBroker had also partnered with ElectricPe to set up 1 Lakh electric charging stations in residential communities across India in 2022.

In January 2022, ElectricPe raised $5 Mn in its pre-series A round led by Green Frontier Capital, Blume Ventures and Micelio Fund, with participation from NB Ventures, Anchorage Capital Partners, Supermorpheus and Climate Angels.

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14. Emflux Motors 

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders: Ankit Khatry, Varun Mittal, Vinay Raj Somashekar
• Funding Raised To Date: $648K
• Investors: Meher Roy, Nikhil Arora, Meet Kanodia, Krit Sankalp, Nitish Singh and Risabh Gupta
• Headquarters: Bengaluru 

Emflux Motors offers sustainable mobility solutions and other tech solutions for EVs. It sells an electronic bike Emflux One that has a maximum speed of 200 kmph and can cover up to 200 km on a single charge. Besides this, it sells technology stack such as battery management system, motors, motor controller, charger circuit, EVSE, master controller, and battery pack. 

In 2017, Emflux Motors raised $648K in an angel funding round. The round saw participation from Meher Roy, Nikhil Arora, Meet Kanodia, Krit Sankalp, Jugnoo’s Nitish Singh, and Risabh Gupta.

The EV startup aims to create 10 Mn two-wheeler EVs in India by 2027. It primarily focuses on building brand and loyalty by creating high-performance electric vehicles.  It also plans to build an ecosystem of partner OEMs and become their tech and component supplier. 

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15. EMO Energy

• Founded In: 2022
• Founders: Sheetanshu Tyagi and Rahul Patel
• Funding Raised To Date: $1.5 Mn
• Investors: Transition VC, Gruhas
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

With its integrated tech stack for two- and three-wheeler EVs and heavy-duty vehicles, deeptech startup EMO Energy is addressing two challenges adversely affecting EV adoption in India – safety and charging efficiency. 

The startup calls its technology platform ZEN, which comes with different applications such as ZEN PAC (swappable battery packs for two- and three-wheelers), ZEN Ctrl. (battery management system and connected software), ZEN Rig (battery packs for heavy-duty vehicles), and ZEN Wall (fully integrated battery inverter system for residential and light commercial use).

EMO Energy has successfully conducted pilot programmes with nearly 10 electric vehicle (EV) companies in the country, deploying approximately 100 batteries to date. The startup is rapidly expanding its network of partnerships. While most of its offerings are still in the pilot phase, EMO Energy has already started generating revenue by selling its battery packs, ranging from 2 kWh to 3 kWh, for two- and three-wheelers.

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16. EMotorad

• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Rajib Gangopadhyay, Kunal Gupta, Aditya Oza, Sumedh Battewar
• Funding Raised To Date: $5.9 Mn
• Investor: Basant Lohia from TaraSafe, Green Frontier Capital (GFC), LetsVenture, Ivy Growth associates
• Headquarters: Pune
• EMotorad sells electric cycles for daily commuting and casual rides. The startup uses local sourcing and manufacturing facilities in India to build electric cycles.

In October, the Pune-based startup secured $2.9 Mn (INR 24 Cr) in its Pre-Series A funding round. During that time, it asserted that it sold more than 16K electric cycles in India since its inception

It raised $3 Mn in its seed funding round in late 2021. Its cap table includes Green Frontier Capital (GFC), LetsVenture, Ivy Growth associates and Basant Lohia from TaraSafe.

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17. ETrio 

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders: Sathya Yalamanchili, Deepak M V 
• Funding Raised To Date: $3 Mn
• Investor: Janardhan Rao
• Headquarters: Hyderabad

Etrio offers commercial and non-commercial electricity mobility solutions. Its product portfolio includes electric kits, retrofitted electric light commercial vehicles (eLCVs), a three-wheeler EV named Touro, and two bicycles – Ashva and iSwitch. eLCVs have been launched to transform and electrify the logistics segment, while bicycles were launched to meet the demands of cargo and personal segments. 

In 2020, ETrio raised $3 Mn in a Series A funding round led by Triumph Global’s Janardhan Rao. The round saw participation from a cohort of Singapore-based HNIs. 

As per its website, ETrio has partnered with various companies including Amazon, BigBasket, Flipkart, DIAGEO, Lightning Logistics, Amplus Solar, and ZYPP Electric. 

It has also received certifications from various government bodies such as ARAI, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, and the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, among others. 

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18. Euler Motors

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders:  Saurav Kumar
• Funding Raised To Date:  $21.8 Mn 
• Investors: Blume Venture, Emergent Ventures, Andrew Lee, Inventus India, Jetty Ventures, Srinivas Anumolu, K Ganesh, Sujeet Kumar, QRG Investments and Holdings, ADB Ventures,
• Headquarters: New Delhi 

Euler Motors offers commercial electrical mobility solutions through three-wheeler EVs, energy infrastructure, app and web-based software solutions. Its three-wheeler EV, Euler HiLoad, has the capacity to hold up to 688 Kg. The company claims it can get charged in 15 minutes and cover a distance of 151 Km on a single charge.

In the charging infra, the EV startup offers three types of chargers – Flash2, onboard charger, and Charge on Wheels. In the software segment, its app provides an array of services such as real-time GPS tracking, learning analytics, geo-fencing, and battery temperature, among others. 

In April 2022, Euler Motors raised about $5 Mn in a follow-on Series B round from Moglix. Prior to that, it raised $10 Mn as a part of a Series B funding round led by QRG Holdings. The round saw participation from ADB Ventures, Inventus Capital, and Blume Ventures. 

It claims to have supplied more than 250 three-wheeler EVs to various companies including Ecom Express, BigBasket and Udaan.

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19. EVage

• Founded In: 2014
• Founders: Inderveer Singh, Pulkit Srivastava, Harnoor Kaur
• Funding Raised To Date: $28 Mn
• Investors: RedBlue Capital
• Headquarters: Chandigarh

EVage offers commercial solutions for sustainable mobility. It plans to supply electric commercial vehicles to the delivery fleets of logistics companies. 

Recently, Evage raised $28 Mn in a seed funding round from RedBlue Capital. Its first model, X, is a one-tonne truck built for the commercial delivery market.

The startup claims to be the supplier to Amazon India’s delivery partners. 

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20. Evera

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Nimish Trivedi, Vikas Bansal, Rajeev Tiwari
• Funding Raised To Date: $7 Mn
• Investors: Westova Capital, Devonshire Capital, IEG – Investment Banking Group
• Headquarters: New Delhi

Evera is a New Delhi-based electric cab services provider that operates in both B2B and B2C verticals. Founded in 2019, the startup claims to have taken more than 40,000 rides, with a network of 43 charging stations in the national capital region.

Unlike many ride-hailing companies, Evera employs full-time drivers rather than working with gig workers. The startup says the drivers can’t cancel rides since they’re paid by the startup.

Evera competes directly with BluSmart, which raised $42 Mn in May 2023.

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21. Exponent Energy

• Founded In: 2020 
• Founders: Arun Vinayak, Sanjay Byalal
• Funding Raised To Date: $5 Mn 
• Investors: YourNest VC, 3one4 Capital, AdvantEdge VC, Motherson Group, Rajesh Yabaji, Pushkar Singh
• Headquarters: Bengaluru 

Exponent Energy offers energy solutions to EV owners. The startup claims that its lithium-ion battery and charger combo can charge EVs up to 100% within 15 minutes.  

In December 2021, the EV startup raised $5 Mn in a Pre Series A funding round led by existing investor YourNest VC. The round saw participation from other investors including 3one4 Capital, AdvantEdge VC and Motherson Group. 

As per an Inc42 report, it also raised an undisclosed investment in September 2021 from investors including YourNest, 3one4 Capital, AdvantEdge, BlackBuck’s Rajesh Yabaji, and LetsTransport’s Pushkar Singh among others.

Before launching Exponent Energy, its cofounder Arun Vinayak worked with Ather Energy for seven years, while the other cofounder Sanjay Byalal had earlier worked with Ather Energy as well as HUL.

