Bangalore-based Lookup, a free and secure messaging app that connects shoppers with local businesses has raised $2.5 Mn in Series A round of funding. The round was led by Vinod Khosla’s personal fund Khosla Impact which also saw participation from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and Global Founders Capital, the European investment fund from Rocket Internet’s Samwer brothers.

Other participants in the round include Geneva based ACE & Company, Singapore based M&S partners, New Look fashion chain founder Tom Singh, Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey and LivSpace founder and former Google Local head Anuj Srivastava.

Earlier this year in January, Lookup had raised a total of $382K in its seed round from Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, DeNA Japan, Beenos founder Teruhide Sato and MKS Switzerland SA. They also participated in the current round.

The funds raised in this round will be used to expand Lookup’s merchant base, in order to enhance convenience for its users and to branch out into newer geographies.

Founded by Innoz’s Deepak Ravindran, within about 9 months of launch, Lookup has already registered 1 Mn users with over 800K users on Android. The startup has over 250K monthly active users and over 70K merchants on the platform, with daily activity of 55-60,000 users.

Currently, operational in three cities, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, to date, Lookup has received over 15 Mn messages and handles about 100K daily messages ranging queries from food, medicines, groceries and electronics in a hyper-local area.

Deepak Ravindran, Founder and CEO of Lookup said, “Chat is eating the world. Lookup uses Chat to disrupt local commerce in India, which is a $750 Bn industry. India has the highest shop density in the world with over 45 Mn local businesses.” He further added, “Today, it is very easy to find and buy products online. However, when you want to buy something offline, we still end up picking up our phone and dialing local shops or running around. We want Lookup to be the Google equivalent for finding products and services offline. For this, we hyperlink every local store near you with a simple chat app which give you synchronous connection to the verified vendor.”

Few Recent Developments:

• The startup has recently  incorporated the booking feature for local saloons and spas and has tied up with supply chain solution firms like Delhivery for POS terminal integration.
• Introduced hyperlocal deliveries in association with RoadRunnr where users can get all products from local stores delivered on time through Lookup. People can buy products using ‘cash on delivery’ or by using its mobile wallet called “Lookup Cash”.
• Launched a vendor assistance helpline where businesses can give a missed call to 7676566867 (7676-LOOKUP) to get verified on Lookup.
• Besides, the startup is also working on a unique concept called Offline API where people can get access to anything on demand from any local store. Recently, it introduced Juice API in association with local merchant in Bangalore. This API is also partnered with many more vendors including Chai Point (tea on demand), Laundry and much more. The company partnered with OYO Rooms to book budget hotels and guest houses PAN India and also has an exclusive tie-up with midnight delivery service Niteout that delivers food, beverages, munchies and even few medicines throughout the night.

Lookup will be soon foraying Dubai in partnership with Etisalat.

“I’m honored to be a part of Deepak’s next big project, and I am truly impressed by what he has already accomplished in his life. I’m very excited about working with such an inspiring entrepreneur, whom I share common ideologies with,” said Twitter’s Biz Stone, who will be advising the team.

Players like Haptik and Yellow Messenger also operates in the same space.

The post Lookup Raises $2.5 Mn Series A To Become The Google For The Offline World appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Earlier last week, we concluded the sixth edition of Pulse42 and StartupPulse in Bangalore, which was an immense joy!!

StartupPulse

After receiving hundreds of applications, we shortlisted 10 startups for this edition, selected 10 startups went through one day long mentoring from industry experts from different domains at Amazon Web Services office at MG Road. Mentors who were part of the session included:

• BK Birla, CTO at Asklaila
• Rohith Veerajappa, Co-founder, Wowlabz
• Divyam Khurana, Interaction Designer at Wow Labz
• Manoj Mohan, UX Lead at Wow Labz
• Satanik Chaudhuri, Co-Founder & Vice President – Marketing at PropGod
• Yadunandan, Sales Manager, Enterprise – Talent Solutions at LinkedIn
• Tanpreet, City Sales Head from Bangalore
• Sujoy Golan, Global Head of Digital Marketing at InMobi
• Anant Vidur Puri, VC Investment Professional, Bessemer Venture Partners
• Naresh Deevi, Partner, Husys
• Supriya Goswami, Director Marketing, India and South East Asia at InMobi
• Shubendu Panigrahi, Founder, Ventursity

Based on mentor feedback we shortlisted 5 startups, who were further nurtured on how to Pitch right to the investors and were also guided on how to make an efficient pitch deck. Annkur of Pricebaba took this session.

On 10th September, these selected 5 startups i.e. pitched to a group of investors at the Matrix Partners office.

Related: Meet The Winners Of StartupPulse Bangalore 2.0

The pitches were attended by investors including:

• Venkat Raju
• Rajesh Rai
• Venugopal of Orios
• Sharad Puri of Applyifi
• karthik Ramachandra of Mumbai Angels
• Pradeep Kamasani
• Dhruvil Sanghvi of Loginext

Pulse42

Following up the trend, Pulse42 party was attended by people from the Bangalore’s startup community which included Entrepreneurs, Angels, VC firms etc.

Thanks to the awesome organisations AWS, and Matrix Partners for hosting us.

Special thanks to Pallav Nadhani of Fusion Charts, Gaurav Arora & Digbijoy Joseph of Amazon Web Services, Dhruvil Sanghvi of Loginext, Prajakt Raut, Deepak Ravindran of Lookup, Angad Rikhy of Unitus Seed Fund & Megha Bhagat for helping us out in organizing this edition.

[We would like to thank all our sponsors Amazon Web Services, 10,000 Startups, Lookup, Loginext Solutions, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Atom Technologies, Embibe, Paytm, growX ventures, Guerrilla Ventures, eshiksa, Outbox who helped us put together this amazing event and made it a success.]

The post Pulse42 & StartupPulse Bangalore 2.0: Thanking The Entire Bangalore Community appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

While the Government of India moved step ahead by issuing a separate advisory for on-demand technology platforms last week, meanwhile, the Government of Maharashtra has released a draft notification of its City Taxi Scheme, 2015 which is going to change the way the rider and the on-demand cab services will work in the city.

The new proposed Scheme, consists of number of clauses/regulations which will have a negative impact on consumer choice and freedom, these include:

• The licensee shall maintain a fleet of minimum 1000 and maximum 4000 taxis either owned or through an agreement with individual taxi permit holders. However, maximum 2500 permits will be issued to a licensee in first phase.
• The licensee shall comply with the Induction schedule for Taxi as given below — i) 250 Taxi at the time of grant of license; ii) 500 taxi within three months of grant of license. iii) 1000 Taxi within 6 months of grant of license. iv) Remaining taxi in 9 months of grant of license.

– This will lead to reduced availability, longer ETAs and higher fares for the riders.

• The licensee shall ensure that each Taxi is equipped with temperature control device in proper working order and is fitted with working electronic digital fare meter on the front panel (dashboard).
• Taxi shall be fitted with GPS and GPRS based tracking device, printer, and a display panel showing the path traversed and total distance covered. The device shall be in constant communication with the control room of the licensee while the taxi is on hire. In case of closure of the said GPS, the reason thereof is to be recorded by the licensee along with the duration of such closure. The minimum specification of the devices will be prescribed by Transport Department and may be changed from time to time.
• The Licensee shall charge fare and comply all other conditions as prescribed by the concerned transport authority from time to time. Fare will be decided as per cost of vehicle / engine capacity of the vehicle.
• A LED display panel visible from both front and rear should be installed on the roof of the Taxi to indicate that the vehicle is a Taxi and whether it is available (green indicator) or occupied (red indicator). The dimensions of the LED display panel shall confirm to those prescribed by the State Transport Authority from time to time.

Speaking about this new scheme, Uber, in its blog said, 

The Scheme has been proposed under pressure by certain parties having vested interests – as a measure to counter the rapidly increasing adoption of on-demand transportation platforms that have proven to be a more efficient, affordable and convenient option over traditional fleet/ radio taxis. This Scheme for all intents and purposes, erroneously assumes fleet/ radio taxis, black and yellow taxis and vehicles on on-demand technology platforms to be a part of the same category of commercial vehicles.

This new draft comes in a month after Mumbai-based Kaali-Peeli taxis have gone on strike demanding ban on Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure. Over 10,000-15,000 taxi drivers participated in this agitation, which was started by Swabhiman Taxi-Rickshaw Union, led by Nitesh Rane, son of Congress leader Narayan Rane.

In a separated development, Uber driver partners in Mumbai and Pune were assaulted, their cars were damaged and the company-owned equipment (mobile phones) were taken away by the protestors some time back, as mentioned by Uber in its blog.

The draft is available for public comments until October 31, 2015.

Welcome to Flash Feed, your essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web – bite-sized and updated all day.

The post Maharashtra Govt. Plans To Limit Fleet Size For Taxi Aggregators; Asks For Physical Meters, Rooftop Indicators In Taxis appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

After investing in numerous Indian startups, Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Son has invested in Silicon Valley-based startup – Abra. Along with Tata, American Express also invested in this round.

Abra is changing how people use cash and their smartphones to send and receive money around the world. The startup basically enable anyone to store digital cash, valued in any currency, directly on their phone with no bank required.

This investment is part of the $14 Mn Series A round, announced by the company in September. Interestingly, this is first investment in the crypto currency (digital currency) startup for both American Express and Ratan Tata.

With the funding, the startup has also announced that the Abra app will be available to all registered users in the US and Philippines in the coming weeks, with more countries to follow soon. The Abra app allows people to store digital cash, sending that money to any smartphone and using a new network of human ATMs, called Abra Tellers, who are individuals or businesses earning money by buying and selling digital cash to and from any consumer via the Abra app.

The company also announced their entry into online, digital cash-based merchant payments. Any merchant who adds the Abra Merchant APIs to their web or mobile app can allow a consumer to pay for any product or service by simply typing in their mobile phone number at checkout. Authorization and settlement happens as soon as the consumer confirms the transaction via the Abra app.

“As people and businesses transact more globally, there’s a need for more convenient and affordable ways to move money, and we think the blockchain could play an important role in the evolution of money transfer and commerce, especially in emerging markets,” said Harshul Sanghi, Managing Partner, American Express Ventures.

Abra was founded in 2014 by Bill Barhydt.

Welcome to Flash Feed, your essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web – bite-sized and updated all day.

The post Ratan Tata, American Express Invests In Digital Currency Startup Abra appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

She is an HR manager and everyday her usual routine is to scroll through resumes to find the right person. Numbers in database are either outdated or incorrect and the task gets mundane when hundred of resumes that are too long. Her company pays thousands to two-three job portal for the database, and worst is similar people posting resume on all the sites,  thus, the duplicity goes up to 20-30%.

Karthik Prasad, a former consultant at Cognizant, left the outsourcing firm to run his consultancy in UK. During which he realised that getting the right talent was as difficult as running the firm. And this was across the board, not only his consulting firm, but even his clients were facing the same issue. He met Swash Ram and Ronak Jain, who later joined in as co-founder.

In 2014, the trio came up with the idea to start Beatmysalary, in a bid to  solve the problem of  the HR departments and job seekers. The basic idea was to create a platform for senior job seekers, who prefer to remain anonymous during their job search, to be discovered by employers without actively engaging in the whole rigmarole of job search. From an employer’s standpoint, it provides a marketplace with a list of unique candidates in its database; thereby making the candidate search more easy, effective and less time consuming.

How It Aims to Beat Other Portals

There are multiple stages in recruitment process; starting with lead generation & discovery, engagement, verification and onboarding. Beatmysalary plays in the first and second stage where it helps the employers find the candidates and engage with them. Also, it targets senior candidates with 5 years to 15 years of experience, or more.

The differentiation, however, is in the way they connect the two sides. Beatmysalary provides anonymity to the job applicants. According to Karthik, candidates do not like to list their names in job portals, because their present employer might find about them, thus, ensuring privacy for the candidates.

Also, it doesn’t require uploading of cover letters and resumes.

A candidate just needs to register by sharing details of his/her roles, current salary, expected salary and key skills. There is also an option to add more details like patents filed, or certifications/achievements. Candidates can also share their requirements like day care services, transport services, and more. The entire profile is condensed into 30 keywords and produced in form an identity card.

While for an employer, the experience is made similar to that of online shopping or surfing profiles on Tinder (dating app). There are skill-based categories, a selection basket and pre-defined steps. Starting with first step where employers can use filters to search candidates of required age, notice period, availability, skill and projects. Employers can pick the chosen identity cards and put them in the basket.

Next step is connecting with the candidates and taking the conversation forward. Rejected profiles can be discarded in the bin. It takes away the hassle of maintaining a worksheet and updating the status, time and again for every candidate.

During the connect phase, the employers use online telephony system to contact the candidates. Since the calls are made over the internet, the candidates don’t have to divulge their numbers, thereby maintaining the anonymity. The candidates’ profiles are regularly phased out after every 12 weeks, to keep the database active.

Business Model

Like any other job portal, Beatmysalary has subscription based model for the employers. It has three plans; monthly, half-yearly and annual for business bucketed as startup, small enterprise, business and enterprise. The pricing ranges from $100 for a monthly package for a startup to $11,000 for an annual plan for an enterprise.

The online portal started early this year and is still in the Beta stage. Within its first month, it signed up around 70 recruiters and 1000 job seekers. A few of its marquee clients are Amazon, Target Corp, JustDial, Walmart Labs and IMS, among others.

At present, it has over 125 recruiters, around 30% of which are startups and small businesses, 40% are medium size and remaining are large enterprises. It has over 2500 registered job seekers, 30%-40% from IITs and B-schools.

The Hurtle Of The Portal

In the next twelve months, BeatMySalary, aims to have 75,000 senior candidates and 1000 paid recruiters. At present, India is their largest market, with Ronak looking after the entire India business. But the startup plans to enter global markets like the US, Australia, Japan, France and the Middle East by the end of 2016, and touch over $10 Mn in revenues.

On the product side, it is building data analytics and data validation technologies in the backend to improve employer experience and give better suggestions during their search. Recently, the startup has launched its app for Android and iOS.

In order to fuel its expansion plans, the company is trying to raise $2 Mn in a couple of  months.

The Competitive Landscape

Naukri is the biggest player in job search space with more than 20% of market share.  According to latest reported numbers in its annual report, it has around 41 Mn resumes in its database compared to 25 Mn in 2011 and unique customers at its website have grown by 7.9% CAGR to 57,000 compared to 42,000 in 2011.

The online recruitment space is highly competitive, and for ages it has been monopolised by traditional players like Naukri, Monster, Shine, Indeed and TimesJobs. Sensing a stagnation in this space, a whole bunch of startups like IIMjobs, Hiree, Babajobs, HackerEarth, GrownOut and Venturesity, among others, have sprung up aiming to grab the disruptive market opportunity.

However, Beatmysalary is focused towards mid-to-senior level hiring, like HeadHonchos – a career portal exclusively for the senior management professionals.

Super, the job-seeking app is another player in this space and calls itself the “Tinder for jobs”. It connects people not only to the job, but also to the company culture, their vision and what it actually feels like to be there. Recruiters can search through the list of candidates and simply swipe to choose the ones they like. This Mumbai-based recruitment app acquired Viraltrics, a mobile SaaS startup for deep linked referrals, in March this year. Soon after that, it acquired Crunchcommerce to disrupt jobs on mobile.

