In this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, by accident or design, India is excelling at being a fast follower. Whether it is ecommerce, ride-hailing, online grocery, payments or fintech, we may have come late to the party, but sector after sector we are consistently leapfrogging peers in other countries.
Given India’s relatively low financial access, the great inclusion opportunity, and the scope to expand consumer debt-to-GDP ratios, fintech represents the next big opportunity. We have made the argument before that, unlike in most western countries, where the appeal of fintech is in disrupting the status quo among established players – in what amounts to, de facto, a zero-sum game – in India, the fintech thesis is one of market expansion and increasing the size of the pie. And, in this context, the role of a regulator becomes mission-critical. The regulator has to strike the fine balance between consumer protection and organised market development. In this context, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI’s) recently released draft guidelines for a regulatory sandbox hold a lot of potential.
Digital payments represent a significant leap for a country that, till a few years back, had but a handful of participants. The demonetisation was a shot in the arm to digital payments, which tripled to seven percent of GDP in just three years. Revolutionary technologies like machine learning, robotics, and the IoT (Internet of Things) are expected to transform the way people interact, shop and pay. As a fast follower, we should learn from others’ mistakes to make a better mousetrap. In fintech, there are a few interesting examples from around the world that could help catapult India’s fintech ecosystem to pole position.
The UK and 15 other countries have taken the initiative to set up regulatory sandboxes in the past few years, allowing different players in the financial ecosystem to test new solutions. Many incremental, as well as radical innovations, have been tested here thoroughly before a full-scale rollout. India can take a leaf or two out of their books, without having to undergo the same learning curve.
Around the world in regulatory sandboxes
The UK FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) allows traditional and new players, as well as technology businesses, to use the regulatory sandbox and its capabilities. In India, ‘fintech’ companies could either be startups or well-heeled organisations that have even shaped the industry. Recognising this and encouraging collaboration between the two could help launch robust products with better consumer acceptance.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) too lets banks and their technology partners conduct pilot trials with its sandbox. In India, a significant number of banks and startups are developing new financial initiatives and trying to solve for the country’s complex financial needs. Such an approach will provide a level playing field to both. Other markets like Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore, where regulatory sandboxes have emerged, also encourage multiple players to participate.
Innovation in any field requires a flexible regulatory framework. Players and their products operate within existing regulations and their limitations. To address such hurdles, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) specifies exemptions for participants. Eligible fintech companies can test certain products or services in the sandbox for up to 12 months without an Australian financial services (AFS) licence or credit licence. Participants can also use existing legal or fintech licensing exemptions in that duration. This provides leeway for new solutions that may not have seen the light of day within existing regulations. Emerging players in the UAE too can apply to the authorities for specific exemptions while operating through the sandbox, provided appropriate consumer protection measures are in place.
While the digital payments regulations in India are indeed progressive, it will augur well to provide a degree of flexibility without fear of legal sanction. It may also shorten the time to market and help India vault ahead in digital evolution.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) provides guidelines for fintech innovation with the caveat that once the experiment is successful and the entity exits the sandbox, it must comply with the relevant legal and regulatory requirements. A regulatory sandbox is meant to provide new solutions with a wider perimeter for testing, within a controlled environment and with limited consumers. Adhering to all existing regulations may be counterproductive as some innovations could necessitate regulatory amendments in the future. A smarter way to ensure risk mitigation is to check for the intent to deploy to a broader market and an appropriate exit strategy.
The UK FCA appoints a dedicated case officer who acts as counsel for sandbox participants. The officer guides how the innovation fits into the sandbox and advises on safeguards to be built into the product. In India too, having a dedicated guide, either from the regulator or an industry expert, could help new players and innovators understand and navigate legalities. In addition, the player could have a mandatory, documented exit strategy that can be put in motion if the product faces failure. This practice is followed in Bahrain, Singapore, and Eswatini (erstwhile Swaziland).
One of the objectives of a regulatory sandbox is to allow the testing of a wide range of products and services, some of which may not fall within the current regulatory ambit. Many countries today like Singapore and the UK have sandboxes and the frameworks do not explicitly debar any technology from using the sandbox. They encourage its use for new solutions as long as participants conduct due diligence and adhere to the law.
What lies ahead
In India, 40 percent of MSME lending happens through informal money markets. Specifying products like credit information, credit registry, etc. in a negative list, though indicative, may hinder the growth of credit solutions further, in an already underpenetrated credit market. The sandbox could give rise to novelties that solve niche problems but at a slight premium. Mandating low-cost products would deter the development of solutions that are not targeted at the masses. The majority of sandboxes world over provide maneuvering room for such innovation instead of categorically disallowing product types.