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22. Fyn Mobility

• Founded In: 2013
• Founders: Visakh Sasikumar
• Funding Raised To Date: $2.4 Mn 
• Investors: Eagle10 Ventures, Bluehill Capital, Sattva Group, Nanavati family, Sincere Syndication, Conscience Multi-Family Office, GAIL (India) Ltd,  Arshad Sayyad, Vijay Ratnaparke, Shaji Koshy and IITM Research Park’s Ashok Jhunjhunwala, among others.
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Fyn Mobility, which was earlier known as Pi Beam, offers micro-mobility EV solutions and data analytics services for the EV ecosystem. Its product portfolio includes PIMO Utility two-wheeler, E-Trike, E-Kart, and E-Auto.  

In March 2022, Fyn reportedly raised $1.7 Mn in a Pre-Series A round led by Inflection Point Ventures. 

The round saw participation from investors including Sattva Group and Nanavati family, Sincere Syndication and Conscience Multi-Family Office, and angel investors Fidelity Investments’ Arshad Sayyad, Robert Bosch’s Vijay Ratnaparke, Royal Enfield’s Shaji Koshy and IITM Research Park’s Ashok Jhunjhunwala, among others.

Prior to this, the EV startup raised $705K in a bridge funding round from GAIL (India) Ltd. Currently, it has a presence in Bengaluru and Chennai. It plans to add 2,000 EVs by FY23. 

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23. goEgoNetwork

• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Sayantan Chakraborti, Dheeman Kadam, Pravin Kumar 
• Funding Raised To Date: $2 Mn
• Investors: Olivier Guillaumond, Rishi Bagla
• Headquarters: Pune

goEgoNetwork offers energy solutions to customers. With its goME app, EV owners can locate the nearest charging stations and use them. 

In August 2021, goEgoNetwork raised $2 Mn (nearly INR 15 Cr) in seed funding to expand its existing electric charging network. The round saw participation from Bagla Group’s Rishi Bagla and Global Innovation Labs’ Olivier Guillaumond.

In 2021, goEgoNetwork is reported to have partnered with TVS Motor to promote EV infra in Himachal Pradesh. Following this, it set up an EV charging facility at Kaza in Spiti Valley to cater to the needs of EV scooters and cars in the region.

The EV startup has got certifications from various government bodies including ARAI and OCA.

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24. Grinntech 

• Founded In: 2013
• Founders: Nikhilesh Mishra, Puneet Jain
• Funding Raised To Date: $2 Mn  
• Investors: V Sumantran, Lakshmi Narayan, KS Manian
• Headquarters: Chennai

Grinntech offers energy storage solutions to customers. It claims to provide an array of lithium-ion batteries such as IC Engine starter batteries, e-cycle and robotics batteries, two-wheeler batteries, three-wheeler batteries, small commercial vehicle batteries, light commercial vehicle batteries, and MHCV batteries, among others.

In 2020, Grinntech raised $2 Mn in an angel funding round. The round saw participation from investors including Ashok Leyland’s V Sumantran, Cognizant’s Lakshmi Narayan, and NAPC’s KS Manian. During the same year, the startup also graduated from the IIT Madras Incubation Cell.

In 2020, Grinntech inked an MoU with the Tamil Nadu government involving an investment of INR 100 Cr. In the following year, it established a manufacturing facility in Chennai that can meet the demand of up to 400 MWh.

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25. Kabira Mobility

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Jaibir Siwach, Akash Siwach, and Sagar Siwach
• Funding Raised To Date: $52 Mn
• Investors: Al-Abdulla Group, Classic Group
• Headquarters: Goa

Kabira Mobility is a Goa-based electric motorcycle manufacturer, which started a fledged sales of its ebikes in April 2022. It targets young bike enthusiasts. 

The startup has so far launched two models of its flagship bikes – KM3000 and KM4000. While its KM3000 bike model comes with a 4.14 kWh battery capacity and a range of 120 km per charge, the KM4000 model has a battery capacity of 4.60 kWh and offers a range of 150 km. 

Kabira Mobility also has plans to launch pro variants of its KM3000 and KM4000 models this year. Next year, the ebike startup is expected to launch a new model – KM5000 – in the cruiser bike category.

Earlier this year, the startup raised $50 Mn (around INR 412 Cr) in its Series A funding round Qatar-based Al-Abdulla Group, taking its total funding received to INR 430 Cr.

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26. Kazam EV

• Founded In: 2020 
• Founders: Akshay Shekhar, Vaibhav Tyagi
• Funding Raised To Date: $4.53 Mn
• Investors: Inflection Point Ventures, We Founder Circle 
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Kazam EV offers software solutions for energy infrastructure. Besides aligning with its own charging stations, the startup’s software supports charging stations of other EV companies as well. It additionally helps micro-entrepreneurs earn money by setting up charging stations in their parking areas. 

In 2021, Kazam raised INR 7 Cr ($0.93 Mn) in a seed round led by Inflection Point Ventures. Besides, it raised an undisclosed amount of investment from We Founder Circle. Earlier in May 2023, the startup picked up $3.6 Mn in a round led by Avaana Climate Fund.

As per its website, Kazam has set up over 7,000 charging stations in India. It has a presence in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi-NCR, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. Its products are essentially utilised by EV OEMs, EV fleet operators and micro-entrepreneurs.

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27. kWh Bikes

• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Kartik Gupta, Siddharth Janghu 
• Funding Raised To Date: $2 Mn
• Investors: LetsVenture, Better Capital, Cloud Capital, Renu Satti, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Rajiv Nazareth, Paresh Sukthankar, Dipak Gupta
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

kWh Bikes manufactures electronic bikes, EV chassis, vehicle control units, battery packs and motors. The EV startup claims that its prototypes can reach a speed of up to 70 kmph and can also cover 150 km on a single charge.

According to an Inc42 report, kWh’s scooters are in pre-production and the company has received expressions of interest (EOIs) for over 15,000 units. The startup further plans to enter the Indian B2C market.     

In October 2021, it reportedly raised $2 Mn in a seed round led by LetsVenture. The round saw participation from Better Capital, Cloud Capital and angel investors including Paytm Payments Bank’s Renu Satti, Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, ALF Engineering’s Rajiv Nazareth, HDFC’s Paresh Sukthankar, and Kotak’s Dipak Gupta, among others.

The startup is planning to expand research and development (R&D) across various EV components such as battery, BMS, VCU, and motor.

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28. Lithium Urban Technologies

• Founded In: 2014
• Founders: Sanjay Krishnan
• Funding Raised To Date: $58 Mn
• Investors: IFC, EverSource Capital 
• Headquarters: Bengaluru 

Lithium Urban offers sustainability solutions and charging infrastructure to business organisations. The startup essentially offers transport service through its fleet of EVs and associated charging stations.

As per its website, the startup is certified by ISO for implementing guidance on social responsibility. It presently has a fleet size of 2,000 vehicles and operates in over 15 cities, including Bengaluru, NCR, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Mumbai. 

Through its tech stack, the startup claims to deliver 2X productivity, reduce carbon footprint and cut down transportation costs by 40%. As per Tofler, its revenue from operations stood at INR 53.6 Cr in FY20 as against INR 41.8 Cr in FY19. However, its loss widened to INR 21.1 Cr in FY20 as compared to INR 15.3 Cr in the previous fiscal year. 

A few days ago, it reportedly partnered with Tata Motors to deploy 5000 XPRES T Electric Sedans across India for employee transportation.

In March 2022, EverSource Capital, which manages India’s largest climate impact funds, acquired a majority stake in the startup for about $50 Mn. Prior to this, the startup raised $8 Mn from World Bank’s investment arm, International Finance Corporation (IFC), as an equity investor. It raised additional capital from other investors as well. 

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29. Lohum

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Rajat Verma, Justin Lemmon, Gazanfar Safvi
• Funding Raised To Date: $20 Mn+
• Investors: Baring Private Equity Partners, Talbros Automotive Components, Stride Ventures
• Headquarters: Noida

Lohum is a producer of lithium-ion battery raw materials, which it achieves by recycling, repurposing, and low-carbon refining.