Furthermore, PM Narendra Modi recently launched a job portal called National Career Service, to take over all government-run employment exchanges in the country. The portal plans to bring in 20 Mn job seekers already registered with the various employment exchanges in India, and it is also trying to bring 900,000 establishments and companies on the portal.

Editor’s Note

The online recruitment space is evolving. Traditional players have dominated the market since ages, creating a stagnation. However, of late, the online recruitment startups are creating quite a stir in this space. Sensing the disruptive market opportunity, a number of players have mushroomed. However, experts believe that with the growing number of job seekers entering the market each year, there can be room for everyone to grow.

Capitalising this opportunity, however, will be a different ball game altogether. Bringing down giants like Monster, Naukri and TimesJobs won’t be an easy task. It would require meticulous planning and impeccable execution. These online recruitment startups have to remain on top of their game and ensure that they adapt and evolve regularly to cater to the demands of the constantly evolving talent pool. In order to stand out from the crowd, they should ensure that they highlight their differentiating factors and make sure they stay relevant.

The post Privacy Meets Opportunity: Startup Beatmysalary Lets Senior Professionals Scout For Jobs Anonymously appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

It was around the same time last year that Ritesh fleetingly mentioned about the amazing co-working spaces that the Valley had and the lack of them in India. While everyone else in the Indian ecosystem was lamenting about the lack of proper Silicon Valley style hubs and creative spaces for entrepreneurs and creatives, debating about how we could recreate the Valley culture back here in India, Ritesh just went ahead and built it on his own.

About four months back, he frantically calls us to say that he’s found the dream location for his vision. It was around midnight when he took us down to Connaught Place, the heart of Delhi, where all roads converge. And there it was, the iconic Regal building, officially classified as a historic site by the Government of India. It was right then that we all could feel the goosebumps – this was the perfect place, the place that’ll house some of the most creative minds of the country and will fuel the future!

Enlarge

Earlier this week was it’s official launch – and everyone from the corporates to ministers to young starry eyed founders was there – to soak up on arguably the most amazing coworking space designed and built in India! And boy was it worth the wait and definitely lived up to it’s name – Innov8!

Right from choosing the location to the furniture, the design, the carpets, the work stations, the lighting, the messages and even the paint on the walls – everything echoes the labour of love behind it. From our calls being interrupted by vendors, construction noise forming a backdrop in each one of them, to being interrupted by queries of workers, we’ve seen it all. But in the end, we managed to gather together all those interesting tales hidden behind every nook and corner of the place, which will have grander stories to tell when some of India’s coolest minds move in to work at Innov8.

“The next big thing in asset building is to get great minds at work,” says Ritesh Malik, co-founder of the co-working space called Innov8. The co-working space is modelled after Ritesh’s close observation of many interesting co-working spaces during his stint in Boston. True to its name, the space has been built in a way to facilitate startups and founders to think out of the box and just be the right launch pad to foster free thinking, innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

But why would an angel investor (Ritesh is founder of Project Guerrilla) in over 25 startups suddenly decide to build a co-working space right in the heart of Delhi, in one of the most costliest rental places in the world?

It’s not a tale driven by money or greed, but driven by the love for the power of ideas and how they need to be encouraged by providing the right fertile ground. “During my stint in Boston, I chanced upon a lot of interesting co-working spaces. That is when the idea sprang forth, to build a place where we could get the best of minds together. Incubation centres attract a certain kind of talent only. And I really find this concept of taking equity for providing an office to startups ridiculous,” he added.

Back home, Ritesh used to brainstorm with his friends and family as to how could such a coworking space be built in India, built on the same lines as the ones in Silicon Valley, which has the highest number of co-working centres and accelerators in the world. He brainstormed and researched for almost 8-9 months before launching Innov8, fashioning it on the model of world class coworking spaces.

Location, Location, Location

As anyone setting up a business knows, the first and foremost important question to be answered is, “where would it be located?” Ritesh understands how difficult it is for them to find a suitable office location and thus he wanted to choose a location which is easily accessible. Connaught Place (CP), the heart of Delhi, was no wonder the perfect destination.

CP being centrally located, easily, accessible, having metro connectivity, and has almost 500 MNCs with their offices based in and around it. At such a location, attracting startups and mentors alike becomes easy, ideating and meeting people becomes a more enjoyable experience. After all, says Malik, growth hacking is dependent on the number of people you meet. However while choosing CP as a location was easy, the hard part was zeroing in on the right place.

Worldwide, CP is the fifth costliest place for office rentals. No wonder, Ritesh and his team consisting of Sumit Ranka, Vivek Mohan, and Hemanth Valsaraj, faced challenges finding just the right office which would fit their budgets. After a lot of reconnaissance, they found their ideal fit – an old restaurant called Standard, which was frequented by Englishmen in its hey days. Now, the building with a historical significance and commands an awesome view of the CP area, was in the possession of an IAS officer. After much negotiation, the gentleman agreed to rent out the place on a contract basis for the next couple of years.

Having taken the first step towards securing a place, the team was ready to completely transform the place to its current avatar. But that involved challenges from day one.

The Challenges & Transformation Process

The place being a historical one meant that nothing could be changed or altered without proper permissions. Post renting it, the Project Guerrilla team went about getting all the requisite NDMC clearances. The next thing that had to be done was to demolish the old structure and make a new one. This was because there was no steel in the structure as it was built about a 100 years back. So the team had to start from introducing steel cables in the structure to make it quake resistant, so that the cables could bear the load of it all. And that is easier said than done.

First of all it required clearances from the architect. Secondly, CP being a no entry zone, no vehicle can stop in it unless it’s in a parking zone. This meant that no trucks would be allowed to stop during the construction, thereby complicating the process. Thus the team had to speed up construction and work as quickly as possible to reinforce the structure. Working 24/7 with 50 people in double shifts i.e. 25 people working for 12 hours, the team was able to completely introduce reinforcements in the building in 13-14 days. Once the structure was ready, began the work of fashioning it into a crib for idea generation or what we call the design process.

Interestingly, the entire structure and design was completed in a mere 49 days!!

The Masterplan

Ritesh says that most of the co-working spaces or incubation centres he saw in the country only focus on taking a space of 10,000 sq. ft., stacking it to its maximum capacity, and then charging people per seat. In contrast, in the centres in US, Brazil and some other startup friendly countries, the co-working spaces are characterized by huge open innovation areas. In such places, about 6,000 sq. ft. is the carpet area dedicated to startups while about 4,000 sq. ft. is the open innovation area. Innov8 is also fashioned in a similar way – out of the 8,000 sq. ft. space, about 5,000 sq. feet is the carpet area while 3,000 sq. ft. is an open innovation zone. And in a very refreshing and delightful way, the open innovation zone in Innov8 is on its terrace, affording a great view of Delhi!

The idea was not to fill up the space to its maximum capacity of 250 but rather get the 100 best minds to work together. Ritesh and his team looked at the designs of many co-working spaces before they finalized the plan for Innov8. They chose Nitin, a close friend who was also working with one of Project Guerrilla’s startup companies to design the place.

The Details

Right from the pine wood work to the lighting to furniture, no little detailing was spared. A lot of pine wood has been employed to fashion the interiors to give a modern and bold look to the place. The labourers involved belonged to the state of Bihar, and thus they have managed to make a perfect union of their Indian craftsmanship with modern detailing.

Furniture: Realising the importance of the ergonomically designed yet beautiful furniture, most of it has been imported from Malaysia and is a combination of modern furniture from Bristol and Herman Miller.

The chairs for the workstations have been bought from Herman Miller, ensuring the best minds have the best seats to work on. The chairs are expensive but are the best one could ask for.

Similarly, great precision and skill has been put in constructing the work stations. Each work station costed around INR30-35k with a lot of emphasis on comfort, efficiency, and utility.

Lighting: Bright lights have been employed in most of the area to impart the place a vibe of energy and spark. Coupled with dull walls, the work space has turned out to be an enthusiastic, inspiring space to ideate.

Utilities: Every care has been taken to incorporate the best of functional resources in the work space. So while the Wi-Fi lease line is from Cisco, for air conditioning, Mitsubishi’s industrial acs have been employed. Similarly, the carpets on the floors have been picked up from Moody’s carpets in China. Ritesh’s background in real estate enabled him to pick these expensive yet highly safe and easy to use carpets.

Cafe: A co-working space is incomplete without a snazzy café to feed the hungry souls of startup founders. Hence the place boasts of a well-designed café measuring about 1,200 sq. feet which operates on the pay as you go concept. The café will be open from 10 am to 10 pm. As per Malik, they haven’t yet cracked the F&B model but would be doing so in the first 1-1.5 months as the place gets operational. Meanwhile, in also houses a pop-corn machine, a 700 litre refrigerator from Samsung and a CCD express machine for the best micro roasted coffee.

Singularity Boxes: Another interesting space in Innov8 are the singularity boxes. The boxes consist of white boards to facilitate ideation and brainstorming.

Recreation Zones: Innov8 houses multiple recreation zones to allow entrepreneurs to shed stress & help them zero down their thoughts. These have been equipped with foosball and skateboards, among other recreational and sporty tools.

Besides these, the place is equipped with an Innovation Lab which has a music system, a 3D printer, three Ultra HD TVs in different corners, a Segway, virtual reality headsets, and drones among many other cool things.

The Membership Plans

The Open Innovation Zone

This is one of our favourite places to unwind and has been done up to literally foster playfulness and innovation, which go hand in hand. The area has a unique place called the Pebble Zone which is literally paved with only pebbles. Thrown in with that a trampoline, lots of greenery, mini golf and lots of other sporting equipment, an open amphitheatre, and solar lighting, you have an area bound to become a favourite hotbed for many new emerging ideas.

Each Walls Has A Story To Tell

Walls are an open canvas for an artist, and the stories etched on every wall of this space will inspire many more such stories from startup artists. One such wall imbibes in every startup’s moto – the world “Hustle” – hand stitched together with over 10,000 meters of thread!

Then there are others which are framed with inspiring quotes designed by freelancers, adding to the spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity.

One wall by the staircase has been decorated with frames of Forbes luminaries, accompanied by even more creative facts.

Here’s another one which salutes the creative spirit of an entrepreneur!

There are many other stories hidden in the nook and corner of this co-working space. Developed in a period of about two month at a cost of about $537K ( INR 3.5 Cr ), Innov8 has launched its application process for startups and has already received numerous applications for the same. As Ritesh rightly sums it up, “We have 100 seats in this space and we are not even thinking of breaking even or let alone make a profit, given the money we have pumped in this project. But what we are looking to have is the best of teams and the most fertile startup minds, people we can work with. This place is just for the passion we have for startups.”

One look at Innov8 and you will be sure that this place has been born out of passion and bred for passion.

If you’re around Delhi anytime, do drop by and take a peek at Innov8 at 69, Regal Building, at CP.

The post How Passion Motivated A Doctor To Build India’s Sexiest CoWorking Space At One Of The Costliest Place In 49 Days appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

No, this is not a Tweet story. And I guess you’d have figured out where we are headed with this. At least those aware of many such incidents, would have.

In today’s world, startups are the thread with which dreams are woven. The instantly-inspiring rags-to-riches stories have become commonplace and glamourised to such an extent that “entrepreneurship” is spreading like a deadly contagious virus in a zombie movie (simply comparing the pace here; not saying entrepreneurs are turning into zombies).

The Indian startup ecosystem is the fastest growing ecosystem in the world, and currently the world’s third largest, according to Nasscom. From a distance, this rapidly growing ecosystem looks healthy, vibrant and full of opportunities, but if you look closely, you can clearly see signs of decay that can potentially damage this fragile ecosystem. After all, no good can come of anything built on the foundation of lies and deceit.

No good can come of anything built on the foundation of lies and deceit.

Our goal, at Inc42, is to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship in the country and preserve the Indian startup ecosystem, that we are also a part of. As part of this endeavour, we realise that it’s imperative that we look at things more closely, rather than simply glorifying everything. There are a lot of half-baked truths and lies making round in this ecosystem; enticing and entrapping gullible entrepreneurs. This is our first of the many forthcoming attempts to weed out the lies, bring forth the truth and the right people in the ecosystem, to safeguard the interests of the existing entrepreneurs, as well as the aspiring ones who dream of being a part of this ecosystem.

Our endeavour is simply to put forth the facts and ensure that the right picture is being conveyed, without any intentions to malign anyone’s credibility. Transparency is essential for safeguarding the interests of gullible entrepreneurs and we attempt to ensure just that — identifying and amplifying the right wavelength, thereby weeding out the noise.

We decided to focus this article on Mukund Mohan, not because we had him on our radar or anything of that nature, but because we happened to stumble upon certain claims made by Mukund Mohan’s latest venture, NapkinStage, on its website. Napkin Stage is new fund that Mukund recently started for early-stage startups. Its website mentioned that it has invested in three startups of which, as per our knowledge, two were bootstrapped — Appointy and SignEasy. This was big news and therefore we decided to follow it up with the founders of all the startups. On reaching out to them, we found that the investment news was not true. This startling revelation instigated us to dig even deeper and verify some more facts.

Before:

After:

This happened after we started digging into this and asking questions.

Today:

We spoke to all the three startup. Here’s what they had to say:

ChargeBee: Krish Subramanian, Co-founder of ChargeBee confirmed that Mukund is an Advisor and not an investor.

According to the Business Today article, Krish had once offered Mukund equity in return of his help but was turned down.

SignEasy: As per the startup’s founders, Mukund has not invested in SignEasy, but, is an advisor in the company.

SignEasy lists Mukund as Advisor on its website.

But, Mukund’s Linkedin profile stated that, he was a board member at SignEasy since June 2015. This was however changed to Advisory Board Member after our inquiry later on.

Sunil Patro, CEO and founder of SignEasy, had asked Mukund to take it down from Linkedin after us approaching him and Mukund finally removed it after a few days. Signeasy was part of Microsoft Accelerator’s Winter Batch of 2013.

Appointy: Appointy was part Microsoft Accelerator batch and graduated in May 2014.

So this pushed us to delve deeper.

Let us start with who is Mukund Mohan, according to the picture plastered all over the internet.

Mukund Mohan In His Own Words

We’ll let Mukund describe himself in his own words.

“I’ve started 7 companies, been bankrupted twice — I failed in 4 and I sold 3”

“I have 4 exits and 2 failed startups”

So how many companies did he actually start? How many has he sold? How many has he failed at? Does anyone know?

The Complex Web Of Companies

Let me make this a little more easy for you. We’ve made this small visualization containing all the companies Mukund has claimed to be associated with in the form of founding it, investing in or advising any.

The Startups He Claims to Have Founded

In his blog, Mukund claims that he founded and sold three startups, including BuzzGain and has failed in one. However, in an interview with ET, he mentioned that he has founded a total of 5 companies; 3 of which were sold and failed at two. This has been published and re-published by a lot of media houses, but we tried to examine these claims a bit more. According to a Business Today article, Mukund founded and exited three companies — Interfinity, Amura, BuzzGain, and failed at one called Asera.

We tried to find a bit more about these companies. Here’s what we found:

Interfinity: We found absolutely no trace of a company called Interfinity that was even remotely linked to Mukund, on the internet, except the ET article where he claims it to be his first company. The only mentions we found were two LinkedIn profiles — Dariusz Otreba, who claims to have cofounded Interfinity in 1996 and was associated with it till 1999; and the second profile belonged to Theo Zuijdwijk, who was the Managing Director of this company between 2010 and 2011. We are not sure if these two are the same companies.