An ideal regulatory sandbox framework would be an enabler for the industry. Homegrown fintechs could have instant access to global proprietary technology and platforms of larger participants such as banks and payment networks; tweak their products, test it for scale within the confines of the sandbox and have a ‘ready for market’ product within a short span of time, significantly cutting down their learning curve.
Let’s look at fintechs that specialise in transaction authentication solutions for mobile devices, making second-factor authentication smoother and friction-free. Commerce in India is increasingly going mobile, and with around 200 million smartphone users, cybersecurity is a permanent focus area. Authentication through SMS OTPs have their own challenges but need to become more convenient. What if a fintech solution allowed devices to generate their own OTPs and authenticate transactions, reducing the risk of MITM and other attacks? Using the sandbox, the fintech could test this solution with limited risk, a simulated environment, and select consumer segments. This could help the fintech enhance the proposition, incorporate feedback, scale the solution, and build in necessary controls, moving to effective risk-based authentication.
The RBI’s proposal for setting up a regulatory sandbox is a welcome approach and would catapult India to the forefront of payment innovation alongside countries like Singapore, Australia, and the UK. Allowing players to participate in a regulatory sandbox can introduce avant-garde digital payment products ably steered by the regulator. It will also build trust in traditional and non-traditional players for open collaboration. The regulatory sandbox can indeed be a highly effective tool that demonstrates to the payments ecosystem that novelty in digital payments is required, encouraged, and fostered.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
Postman, the Bengaluru-based platform for API development, announced it has completed its Series B funding round with $50 million, led by CRV and Nexus Venture Partners. The company had earlier raised Seed funding of $1 million in 2015, and Series A funding of $7 million from Nexus VP in 2016. With the fresh round, Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, will join the board of directors at Postman.
After starting it as a pet project, ex-Yahoo employees Abhijit Kane, Abhinav Asthana, and Ankit Sobti built Postman to make it one of the most-popular apps on the Chrome store, which also evolved to be a robust native app for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Postman is currently the only complete API development environment, and its popularity has soared because of its simple and intuitive UI that allows developers to manage every stage of the API lifecycle.
From left to right: Abhijit Kane, Abhinav Asthana and Ankit Sobti, and Cooper at the bottom.
“Postman has created a powerful collaboration platform for the entire API development lifecycle. CRV is deeply involved in the API and micro-services space, and we have been tracking Postman from its early days in Bengaluru. We are looking forward to working with Abhinav, Ankit, Abhijit, and the rest of the team at Postman as they build a foundational software company,” said Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, the Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners, said in a press statement:
“As software development moves from a code-first to an API-first approach, Postman is evolving as the must-have companion for every developer. It has been a real pleasure to have backed Postman from day one. We are super excited about the journey ahead."
Founded in 2014, Postman now caters to more than seven million users, and helps support API development at more than 300,000 companies across the world. The company intends to use the new funding to accelerate its product roadmap, expand its commitment to helping companies leverage the platform across the enterprise, and increase customer support and success throughout the community.
Abhinav Asthana, CEO and Co-founder, Postman, said,
“APIs are the building blocks of effective software – so while software might be eating the world, we know that APIs are eating software. Innovation in APIs will drive the future of software development, and this funding will further accelerate Postman’s growth in the API ecosystem.”
Launched as a product in November 2015, Postman has pioneered the transition of software approach from code-first to API-first. The company has offices in Bengaluru and San Fransisco.
Tsering Norbu’s life seems straight out of the movies. Now 24-year-old, he tried to escape from Tibet at the tender age of 10 but was caught by the Chinese authorities and jailed for a month. Two years later, on his second attempt, he successfully made his way to Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, India, where the Tibetan government in exile - the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) - is headquartered.
Tsering made his way out of Tibet on foot, in harsh winter conditions when Chinese authorities do not monitor the borders as stringently. He crossed over to Nepal, from where he was guided to Dharamsala by CTA representatives. “There is a Tibetan reception centre in Nepal funded by the United Nations. That is where I first went,” Tsering reminisces.
A little more than a decade later, Tsering has his own ecommerce fashion startuppalnor.com, which sells clothes, accessories, and bedding that are a mix of traditional Tibetan and modern fashion.
The young Tibetan entrepreneur is also looking at marrying technology and fashion with his startup but is reticent about details since it is still in the ideation stage.
“There is a lot of scope for innovation at the junction where fashion meets technology. So, we are exploring the various intersections of fashion and nanotechnology, fashion and AI, and fashion and IoT to come up with new innovative products,” he says.