Working in a closed-loop recycling model, Lohum acquires used lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles, stationary storage, and consumer electronics. These batteries are then tested and, if deemed reusable, they are given a second life. If the batteries reach their end-of-life, Lohum recycles the battery materials and sells the resulting metals and chemicals to various customers across the supply chain.

Since its inception, the startup has raised over $20 Mn in funding. Lohum recently said that it has collaborated with insurtech unicorn ACKO to optimise the battery insurance and financing costs for the customers.

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30. Magenta Mobility

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders: Maxson Lewis
• Funding Raised To Date: $35 Mn
• Investors: bp Ventures, Morgan Stanley India, JITO Angel Network
• Headquarters: Mumbai

From being a solution provider in the EV charging ecosystem, Magenta Mobility has pivoted to becoming an end-to-end integrated emobility solution provider. 

Currently, it operates over 1,550 electric three-wheelers in the L5 category for last-mile delivery, which it is planning to expand to more than 3,000 vehicles by the end of FY24. Magenta Mobility runs its cargo delivery and logistics services in nine cities, including Bengaluru, Mysuru, Pune Mumbai, Delhi NCR, and Hyderabad. The startup is not a manufacturer and sources its three-wheeler EVs from Piaggio, Altigreen Propulsion Labs, Euler Motors, and Mahindra.

In its charging ecosystem, Magenta Mobility manages 39 charging depots to cater to the charging needs of its EV fleet.

Besides, it also develops software technology to enable this entire emobility ecosystem.

In April 2023, Magenta Mobility raised $22 Mn (about INR 180.6 Cr) in its Series A1 funding round from bp Ventures and Morgan Stanley India infrastructure.

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31. Metastable Materials

• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Shubham Vishvakarma, Saurav Goyal, Manikumar Uppala
• Funding Raised To Date: Undisclosed 
• Investors: Sequoia Capital’s Surge,  Speciale Invest, Theia Ventures, Akshay Singhal, Sanjeev Rangrass
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Metastable Materials has developed a one-of-its-kind mechanism, a chemical-free integrated carbothermal reduction process, for extracting and recycling materials from lithium-ion batteries in a more economical and efficient manner. 

The startup was part of the eighth cohort of Sequoia’s Surge accelerator program.

In April 2023, the cleantech startup raised an undisclosed amount of funding in its Seed round from Sequoia Capital’s Surge and other venture capitalists like Speciale Invest and Theia Ventures. 

Metastable Materials is now setting up a 21,000 sq ft battery recycling facility on the outskirts of Bengaluru.

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32. MoEVing

• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Mragank Jain, Vikash Mishra
• Funding Raised To Date:  $10 Mn 
• Investors:  D.S. Brar, Anshuman Maheshwary, Srihari Raju Kalidindi, Ashish Goel, Krishnadeva Veerareddy, BeyondTeq, GCC family offices, Strides One, TradeCred, N+1 Capital, and Nitish Mittersain
• Headquarters: Gurugram

MoEVing offers intra-city last-mile delivery solutions, energy infrastructure and fintech solutions. It provides delivery services to companies operating in ecommerce, e-grocery, FMCG, logistics and D2C. Besides, it also works along with OEMs, drivers and financial institutions to address the problems of EV owners when they adopt EVs.

In May, the EV startup secured $5 Mn through equity and debt financing in its ongoing seed funding round. Investors like BeyondTeq, GCC family offices, Strides One, TradeCred, N+1 Capital, and Nitish Mittersain from Nazara Technologies participated in the round. 

MoEving has a presence in 10 cities in India including Delhi-NCR, Pune, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Kolkata. It aims to add 10,000 EVs and 100 charging hubs in 30 cities by 2023. 

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33. Motovolt Mobility

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders: Tushar Choudhary 
• Funding Raised To Date: $1.9 Mn 
• Investors: Wami Capital, PPAP Automotive, Vikrampati Singhania, Ankur Agarwal, Vikas Bagaria
• Headquarters: Kolkata

Motovolt offers sustainable mobility solutions to consumers. Some of its electric bikes are URBN e-Bike, Kivo Easy, Ice, and Kivo 24. 

Recently, the startup also launched an electric bike called URBN for its consumers. The new electric bike has removable twin batteries, weighing about 10 kg each.

In November last year, it bagged $1.9 Mn in Pre-Series A funding round led by Wami Capital. Earlier, it had shared plans to invest INR 200 Cr into its business (in 2023) to enhance product offerings and expand its facility as well as sales network. It claims to have more than 100 POS across the country.

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34. Oben Electric

• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Madhumita Agrawal, Dinkar Agarwal, and Sagar Thakkar
• Funding Raised To Date: $10.7 Mn
• Investors: Stride Ventures, Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency, Mumbai Angels, We Founder Circle
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Currently, the electric two-wheeler market is predominantly dominated by escooter manufacturers. However, the electric motorcycle sector is relatively limited, with only a few companies operating in this space.

Oben Electric is one of those few startups that are manufacturing electric bikes to make a major shift in a market ruled by the stalwarts like Bajaj Auto, TVS Motor, Hero MotoCorp, and Eicher Motors.

Its flagship electric motorcycle Oben Rorr comes with a top speed of 100 km per hour and a 4.4 kWh battery capacity that can fully charge in two hours.

In the electric motorcycle manufacturing space, Oben Electric currently competes with Revolt Motors, Ultraviolette, Matter, Odysse, Hop Electric, Kabira Mobility, and Orxa Energies.

The startup has raised around $10.7 Mn (over 88 Cr) in total funding so far. In its extended Pre-Series A funding round, it raised $4.88 Mn (INR 72 Cr) in June 2023.

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35. Ohm Mobility

• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Nikhil Nair
• Funding Raised To Date: $400K
• Investors: Antler India, Blume Founders Fund, Catalyst Fund, Kunal Shah
• Headquarters: Bangalore

Ohm Mobility is an end-to-end EV-focussed financing platform, which aims to help EV players to get easier access to institutional capital while enabling lenders to discover, verify, and deploy capital to EV companies. It is building a technology platform to connect EV buyers with capital providers.

In May 2023, Ohm Mobility raised INR 3 Cr in a pre-seed funding round led by Antler India. The funding round also saw participation from Blume Founders Fund and angels like Sagar Gubbi, Anshuman Bapna Mathew Chako, and Karishma Menon.

Its current client portfolio includes Race Energy, Eveez, and Hala Mobility, among others. The startup competes with the likes of Vidyut and Turno in the space.

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36. Okinawa Autotech

• Founded In: 2015
• Founders: Jeetender Sharma 
• Funding Raised To Date: Bootstrapped 
• Investors: NA
• Headquarters: Gurugram

Okinawa offers sustainable mobility solutions. The startup offers EV vehicles–RIDGE+, PRAISE PRO, IPRAISE+, R30, Okinawa R30 and LITE. Its high-speed scooters hold various features such as detachable batteries, fast charging, central locking, app connectivity, etc. Its EV vehicles are priced at INR 50K-INR 1.14 Lakh.

As per LinkedIn, it has over 350 dealerships across India so far. It has received a FAME II subsidy from the Indian government and also, got IATD certification for design and manufacturing. It also partnered with the Indian Navy, Delhi Transport Corporation and Tirupati Smart City.

It claims to have sold more than 1 lakh EV scooters since its inception. It has two manufacturing plants in Rajasthan; one plant with a capacity of more than 1 lakh units is in Bhiwandi while the other with 0.5 Mn units is in Alwar. 

Since It’s a bootstrapped venture, the startup has not got external financing so far. However, it is reportedly looking at raising INR 400-INR 500 Cr from American and European private equity players.

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37. Ola Electric 

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Bhavish Aggarwal
• Funding Raised To Date: $859.7 Mn  
• Investors: Tekne Private Ventures, Alpine Opportunity Fund, Edelweiss, Tiger Global and Matrix India, SoftBank, Hyundai, Kia Motors, Bank of Baroda, Falcon Edge, IIFL PE, Cars 24, Moglix, Dealshare, VSS Investco, Pawan Munjal, Ratan Tata, Rahul Mehta
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Bhavish Agarwal-led Ola Electric offers two-wheelers EVs and energy infrastructure. Founded in 2017, the EV startup manufacturing facility, Ola Future Factory, has a production capacity of 10 Mn two-wheeler EVs per annum and deploys over 3000 robots. 