Some questions that come up:

1. What happened to Interfinity?
2. An internet company that had an exit/was sold doesn’t have any traces online?

Amura: We found no company called Amura associated with Mukund, on the internet. We came across a few websites like http://amuratech.com/, http://www.amura.co.uk/, http://amuralab.com/. However, we did come across a company called Amura Consulting. LLC that was incorporated in 2007, and is currently inactive. The principals associated with that entity, however, are by the names of Pabby Saket and Narayanan Valli. Again we found no connection between them and Mukund Mohan.

More questions:

1. Which is the real Amura and what did it do?
2. Again, how can a company vanish without a trace on the internet?
3. Who bought it?

BuzzGain: It was co-founded by Mukund in 2008 and was sold to the Meltwater Group in January 2010 for $4 Mn. This is the only company we found proof of existence and an acquisition.

Canvas Group: Mukund has mentioned Canvas Group in his profiles and in a number of articles. However the only trace we found of this was Mukund owning the domain name canvasgroup.com between February 2005 and Jan 2008.

Yet again another company was born and then disappeared without a trace.

PS. In one particular instance, he mentions that he has sold two companies before Canvas Group.

The questions:

1. When was Mukund’s Canvas Group founded and what happened to it?
2. Again how many companies did he sell so far and which ones?

Jivity: So this one did exist. We dug into the MCA filings and found out that it originally started out as a subsidiary company of eYantra Industries Pvt Ltd under the name of eYantra Online Ventures Pvt Ltd in January 2010.

Mukund mohan was appointed as its CEO and Director in April 2010. The company was then renamed to Jivity Merchandising Pvt Ltd in July 2010 and then to Magixo IRM Solution Pvt Ltd in October 2012.

Interestingly Mukund continued to be its CEO and Director till April 2014, when his CEO tenure expired. He still continues to be a director in that company.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he left the company around February 2012. The other directors include Phani Raj (Also another director of eYantra Industries Pvt Ltd), Rahul Ashok Mehta, Raju Mulinti and Koteswara Rao Meduri.

This is the first email we got from Mukund when we had started asking around about him, earlier this week:

So as Mukund said, all we did was ask in our reply to which we didn’t get a reply.

The next set of emails came four days later:

Mukund, after exchanging these emails with our team, and after receiving a few mails from some of the people we talked to regarding the story, graciously posted a blog post to clarify some of the stuff.

Again here he mentions that he joined and left the company in 2011 and 2012, respectively. However as per the MCA filings mentioned earlier, he joined in as the CEO in 2010 and his CEO role expired in 2014.

On Jivity’s website, through Archive.org, we found out that it had mentioned VenturEast, Argonaut Ventures and eYantra as its investors.

Mukund, in yesterday’s blog post, stated the following after we tried asking him about his many investments:

We reached out to Phani Raj, the founder of eYantra, on this and this is what he had to say about the Jivity claims:

Mukund was the cofounder of the subsidiary venture of eYantra, by the name of Jivity.

Jivity was never funded by VenturEast and/or Agronaut.

Jivity was never merged into eYantra. In fact the subsidiary (Jivity) was demerged from eYantra.

We’ve verified Phani’s points through Jivity’s MCA filings as well.

Also Sarath Naru, the Managing Partner of VenturEast, had this to say on the issue:

“Ventureast invested in eYantra, founded by Phani Raj. Jivity, was set up initially as a subsidiary of eYantra, and was spun off. This was co-founded by Mukund Mohan.”

So in a defensive post in which he claims that he’s trying to clear the air, Mukund Mohan has to make false claims yet again — Oh the irony!

And now that he’s mentioned it himself in the blog post, let’s talk about the Engrave incident:

The Engrave Story

Long story short, we had a chat with Engrave’s founder, investors and advisors, and have seen all the exchanged mails between them all as well as Mukund and Jivity.

So in October 2011, Engrave raised the invoice for an order of 350 pcs of crystal cubes that was to be delivered to Wells Fargo on behalf of Jivity. The order was delivered in September 2011.

He followed up for 8 months for the payments but got nowhere. Below is a summary of the issue highlighted by Nimish in a mail to Mukund.

Mukund, in his replies, said that Jivity had no money, was at the verge of shutting down and all his employees had been laid off.

In fact, Nimish and his wife were threatened by Mukund that he’d file a lawsuit against them. This was highlighted on Twitter again last year:

Below are some of the internal mails that were exchanged about the issue between Nimish and some of his investors and advisors.

Anand Lunia, an investor in Engrave and who also runs India Quotient, had this to say on the incident:

“At the time when we had invested in Engrave, Nimish had discussed with me regarding the backlogging of payment with Mukund Mohan. As far as I know, Jivity had received payment from the client, but had not further paid Engrave for the same giving reason that the products were faulty and they haven’t been paid by the client. He even said that he is just the company’s CEO and has raised funds, thus its the investor’s call on whether or not to make the payment. He continued bullying and had no regret. In response to my call, he called Nimish and started yelling at him.”

In his blog post, Mukund mentions the Engrave incident and had this to say in his defence:

Here’s what Nimish had to say about this:

He(Mukund) personally called me and requested to take up the order. He told me he was leaving for a holiday to some place outside India — otherwise he’d have personally overseen the issue.

While this startup was suffering, Mukund was giving interviews telling people about how well off he was and how he owned an Audi and BMW in the US.

We’d leave you to be the judge of this.

Vangal, GitGrow, and Hey Maya: 

In this bio, Mukund claims that he had built and successfully sold 2 startups, one of which was Vangal.

This TOI article of 2011 profiles the work Vangal does and the clients it has:

This DeccanHerald article of 2012 quotes Mukund as the CEO of Vangal and claims that he is developing a mobile app by the name of Hey Maya.

According to the Gust profile of Vangal, it describes the founders of Vangal and reiterates the Hey Maya claim.

As per an archive search of Vangal’s website and domain, Mukund has owned the domain, vangal.com, since 2006 till present.

According to Archive.org, from September 2012 till October 1, 2015 vangal.com used to redirect to Gitgrow.com. However now it just takes us to the default GoDaddy page. There was a website that existed earlier, however, that made claims similar to the TOI article mentioned above.

We again checked out the MCA filings for the company, Vangal Software Services Private Limited, and found that Mukund and his wife, Vinita Ananth, are the only two directors of the company since incorporating on April 16, 2010.

The filings further revealed that there was no form of funding made into Vangal or had any form of exit. Further the only annual returns that were filed were of the financial year 2010–11 and showed no forms of revenues.

It is also to be noted that Vinita’s LinkedIn profile says that she founded Social Hues in 2010 as well. Mukund’s response to this Vccircle article mentions Social Hues as one of his key investments.

Interestingly her LinkedIn profile mentions her being the CEO of GitGrow and SocialHues. Social Hues has the exact same description as Vangal had in the TOI article above.

Who founded which company? Who funded which company? Which company did what? Did any of the companies actually do anything? I’m sure you’re as confused as we are.

Meanwhile according to this NextBigWhat article, Mukund has raised a total of $29 Mn in series A, B and C for his startups. So far we’ve been through most of his publicly claimed companies and haven’t found most of that money. Maybe there are some other companies that he hasn’t mentioned about yet or we don’t know about?

His Claimed Investments & Advisory Roles:

We were earlier planning to highlight some of the absolutely random claims investments and advisory roles that Mukund had listed in various online profiles. But since Mukund has graciously provided a reason for that in his blog post, we’d like to show you some more inconsistencies in his own words yet again.

Here’s a screenshot of his claims from yesterday’s blog posts:

Jivity: As was quoted above, it never received any funding from VenturEast and Argonaut Ventures, nor was it merged into eYantra.

Social Hues: Mukund mentioned that Social Hues was one of his key investments in the TOI article. However the company was founded by his wife, which did the exact same thing as Vangal, of which Mukund was also the CEO and had claimed of successfully selling it.

Pricearoo: Interestingly, in his blog post, Mukund mentions that he had invested in Pricearoo and that it was merged with another company.

However in a blog post, dated June 2012, by Mukund himself on the same blog, says otherwise:

Also he mentioned Pricearoo in another interview with MarketExpress:

We verified that Mukund owned the domain, pricearoo.com from 2011 to 2013. Meanwhile Priceonomics was founded in June 2011. So it’s unlikely that Pricearoo was ever started before Priceonomics, as claimed in both the above screenshots.

On one hand he says that it was a side project which “failed miserably” and “never took off” and on the other hand he says that it was a company he invested in and was then involved in a merger? I’m quite confused now!

FreshMonth: The only record we found of it is this site — freshmonth.strikingly.com which mentions that it does events and claims — ”We’re on a mission to connect leaders & investors from US to Bangalore. At FreshMonth, you get direct access to technologists, entrepreneurs, innovators and important new ideas from Silicon Valley every month!”

The last event it held was in January 2015 at Microsoft Ventures in Bangalore, which was part of the WorldStartupReport series of events. But maybe this isn’t the startup that Mukund was talking about in his blog post as he says it has shut down.

Azoi: We’ve confirmed from sources aware of the matter, Mukund Mohan did agree to invest but has never transferred the money to the startup. (We’re) Surprised he decided to mention it again in the blog post after his Angel List profile.

Maybe the startup founders had forgotten that they had asked Mukund for social proof by displaying them on his public profiles as an investment and not give them money. Or maybe Mukund just forgot about this due to the huge number of “investments” that he’s done!

500 Startups: Mukund Mohan has publicly claimed in his blog that he and his wife are LP’s in 500 Startups.

He claimed this again in an interview with Outlook Business:

And yet again he confirmed the same on Twitter:

However we’ve confirmed from people close to the matter confirmed that this never happened due to a conflict with Mukund Mohan’s position at Microsoft.

PlusTxt: Mukund had mentioned PlusTxt as an investment on Angel List last year and was brought to light on Twitter last year, after which it was removed.

We have confirmed with PlusTxt’s founder, Pratyush Prasanna, that Mukund had never invested in PlusTxt as well.

Kinetic Brains: Yet another company owned by Mukund Mohan’s relatives, i.e his parents since incorporation. Interestingly they both resigned on 14 September 2011 from being directors and Mukund became the director of the company on exactly the same date. And yet again the last annual returns were filed for the financial year 2010–11.

I think we should have been more clear about what we meant by “startups invested in or advised” in our mail. We meant startups not founded by you or your relatives!

The Mysterious Case Of Zodiac

So Mukund claims that he has invested in numerous (number varies from time to time, at will) startups in the US through an investment vehicle.

So in an interview with Sramana Mitra in March 2012, here’s what he had to say about that:

In this article on NextBigWhat in August 2012, here’s it again:

And then in yesterday’s blog post by Mukund, the name suddenly changed to Zodiac Investments LLC and is apparently based out of San Jose.

Again we researched on these entities and here’s what we found:

There exists a Zodiac Ventures, LLC in San Jose, formed in 1999 and is now Zodiac Spirits LLC, a spirits and vodka company.

There also exists a Zodiac Venture Partners, LLC in San Jose, formed in July 2000.

Then there is Zodiac Venture Fund I, LLC and Zodiac Venture Fund II, LLC formed in 1999 and 2000. The latter is still active.

And finally there is a Zodiac Investments LLC formed in 2009 and based out of Utah.

So which one is it? Looks like we’ll never know! Coz as usual the facts just never seem to match. Though we’ll give him the benefit of doubt in this case as he might have forgotten the exact name of the investment vehicle through which he invested in a significant number of startups in the US.

The Advised Companies

SignEasy: Mukund Mohan writes that he is an advisor at SignEasy. We’ve confirmed from sources close to the development that he indeed does hold 0.5% equity as advisory.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s been on the advisory board since June 2015. Even if Mukund might have technically taken the equity after him quitting the accelerator the next month, we’ve confirmed from reliable sources that the advisory equity part was decided upon within his tenure at Microsoft.

The question that comes up here is that isn’t this a conflict with Microsoft Accelerator/Venture’s clause that doesn’t allow it’s program directors/senior management to hold equity in a Microsoft Ventures accelerated company?

Even if technically he might not have violated the conflict directly, are there no moral obligations to be honoured?

We’ve emailed Microsoft Ventures the questions that arise from this incident and are awaiting their official response.

The Minjar & Adepto Incident: In June 2013, The Economic Times ran an article that Adepto Solutions has been acquired by cloud solutions company Minjar.

“We deny this news as we never had any acquisition related talks with Adepto team,” said Minjar’s founder in an e-mail to NextBigWhat.

It turns out that Mukund had announced the acquisition of Adepto by Minjar in a PR meetup.

We had handpicked them from 450+ applications. Basis our learnings from batch one, we made several improvements in our program, e. g. including more seed stage/angel investors as lead mentors, sharper focus on product definition and roadmap and stronger UX support. All these have helped this batch immensely as they prepared to take a significant leap into the global marketplace. In fact, one of them, Adepto, just got acquired!” [Mukund Mohan, CEO-in-residence, Microsoft Accelerator]

Was this another form of social proof his “advised startup” asked from him as a favour? To create a buzz about them by spreading false rumours of an acquisition? Or does Mukund announce stuff about his startups without even talking to them?

Conclusion

After going through all the startups that Mukund claims to have founded, invested in or advised, any entrepreneur would have the following questions ringing in his/her head:

1. Apart from BuzzGain, as per our knowledge, none of his startups performed successfully or raised any funding. Some of them even vanished without a trace. But, that didn’t deter him from founding companies at rapid frequencies. What was his plan after all?
2. Isn’t claiming these kind of inaccurate facts in public a form of deceit? Especially when so many young entrepreneurs and people from across the globe look up to him as a role model?
3. Will no one ever verify any facts about what people claim? Will the media just quote anything they are told or have read elsewhere?
4. Can we no longer hold anyone to their word anymore? Does someone’s word, especially of such a senior “ecosystem builder”, not hold any value or meaning? Whom can trust in such a small and fragile ecosystem?
5. Is being a serial entrepreneur so important that one can neglect the performance of one’s company and simply focus on what’s next?
6. Sharing details about his previous ventures, especially his exit strategies and failures could have really helped many entrepreneurs. So, why did Mukund refrain from doing so?
7. Is this taking the motto “Fail Fast, Fail Often” too literally?

The main questions still remain a mystery — How many companies did Mukund start? How many did he fail at? How many has he actually sold and to whom? Which companies has he invested in and advised truly, that are not his own or his relatives? Why is everything so confusing about his claims? Lastly why the heck don’t any of the facts check out?

While Mukund claims this is a targeted hit piece, we’ve not put words or given any sort of opinion. In fact the irony in the whole story was amount of inconsistencies, that we’ve described above, that were there in the “defensive blog post” against our so called “hit piece”. All we’ve done is raise questions on the inconsistencies in his own words and claims made across the web and in the media. The rest is for you to decide!

PS. We also have a good number of off-the-record confirmations and statements from a number of highly respected entrepreneurs, investors and ecosystem builders who have acknowledged these issues and have told us about many more such incidents that we have decided not to publish as we didn’t want to be seen as giving our own opinion.

Also feel free to come forward if you or someone you know in this ecosystem has gone through similar incidents and wants it out in the open! Let us all pledge to make India a #SwatchBharat4Startups!

The post Mukund Mohan – The Chronicles Of Napkin-Ville appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Ever imagined what it would be like to move in the Large Hadron Collider? A high energy particle travelling at the speed of light, colliding until the great Big Bang.