After the CTA took him in, Tsering completed his education from Tibetan Children’s Villages (TCV) Suja school in Mandi, a branch of an integrated community in exile for the care and education of orphans, destitutes, and refugee children from Tibet. He went on to study computer science engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology.
He soon realised that he wanted to pursue entrepreneurship. His dream was given wings last year in August at the Jindal Centre for Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship (JSiE). The centre, a part of the OP Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana, in 2015 launched a programme in partnership with the CTA to support Tibetan entrepreneurship across India.
“Attending JSiE’s incubation programme and business empowerment sessions is like getting your tap water purified in a water filtration plant,” Tsering says.
Addressing the unemployment issue
Jeremy Wade, Founding Director, Jindal Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, OP Jindal Global University, says unemployment has been a problem with Tibetan community in India and the CTA believed that such a programme would help address the issue.
Each year, four to six Tibetan entrepreneurs are selected by the CTA’s Tibetan Entrepreneurship Development (TED) initiative to attend a five-week pre-incubation programme at the JSiE centre in Haryana. The candidates are either at an idea stage or have limited experience in entrepreneurship, Jeremy says.
Jeremy Wade, Founding Director, Jindal Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, OP Jindal Global University with the Batch of 2018
Tenzin Rigthen, 28, is part of JSiE’s first batch in 2015, and now runs a successful restaurantTenzin Kitchen in Bengaluru’s Koramangala area.
Speaking of his experience, Tenzin says, “Before I attended JSiE’s incubation programme, I was just in a business ideation stage. At the centre, my idea become a precise and goal-oriented business model, which is now a successful restaurant.” He is now planning to expand his business with more outlets.
TED’s Executive Programme Officer Tenzin Wangyal says, "Tibetan Entrepreneurship Development (TED) is one of the important initiatives of the CTA. It aims to provide end-to-end business development support to Tibetan entrepreneurs. Our vision is to transform the Tibetan community in exile to become economically sustainable and self-reliant through our role as mobiliser of the Tibetan entrepreneurial spirit so they can partake in national and global opportunities and contribute to the community’s economic wellbeing."
The programme will enter its fifth year in 2019, and 20 entrepreneurs have been a part of it till now. “The age group of the candidates is between 20-40 years,” Jeremy says.
Speaking about the scope of the programme, he says, “While communication and pitching is one aspect, we also help them in business planning, business modelling, and lean startup methodology, while testing their assumptions. The entrepreneurs are taught how to create a marketplace quickly, book-keeping, financial aspects, marketing, digital smarts etc. We also guide them on legal aspects and help them prepare a legal entity for their startups.”
The programme is conducted by OP Jindal’s faculty, external mentors, and established entrepreneurs. Afterwards, the graduating class pitches to the CTA in Dharamsala for a Rs 3 lakh grant, which is like an early seed capital. The success rate of getting the grant has been nearly 100 percent, Jeremy says.
Why the Tibetan community?
Firstly, it had to do with timing, Jeremy says. “The CTA was starting a programme to encourage entrepreneurship around the same time we were setting up our centre. Our mission was growing the number of incubators at that time. Our vision was to focus on inclusive entrepreneurship and focus on a community that would not have the typical resources,” he says.
And secondly, the OP Jindal University had a connection with the CTA, he says. “The Tibetan prime minister-in-exile (his title changed to ruler or regent in 2012) Lobsang Sangay and the university’s Vice Chancellor, C Raj Kumar, were batch mates at Harvard Law School. He had visited our campus. The university had started to and still offers scholarships to Tibetan students. We had also started doing training programmes for CTA officials.”
Lobsang Sangay with Tibetan entrepreneurs and JSiE staff
Interestingly, despite the Tibetan community having been in India for 60 years, the government only recognises them as “foreigners”, and not as refugees. This is owing to the fact that India is one of the few liberal democracies that did not sign the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which defines refugees and makes states accountable for their wellbeing.
According to government data, the Tibetan population in India has, over the last seven years, dropped 44 percent to 85,000 from 1,50,000 in 2011.
The road ahead
According to Jeremy, the future will be for the CTA to run the programme in-house. “They have acquired space in Dharamsala and a centre will be set up there. CTA officials will conduct the programme. We will continue mentoring and visiting the centre,” he says.
The format will continue to be a five-week pre-incubation programme. JSiE will lend support to the entrepreneurs by helping them find mentors, investors, and in scaling.
A helping hand
According to the UNHCR, an unprecedented 68.5 million people around the world have been forced from home. They include nearly 25.4 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18.