Recently, Ola Electric was also selected for receiving incentives from the Indian government under the $2.4 Bn PLI scheme to manufacture advanced chemistry cell batteries. A few days later, it also invested in Israel-based battery technology company StoreDot to have access to its XFC battery technology that charges batteries in five minutes. 

In January 2022, Ola Electric completed a $200 Mn Series C funding round at a valuation of $5 Bn. The round saw participation from investors including Tekne Private Ventures, Alpine Opportunity Fund, and Edelweiss, among others. 

Ola Electric claims to have sold EV scooters worth $150 Mn to date. As per Tofler, it clocked a revenue of INR 107 Cr and a loss before taxes of INR 107 Cr in FY21. 

In December 2021, Ola Electric was expected to head for IPO listing as the EV startup increased its authorised share capital to INR 3,825 Cr.

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38. Prakriti E-Mobility

• Founded In: 2019
• Founders: Nimish Trivedi, Rajeev Tiwari, Vikas Bansal
• Funding Raised To Date: NA
• Investors: IEG Investment Banking Group
• Headquarters: New Delhi

Prakriti offers sustainable transport solutions and charging infrastructure. It offers a fleet of EV cabs, Evera Cabs, to individual customers and organisations. Besides this, it operates battery charging stations in Delhi-NCR. As per its website, it has set up 43 charging stations, including 13 fast-charging stations, that cater to the needs of commercial and private vehicles.

It claims to have recorded about 8 Mn Kms across Delhi-NCR in the last 2.5 years. It further states that it has partnered with online travel company MakeMyTrip and the Delhi government.

In April this year, it raised an undisclosed investment from IEG Investment Banking Group as part of its Pre-Series A funding round. The first tranche of $5 Mn capital would be invested in the startup’s Pre-Series A round.

It aims to expand to inter-city travel segments and also venture into Tier-2 cities in the future. 

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39. Pure EV 

• Founded In: 2015
• Founders: Rohit Vadera, Nishanth Dongari
• Funding Raised To Date: NA
• Investors: VC Nannapaneni
• Headquarters: Telangana

PURE offers sustainable mobility solutions and energy storage systems. It manufactures Lithium batteries and five EVs including eTryst 350, epluto, epluto7G, ETranceNEO and ETrance+.   

Its electric bike, eTryst 350 is powered by 4.0 KW peak and 3.0 KW nominal motors. The EV bike’s top speed is 85 kmph and has a load capacity of 160 kg. The epluto scooter is powered with 250 Watt brushless hub motor, and has a top speed of 25 kmph. The epluto7G is powered by 2.2 KW peak and 1.5 KW nominal motors and has a top speed of 60 kmph. 

The ETranceNEO scooter is powered by 2.2 KW peak and 1.5 KW nominal motors and has a top speed of 60 kmph. It has a loading capacity of 150 kg. The ETrance+ is powered by a 250-watt motor and has a top speed of 25 kmph.

The startup graduated from IIT Hyderabad. In 2019, it reportedly secured an undisclosed amount of funding from VC Nannapaneni, chairman and managing director of Natco Pharma, at a valuation of $35 Mn.  

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40. RACEnergy

• Founded In: 2018
• Founders: Arun Sreyas, Gautham M
• Funding Raised To Date: $4.3 Mn
• Investors:  Huddle, Prophetic Ventures, Micelio, growX Ventures
• Headquarters: Hyderabad

RACEnergy builds retrofit kits for transforming conventional three-wheeler vehicles into EVs. It also provides energy infrastructure via its battery-swapping stations.

The startup reportedly raised $1.3 Mn in a seed funding round led by Micelio Fund and growX ventures in 2021. The round saw participation from Huddle, Prophetic Ventures and BITSian Angels, among others. 

The capital, raised from the round, was infused in research and development (R&D), enhancing the startup’s swapping technology and infrastructure. Prior to this, it raised $500K in a seed funding round from growX ventures, Prophetic Ventures and some angel investors.

RACEnergy raised a Seed round of $ 1.3 Mn, led by Micelio Fund and growX ventures, along with investments from Huddle and Prophetic Ventures. The company raised $3 Mn in a pre-series A round led by growx Ventures with participation from Micelio Mobility, Huddle and other angel investors. The funds will be used for market expansion and for building a new facility.

It aims to set up an extensive battery-swapping network in India and foray into other continents by ​2023.

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41. Revolt Motors 

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Rahul Sharma 
• Funding Raised To Date: $20 Mn+ (approx)
• Investors: RattanIndia Group
• Headquarters: Haryana

Revolt offers sustainable mobility solutions across India. The startup manufactures AI-enabled EV bikes – RV 400 and RV 300. Its EV bikes are equipped with onboard charging and portable charging features. The RV 400 has a 3.24 kWh lithium battery while RV 300 has a 2.7 kWh lithium battery. 

The startup also offers app-based battery swapping stations named Revolt Switch Stations where EV bike owners can exchange their batteries for a charged one. It has retail stores in multiple cities of India, including Jaipur, Surat, Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Noida, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Visakhapatnam, Lucknow, Kochi and Hubli. 

In April 2021, it secured INR 150 Cr (around $20.12 Mn at then exchange rates) from RattanIndia Group to expand its footprint in India and the South Asian market. With this investment, RattanIndia acquired a 43% stake in the Haryana-based EV startup, while Rajiv Rattan, chairman of RattanIndia Enterprises, joined its board as a non-executive chairman.

Earlier this year, RattanIndia acquired Revolt entirely, making it a wholly-owned subsidy.

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42. River

• Founded In: 2021
• Founders: Aravind Mani and Vipin George
• Funding Raised To Date: $28 Mn
• Investors: Al Futtaim Group, Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, Maniv Mobility
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

River is an electric two-wheeler manufacturer that launched its first escooter model India in February this year. The startup ran operations in stealth mode for the last two years while working on its product development and R&D.

River’s Indie comes with a motor that has a peak power of 6.7 kW and can reach a top speed of 90 km per hour. The current vehicle model has a 4 kWh battery with a range of 120 km. 

River throws direct competition to the escooter majors like Ola Electric, Ather Energy, TVS Motor, Pure EV, and others.

In June, River raised $15 Mn (INR 124 Cr) and is looking to start its vehicle delivery in August this year. So far, the startup has raised $28 Mn in three funding rounds.

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43. SmartE 

• Founded In: 2015 
• Founders: Goldie Srivastava 
• Funding Raised To Date: $18.3 Mn 
• Investors: Mitsui and Co, Ecotransit Investments International, Shell Foundation
• Headquarters: Delhi

SmartE offers last-mile connectivity to commuters. The startup operates a fleet of electric vehicles in more than 10 cities in India, including Faridabad, Noida, Gurugram, Delhi, Lucknow, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. 

In January 2022, SmartE along with Revfin, an EV-focused lending startup, got an undisclosed amount of investment from the Shell Foundation to extend new loans to three-wheelers EVs on its platform. In July 2019, it raised INR 100 Cr in a Series B funding round from Mitsui and Co. Prior to this, it had raised $5 Mn in Series A round from Ecotransit Investments International.  

According to its website, SmartE has partnered with 17 companies such as Kinetic Green, NTPC, SBI, HSIIDC, ACME, Sun Mobility, Exicom and AMARA RAJA. It further claims to have worked with more than 25 clients, including BigBasket, Flipkart, SpicXpress, Milkbasket, and Blowhorn.

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44. SUN Mobility 

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders: Chetan Maini, Uday Khemka
• Funding Raised To Date: $50 Mn 
• Investors: Vitol
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

SUN Mobility, a joint venture of Maini Group and Sun Group, offers energy infrastructure. It manufactures lithium-ion batteries, named Smart Batteries, for two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and buses. 

Through its app, EV drivers can locate its battery swapping stations and Quick Interchange Solutions, and swap their batteries. 