When it comes to an entrepreneur’s journey, life is seldom different.

The daily trysts with failures, the burdens of innovating constantly, the uphill climb towards resource optimization, days stretching into nights and nights stretching into mornings, possibility of failure trailing like a shadow at every turn, a spirit that simply can’t afford to die till dreams have been fashioned out of concrete, the unlimited caffeine intake and the never ending hustling…the journey is similar to that high energy particle in the Collider whooshing towards either success of failure…the tussle between the two never ending at any point….

And yet all he moves forward with is a vision. A passion. A dream. And the desire to build something no one has ever built before. This video beautifully sums up the life of an entrepreneur in just 90 seconds.

This video was originally made by Patrick Bet-David (http://www.patrickbetdavid.com) on Valuetainment.

The post The Life Of An Entrepreneur In 90 Seconds [Video] appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

“Lets create world’s best food tech company :)”.

That’s how Harshvardhan Mandad, CEO and cofounder of TinyOwl, signed off in an email to his employees a week before the news of TinyOwl securing $7.6 Mn (INR 50 Cr) from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners had sufficed in the media. The funding was supposed to buy TinyOwl a 12 month runway to manage the turmoil in the company and restructure itself to create a sustainable business.

So while the employees were still soaking in the news of funding and looking forward to a better future, they received a mail (dated 31st October) informing them of a TownHall meeting scheduled for 2nd November to discuss the future direction of the company from Rohit Joshi, General Manager – Human Resources.

And then, without any reason, the scheduled Townhall meeting was postponed from 2nd November, with plans of holding it on a new date.

Flash forward to 3rd November, news flows in that the company has fired 112 employees in Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi, as it decides to shut operations in these four cities. Four of TinyOwl’s five co-founders –  Harshvardhan Mandad, Gaurav Choudhary, Saurabh Goyal, Shikhar Paliwal and Tanuj Khandelwal – set out to personally close their chapters in these four cities. Currently, all the founders have switched off their phones and gone underground as angry employees at all offices are caught unaware and left stranded with only post dated cheques of their November salaries.

Is this how a startup intending to be the best food tech company treats its employees? First you assure them of a bright future and suddenly you make a U-turn and leave them in shock with no jobs, no assurances, no deadlines. This vanishing act by TinyOwl founders has shaken the trust of many people working in the startup ecosystem.

Apparently, raising money is “pretty easy” for Harshvardhan Mandan. He said so in an article dated February 19, 2015. When asked about how he manages so many people, he answered, “It is not that hard. You have your priorities in order, decide on the things that are most important and stick to it.” So, maybe he might have thought that firing all these employees “won’t be that hard” – something he might agree to disagree now.

While things were managed peacefully at three location, the situation became a nightmare for Gaurav Choudhary, one of TinyOwl’s cofounders, at the Pune office, where he was held hostage by protesting laid-off employees. The employees at the Pune office, numbering about 25, were demanding full and final settlements. They had been told to follow up with TinyOwl’s Mumbai office for settlements. However salaries which were expected to be credited into employee accounts by 3:30 PM yesterday had not materialised yet.

Many of the protesting employees were also the ones who had been fired in the previous firing rounds and still had not received their dues. The crime branch turned up at the office, asking employees to delete the Whatsapp group formed by the employees to vent their ire and to discuss strategies of protest. The office also saw the turnout by political parties which led to a heated argument.

However, a few hours ago, Gaurav was finally able to leave the office to make his way to Mumbai, after being held hostage by employees for almost two days, reported Medianama.

On being given a chance to speak, Choudhary told the assembled policemen, “What we’ve decided is, in 6 cities, jitna company ka burn hain, woh current funding se nahi ho sakta (At the company’s current burn rate, we cannot sustain with the current funding). We closed the funding on 23rd, so the board decided to shut down 4 cities. Not Mumbai and Bangalore, those will continue operating. Yes, it is a sudden decision, but the market crashed and the money is very.. so we didn’t have the bandwidth to retain people. According to the company clause, the resignation period varies for different employees, managers and above have a 2 month notice period. In case of sudden resignation or termination, the company’s liable to pay the amount according to the notice period, and according to the clause, we have to pay this by the end of the notice period.”

A major source of their discontent stemmed from the fact that they have been fired so close to Diwali and just a few days after the company closed a $7.6 Mn funding from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners. Employees also complained about the company burning almost 200X their returns on customer acquisition and spending lakhs of money on newspaper advertisement which never went live.

Speaking on anonymity with Inc42, TinyOwl employees fired from Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Pune offices laid bare the facts about TinyOwl’s downward spiral.

This is what a jaded employee mailed us, on condition of anonymity.

“TinyOwl Technology Pvt Ltd has fired (complete city operations), no official email was sent for termination or resignation was procured from us for the following locations:

Delhi – 52 ppl
Pune – 25 ppl
Chennai – 20 ppl
Hyderabad – 21 ppl

All or most of these employees have been working in the middle or top level in the management structure.

A few days back Harsh Mandad (co founder, CEO) has sent a mail to all employees stating that the company has been able to secure funding, and a good future ahead for all employees.

On 2nd November a townhall meeting was scheduled in mumbai for all employees to be connected, which was abruptly cancelled.

On 3rd November ALL employees of the above mentioned locations were called to office, for a personal meeting with one of the co founders. It was announced that all the employees are now no longer working with tinyowl, and that all employees will have to leave.

No clarity has been provided regarding FNF formalities, or any severance or notice pay for these employees.

Clarity was sought from Harsh Mandad regarding this, and all employees were told by him on call that a board meeting is scheduled today(4th nov) morning with investors and a decision will be reached today.
4th November – since early morning, the co founders are not contactable or traceable, nor available in any office, or even their residences. All their mobile numbers are switched off.

All these 118 employees are now left with nothing, and no info/clarity is available from anywhere.
Company has also released a statement regarding this, but there is no closure or any clarity of pacification for any of these employees (including me) who have lost their livelihood.

Outwardly they are trying to show that all is well while inside things reflect a different story, things look bleak for us.

Situation today is the same, got mail from co founder to send us what our demands/expectations for this separation process are, and we have submitted the same to them but they have not replied with anything concrete, just that they would be finding a solution at the earliest.

They want us to nominate a representative who will then have to travel all the way to Mumbai to tinyowl HQ to discuss.

We are not really keen on doing that and waiting for them to send us their proposal post their meeting with the investors/board. They have not clearly said anything till now.

Things in Pune got out of hand, and we kind of knew they were pushing it too far, and if an amicable solution is needed in this case we need to get it done with cordial methods.

In the news, it has been falsely mentioned that Saurabh Goyal was held hostage in Gurgaon office, he went back same day along with all employees, checked in to his hotel as well, and from there he went missing.”

Delhi

A Delhi employee, where the company had started operations this year, on condition of anonymity, sent across a mail expressing the entire scenario.

“It was going well. We were hired to start the operations in the new city. We launched the city in a month’s time. We made TinyOwl a renowned brand in the market. Suddenly in August end they fired around 200 employees from all cities, stating it was strategic decision and that they had made a mistake in hiring. Prior to that, few people from top level (the VP and City Head) had already left the company.

Many a times, we had received mails from the CEO stating things are going well. “We are proud of you. Let’s make TinyOwl a best food tech company”. Just last week, we even received a positive mail from him stating that TinyOwl was on the verge of closing funding and that he was looking forward for the growth of TinyOwl with us.

Suddenly on the night of 2nd November, we received an email from headquarters stating one of the co-founders is coming to meet all of us to discuss the growth of the company. Then Saurabh Goyal came and told that “we are shutting our office today. And today is your last day.”

It was a shock for everyone as no one had thought how can they do this as just a few days back, they had closed the INR50 Cr funding. They have sent out a false PR stating that they are firing people when instead they are shutting down their offices. This move will destroy our careers.

We questioned Saurabh about a lot of things but he was numb. We asked him mainly-

1. This is not a sudden decision, then why were you sending mails that everything is going well?
2. What was your business strategy?
3. Where have you spent the INR 100 Cr funding raised in the last round in just 8 months?
4. When no money was spent any marketing in Delhi-NCR, how can you expect business to grow here?

He was numb all the time. After a lot of discussions he told he will come to office tomorrow and he will attend the board meeting from Gurgaon office. Later he went to his hotel where he had booked his hotel from 3rd November to 6th November. He ran away from the hotel without informing hotel people. People say he ran away in the night. When the hotel staff opened his room, the ac was still working. Every co-founder is still not reachable over the phone.

Now these people are playing games over the email. We don’t have any hopes now. We don’t trust these people as they have run away and no timelines have been promised from their yet. They furnished the office in Mumbai, and have wasted money on useless stuff. They never acknowledged our ideas and suggestions to grow the business. It looks like they didn’t have any plans to grow which is the main reason for the top management leaving the company in 4-6 months.

They should have been mature enough given that they are hiring 1200 people. Every co- founder is unreachable and has gone underground. People in Pune office are in police station to keep one of the co-founder in office. We only wanted the CEO to come here and give things in writing. We want 3 months of salary as no one was notified of the shutdown. We are asking them the timelines and there is no reply from their side. All they told us that we are doing board meetings and pushing case in front of the board.”

Another employee from the Delhi office who spoke to Inc42, confirmed the turn of events.

He stated that extra security had been employed at the office when Saurabh had arrived at the office. The company had issued post-dated cheques for 30th November which had been refused by the employees. Though the employees were impatient but nothing untoward happened at the office. Saurabh had affirmed them that there would be a con-call with company board members the next day to make the final decision. Employees had requested him to show up the next day and not let them down. However, he went absconding. His phone was switched off the other day, and the hotel guys confirmed he had checked out of his room. Instead of his appearance as he had promised, all he left his employees was with mail asking for their demands. In his reply, he stated, “We will get back to you in a couple of days.”

Chennai

In Chennai, where the TinyOwl office had started operations this July and had close to 20 employees, the firing proceeded in a relatively peaceful way. All the employees were laid off and were told to be compensated with a month’s income in the form of PDCs. However the employees are demanding two month’s compensation. Discussions are still going on between the employees and founders and the office is expected to remain open till all the dues are cleared by the company.

Hyderabad

In Hyderabad, TinyOwl had started its operations in May this year and had close to 20 employees on its pay roll. It was Tanuj Khandelwal who came to deliver the news of the layoffs and gave post dated cheques to employees. Here also, there were no agitations by the employees and things were handled smoothly. The employees are still in discussion with Tanuj and an employee representative was asked to come to Mumbai for the same. However, the employees denied this request and want the negotiations to happen in Hyderabad itself.

With the current layoffs, the employee strength will now reduce to 500 by December with operations restricted to only Mumbai and Bangalore.

Harshvardhan stated in a media statement, “We have had a long day in resolving a critical situation in Pune wherein two of our employees had been made to stay back in office for over 48 hours. We have been able to resolve this and have immediately started working on considering the demands beyond the terms of employment, placed forward by other employees from other cities. We request you to please give us some time to first address our employees concerns. Post that we will be more than happy to answer any queries you may have.”

Aditya Narayan Mishra, director and CEO of Ciel HR Services and former president-staffing of Randstad India, believes that such communication should have been handled with sensitivity as it concerns the lives of so many people – their careers, aspirations, dreams, emotions and financial commitments.

“Such situations are likely to be few and far between. Normally entrepreneurs value the contribution made by their employees while they(entrepreneurs) try to fulfill their own dreams and give shape to their ideas. Such aberration isn’t going to dampen the spirit of risk-taking and co-traveling towards a destination that’s not discovered yet. With the changes in our socio-economic situations, more people are open to taking the risk and being adventurous,” he added.

As working for startups can be unpredictable, Aditya believes that employees should take extra effort to track their company’s performance on an ongoing basis; watch out for signals in the market such as addition of new customers, new employees; tone and body language of the promoters; exits or changes of senior management and mood of the senior folks in the firm.

TinyOwl’s hiring and firing tale becomes the latest in the series of those happening in the startup ecosystem. Zomato, HelpChat, and Housing are the other startups who first raised fundings at dizzying valuations, hiring at breakneck speeds, and then resorted to sudden firing.

This trend raises serious questions about how equipped are startup founders to make their business scalable and sustainable. They may have raised millions in funding but are they prepared enough to gainfully utilise that amount of money?

TinyOwl’s hostage drama and the firing bloodbath puts serious questions on the efficacy of Indian startup founders to turn a well-funded business into a sustainable one.

[The earlier version had errors – We had earlier misquoted Medianama by stating that “According to Medianama, the politicians helped resolve the conflict.” and have therefore removed that portion.]

The post The TinyOwl Saga: Layoffs, Hostage Crisis, Absconding Cofounder & Jaded Employees appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Vadodra-based Gingercrush, a licensed product customization platform startup, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from TV Mohandas Pai’s family office. As a part of the deal, Pai will mentor the founding team and senior management to strengthen the organizational leadership and set the company up for strong and responsible growth.

Gingercrush offers an on-demand retail platform where consumers can instantly shop or customize products to fit their personal style and purchase a vast array of products. Gingercrush is also a home to thousands of digital images from brands and a community of sellers who are artists, photographers, designers and creative consumers. Consumers get to not only choose but create their own designs on their favorite lifestyle products. High-quality affordable products are made available on the site for all age-groups of consumers, for every occasion and need. Most products on Gingercrush are turned around within 24 hours.

Gingercrush was founded in 2015 by Rajvi Makol & Saumya Nidhi. earlier in July, the startup had raised $1 Mn funding led by Gokul Jaykrishna and Brand Capital, a division of Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd. 

Welcome to Flash Feed, your essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web – bite-sized and updated all day.

The post TV Mohandas Pai Invests In Gingercrush  appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Diwali is the time when we clean and refurbish our homes. As we bid adieu to the festival of lights, this year, let us take some time out to look around, contemplate and figure out a way to clean up the space we belong to – our startup ecosystem. As our ecosystem grows, so does the complexities within it, breeding harmful trends, developments and even people who can disrupt the balance of our ecosystem.

As part of our “#SwachhBharat4Startups!” initiative, we, at Inc42, decided to reach out to some stakeholders of the ecosystem to understand their viewpoints on how to keep our ecosystem clean and thriving, and what they want cleaned from the ecosystem. Here’s what they had to say:

Ritesh Malik, doctor, entrepreneur, investor & creator of Innov8 Coworking

• Clean the mindset of people.
• Don’t go for valuations, but for value creation.
• Create a self-sustainable model; don’t be dependent on investor’s money.
• Don’t bleed too much, if customers are not willing to buy the product at your cost price that means it’s not valuable to them.

Kashyap Deorah, entrepreneur, investor & writer

“I like the initiative. It is easy to create a list of things that the government or ecosystem should do, but I am cynical that those things will make a difference in cleaning the ecosystem.”

“Instead, I think we need to use the power of the masses to clean up the ecosystem and hold people accountable. I think we need to create a wikileaks for Indian startups. Any whistleblower should anonymously be able to expose a wrongdoing. It could be an employee, a customer, a supplier, a service provider, a co-founder, an investor, or anyone involved who is witness to wrongdoings. As long as the forum is moderated appropriately, and the content is compelling, it should do the trick.”

Samar Singla, founder and CEO of Jugnoo

I think it is a great initiative and would bring valuable insights to make our ecosystem stronger. In my opinion, a lot can be done to streamline this space:

• To begin with, all startups initially have just a handful of employees, the perception of this small size is already changing and people are understanding that while there may be lack of structure initially, but there is speed in execution which startups should take advantage of.
• Acceptance of friction and competition will further strengthen this space, which is essential for an ecosystem to make complete sense.
• Collaboration and cooperation also help delivering a value-added service.

Tarun Matta, founder of IIMjobs.com and Hirist.com

I think we can keep our ecosystem clean and thriving by building startups with long-term focus, strong business fundamentals that create real value for customers.

Prafulla Mathur, founder and CEO, WudStay

“The last few years have been extremely exciting for the startup ecosystem in India. With fresh approaches to solving basic consumer needs translating into billion-dollar companies, it is important that entrepreneurs do not deter from the mission to create real value for their customers. For India’s startup ecosystem to further mature, it is important that we keep reminding ourselves that valuations and funding are not the end objectives. Rather, it is essential to focus on creating products that solve a specific need.”

Prashant Chaudhary, Co-founder of Mr. Right

“Indian startups are not much different than Bollywood; copying from the west, uncredited remakes, shoplifting stories from original authors, spending heavily on marketing, and making media your friend. This is the oldest way to take advantage of the not so aware mass. Startups in India need to do away from this. We are on the verge of becoming the fastest growing startup ecosystem in the world. Eventually, Indian startups will run out of ideas to emulate.”

Manoj Agarwal, Founder, Giftxoxo.com

“Funding frenzy is taking priority over business fundamentals in startups today. Nowadays, startups with good ideas get lost in the wave of funding instead of getting their business models right. The startup ecosystem and senior industry professionals should empower the young startups with core business fundamentals, profitability and values to build a sustainable long term business instead of a short-term gain.”

“The government policies and positive media discussions in this direction would help build a strong start-up ecosystem in India.”

Ankita Jain, Founder, GoPaisa.com

“Startups have thrived during the past couple of years, pretty much without any government support and our bottom-of-pyramid ranking in ease of doing business index. In spite of this, FDI in India is the highest when it comes to investments into startups. If proper support with easy clearances & faster decisions from all governmental departments are made available, we believe India can be in top three investment destinations globally, and hence, creating further jobs, prosperity & wealth for the society”

“So, basically cleaning away the lethargic attitude, red-tape, and ‘chalta hai, ho jayega’ attitude throughout the society can bring a sea-change for more prosperous and happy India”

“The world is enough for everyone’s needs, but not enough for everyone’s greed” – the words or Mahatma Gandhi are apt for our startup ecosystem as well. We are all a part of this rapidly expanding and fragile – yet extremely enduring – ecosystem. Let’s strive to weed out the greed and negativities in it and propagate the right values, fundamentals, mindset and support; thereby creating a clean, healthy, nurturing and transparent startup ecosystem for all.

The post Done Cleaning Your Homes For Diwali? Time To Clean Our Startup Ecosystem Now appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Ola, mobile app for personal transportation has raised $500 Mn in its Series F funding round. Baillie Gifford, Falcon Edge Capital, Tiger Global, SoftBank Group, DST Global and Didi Kuaidi participated in this round of funding.

With the current round, Ola has closed over $1.3 Bn of external funding, of which over $1.2 Bn has been raised over the past year. In April 2015, Ola raised $400 Mn of funding led by DST Global in Series E and prior to that, $210 Mn from SoftBank Group as part of its Series D round in October 2014. Ola counts Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, Steadview Capital, Sequoia India, Accel Partners US and Falcon Edge also amongst its existing investors.

The funds will be deployed to further accelerate its growth in the Indian market with a focus on building mobility for a billion people.

As per the company, it has grown by over 30 times in the last one year, now clocking over 1 Mn booking requests a day. It has over 350,000 vehicles registered on its platform from across 102 cities in India.

Bhavish Aggarwal, Co-founder & CEO, Ola said

As we pursue our mission to build mobility for a billion people, we are excited about bringing onboard partners who can help us get there faster. We will continue to build for the local market through innovative solutions like Ola Share, Ola Prime and Ola Money, as we grow the mobile ecosystem in India.

Ola’s mobile apps, accounted for a presence in smartphones of 78% cab users in India according to recent mobile intelligence reports. The company has introduced a wide range of personal transportation options to serve millions of customers across the country, even in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. This includes Kaali-Peeli taxis in Mumbai, Auto-rickshaws in 6 cities, Yellow Taxis in Kolkata and Ola Share (beta) in Bangalore, a first of its kind social ride-sharing option for users within their groups of choice.

Welcome to Flash Feed, your essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web – bite-sized and updated all day.

The post Ola Raises $500 Mn Series F From Baillie Gifford, Falcon, Tiger, SoftBank & DST Global appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Online taxi booking startup for outstation travel, AHA Taxis has raised an undisclosed round of angel funding from ah! Ventures. The deal was advised and syndicated by ah! Ventures and led to closure on its private equity investment platform, CLUBah.com.

Additionally, AHA Taxis has roped in Vikas Taneja of Games247 as advisor.

AHA Taxis was founded in April 2015 by Amit Grover (ex-Infosys, Asian Paints, Onida, IIT-IIM alumnus), along with Praveen Samariya (ex-Times Internet, IIT alumnus), Kunal Krishna (ex-Headstrong, Copper Mobile), Kumar Arayan (ex-Swiggy, Askmebazar, NIIT) and Shivam Mishra (ex-Crazzy, college dropout).

A division of WAAH Taxis Pvt Ltd, AHA Taxis helps travellers save cost on outstation travel by charging only for actual KMs travelled. Traditionally in Indian road travel, the taxi owners charge a return fare from customers even for one way trips, as they are not assured of passengers on return journey.

Amit Grover, Founder, AHA Taxis, explains,

Very few of the present cab provider offers intercity ride, “AHA” being one of them. Having said that, the primary problem with a regular cab is that you get charged for the return trip too. Here, “AHA Taxis” takes the lead by providing you the taxi and charging you only for the actual kilometres travelled. We are aggregating demand and supply using website and mobile app to make it a win-win situation for all stakeholders – taxi owners, customers, society and environment.

The startup provides service in 100+ cities and plans to expand to another 100 cities by mid-2016. It has served outstation trips across 100+ cities.

The company plans to use the funds raised by investing in technology, marketing and operations. Currently the company is clocking almost 100% month on month growth on all metrics, and with angel investors backing, aim to achieve 10x growth within a year.

AHA Taxis plans to expand to newer geographies, with a focus on tier 2/3 towns, and start coverage of non-tourism sector beyond usual routes like Delhi to Jaipur, Agra, Haridwar and Chandigarh.

According to the Association of Radio Taxi India, the taxi business in the country is growing at 20 to 25 per cent a year. The organised taxi sector accounts for just four to five per cent of the industry and totals $800 Mn and is expected to grow to $7  Bn by 2020. Revenues for taxi services providers are expected to grow at a CAGR of about 25% during 2014-19.

Our Investment is AHA Taxis is at the opportune time as we believe strongly in the potential of the business in India. We are extremely confident of the team led by Amit and had no second thoughts on wanting to be early investors in AHA Taxis. We are assured of their service offering & technology and also their ability to create significant shareholder value, Harshad Lahoti, Founder & CEO of ah! Ventures said.

Welcome to Flash Feed, your essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web – bite-sized and updated all day.

The post Outstation Taxi Booking Startup AHA Taxis Raises Angel Funding appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

“Whatever you do, be different – that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.” – Anita Roddick

Nothing could be truer for the women entrepreneurs of today who are chartering unknown territories unabashedly and fearlessly. Be it in ecommerce, education, investing, travel, fashion, retail, fitness, hiring, and anything and everything under the sun, they are proceeding with gumption and unbridled enthusiasm to change the world around them, make a difference with their ideas, seek solutions that have never been sought, fight diseases and social norms, run successful ventures and generate employment for many, and give rise to new sustainable ecosystems.

Each of them is scripting her own success story in today’s new age world. On Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, we bring to you the journeys of some of these dynamic Indian women, who have set benchmarks in their chosen fields.

Maya Angelou has said, “I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”

Hats off to all of these women entrepreneurs!

Arpita Ganesh

Arpita Ganesh or more popularly known as the ‘Indian Bra Lady’,  found her calling in a unique vocation – creating a lingerie brand that will help women find their right size, fits and styles, all at affordable prices. After experiencing a bra-fitting session in New York, Arpita was ready to leave her 10 years long career in advertising to make a dent in the Indian lingerie market. She founded Buttercups in 2008, India’s first high-end lingerie brand that retailed international labels and provided personalised sizing, to fitting, to consultations based on one’s requirements.

The startup has provided fitting sessions to more than 3000 women, and was crowd funded in its early stages. This year, in June, it raised angel funding from Kanwaljit Singh, Angie Mahtaney and others.  Buttercups is proof that anything done with passion, however challenging it may be, will find takers.

Rashi Menda

Two years ago, Rashi Menda would look into her closet with an assorted collection of unopened, unworn shopping bags sitting on the floor – and still find herself saying, ‘I have nothing to wear!’ Just like Rashi, millions of Indian women stock their closets with stuff worth over one billion dollars every year and still have nothing to wear. Wanting to change that, Rashi went ahead and launched Zapyle, an Instagram like fashion marketplace to discover, sell and buy pre-owned fashion attire.

Zapyle assists preloved clothes and accessories in finding new wardrobes, so nobody will ever feel that they have nothing to wear, but rather have fun wearing it. The startup has raised $1 Mn in a funding round this September. Rashi  holds a BSc in Economics-Finance from University of Minnesota, and before founding Zapyle, she had worked with Ernst and Young in the Tax and Risk analytics, and later for an ecommerce startup Unamia catering to apparel for kids.

Manisha Raisinghani

After studying Big Data and Analytics in 2009 from Carnegie Mellon University, Manisha Raisinghani, worked in the logistics space while working as a consultant for IBM Consulting. Interested by the ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation) software used by trucks in the UPS for logistics, she along with Dhruvil Sanghvi, who had attended the course with her, got thinking how they could replicate the UPS technology in other countries. In January 2014, the duo quit their jobs and invested over $70K into building a product from ground up in about six-seven months. Thus, was born LogiNext Solutions in August 2014. A year later, about 60 companies have started using its services including the likes of Flipkart and Paytm. In its latest round, it has snapped $10 Mn  funding from Paytm.

Priyanka Gill and Namrata Bostrom

After completing her graduation from Lady Shri Ram College, Priyanka worked as a fashion journalist for several years before pursuing  her Masters from Kings College, London.

In late 2012, Priyanka met Namrata Bostrom, and since both of them were looking at digital content space for women, they came up with the idea of digital lifestyle magazine for women and co-founded Popxo.com in early 2014.

The startup has recently raised approximately $2 Mn in its Series A funding round this November to broaden its editorial operations in English and Hindi language. According to the projections, Popxo will have 300 Mn women users by the end of 2020.

Naiyya Saggi

Naiyya Saggi is a graduate from the Harvard Business School (MBA 2012), where she was a Fulbright and J.N. Tata scholar, and worked for more than four years  at McKinsey & The Bridgespan Group in Boston. When a lot of her friends became parents and were baffled with the new experience looking for answers, she noticed multiple Facebook groups that were strewn with questions ranging from parenting to paediatrics. This Harvard scholar was then inspired to launch BabyChakra – a platform that helps parents discover and connect with local services relevant for maternity and childcare.

BabyChakra was launched in November 2014 and is the fastest growing platform for Indian parents today. BabyChakra helps parents discover and connect with local services relevant for maternity and childcare. It has quickly scaled to cover three cities in India – Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, and has raised an angel round of funding led by Mumbai Angels this June.

Aditi Avasthi

After graduating from Thapar University, Aditi got an MBA from the University of Chicago and founded Embibe, in 2012. With a view to disrupt the education space in India, Embibe focuses on technology and data combination to help students prepare better for the competitive examinations.

The inspiration to start Embibe stemmed from Aditi’s own challenges whist she was taking competitive exams way back in 1999 and lack of proper resources to aid exam preparation that time.  Embibe focuses on creating a personalized preparation routine for the user, employing technology as an aid. After raising $4 Mn from  Kalaari Capital and venture fund Lightbox, the Mumbai-based ed-tech startup had acquired 100Marks, a student guidance platform for JEE Main, Advanced and Medical, in an all cash stock deal.

Vani Kola

If you are even a wee bit familiar with the venture capital investing space in India, it is hard to miss out on one name in particular, Vani Kola, Managing Director of Kalaari Capital. Born and educated in Hyderabad, Vani  got her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Osmania University and then left to get a masters degree from Arizona State University, spending 22 years in the US. Kola co-founded Kalaari, after successfully building and selling two companies, Certus and Rightworks in Silicon Valley.

In 2006, she returned to Bangalore,  founding Kalaari Advisors in 2006 to create an early-stage venture ecosystem in India. To date, Kalaari Advisors has funded more than 50 companies in India. Vani focuses on technology companies, leveraging India’s domestic growth to create high growth enterprises. No wonder, she has been identified as one of the top 10 entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and was  listed as one of the most powerful women in Indian Business by Fortune India last year.

Shuchi Pandya

Shuchi Pandya is the founder of  Pipa+Bella, a fast-fashion brand of fashion jewellery, offers women with well-curated collections which are available at affordable prices. Growing up in a family of jewellers, studying marketing at the Stern School of Business, and then MBA from Wharton, she started developing her idea for Pipa+Bella and building a tech-based business, and ultimately founding it in 2013. The startup has recently raised $600K in a pre-series A round, led by Singapore’s Lionrock Capital this July.

Suchita Salwan

Tired of complaining about Delhi that it was a boring city and  its people were dull, Suchita Salwan, at mere 22 years, decided to change that mindset, and started hunting for people, things, and places that made Delhi interesting and brought to fore its bright side.  Thus, was born Little Black Book Delhi (LBBD), a site which has quickly become the go-to place for curated discovery of Delhi’s culture. The site now incorporates events, curated city tours, and weekend checklists.  It has raised a seed investment of $150,000 from a group of angel investors, this June.

Shradha Sharma

If you track the startup ecosystem in India, it is unlikely that you haven’t heard of YourStory and Shradha Sharma, who founded the online media venture for Entrepreneurs and Startups in 2008. She is a graduate from St. Stephens College, worked with the Times  Of India as Brand Advisor, and later with CNBC TV18 as Assistant Vice President. YourStory along with its sister platforms, HerStory, SocialStory, YS TV, YS Research and YS Pages, have reached 60 Mn engaged readers. The company has hosted over 220 events across YS Meetups, TechSparks, MobileSparks and SheSparks. These events have had a direct impact on over 1.7 Mn people. In August this year, it raised close to $3 Mn in its Series A round of funding led by Kalaari Capital, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures, T V Mohandas Pai and Ratan Tata.

Nidhi Agarwal

Nidhi Agarwal is the founder of Kaaryah, a brand of western, non-casual wear for Indian women,aims to provide the best possible fit with its 18 sizes. The brand aims to bridge the gap  between western formals and the Indian silhouette. An MBA from Kellogg School of Management, and a certified Chartered Accountant by education, Nidhi, decided to found Kaaryah back in 2010 when she was working as a strategy consultant. On the way to the airport for a client meeting, she spilled coffee on herself and struggled to replace her shirt with a simple white shirt of a right fit at the mall. That experience triggered her to found Kaaryah. This June, the startup has raised its Series A investment from Ratan Tata.