As per its website, the startup has partnered with various companies such as Omega Seiki, Vitol, Zypp Electric, Tata Power-DDL, Zyngo, Bosch, Piaggio, IndianOil, Uber, SmartE, Microsoft, and Ashok Leyland. It presently has 65 swapping stations in 15 cities in India, including Delhi, Noida, Faridabad, Chandigarh, Amritsar, Gurugram, and Bengaluru.

In October 2021, it reportedly secured $50 Mn in funding from Vitol to expand its footprint in India and abroad. 

It aims to set up 500 battery-swapping stations in the country by the end of the current year. It further plans to launch new products to improve the battery-swapping experience and strengthen its leadership.

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45. TSUYO

• Founded In: 2020
• Founders: Lalit Baid, Vijay Kumar 
• Funding Raised To Date: $12 Mn+
• Investors: Ramkrishna Forgings
• Headquarters: Delhi

TSUYO Manufacturing, a subsidiary of JYVA Engineering, makes powertrain solutions for electric vehicles (EVs) in India and other Asian nations.  

The startup produces BLDC motors and controllers for three-wheeler electric vehicles. It also builds customised EV solutions for companies, according to its website.

In December last year, Kolkata-based supplier Ramkrishna Forgings Ltd. acquired a 51% stake in TSUYO for around INR 100 Cr (around $12.07 Mn at the then exchange rates). 

Ramkrishna Forgings had said that it would invest heavily in TSUYO in the next five years to increase its turnover to around INR 500 Cr by the end of the fifth year. 

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46. Ultraviolette Automotive

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders: Narayan Subramaniam and Niraj Rajmohan  
• Funding Raised To Date: $20.56 Mn
• Investors: TVS, Zoho Corporation, Kumar Vembu, 
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Ultraviolette Automotive offers sustainable mobility solutions and energy infrastructure to customers. The EV startup sells a zero-emission electric bike named F77 and batteries on its website. 

In December 2021, Ultraviolette Automotive raised INR 112.5 Cr (about $15 Mn) from TVS Motor and Zoho. While TVS invested INR 75 Cr, Zoho pumped INR 38 Cr into the startup.  

Prior to this, Ultraviolette Automotive got an investment of INR 30 Cr from TVS in Series B funding round. In October 2020, it got an undisclosed amount of investment from GoFrugal’s Kumar Vembu as a part of a Series B round. Vembu also invested in the EV startup’s Series A round.

In 2018, Ultraviolette Automotive raised $862K (INR 6 Cr) in Series A round from TVS Motor Company. Earlier in 2017, TVS invested $700K (INR5 Cr) for a 14.78% stake in the EV startup.

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47. Vecmocon

• Founded In: 2016
• Founders:  Peeyush Asati, Adarshkumar B and Shivam Wankhede 
• Funding Raised To Date: Funding: $5.2 Mn
• Investors: Tiger Global, Blume Ventures, Tessellate Ventures
• Headquarters: Delhi-NCR

Vecmocon offers battery management systems, vehicle intelligence services, chargers and instrument clusters. Its plug-and-play service integrates into electric vehicles’ OEMs. It is currently offering these services to electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers, forklifts and tractors.

According to its website, the EV startup will soon begin offering motor controllers and fleet management for electric vehicles. 

In October, the EV startup secured $5.2 Mn in its Pre-Series A funding round from Tiger Global, Blume Ventures and other angel investors. The startup said it powered 5K EVs to date and aims to power more than 500K electric vehicles by 2025.

In 2019, it secured $300K in its seed funding round led by Tessellate Ventures.

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48. Yulu

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Amit Gupta, RK Misra, Naveen Dachuri, Hemant Gupta
• Funding Raised To Date: $27.4 Mn
• Investors: Blume Ventures, 3One4 Capital, Wavemaker Partners, Incubate Fund India, Grey Cell Ventures, Bajaj, Rocketship
• Headquarters: Bengaluru

Yulu offers sustainable mobility solutions and charging infrastructure. The startup uses IoT, ML and AI for demand-supply management and efficient operations. It manufactures three EVs – Yulu Miracle for urban commuters, Yulu Move for short-distance commutes, and Yulu DEX for commuters carrying goods. Besides this, it offers rental services to commuters for up to 90 days in a few Indian cities, including Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Pune. 

It is currently operating in cities like New Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad and Bhubaneswar in India. In November 2021, it reportedly started a wide network of battery and swapping stations – Yulu Max Network. 

In December last year, it reportedly raised $7 Mn in a debt funding round from Magna International INC through non-convertible notes. It has secured a total funding of $27.4 Mn to date. It claims to have swapped 3 Mn batteries to date and will expand its fleet to 100K units by the end of 2022. It further aims to start a franchise model and offer services to individual buyers over the next year.

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49. Zypp Electric

• Founded In: 2017
• Founders: Akash Gupta, Rashi Agarwal
• Funding Raised To Date: $12 Mn
• Investors: Northern Arc, 9Unicorns, Anthill Ventures, Nanavati Family Office, We Founder Circle, Riso Capital Fund, Dholakia Ventures, Venture Catalysts, IAN Fund, Tarun Saraf, Rahul Khera, Arjun Seth, Mark Joseph
• Headquarters: Gurugram

Zypp Electric offers B2B delivery and shared mobility services to consumers. It provides electric scooters for last-mile delivery to more than 50 companies, including Zomato, Swiggy, BigBasket, Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, PharmEasy, Delhivery, and Spencers, among others. 

Earlier, it had shared that with 6,000 electric vehicles on the road, it helped its partners complete more than 5 Mn deliveries in the financial year 2021-22.

In September 2021, it bagged $7 Mn in a Series A funding round led by 9Unicorns and Anthill Ventures. 

It has a headcount of 400 employees and plans to double its employee base by September 2023. 

This is a running article, we will keep adding more names to the list.

Last updated on July 15, 2023

The post 49 EV Startups That Are Helping Keep The Earth Healthy And Clean appeared first on Inc42 Media.

It’s not often that a company raises its first external round 17 years after inception, especially if it continues to rake in profits, but that’s exactly what Kaar Tech did last week, when it raised $30 Mn led by A91 Partners.

In an ocean of startups and in the burgeoning enterprisetech space, Kaar Tech has flown under the radar after being founded in 2006 and has plugged away at the digital transformation space in key geographies with a bootstrapped approach. All while building its products and tech platform from India.

The company’s first fundraise is something of a surprise in a year when total startup funding has plummeted by 72% (YoY), but in other ways it’s not really surprising given that investors are largely focussing on sustainable business models. With profits in the past several years, Kaar Tech certainly stands out among loss-making startups.

Cofounder and CEO Maran Nagarajan told Inc42 that the company has not done anything different in the past couple of years even as other tech companies have had to reassess lines of business and cut back on workforce or spending.

Kaar Tech was founded by Maran Nagarajan, Ratnakumar Nagarajan, Selvakumaran Manickam and Gaurdian George in 2006 and initially focussed largely on the SAP consulting opportunity and built its core around SAP S4/HANA, which is an enterprise resource planning software used by large manufacturers and enterprises to streamline operations.

“All of us founders spent more than a decade in Western countries in various tech and consulting roles — the US, the Netherlands, Singapore and the Middle East. So we had a good idea of what companies in these geographies needed. When we came back to India in 2006, we decided to focus on the SAP and SAP S4/HANA space, which was our strength.” – Kaar Tech CEO Maran Nagarajan

Kaar Tech’s Digital Transformation Suite

SAP consulting typically involves enabling companies to streamline processes and get a clear view on the utilisation of its resources across any operational activity. The typical customer profile for Kaar Tech are companies in the manufacturing space where the digital transformation wave has truly embedded itself.

Elaborating on the SAP-centric solutions, Maran said that for enterprises in any discrete manufacturing vertical leverage SAP S4/HANA is the core, covering everything from financials, human capital management, inventory management, manufacturing, distribution and logistics to supply chain management. Kaar Tech has built its domain expertise in these core areas over the past 16 years.