Meena Ganesh

Meena Ganesh, CEO of Portea Medical, a provider of home healthcare services in India, is a woman who has donned many entrepreneurial hats. An undergraduate degree in Physics from Madras University and an MBA from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Meena,  started her career at NIIT, and went on to work at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Microsoft. In 2000, she co-founded Customer Asset, a call centre and BPO company, with funding from Softbank Capital and Newscorp. Customer Asset was acquired by ICICI Bank in 2002, and later re-branded as Firstsource. Post that, she worked at Tesco as CEO of its India operations, setting up its IT and back office hub in India.

After five years with Tesco, she joined Tutorvista, an online tutoring company founded by her husband, as a co-promoter. Pearson Education acquired a majority stake (around 76%) in TutorVista in 2009. In July 2013, the husband wife duo Meena and Krishnan Ganesh acquired Portea Medical, a healthcare firm based in New Delhi, after which Meena moved in as the CEO. Portea Medical operates across 24 cities and handles 60,000 visits in a month to patients’ homes. This September, it raised $37.5 Mn in a Series B round of funding led by Accel Partners.

Kanika Tekriwal

Kanika Tiwari is the co-founder of JetSetGo – India’s first online marketplace for private jets and helicopters launched in 2014. Leveraging her more than eight years of experience in the aviation industry, Kanika realised the frustration of customers while dealing with charter brokers and operator due to the fact that due to sheer lack of transparency and non-availability of charter planes, customers pay astronomical amounts. It was from here, that the idea to develop JetSetGo started.

JetSetGo is fundamentally re-defining the private aviation business, by seamlessly creating marketplaces that join the dots between charter customers and operators on one hand and service providers with operators on the other. It recently raised funding from Yuvraj Singh’s debut startup fund, YouWeCan Ventures, in July this year. For Kanika who has beaten cancer to and is now entering unchartered territory, the flight to greater heights has just begun.

Lavanya Venkatraman

Lavanya Venkatraman is a NIFT graduate and did her master’s degree from the London College of Fashion. She had a stint at EU SERVIVE and was also a manager in the marketing team for business alliances at Myntra. Post that, she teamed up with Vasudevan Thrikkazhippurath, and Ashish Singhal  to form Urban Tailor, a professional tailoring service for women which comes at the click of a button. With the advent of on-demand marketplaces, almost any errand can be run at the swipe of a hand. However, the tailoring industry is still stuck in the dingy city lanes, where the masterji’s promises are big, but deliveries are always late and far from our expectations.

Sensing this need, Bangalore-based startup, Urban Tailor, wants to address this unmet need and further guarantee perfect fit and on-time delivery with convenient pick-up & delivery at your doorstep. The startup has raised recently raised its seed funding led by a group of angel investors (mostly ex-Myntra executives).

Nidhi Verma

Given her experience of more than 15 years in the travel space, it was but natural that Nidhi Varma would do something in that domain when it came to starting her own venture. And she did. In order to address the points of travellers about in-depth information about tourist places, this commerce graduate from the Narsee Monjee College of Commerce & Economics, launched Guiddoo, an in-destination travel app along with Vineet Budki in 2013.

The mobile app provides an in-depth and highly researched audio visual guide to world famous monuments and attractions such as the Taj Mahal, Statue of Liberty, The Colosseum, Eiffel Tower and Angkor Wat, as well as modern monuments like the Burj Khalifa. The company has curated content for over 300+ monuments, attractions and locations around the world with the app seeing over 100K downloads. This year, Guiddoo, raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a group of angel investors.

Shweta Singh & Presha Paragash

Shweta Singh & Presha Paragash are founders of Sol Primero, an early stage investment firm dedicated to partnering with ambitious entrepreneurs addressing large opportunities that require innovation. Both of them are Wharton MBA graduates, and also have 5 years of investment banking experience at UBS Investment Bank in London. Shweta has also worked with the restaurant discovery platform, Zomato, in the International Operations team where she oversaw the launch of the business into several new geographies.

In 2014, they came together to set off in a new direction, launching their own investment firm Sol Primero. Till date, it has invested in startups such as Cubito, Curofy, JustRide, Zostel and Plabro to name a few.

Richa Singh

YourDOST is a technology startup of a unique kind- it aims to establish a unique platform for mental wellbeing and emotional support. The startup connects experts to people who look to discuss any kind of emotional issues, while providing them required anonymity. Founded by Richa Singh, an IIT Guwahati alumnus, in partnership with Puneet Manuja and Prakhar Verma. The startup aims to create awareness and reduce the stigma associated with mental wellness in our society.

Richa is confident that technology combined with empathy and right kind of experts will go a long way in helping people going through a various emotional and mental challenges and equipping them to better deal with it. No wonder, YourDOST has close to 70,000 users which is growing at about 40% month-on-month basis. With 10,000 registered users, currently, a team of 75+ experts service around 300 one to one interactions on a daily basis. Recently, it raised close to $400K in an angel round of funding from angel investors.

Anisha Singh

Anisha holds a master’s degree in political communication and an MBA degree in Information Systems from the American University.. She started her career with the Clinton administration where she helped women entrepreneurs raise funding for their ideas. Later, she worked at Centra software in Boston before returning to India.

After working for years, she became an entrepreneur when she founded mydala.com in 2009.

Delhi-based Mydala is a marketing portal which connects merchants and consumers and allows users to purchase offers from different brands via ecommerce. The startup recently made headlines when it was reported that Chinese internet search giant, Baidu, is interested in buying majority stake in the company. Anisha co-founded Mydala with Ashish Bhatnagar and Arjun Basu last being in 2011 taking total funds raised by it to $6 Mn.

Swati Bhargava

At a young age of 16, Swati obtained a scholarship to study in Singapore, and had pursued her graduation from London School of Economics. After working with Goldman Sachs in London, Swati founded Pouring Pounds with her husband Rohan Bhargava in July 2010. Later, the duo launched  cashback website, Cashkaro.com, in November 2012. Headquartered in Gurgaon, the company raised $3.7 Mn in November from Kalaari Capital. Prior to that, Cashkaro had received a funding of $750,000 from angel investors. Associated with various startup and tech initiatives, such as the Nasscom 10,000 girls in tech, Sheroes and TiE, Swati is also well known for her social media activities.

Richa Kar

Richa, an engineering graduate from BITS Pilani, before founding Zivame.com, had worked with several global retailers.

Bangalore-based Zivame online store for lingerie products, which Richa  founded in 2011. In 2015, Zivame garnered a lot of attention when it raised $40 Mn led by Zodius Technology Fund and Khazanah Nasional Berhad. It also saw participation from Unilazer, IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital. The cherry on top came later when Ratan Tata had invested in the company before it was out to raise its series C round.

Priya Maheshwari

Priya Maheshwari – a master degree holder from University of Pennsylvania.She had worked as a policy expert in New York and later moved to Bangalore. She co-founded Properji.com along with IIT Alumni Guruprasad Bangle, Umesh Rangasamy and Naveen Galithoti in August 2013.

The startup aims to introduce transparency and professionalism in the property market. With features like Fraud Protection Scheme and Buy-back Guarantee, the startup claims to provide research based facts to guide the buyer to buy the perfect house of their dreams.

As early as in 2014, the startup had close to 800 users, and had helped its users to buy properties worth over INR 20 Cr.

Radhika Aggarwal

Radhika had done her MBA from Washington University. Radhika co-founded Shopclues.com in 2011 with Sanjay Sethi, Devesh Rai G, Vishal Sharma and her husband Sandeep Aggarwal.

Backed by Helion Venture Partners, Nexus Ventures and Netprice’s CEO Teruhide Sato, the startup has recently raised $100 Mn in series D funding. They have close to 33,000 partners and are expanding tremendously.

Falguni Nayyar

Falguni has a degree in economics from Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics and Post graduate diploma IIM Ahmedabad. A veteran in the field of financial planning with an experience spanning over 25 years, Falguni, eventually, quit her job to be an entrepreneur. She launched Nykaa – a women centric ecommerce portal providing beauty and wellness products in April 2012. Focused on providing the best beauty and wellness products, the startup targets the urban women of the modern India. Nykaa.com raised undisclosed sum through private investors including NRIs and HNIs.

Preeta Sukhtankar

A graduate from St. Xavier’s College, Preeta Sukhtankar  co-founded  The Label Corp. The company focuses on celebrity expertise for suggestions and acts like an “editorial” brand. Working with celebrities like Suzanne Khan, Malaika Arora Khan and Bipasha Basu, the startup has further plans to expand its celebrity portfolio, and to create virtually real-time environment for its users, with the expertise of top celebrities in the industry. Label Corp is backed by  Kalaari Capital.

Pranshu Bhandari

Pranshu, a graduate from NMIMS, Mumbai, co-founded CultureAlley along with Nishant Patni and a team of six other in December 2012. CultureAlley provides audio-visual lessons to help its users learn language at the comfort of their homes. Personalised in real-time to serve to the needs of the user, it can be accessed even while browsing Facebook or Twitter.

CultureAlley has received $345K in total from angel investors in three rounds of funding. The startup has a userbase of over 400 thousand users in 220 countries, around the globe.

Sairee Chahal

Sairee, the founder of Sheroes.in, is on a mission to empower women. Sheroes helps women find a suitable job. Sheroes recently raised $770K in an angel round of funding led by Ragahv Bahl & Ritu Kapur’s Quintillion Media (publishers of TheQuint.com) and 500 Startups. The round also saw participation from from Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Rajan Anandan , Flipkart’s Binny Bansal, Mekin Maheshwari, Girish Mathrubootham, Indus Khaitan and Krishna Mehra.

Sakshi Tulsian

Sakshi is an engineering graduate, had worked with several software companies including Sapient technologies, Technoapex and Web sanchar, before she co-founded ‘Posist’ with her husband, Ashish Tulsian in September 2011.

Posist is an SaaS-based eatery management system for the country’s growing restaurant industry. The main features include customer relationship management, inventory, delivery, take-away and table orders. The web-based service provider had raised approximately INR 3 Cr. via LetsVenture and plans to expand its user base over the country.

Suchi Mukherjee

Limeroad was started in 2012 by Suchi along with Manish Saksena, Ankush Mehra and Prashant Malik. The company has raised a funding of $20 Mn from Lightspeed venture partners, Matrix partners and Tiger Global.

Limeroad, a fashion discovery portal,provides users with latest range of products and accessories, 80 percent of which are unique to their own portal. It has  a product listing of over 200,000 products.

Aditi Gupta

One the most common taboos is Menstruation, but with time, it is getting the attention that is needed for the society to accept the fact and talk openly about it. One such initiative has been taken by Aditi Gupta. In 2012, she co-founded Menstrupedia with Tuhin Paul, a crowdfunded initiative. The company provides a resourceful guide about menstruation which helps women to stay healthy and active during their menstruation.

Upasana Taku

Upasana Taku is a graduate from NIT Jalandhar and  masters in management science and engineering from Stanford University. She started a career in payments and financial services which spanned a period over eleven years.

She is the  Director and CEO at Zaakpay.com and apart from her job, Upasna, co-founded MobiKwik with Bipin Singh in 2009. Mobikwik has recently raised $25 Mn in its Series B round of funding from Tree Line Asia and others. It was reported that the company is now planning to raise another $100 Mn for its next round of funding.

Valerie Wagoner

Valerie, an Stanford University alumni has been a part of companies like eBay, Ning and SayNow. In 2013, she was also named as the top innovator under 35 for India by MIT.

In 2010, she founded ZipDial which is a leading mobile analytics and marketing platform.

The company received an undisclosed amount in three different rounds of funding, before getting acquired by Twitter.

Shubhra Chadda

Shubhra Chadda co-founded the Bangalore-based startup Chumbak with her husband, Vivek Prabhakar, in the year 2010. The company offers attractive products which include accessories, phone covers and other lifestyle products. Initial investment in the startup was fulfilled by Shubhra and Vivek after they sold off their house to raise INR 45 Lakh. In 2014, the company had raised $2 Mn from Matrix Partners and Seedfund. Earlier in 2013, the startup had raised its seed round of funding from Seedfund itself.

Malini Agarwal

After graduating from Delhi University, Malini had worked with several media giants before starting her blog Missmalini.com, which covered all the gossips from the world of fashion, entertainment and Bollywood in 2008. Started as a hobby to fulfill her writing needs which Malini was fond of. But soon, she left her job to concentrate on the blog.

The startup raised an initial angel funding in early 2012, and looks forward to raise another one  this year.

Sabina Chopra

With over 16 years of work experience, Sabina, who headed operations for ebooker (Europe’s largest travel company) in India, launched Yatra.com in 2006 along with Dhruv Shringi and Manish Amin. In 2014, the company raised around INR 140 Cr in a funding round led by IDG Ventures and Vertex Ventures along with other angel investors. In a bid to stay ahead of its competition, the company has recently announced the launch of its new homestay accommodation at about 14 leisure destinations and eight business centres.

Chitra Gurnani Daga

Chitra Gurnami co-founded Thrillophilia Adventure Tours Pvt. Ltd. with Abhishek Daga in May 2009 In Bangalore. Thrillophilia is an online marketplace for tours and activities which lets one can discover, compare and book tours and activities. The website has more than 1 Mn visitors every month and is growing at 200% annually. The startup raised angel round of funds in September 2013.

Prukalpa Sankar

Prukalpa Sankar is the co-founder of SocialCops, that has raised capital of worth $320k led by 500 Startups, Rajan Anandan (MD, Google India) and Manoj Menon (MD, Frost & Sullivan APAC).

Her flair to do something for the society pushed her to found a data technology company that uses technology to turn citizens into key decision makers and to make data driven decisions in public health, education & infrastructure.

At an early age of 10, Prukalpa coded an HTML website for Harry Potter Fans around the world. During her graduation, she founded the Singapore Entrepreneurship Challenge, an event which sees participation from over 150 startups every year.

Prukalpa is based out of Delhi and is a graduate in Biomolecular Engineering and Entrepreneurship from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. She has also worked with Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil.

Ashwini Asokan

Before founding Mad Street Den with her husband Anand Chandrasekaran in 2013, Ashwini Asokan, worked as a mobile portfolio manager at Intel and at Imprint Colour Graphics.

MSD focuses on AI and its flagship product is a visual search engine which can be used by fashion based ecommerce websites. The startup has several visions to deliver life changing experiences to its consumer base. In January 2015, the startup had raised $1.5 Mn from Reservoir Investments’ Exfinity Fund and GrowX Ventures.

Neeru Sharma

Neeru Sharma co-founded Infibeam.com with Vishal Mehta, Vijayakumar Subramanian and Sachin Oswal in 2007.

Being an engineer with an MBA degree from Carnegie Melon University, Neeru, had worked with Amazon, US in the department of corporate development and media retail. She  played an important role in $850 Mn Zappos acquisition before founding Infibeam.

The self-funded startup was initially funded by Vishal Mehta with a sum of INR 10-15 Cr. The firm has executed two acquisitions so far – picsquare.com, a personalised photo printing website in 2008 and Odigma, a digital marketing company for $5 Mn in 2014.

The startup had filed the draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with SEBI for a public issue of its equity in June 30th, this year. It became the first ecommerce company in the country to be listed with capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), giving its approval to the company to raise $69 Mn.

Pankhuri Shrivastava

Pankhuri is the co-founder of Bangalore-based startup, Grabhouse.com, an online portal used to search for roommates with similar requirements and budget. The startup had initially raised capital from Chetan Bohra and Navin Ranka of RB Partners.