The Chennai-headquartered company has focussed largely on SAP for most of its lifetime, and only ventured into other areas in 2022, given the broader needs of its target base of enterprises. As digital transformation needs burgeoned, so did Kaar Tech’s suite of offerings for companies.

“We gradually shifted into other areas that can also be offered as a horizontal service. We now offer our platform for data engineering, cloud engineering, product engineering and business process management, which have been in place for just over a year now,” Maran added.

Besides the core areas, Kaar Tech offers edge tech solutions for HR and talent management, financial supply chain solutions, warehouse management, third party logistics and transportation management, vendor management, forecast planning, customer relationship management, marketing, customer data management and more.

“There is a third layer that is ‘beyond edge tech’. Here we are talking about AI or ML-based solutions, or blockchain or process automation through robotics. These are all point solutions depending on which component of the business has engaged us,” Maran said, adding that most of these pieces have been added gradually after Kaar Tech had established domain expertise in SAP.

The idea is that when large enterprises eye digital transformation, they tend to require holistic engagement and end-to-end solutions. The company typically targets enterprises with market caps of between $500 Mn to $5 Bn as this allows Kaar Tech to cast a wider net in terms of the customer base, but also allows the company to focus on more sectors.

Currently, the company is working on 90 active projects, with over 300 enterprise customers served since inception.

Maran added that each project can bring in between $1 Mn to $10 Mn in revenue depending on the degree of engagement by Kaar Tech’s team of consultants and engineers. In FY23, the company claims to have earned INR 350 Cr in revenue with a profit of INR 65 Cr, up from INR 41 Cr in FY22.

Inc42 has not seen the company’s FY23 financials to independently verify the claimed profit amount.

Eyeing Acquisitions In The US

Of course, the fundraise changes things from the point of view of growth and scale, and the expansion into new horizontal areas in large part prompted the decision to raise funds, after more than a decade of being bootstrapped.

As it entered the horizontal space, Kaar Tech realised the need to add more pieces to its tech platform. One way is to acquire companies that fit the puzzle, which is the primary objective of the first round raised by the company.

“We would like to do an acquisition to strengthen the areas we have recently entered. This is likely to be in the data engineering or business process management space. And we are also  looking at the digital commerce space very closely where we are in advanced talks to acquire a company,” Maran told Inc42.

Maran added that the latter acquisition will be funded by the company’s generated profits, whereas A91’s funds will be used to acquire a data engineering or BPM company. He added that in the last two years, Kaar Tech has doubled its profits and that’s the objective for the next 24 months as well before a potential IPO.

Setting Targets For IPO Run

Kaar Tech’s primary competition is the likes of Yash Technologies, IBM, TCS, Wipro, Indus Novateur, NTT Data, Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, among other IT services giants. However, on a region-to-region basis, the company has a host of competitors that go beyond these names.

Maran claimed that Kaar Tech’s differentiation comes from the size of the companies that it targets for its digital transformation products and solutions. And this allows Kaar Tech to expand faster than some of its competitors and be more agile in its solutions.

As in the case of most B2B enterprise tech products, Kaar Tech earns most of its revenue outside India. CEO Maran has relocated to the US, for instance, to handle the projected business growth in the North American market, and cofounder George is primarily based in Europe to manage the EU business.

Maran believes that given the profile of clients in the Middle East — including the likes of petrochemical giant Aramco — there is a lot of organic customer acquisition happening in that region. However, the big focus will be on the US market, which is also one of the primary factors for the company’s push for inorganic growth through M&As in North America.

As far as India is concerned, the biggest challenge comes from the fact that Indian businesses do not yet have the maturity to implement large-scale digital transformation projects. “We have not had Indian customers after 2012 or 2013, because if you look at the service margins we expect, Indian businesses do not rise up to our benchmarks and the scarcity mindset is also a challenge when looking at revenue expectations from India.”

Essentially, the people-reliant consulting business does not suit Kaar Tech’s revenue expectations, where most of its employees have billable roles. “We assign people to certain projects and deploy people within large enterprises, so we want to operate with better margins, paying terms and milestones. So that’s why our scope was higher in the Middle East and will continue to be so in the US and Europe.”

The A91 investment is also likely to be the final external round that Kaar Tech raises before hitting the public markets by 2026, according to the CEO. The plan is to target the quarter between December 2025 and March 2026 with Indian and US listing both an equal possibility at the moment.

Kaar Tech is targeting a revenue base of INR 1,000 Cr by the time it lists, and plans to double its workforce by then to 5,000 employees in India and Southeast Asia.

Maran told us that the company fancies its chances for a potential Nasdaq listing, because it anticipates that 40%-50% of the revenue will come from the US by 2026 and most of its acquisitions in the US will also give it a bigger presence in the market.

Given the IPO ambitions, Kaar Tech’s first and potentially final external round, is meant to be a fuel-up before pressing down on the accelerator.

The post What Made Kaar Tech End Its 17-Year Bootstrapping Streak And Raise $30 Mn From A91 Partners appeared first on Inc42 Media.

According to a 2021 UNESCO report, India had a huge disparity in terms of the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) in 2018-19, which stood at 26:1, i.e., just one teacher for every 26 students.

This ratio was even worse for higher classes, secondary and senior secondary schools, at 43:1 and 47:1, respectively, a far cry from the 35:1 specified in the Right to Education Act.

Can AI improve this situation? That’s what Bengaluru-based edtech startup ZuAI is betting on.

Anubhav Mishra and Arpit Jain, alumni of VIT and IIM Bangalore’s Launchpad programme, founded ZuAI in 2021 to leverage AI models to solve the tutor problem. 

“We see generative AI to be one of the pivotal technologies to solve this particular problem, both in terms of accessibility, affordability and also the quality of content, which is being generated,” Mishra said about ZuAI’s mission.

The startup started building its products with the simple aim of bridging the gap between providing an affordable, quality education and simultaneously giving a one-on-one tutoring experience. Last week, ZuAI raised $484K (INR 4 Cr) in a seed round led by the early stage investor Prime Venture Partners, and the founders believe that the GPT opportunity will change the game in online learning.

Having onboarded nearly 4,500 daily active users across classes IV to XII, the startup is looking to build on OpenAI’s large language models to build an interactive experience for students, calling it an ‘AI tutor’.

ZuAI — GPT With An Edtech Twist

Talking about how ZuAI works under the hood, Jain said the company has deployed the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) technology developed by US-based tech giant OpenAI to start things off. 

The large language model (LLM), however, has certain ‘restrictions’ such as it can only generate textual content for Indian students from classes IV to XII across all streams and subjects.

According to Jain, the platform uses 3-4 language models, and depending on the requests, one or more of them are active at the same time, enabling a high degree of personalisation. 

ZuAI’s app offers three chatbots – Exam Bot, Revision Bot and Class Bot. The Exam Bot quizzes the student on topics of their choice, the Revision Bot helps with explanations of key concepts, and the Class Bot allows students to take notes from specific chapters.

“On the back end, we decide which particular model is fit for the problems that each student faces and based on that we use a particular model for that student,” Jain said.

The startup has also baked difficulty levels from 1 to 10 into the platform, where a higher number is a higher difficulty. These levels are automatically triggered based on the responses received from a student. The founders explained that the model starts on a medium difficulty, and increases as the student gets better at a subject.

Students can also force the AI into asking questions of higher difficulty levels, but ZuAI plans to restrict such behaviour as far as possible to retain guided learning to some extent.

There is one problem that ZuAI’s GPT-centric platform cannot solve. It cannot generate content for all the subjects yet as mathematical solutions are not the strong suit of AI models currently. ChatGPT and other LLMs suffer from glitches or hallucinations where they output wrong answers.

Currently, the Bengaluru-based startup is working to develop an in-house computational model to work on numerical-based problems for physics, chemistry and mathematics lessons. So far, though, ZuAI’s focus is completely on creating text-based lessons that explain concepts in these subjects that require calculations. 

“We are not seeing that solution [mathematics] because we have already restricted it to curriculum content, to only answer and respond from the curriculum content and not beyond that. In mathematics, we are working on something, on building our own LLP model to solve the thing step by step,” explained Jain.