The  motivation to start Grabhouse stemmed from the fact that despite so many real estate websites, the problem remains unsolved. Grabhouse aims to cater to the problems of youths moving cities frequently and bachelors who are looking to share rent  who are not willing to pay brokerage. The company has recently raised $10 Mn in its Series B round from its existing investors Sequoia and Kalaari Capital.

Rashi Choudhary

The team of Rashi Choudhary, Karan Mehrotra and Amit Naik launched LocalBanya.com in May 2012 which was Mumbai’s first online supermarket store. It aimed at delivering the best quality products with the widest range.

Rashi, an MBA from SP Jain Institute of Management Studies started off her career with Ernst and Young and switched few companies during her professional career, until LocalBanya happened to her.

Surabhi Dewra

After working as an engineer at Freescale semiconductors and as a promoter at Catalog Educational Services, Surabhi,  decided to implement the idea of exploring the education sector and providing a better quality of education. A holistic approach towards career counseling was missing in the country, and this is what inspired her to start Meracareerguide.com in 2009. An undisclosed amount has been invested by Vishal Gondal and Ronnie Screwvala in the venture.

Suruchi Wagh

Co-founder of  Jombay.com, Suruchi Wagh, has done her engineering from College of Engineering, Pune in India and moved to the states to pursue her masters from University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Suruchi  along with Mohit Gundecha co-founded  Jombay.com in 2010.  Jombay, a talent research and analytics company, has raised funding from VentureWorks India, led by ex-Goldman Sachs MD Keshav Sanghi and the Chairman and founder of Systems Plus Group of companies, Nikunj Jhaveri.

Jombay works with companies like Nestle, Kotak Life, Taj Hotels and Tata AIA among others and has analysed over 1 Mn professionals.

Anu Sridharan

Anu is the founder of NextDrop, a company which allows Indian residents in the urban areas to track the availability of piped water through SMS. Anu has Bachelors in Civil Engineering and a Masters in Civil Systems Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Her Master’s research focused on the optimization of piped networked systems in developing economies to her credit. Anu has also been selected to the Forbes “30 Social Entrepreneurs Under 30″ list.

Pooja Warier

Pooja Warier is the co-founder of UnLtd. India and Bombay Connect. UnLtd. India is a premier incubator for social entrepreneurs in the country while Bombay Connect is India’s only co-working space dedicated to social change. Pooja even runs Journeys for Change, which is a travel company aimed at inspiring leaders into social enterprise through journeys.

Before co-founding UnLtd India, Pooja worked with a range of organisations and initiatives like the World Social Forum & M.V. Foundation. She has a MA in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.

Priyanka Agarwal & Anshulika Dubey

Priyanka and Anshulika are cofounders of Wishberry, a crowdfunding website based in India. These ex-McKinsey consultants started it in 2012. Priyanka is an Engineering and Management graduate from Wharton and Anshulika is an English Literature graduate from Miranda House. The platform mainly accepts creative projects for film, music, theatre, dance, photography, art, design, comic and other publishing. It allows people to pitch their projects to friends, family, fans and everyone else out there who can contribute funds for their projects/dreams.

Wishberry has raised over INR 3.5 Cr. for 150 projects, from 8,500+ funders across the world.  Contributors on Wishberry get rewards in return for their funds, such as VIP access to the project launch and early adopter discounts. In January this year, it raised INR 4 Cr. funding from group of investors including Shankar Mahadevan, Google India’s MD Rajan Anandan, Sharad Sharma, and other angel investors.

Ritu Soni Srivastava

Battling weight gain with her strong will after trying multiple things, Ritu Soni, a seasoned marketing professional with 12+ years of experience in media and telecom, realized that many people could benefit from her journey and experience. Thus was born ObiNo(say No to Obesity)- a Mobile Weight Loss Coach. Unlike traditional weight-loss mobile apps, which focus on counting calories, ObiNo, a mobile weight loss coach works just like a real-life coach on the  Recommend-Remind-Reward model.

It tells you exactly what ‘you’ should be doing to lose weight while reminding you to do it at the appropriate hour, and also informs when the program would reap rewards. All this is done in a group, with other like-minded people, keeping you involved and motivated. In January 2015, the startup raised a pre-seed round in January 2015 from Healthstart, a health-tech Incubator from Delhi. 

Priti Shah

Priti had started her career as a lecturer, post which she took up the role of a travel consultant at Highland Tours and later a business partner at CD Tours and Travelslater. She entered the startup world as Vice President (Ecommerce) at E-Billing Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (EBS) in 2005 and was later promoted as President (ecommerce). EBS was acquired by French payment giant Ingenico.

In 2013, Priti launched Paynear Solutions Pvt. Ltd. alongwith other EBS founding members including Anil Bharadwaj V, Maulik Shah and Prabhu Ram. The company offers Paynear mPay, a mPOS solution that enables merchants to accept card payments and includes a Bluetooth chip and pin card reader, and a mobile app to track and manage merchants business; and Paynear CRM that tracks sales, manages products, and runs business. Its solutions are used by various merchants ranging from small and medium businesses to large enterprises, as well as neighborhood stores.

Priti holds a Doctorate in Management from the National Institute of Management Studies.

The post Inspiring Stories Of Some Amazing Women Entrepreneurs Of The Indian Startup Ecosystem appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

The ecommerce players in India find themselves in a tough spot again, after the Delhi High Court on Thursday directed the Delhi government to probe 21 ecommerce websites for possible breach of foreign direct investment (FDI) laws.

The petition was filed by advocate Rishi Agrawala on behalf of All India Footwear Manufacturers and Retailers Association (AIFMRA) in July. The list includes biggies like Flipkart and Snapdeal. Although, Amazon India does not figure in the list, is 100% subsidiary Junglee.com is on the list.

The government informed the Delhi high court justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw that probe is already in motion for six ecommerce companies to identify any FDI breach. He asked the government to expand its probe to all the 21 companies and has granted four weeks for the complete investigation and report filing.

This probe might just open up a can of worms, and disturb the rapidly-growing ecommerce ecosystem in India. This move might also expose the loopholes in the country’s law and the callousness with which money is being invested.

“The government needs to come out with clear laws pertaining to FDI for ecommerce companies. There are a lot of grey areas which leads to complexity in compliance. More importantly, the local retailers need to find other ways to fight competition with online players. Both formats are here to stay, and offer a strong value proposition to consumers and I’m sure viable business models can be created,” said Ashish Taneja, MD &  co-founder of growX ventures.

He believes that using the FDI angle to cut down the growth of online players could result in some short term interruptions and nothing else. A level playing field of both online and offline players on FDI should be included.

As per the law, FDI is not permitted in ecommerce. However, most of the ecommerce companies are funded by foreign investors, indicating a breach of FDI laws. Some of them claim to be marketplaces and since FDI is allowed in marketplaces, they deny any breach. Others use complex organisational structuring to channelise their funds, thereby either getting around the law or shroud a potential breach. Many offline retailers accuse these foreign-funded players of portraying themselves as marketplaces but engaging in retail activities and selling directly to customers.

Ashish also believes that delaying the decision on FDI for ecommerce and multi-brand retail is also leading to all these complexities. But online businesses are generating multi-billion dollar in revenues, clearly shows that there is consumer demand and such ventures are here to stay.

Here’s the list of the 21 ecommerce players facing the probe:

1) Flipkart

2) Snapdeal

3) Jabong

4) Yepme

5) Shopclues

6) Homeshop18

7) Zovi.com

8) Fashion and you

9) Myntra

10) Limeroad

11) Fashos

12) Voonik

13) Firstcry

14) Infibeam

15) American Swan

16) Heel and Buckle

17) Fashionara

18) Elitify

19) Junglee

20) Darveys

21) Famozi

The post Delhi HC Directs Govt To Probe 21 Ecommerce Companies For FDI Law Breach appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Housing.com has informed of its decision to focus on home buying and selling business and scale down all other verticals including listings and rentals. The company has laid off over 200 employees. This layoff is also meant to drive further efficiencies across the company. With this development, the company will be reorganising its teams to execute the new strategy.

Startups also lent a hand to Chennai in mitigating the woes of the flood. Ola deployed boats in water logged and partially submerged areas of Chennai in order to help citizens who were stranded in waterlogged Chennai. This was done in cordinatyion and on the basis of information provided by the Fire and Rescue Department of Tamil Nadu. The boats manned by professional rowers and fishermen were also used to provide food and drinking water in specific areas. Both the ferrying services and supplies were offered free of cost. Similarly, budget hotel aggregator Oyo offered rooms at discounted prices to provide a safe stay for people stranded due to floods. Lookup partnered with Bhumi, India’s independent youth volunteer non-profit organisations, to conduct collection of clothes as well as other materials from residents living in different areas of Chennai for donating to the victims of the floods.

Important Developments Of The Week

Govt To Probe 21 Ecommerce Companies For FDI Law Breach

The Indian ecommerce players are in a tough spot again after the Delhi High Court on Thursday directed the Delhi government to probe 21 websites for possible breach of foreign direct investment (FDI) laws.

Bluegape Launches Murmur

Bluegape has launched a new app and rebranded itself Murmur, as part of its mobile-first approach. The move came after Bluegape managed to garner impressive traffic on its platform – over 28 Mn unique views and about 47 Mn sessions.

SilverPush Faces Allegations Of Privacy Breach

SilverPush, a cross-device retargeting company, raised concerns in the US over allegations of privacy breach over its technology. Washington-based Centre for Democracy & Technology has submitted a written statement to the Federal Trade Commision that the exercise of connecting a mobile device with other electronic devices creates ‘new privacy issues’ as it enables user activity to be tracked in a more efficient manner.

Frankly.Me Lays Off Almost 40% Employees As It Pivots

Video micro-blogging platform, Frankly.me, laid off close to 30 employees – about 40% of its team, as the company pivots its business model. The company has shifted its focus from a Q&A platform to a more horizontal video social network.

Flipkart Adopts A New Employee Retention Strategy

In a pioneering move by an Indian ecommerce company, Flipkart sold a marginal stake worth $27-30 Mn (INR 180-200 Cr.), in its employee trust fund to high net worth individuals, over the past few weeks.

Snapdeal Launches Snaptrends

Snapdeal has launched an online fashion trends forecasting service, Snaptrends, for its sellers. With Snaptrends, Snapdeal aims to act as a definitive guidebook for fashion and design product development exclusively for Snapdeal seller partners.

Ixigo Launches Super Value Hotels

Ixigo has launched a new meta-search across curated budget hotels, ‘Super Value Hotels’, on its website. It compares deals across branded budget hotel providers such as OYO rooms, Wudstay, ZO Rooms, Vista Rooms as well as independent hotels in popular locations of all major cities of India.

OYO Readies Cafe, Room Service To Woo Customers

OYO Rooms is venturing into food technology and on-demand housekeeping service to expand customer base. With OYO Café, the company will aggregate the kitchens of its listed hotels to prepare food and sell under its own brand. OYO Care will facilitate on-demand housekeeping service in its listed hotels.

LocalOye Lays Off 60 Employees

LocalOye has laid off 60 members of its 100-member call servicing unit staff as part of it restructuring plans. The company said that the move was a result of the company’s decision to automate the process of hiring service professionals.

Other Developments Of The Week

Pigen Rebrands As “GoPigeon”

On-demand first mile and courier service startup, Pigen, rebranded itself as GoPigeon. The website and the logo have also been accordingly upgraded in line with the company’s new branding, as it moves forward in its endeavour to simplify shipping for more and more users.

Transerv Strengthens Its Upper Deck

Transerv Pvt Ltd has brought in former OnMobile global digital marketing head Asutosh Upadhyay as chief product and marketing officer. TranServ has also named Kaushik Mitra and Amit Kumar Gupta as SVP – product and SVP and head – engineering, respectively.

Mahindra Comviva Enters Local Deals Space; Launches Zerch

Mahindra Comviva, the mobility solutions arm of IT services major, Tech Mahindra, has ventured into the B2C commerce space with a new discovery app for local deals, Christened Zerch. The app aggregates deals/offers from nearby merchants in categories such as food and beverages, spas and salons, and apparels, among others.

Bizpluss.in Adds 32 Suppliers From China

Bizpluss has opened doors for suppliers in China and added about 32 suppliers with 50 brands to its portal, giving them a direct entry into India’s retail ecosystem. It is also planning to expand its wings to add suppliers from the UK, UAE and European countries soon.

Domino’s Pizza Partners With Zippr

Jubilant Food Works, which operates Domino’s Pizza chain, has partnered with Zippr to use latter’s coding method for delivering the orders. The location management platform has developed an 8-character code called a ‘Zippr’ which replaces the four line address. Now, Domino’s online customer will simply use a Zippr code while checking out after placing the order online, instead of entering a four-line address.

Food Startup Hello Curry Ties-Up With IRCTC

Hello Curry has partnered with IRCTC, to supply rail passengers with “wholesome healthy meal options” during their journey by placing orders on IRCTC website.

Stayzilla’s Vedanarayanan Vedantham Joins Simplilearn

Simplilearn appointed Vedanarayanan Vedantham as Senior Director of Marketing and Rajeev K.G as Director of eLearning for enterprise business. Rajeev comes with over 20 years of experience and has been responsible for building and leading roles at companies like Pluralsight and Country Manager at Skill Soft.

Voonik Ditches Mobile Only Approach

Personal shopping app for women, Voonik, announced the launch new desktop experience at http://www.voonik.com. After demonstrating tremendous growth and scale through an app-only strategy, Voonik is all geared up to offer its large and growing customer base with a multi-channel experience.

Zenify.in Expands Product Portfolio

Bangalore-based Zenify.in, a residential rental management startup partnered with Rentomojo,to expand its product and technology portfolio for its customers. As part of the tie-up, Rentomojo will run an exclusive campaign for Zenify’s customers.

FreeCharge Launches Gas Bill Payment service

Digital payments platform, FreeCharge, launched Gas bill payment (pipeline gas connection) service for customers on its website and Android app.

MobiKwik Android App Gets A Complete Makeover

Mobile payments network, MobiKwik has updated its Android app completely by revamping its user interface. Reflecting its deep understanding of user behavior and tastes, MobiKwik has launched home screen cards that allow users to explore the different facets of the mobile wallet and couple of other new features.

Ticketgoose Forays Into West Africa

Ticketgoose signed its first International associate M/s SPuTT Integrated Services, in Nigeria, marking its foray into emerging markets. M/s SPuTT Integrated Services has invested in the platform that enables SPuTT to offer wide range of bus ticketing solutions, which include online booking to its B2C customers, agent ticket booking platform, and bus operator ticketing platform.

Practo – Uber Announced Partnership

Healthcare booking platform, Practo, and ride hailing startup, Uber announced a global partnership. This will enable Practo users across India, Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore able to see the closest Uber available when they get a reminder alert for their appointments. Users can then click the reminder notification and complete the booking process.

Meritnation Crosses 1 Crore Users

Online education platform for K-12, Meritnation.com, crossed 1 crore users mark on its site. As per the company, it is adding 8000+ new K-12 students everyday, and over 60% of new students joining Meritnation do so from a mobile phone.

YatraGenie Launches Hotel Booking Service

Bus ticketing and cab-booking platform, YatraGenie, announced launch of hotel booking service on its platform. The new service has been introduced in 50 Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities that YatraGenie currently operates in. YatraGenie plans to partner with 5000 hotels and expand the hotel booking service to 100 cities by March 2016.