Despite raising its first round of funding, ZuAI has not yet solved the monetisation problem. The product is currently free to use, but this could change in the future. The edtech plans to introduce a subscription model for users once it has garnered a sizable user base.

Will AI Become Edtech’s Playbook?

ZuAI is far from the first edtech company to leverage ChatGPT and other LLMs to build course content or track outcomes. 

Even the likes of BYJU’S and Unacademy are launching products with a generative AI flavour and it is easy to predict that more and more startups will take advantage of gen AI in the future. 

For instance, BYJU’S has developed BADRI, an in-house AI model, for personalised learning. Additionally, BYJU’S WIZ, a suite of three AI transformer models, leverages BADRI and two other models — MathGPT and TeacherGPT — for a greater degree of personalisation and delivering effective outcomes.

This will be the challenge for companies such as ZuAI, which have taken the first steps into the wide generative AI pool. Larger players can quickly erode any early mover advantage due to their scale and deeper pockets.

One of the ways that ZuAI and other early stage edtech startups can get a leg up on the bigger competition is by differentiating with India-focused context features. This could mean integrating with government programmes for early and higher education or using AI for skill development and other areas in edtech.

Early Days For Generative AI

While investors have naturally grabbed the generative AI opportunity, the reality is that new models and new LLMs require significant hardware resources for development.

AI-generated video startup Hippo Video cofounder and CEO Karthi Mariappan believes that the hardware costs alone are very high for most startups because of how many discrete graphics processors are needed to generate new models.

Developing a global generative AI success story from India means dealing with the ground reality of the high capital needs for AI startups, according to All In Capital founder Kushal Bhagia.

In an earlier conversation with Inc42, ZuAI backer Prime Venture Partners’ managing partner Sanjay Swamy said that AI can change the game for incumbents in people-reliant sectors such as fintech, consumer services and edtech and replace human resource-intensive models that are proving hard to scale up sustainably. 

He also indicated that gen AI could change the whole unit economics game for startups, particularly in terms of needing fewer human resources to pull off a bigger scale. We all know that edtech giants are suffering from a slew of issues ranging from slow revenue growth to high customer acquisition costs and an uncertain transition to hybrid models. 

Indeed, this is the age where more and more edtech giants are looking to supplement online learning with physical centres. Can ZuAI’s AI-centric model and its focus on online-only learning actually become a competitive moat?

With inputs from Nikhil Subramaniam

The post Can ZuAI Beat Indian Edtech Blues With Its Generative AI Tutor? appeared first on Inc42 Media.

During his engineering days at IIT Ropar, Manoj Kumar got an opportunity to bring positive change in the city-based government schools while working with an NGO. Kumar and his friends visited multiple government schools and engaged with teachers, students and administrators to gain insights into their daily challenges. Kumar was told that many of these schools, particularly in Tier 2 cities and beyond, did not have comprehensive operational systems in place and, as a result, faced a lot of challenges in managing day-to-day operational and administrative tasks.

To address this, Kumar partnered with his techie friend Abhishek Singh in 2017 to launch a SaaS solution, Schoollog.

Jaipur-based Schoollog is an edtech SaaS platform, which has been designed to provide a comprehensive school management and communication solution. It streamlines and automates the administrative and operational processes of educational institutions. Further, the platform helps teachers, school administrators, students and parents to engage at all key levels.

According to Kumar, Schoollog also enables educational institutes to track students’ academic progress. ‘Teacher App’, which has 50K downloads, allows teachers to manage their day, syllabus and conduct tests, among other things (more on this later).

The startup’s ‘Parents App’ has 50K downloads, ‘Student App’ has 100K downloads and ‘Management App’ has 1,000 downloads. 

Singh claimed that the Schoollog apps have, approximately, 2 Lakh active monthly app users. Meanwhile, tuition centres have a separate app, ‘TutorLog’.

“Schoollog empowers students to learn at their own pace, track classroom activities and improve their weak points. As for schools and tuition centres, the platform helps them save time and cost, and gain valuable insights into the performance of students and teachers. Parents can easily monitor students’ progress, make online fee payments and get homework and attendance updates,” said Singh.

Singh pointed out that tuition centres have a comparatively simplified management process due to fewer decision-makers in their system, as compared to schools. However, the need for personalised learning for students in tuition centres remains the same as required in schools.

Meanwhile, talking about the Rajasthan government’s iStart programme, Singh said that it has consistently supported startups through mentorship sessions, providing them with platforms like IT Day and Digifest for product promotion and introducing new schemes and programmes to aid their growth.

He said that the startup generated INR 4.1 Cr in revenue in FY23, registering a 70% YoY increase from FY22. Schoollog aims to clock INR 10 Cr in FY24, nearly 2.5X revenue growth from the last fiscal year.

Schoollog’s Initial Quest

In their startup journey, the founders of Schoollog encountered multiple challenges before scripting their growth success. Singh faced the initial hurdle of convincing schools to become early adopters of Schoollog’s product.

However, their efforts paid off when Sanjeev Kulhari from Sikar-based Daffodils World School showed faith in their vision and became the startup’s first client. Schoollog also faced the impact of the pandemic, with revenues dropping to zero in the initial six months, leaving them cash-starved.

Despite these obstacles, the founders found a silver lining. Prior to their financial struggles, they had developed a test platform to create a minimum viable product. Working remotely, they and their team built an MVP within twenty days. Once the MVP proved successful, the startup experienced significant growth, tripling its revenue in FY21 to INR 1.67 Cr from INR 55 lakh in FY20 and onboarded 500 schools and tuition centres.

Building on this momentum, the founders actively collaborated with educational institutions, engaging online to gain firsthand insights into their specific requirements. This valuable interaction allowed them to shape and refine their platform accordingly.

Furthermore, the initial schools that joined became passionate advocates for Schoollog, effectively acting as the startup’s marketeers. The organic word-of-mouth promotion played a pivotal role in the startup’s scaling efforts, attracting more schools to join based on positive feedback and recommendations.

Today, Schoollog leverages events, conferences, seminars and Google and Facebook ads to onboard new schools. However, the founders attribute their success to their partner schools for refferal, which account for 10% of their monthly sales. Additionally, Schoollog has mapped out the locations of schools and tuition centres, deploying on-ground teams to extend their services.

Schoollog’s AI-powered ERP System Connects All Key Stakeholders

Schoollog connects parents, students, teachers and school administration through the Learning Management System (LMS), an AI-powered enterprise resource planning system. LMS streamlines school management processes and is available in a plug-and-play mode, allowing schools to integrate Schoollog into their existing systems. 

Schools can use specific services offered by the startup along with their current management system. For instance, they can leverage Schoollog’s personalised learning platform without disrupting their existing workflows. Parents, students, teachers and schools are connected by downloading apps, which cater to their specific needs.

Another key feature of Schoollog is an AI/ML-powered personalised learning engine for students. It recommends questions to students based on their learning journey, ensuring that every student learns at his own pace. This makes learning more effective and engaging. Kumar mentioned that the startup charges students a nominal fee of INR 10 per month. 

Schoollog aids in increasing school admissions by providing a comprehensive admission CRM system. This prevents potential admissions from being lost. For instance, a school with 1,000 students can generate approximately 20 extra admissions through Schoollog, resulting in revenue of INR 10-15 Lakh in a Tier 3 city, according to Singh.

‘Teacher App’ empowers teachers to manage their day-to-day activities. The startup will soon introduce Power BI to provide more in-depth analytics later this year.

LMS accounts for 90% of Schoollog’s revenue and the remaining 10% comes from the personalised assessment solution. Out of the total revenue of INR  4.1 Cr in FY23, 60% was generated from schools and 40% from tuition centres.

Democratising Education In Tier 2 and Tier 3 Cities

Singh believes that schools in Tier 3 cities and beyond have not been able to embrace technology, and this is where he aspires to bring a change. 

“With the launch of Schoollog Lite, we will provide cost-efficient tech solutions to schools from these regions. For this, we are actively working with banks,” he added.

The startup plans to align its offerings to schools and tuition centres with the National Education Policy (NEP) and aims to target Hindi-speaking regions like Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. 

Schoollog intends to raise funds to drive digitisation within the education sector. Singh believes that private investors’ sentiment is negative towards edtech startups that are not generating profits.

According to Inc42, edtech funding dropped 93% YoY to $100 Mn in the first quarter of 2023, due to the resurgence of offline education as Covid subsided.

Despite the headwind, edtech SaaS stands out as a promising sector in the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. According to experts, edtech SaaS will be one of the key growth drivers for the Indian edtech sector in the coming months. Notably, it emerged as the top-funded segment in the first quarter of 2023.

Even though Schoollog competes with the likes of Teachmint, MyClassboard, PowerSchool, Schoolguru and Classplus, among others, it has an array of growth opportunities in the country’s $5.9 Bn (approximately) edtech market, which is expected to touch $29 Bn by 2030, as per Inc42’s estimates. 

Disclaimer: This article is part of Inc42 and the Government of Rajasthan’s initiative to shine a spotlight on the state’s emerging startups

The post How Edtech Startup Schoollog Is Helping Schools, Tuition Centres Streamline & Automate Ops appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Ever since the rise in the production of cars in the 1920s, the global automotive industry has been obsessed with plying driverless four-wheelers on roads. Although we have instances in the past of many automotive players using radio waves to make cars go driverless, the tech couldn’t be made road legal due to reasons galore.

As the tide of time rolled on, multiple levels of automation unravelled on the back of the involvement of core technology players and extensive research and development in the field. Subsequently, various levels of automation were reached, and today, many countries across the globe gloat over having level 5 autonomous tech, paving the way for a future embracing truly unmanned cars. 

Although the industry initially witnessed a lot of scepticism and regulatory hurdles, even a century after reinventing the wheel, quite literally, the ecosystem around complete driverless cars has now started to mature at a break-neck speed. 

Trying to reap the benefits of this very evolution and maturity, Bengaluru-based startup Minus Zero has developed nature-inspired AI (NIA) tech, which can run fully autonomous vehicles with only camera sensors. 

Founded in 2021 by two undergraduate students, Gagandeep Reehal and Gursimran Kalra, Minus Zero claims to be the first Indian startup to launch a fully autonomous vehicle in the country with its in-house AI solution.

Notably, in India, the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, does not have a provision that allows the licensing of autonomous vehicles or makes such vehicles legal to ply on Indian roads.  

Even as countries like the US, Japan, and Germany, to name a few, have progressed significantly in building regulations to support advanced levels of vehicle autonomy, India is far behind in the race to build a robust infrastructure that can support a higher grade of autonomy. 

Today, the most state-of-the-art cars that can be seen on Indian roads have either level 1 or level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) capabilities. 

Amid the regulatory hiccups, one may ask, what opportunities does a two-year-old startup have? Well, according to a Statista report, the fully automated cars market in the world is expected to grow to $13.7 Bn by 2030, and this is where the founders see a promising future for their venture.

How Is Minus Zero Reinventing The Wheel?

The core motive behind building Minus Zero was to re-think the way the world has perceived and developed AI algorithms so far and to take inspiration and mechanisms from the nature and human brain to build AI solutions to solve different problems.

As its first use case, Reehal and Kalra saw a huge opportunity in enhancing the tech behind autonomous vehicles by using their in-house technology. In fact, the founders believe that autonomous driving has always been an AI problem, not an automotive one.

Before delving deeper into understating how Minus Zero’s AI works, it is imperative to understand that there are six levels of driving automation, ranging from level 0, which is fully manual, to level 5, which is fully autonomous. Level 5 cars are truly autonomous and can operate without a steering wheel.

While players such as Tesla, Alphabet’s Waymo, Mercedes-Benz, and General Motors have progressed a great deal in building autonomous capabilities, most of their vehicles running on roads today are only ADAS-enabled. Though there are a few fully autonomous vehicles, with more set to launch, these OEMs use multiple equipment like LiDARs, radar, and cameras to run their respective autonomous vehicles.

This makes Minus Zero’s zPod one of the few autonomous vehicles worldwide that can run without human intervention with only camera sensors, thereby eliminating the need for expensive sensors or technologies such as LiDARs and high-definition (HD) maps.

In its whitepaper on nature-inspired AI, Minus Zero states that while numerous companies are working on autonomous vehicles, most are pursuing iterative variations of the robotics paradigm, which relies on the neural network-based understanding of the environment, combined with HD map localisation. 

Generic autonomous driving neural networks are trained using billions of images to detect and identify drivable areas, road actors, and other hurdles on a route, enabling the system to reason about their positions and predict their behaviour. This information is then matched in real-time with an HD map of the world to navigate.

“This approach is inherently fragile because it is nearly impossible to have well-representative data of every possible variation of the environments,” the startup highlights in its whitepaper.

Besides, LiDARs are costly, making level 5 autonomy unaffordable for the masses. 

“Our foreign counterparts put around 80 sensors on one vehicle because the current AI technology is not capable of functioning like a human brain. This also makes such vehicles very costly,” Minus Zero’s cofounder and CEO Reehal said. 

Hence, the Minus Zero team had to invent its nature-inspired AI from the ground up. Reehal said that to make the AI take a safe decision, three things need to be handled efficiently – representation, prediction, and adaptation.

“Our nature-inspired AI can predict the behaviour of anything in its surrounding to plan its next move. Also, AI works very differently and does not depend on the traditional way of collecting data. We create our own scenarios and data, using generative AI. With just a minimal amount of data, we could achieve the level of safety and decision-making that even the state-of-the-art systems haven’t yet cracked,” the CEO said. 

Notably, the startup has received intellectual property rights for one of its techs while patents related to other tech stacks are still a work in progress.

What’s The Plan?

Last month, the startup unveiled ‘the country’s first fully autonomous vehicle, zPod,’ in Bengaluru. The vehicle, still in its concept stage, has been designed to showcase the powers of ‘True Vision Autonomy’, which opens a blank canvas for auto manufacturers. 

Interestingly, Minus Zero is neither an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) nor does it intend to be one. 

“The purpose of minus zero was never to really build autonomous vehicles. We were always intrigued by how a human brain is able to do a lot of things that current algorithms are not capable of doing. So, that is what nature-inspired AI intends to solve, bridging the gap between algorithms, machines, and the human brain. Mobility is just a use case,” says Reehal.

“Minus Zero is building an artificial brain that can go into any next-generation vehicle in any geography to make it fully autonomous,” he explains.

Minus Zero has already started seeing a lot of traction from the OEMs and is considering different partnerships to deploy its AI capability. Having achieved autonomy between levels 4 and 5, the startup is on its way to achieving complete autonomy.

To build these capabilities, the startup has raised $2 Mn in two rounds and is backed by the likes of Chiratae Ventures, Snow Leopard Global, JITO Angel Network, and senior executives from companies like NVIDIA and Lyft.

By the end of the current financial year, the startup aims to raise more funding in a Series A round.

Accelerating On The Autonomous Street

Currently, Minus Zero is extensively doing proof of concepts (POCs) and pilots in partnership with various industry stakeholders, including the sensor companies, chip makers, and OEMs, involved in building autonomous vehicles both in India and abroad.

Besides, the startup is also actively working with the Indian government to structure the regulatory part pertaining to autonomous vehicles.

While India has a long way to go in defining and allowing such vehicles on roads, Reehal is of the opinion that before a regulatory framework is built, we, as a country, need to ensure that the right technology, which solves the real pain points of this industry, is in place. 

As of now, Minus Zero is focussed on partnering with countries like Europe, Japan, and the US, which have more mature regulatory frameworks in place.

Currently, there are only a few new-age startups, like UK-based Wayve and US-based Ghost Autonomy, that are trying to crack a similar code as Minus Zero.

However, scaling in this market is still challenging. Last year, Ford and Volkswagen-backed startup Argo AI had to shut shop after almost five years of being in the market and raising $1 Bn in investment.

Amid this, it would be fascinating to witness how Minus Zero moves past the obstacles to emerge as a pioneering name in the global AV space from India.

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