GREX Ropes Ashith Kampani & Joseph Bosco

GREX Alternative Investments Market, a seamlessly integrated exchange-like platform, appointed Ashith Kampani and Joseph Bosco as advisors to GREX, who will bring in their years of deep experience in Capital Markets with them to the company.

HomeLane.com Appoints Google’s Jayanth Mysore  

Jayanth will head consumer experience for HomeLane. Jayanth earlier played an instrumental role in launching and scaling Google Maps and Google Analytics.

DEN Snapdeal TV-Shop Announces Appointment

DEN Snapdeal TV-Shop (DSTS) appointed Amarjot Brar as the Chief of Business Operations and Amit Katyal as the Head of Finance. Prior to joining DEN Snapdeal TV-Shop, Amarjot has worked with Askme and set up Business Excellence, Quality and Customer management across organisations like IBM, Virgin Mobile and Wipro. While Amit had served as Head finance at digital media group TO THE NEW, India division.

MakeMyTrip Ropes In Former Goibibo’s Deepak Tuli

MakeMyTrip has appointed Deepak Tuli, former Co-Founder and COO at Goibibo as Senior Vice-President-Growth Business. In his new role, Deepak will focus on building and implementing strategies for growing new business lines in the accommodations segment for the company.

PayUmoney To Make Ticket Reservation For Heritage Monuments

PayUmoney is collaborating with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and Canara Bank to facilitate online booking of Heritage Monuments.The move is aimed towards supporting the digitization of ASI’s service offerings under the Digital India campaign, allowing tourists have fingertip access to several prominent cultural heritage sites.

Simplilearn Launches Course On Apple Watch Application Development

Simplilearn, a global provider of online training and professional certification courses, launched its Apple Watch Application Development course. Intended for both aspiring and professional developers, the course is designed to equip individuals with the knowledge and skills to develop any iWatch app they can dream up and aim to create.

ClearTax Launches TaxCloud Application

In a move that could significantly ease the process of e-filing tax returns for enterprises, ClearTax has launched the TaxCloud mobile application ​for CA firms. ​The tax cloud platform hits a key milestone of over 10,000 CA firms across India this November.

The post News Roundup: 11 Stories You Don’t Want to Miss This Week [16 November – 21 November] appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

If you’re an entrepreneur or married to one or are friends with one, you will know what we are talking about! Here’s a sneak peek into an entrepreneur’s life. Sit back and enjoy, there’s a marketing pitch coming to you at the end of it (kidding!)

Spirits Will Guide Us Home

They say keep your spirits high and entrepreneurs are known to take all sorts of random gyaan too seriously and let’s add quite literally!

Meri Dulhan Toh Client Hai

We, ‘startup waale’ are accused of spending way too much time on phone calls and rightly so! But if only they knew who’s on the other end of the line. Sigh!

Weekend Not Workend

For most, Mondays are bad but you will never hear an entrepreneur complain, why? Because weekends don’t exist for us and therefore we don’t suffer from Monday hangovers!

Moms Are Our Superheroes

You see that one like and one share on every single post we share on our social media pages? Well, that’s a mother thinking “not sure what this means, have absolutely no clue. Must like it & share it!”

Too Cool For The Razor

Yes, we are hairy! We sport that lush forest on our faces because A) we are too busy to shave it B) Nobody will take us seriously if we are clean shaven!

Our Idea Tank

Fact: Human brain never sleeps. Fact: An entrepreneur’s brain & heart never sleep. We prefer the solitude the morning throne offers, staring at those tiles and jet sprays tickles our grey matter!

The post Entrepreneurs: Up, Close And Personal appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

US-based global incubator and venture fund, 1776, holds has announced the winners of “The Challenge Cup” . Competing for a prize of $175K in cash and over $1 Mn in other investments, over 40 startups from all over Delhi competed in this challenge on November 22nd to impress a panel of judges at the Delhi chapter of this competition.

The startups were judged by a panel of industry experts including Subinder Khurana (co-founder, Bank Smart Solutions), Nikunj Jain (co-founder, angel investor Frankly.me), Prajakt Raut (co-founder, Applyifi and founder, Hub for Startups), Priyank Aggarwal (head, strategy and new business, Philips India) and Ash Goirala, an angel investor.

The Three Shortlisted Startups From Delhi Are:

Maax Market

Founder: Lenin Srinivasan

Description: Maax Market simplifies tasks of marketing managers by automating routine work structure and allow managing custom market profiles for various customer segments.

Truelancer

Founder: Dipesh Garg and Rajshekhar Rajaharia

Founded in: 2014

Description: Truelancer is a curated freelance marketplace with over 200K freelancers, who are available to be hired as developers, designers, content writers, virtual assistants, growth hackers, social media experts etc.

MyPoolin

Founder: Ankit Singh and Rohit Taneja

Founded in: January, 2015

Description: With MyPoolin, users get to plan their hangouts or trips and pool in the money for the same, from the group, sans constant reminders and follow-ups.

These selected startups will get to attend the Challenge Cup regionals in Singapore. The winners of the regionals will move on to the global finals in Washington DC, that is to be held in June 2016.

Ankit Singh, co-founder of MyPoolin said, “It feels great to have an opportunity to showcase our ‘Made in India’ product globally.”

The company is gearing up for the regionals in Singapore. “It’s work as usual and we will be just focusing on improving and distributing our product which will be helpful for the regionals in Singapore. We believe that MyPoolin as a product has a global appeal and there is a great untapped opportunity and winning the finals in Washington will bring us closer to that goal. We will be focusing on improving and distributing our product which will be helpful for the regionals in Singapore,” he added.

Lenin Srinivasan of Maxx Market also shared his views with us, he said, “We came all the way from Chennai in train to participate in this 1776 challenge cup. Throughout our three-day train journey, we were afraid about our participation and we told ourselves that we have to win and there is no other go.”

“It is very important for us to win the finals in Washington. We are a bootstrapped startup and don’t have funding like other companies. Winning the finals is going to get us increased attention and visibility, which will translate into more customers. We also want to help establish thousands of online ecommerce businesses and use our marketing automation and personalisation technology to help them increase their revenues,” said Lenin.

Dipesh Garg, co-founder of Truelancer, believes that presenting in Singapore will be important for Truelancer’s business. They were also recently approached  by Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore – a statutory body of the Singapore Government that aims to develop information technology and telecommunications within the country. He is also looking forward to present his venture in the US at the finals.

How The Challenge Cup Works:

A total of 20 startups will be chosen for each local competition final for which the organiser has chosen 45 cities across the globe to host Challenge Cup Local competitions. There will be 3 winner per local competition which gives a total of 135 winners.

135 local winners will compete for the regional finals, wherein 45 startups will be shortlisted to compete for the global final to be held at Washington DC.

Challenge Cup Matrix:

On November 21, 2015, 1776 partnered with Headstart Network, an organisation dedicated to foster entrepreneurial ecosystem in India, to host the Mumbai leg of Challenge Cup. The winners included Saypay, ShereIt and KITKI.

The post Meet The Three Startups That Won The Delhi Leg Of 1776 Challenge Cup appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Being a father of two adorable girls, Pravin Agarwala was constantly troubled by the news of child molestation, eve teasing issues etc. And then came the real trigger point – the unfortunate case of a little girl in one of the schools of Bangalore. There was lot of public protest and demand to streamline certain security processes. Looking deeper, Pravin realized that there was absolutely no utilisation of technology to keep the rogue elements out of the system; there was no technology-driven deterrent. So, Pravin called up Uday Singh, Group CEO of SIS, Asia’s leading Security Company and also a close family friend. After long debates and discussions they decided to create a system that could, in their own words, ‘SafePower a Billion people’ – a system that worked as a ‘Trust’ platform.  Hence, driven by social needs as well as business potential, they finally ventured into BetterPlace, a digital background verification service.

From verifying the credentials of a potential tenant, hiring a maid, to fulfilling the workforce requirements of large organisations, BetterPlace aims to provide suitable safe living resolutions for all safety concerns through its web-based service and mobile applications.

So far, the company has been bootstrapped and expects to break even by the year end. However, they have closed their discussions with investors and maintain that “announcements would follow shortly”.

Making The Security Apparatus Work

BetterPlace provides simple cloud-based applications to seek or give feedback about an individual. It has a mobile app to make things handy. To hire or partner with somebody, one needs to do a simple search by name or mobile number or valid ID, request to see the profile and make an informed decision about the other person. One can even create a new request for profiling in just a couple of steps. The service keeps the complexities of the current processes completely out and does a near real time profiling at an affordable cost. BetterPlace has launched its product line through HireSafe, PartnerSafe and TrainSafe.

Says Pravin, “We have a vision to SafePower every citizen. We see the problem everywhere. In apartment complexes where we assume safety rather than demanding it (e.g., is the guard verified? is the visitor checked? etc.), in last mile delivery, in hotels and home-stays, in corporates etc. We have launched our services mostly in logistics, on demand services, facility management and private security companies. We will continue to add other segments as we go along.”

The Business Model

BetterPlace has “Safety as a Service” subscription model which organizations can customize based on their needs. Besides profiling, they also deliver online Safety Trainings for all citizens. For individuals and students, the services are completely free. Besides that, they have high-end apps like VisitorSafe, Digital Locker etc. which are part of the social safety awareness programs and are completely free. “We are well on track to close the year with over 50 subscription-based clients and conducting close to 3500 verification checks daily,” adds Pravin.

Piloted in Bangalore, BetterPlace has recently tied up with Commonfloor Groups team, an online apartment management solution provider, to enable instant verification of staff through Aadhaar card in their recently launched solution, Commonfloor Smart Guard. The product is a mobile app that helps housing societies secure their premises by capturing visitor (Staff/ Guest/Vendors) logs digitally and intimate residents on visitor arrival. With this association, BetterPlace aims to break fresh grounds in the B2C background verification space as today most companies in this domain only focus on the B2B segment.

Everyone’s Playing Safe And How…

The verification industry has been in existence for more than a decade now. The industry took off post 9/11 as the IT industry had to mandatorily check the credentials of its staff, especially while working with US clients. Overtime due to demand supply mismatch, there was a huge jump in profiles with fake education or employment certificates.

Observes Pravin, “Based on our data, we can say that around 22%-25% people furnish fake credentials. This is where most of the companies started checking the credentials of their employees before hiring. Today we estimate this industry to be north of $1.5 billion of which white collar verification services take the majority share. However with increased urbanization, digitization and new business models coming up, we are increasingly seeing a massive influx of blue collared and semi-skilled professionals entering the market in an organized manner. The numbers here are well north of 50 million people. As demand for verification of these new segments has picked up, the market size will scale exponentially.”

As far as both India and the world are concerned, there has been a steady rise in the number of companies and apps offering safety related services as a package. Some of the major players include, KPMG, Securitas, Veri Facts, HireSafe, BeenVerified, People Spy, Janta Khoj, Onicra, Matrix India and IBC India among others.

With security concerns on the rise and the global self-service technology market expected to exceed $31 billion by 2020, representing an annual growth rate of almost 14%, these companies are constantly innovating and diversifying their offerings. Broadly classified, these services include, Address Verification, Court Records Check, Criminal Verification (Police), Criminal Database Check, Drug Test, Education Verification, Employment Verification, Reference Verification, Social Media Scan, Court Database Check etc.

Challenges Faced

For Pravin, there were multiple challenges in the absence of structured data. And people looked at safety as a reactive versus a proactive need. Adding to that were other challenges like speed, complexity of processes and scale. However, Pravin claims that with their APIs, near real time data analytics and business innovation, they have enabled easy integration with client processes, simplifying the complexities completely and creating simple decision matrices. They also continue to build the central database, to keep the rogue elements out, which can be used for continuous tracking.

The Road Ahead…

Presently, BetterPlace has launched services for logistics, on-demand services, facility management, cabs and private security agencies etc., mainly focusing on the large blue collar workforce. Soon, they plan to launch services for more than 100,000 apartments pan India.

“We are going to add another 3 verticals this year. We would be launching our new services and be in all verticals early next year.  Our focus has been on HireSafe so far. We are investing heavily on our technology platform to create a data driven real time profiling system. Besides that we would be adding new capabilities in coming months to ensure we have SafePowered citizens,” signs off Pravin.

Editor’s Note

Globally, India currently stands at rank 54 with a crime index of 46.82. Statistics from National Crime Records Bureau has pegged India with a crime rate of 58.11 per 1,00,000 of the population. On the other hand, there are close to 7500 companies in India, which operate just for providing fake employment and educational certificates, according to a report.

While these are sorry figures indeed, they also present opportunity for the safety-as-a-service market. With consumers increasingly opting for self-service products, doing business with a click or a swipe, there is tremendous potential for a service like BetterPlace to play, innovate and surge ahead.

However, there are already a number of a number of existing and established players in the sector. Faced with a security situation, recently, mega brands like Uber and Ola have signed up with safety-check giants like First Advantage and AuthBridge respectively. Operating in the same domain, BetterPlace is up against giants and to be a ‘giant killer’, it needs to continuously innovate, disrupt and build an envious clientele, to create a stir in the market.

[This article is contributed by Abhishek Chanda]

The post Providing Safety With A Click, BetterPlace Aims To Secure A Billion People appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.

Based out of Mumbai, an international voice calling app, Ringo, has introduced local calling service in India priced at 19 paisa/minute. It enables users to call without an internet connection.

Users can call on any landline or mobile no. in the country, without being charged for roaming, STD or top-up cards. Unlike other VOIP apps, Ringo uses telephone networks instead of phone data or the Internet for a phone call.

Speaking on the development, Bhavin Turakhia, CEO & founder of Ringo stated, “Our vision has been to make calling simple, seamless and low-cost for the masses across the globe. Our local calling service is not only the cheapest in India right now, but it is also free of typical telecom-related hassles such as STD charges and differential pricing. In a country where 3G penetration is not fairly high throughout, we also have a strong edge over Internet telephony apps, as Ringo calls do not use data, and are comparable in price.”

Ringo was founded in 2014 by Bhavin Turakhia, a flagship product of Directi. It is a voice calling app that helps customers to get rid of  the hassles of communication, like switching to different apps for calling options, confusing tariff plans, high costs and low quality calls.

Directi’s other products include Flock, Zeta, Radix and Media.net.

How Ringo Works:

Ringo works just like the retro telcos, but to the advantage of its users. It does not eat into users talktime and works on the call flow of a conference bridge. Once a customer makes a call, it  places an incoming call to the initiator of the call and then patches him/her through to the recipient, thus making it dirt cheap. The app has access to the phone-book, hence, saves its users from the pain of saving numbers/contact. However, if the recipient does not have the app (yes, you need not have the app to receive a call) a unique caller number is generated which is reflected on the screen of the receiver.

Ringo is being used in 100+ countries (in the UK and Brazil) with 500K+ downloads across iOS, Android, Windows platform and at Ringo.co platform.

Additionally, the app offers 50 minutes free talk time to every user  for the first time users. It also  50 additional minutes for every friend a user refers to Ringo.

Commenting on future plans for Ringo, Bhavin added, “Our aim is to become a smart, one-stop calling solution for people across the globe. Local calling in India is certainly our biggest step in that direction.”

The post After revolutionising International Calling Space, Ringo Goes Local appeared first on Inc42 Magazine.