JSiE is also keen to help other refugee communities in becoming self-sustainable by taking up entrepreneurship.
Jeremy says, “The refugee population around the world is growing. We met with the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, in Delhi recently. We have had learnings working with the Tibetan refugee community that we can share and apply to other refugee communities in South Asia, Asia, and the rest of the world.”
In the last few years, the world is rife with debates around refugees and refugee-related policies. In fact, US President Donald Trump made promises to keep immigrants and refugees away from the country to ‘ensure safety of jobs for native people.’ But reports and statistics tell a different story.
The National Foundation for American Policy states that 55 percent of $1 billion startups (50 out of 91 such startups) in the US have had at least one immigrant founder.
(From L to R) Tenzin Seldon, Co-founder of Kinstep, TeyEl-Rjula, Co-founder of Tykn.tech, Mursal Hedayat, Founder of Chatterbox
Looking at major tech giants, Google chief Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are both immigrants. Other founders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Steve Jobs are sons of immigrants from Cuba and Syria, respectively. During a speech at the University of Glasgow, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said,
“Our company has immigrants in it that are key to the innovation of our company. Our company depends on diversity. It’s the tapestry of getting people with all different backgrounds and all different point of views that are able to create the best products.”
To put it clearly, the world and its society is built on contributions made by refugees and immigrants.
On the occasion of World Refugee Day on June 20, YourStory presents four startups founded by refugees trying to solve real-life problems.
Tenzin Seldon, Co-founder and CEO of Kinstep
Tenzin grew up in Dharamsala, India and moved to the US when she was a teenager. She pursued her undergraduate studies in Stanford University. As the first Tibetan Rhodes and Harry S. Truman scholar, Tenzin studied Comparative Social Policy at Oxford University.
During her fellowship at the United Nations, she noticed a major challenge among the migrant and refugee youth in the Asia-Pacific region was resettlement.
Realising that technology is a powerful medium to address these gaps, she concluded that a social venture tech startup could be the best fit. Hence, she co-founded Kinstep in 2016 with Adrienne Huesca, a startup and VC advisor, and the COO at Kinstep.
Based in San Francisco, Kinstep is a platform that connects immigrants with employers. The startup ensures that no immigrant is saddled with ‘under the table’ work. Kinstep helps to negotiate full employee rights, so that these workers receive benefits like bonuses and healthcare benefits from the employers.
Tenzin was among the Forbes’ 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneurs 2018. She recalls her own journey to the US and says that a tech service would have made things easier for her. Speaking on migrant employment at MIT-Solve, she said,
"Immigrants show up. They've shown up for work, shown up for this economy, and shown up with their political and social will. When you add an immigrant or refugee, it immediately starts attracting new ideas."
Abdullah Almoaiqel, Khalid Maliki, Tey El-Rjula - Founders of Tykn.tech
Tey El-Rjula started his asylum application in a refugee camp in Netherlands after his five-year work permit was terminated in 2014. There, he noticed that most Syrian refugees could not verify the authenticity of their documents, and had lost their land titles and academic certificates on the road. On his Dutch driver’s licence, his birthplace was unknown as he was born during the Gulf War when all birth registries were destroyed.
It occurred to him that they were all ‘invisible people’. Having seen and lived the hardships that comes first hand for all immigrants, he founded Tykn.tech with COO Khalid Maliki and Business Development Lead Jimmy J.P. Snoek, in November 2016.
Based in Hague, the Netherlands, the startup has developed a platform using blockchain and smart technology where personal data proof can be secured and shared. The company’s main aim is to ‘provide digital access through digital identities.’
Mursal Hedayat, Founder of Chatterbox
Mursal’s mother was a successful engineer in Afghanistan. But after Taliban took over Kabul, the two fled to the UK for safety. There, her mother was left without a job for a decade despite being a civil engineer graduate from the Kabul University with many years of industrial experience. Mursal was four at the time. Growing up, she saw several other refugees facing the same problem.
Knowing that refugees were skilled, educated, can speak English comfortably and contribute to the society in the UK, she decided to close this gap.
Based in London, Mursal’s social enterprise Chatterbox was founded in 2016. It works as a platform where displaced people can impart their culture and provide linguistic training for students and professionals in London.
It has trained over 110 immigrant tutors known as ‘coaches’ who have worked for 2,028 hours. Additionally, 834 learners have connected with refugee coaches. Some of the most popular languages available on Chatterbox are Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin.
Mursal was recognised in the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs list in 2018 and MIT Innovators Under 35 in in 2018. Speaking about her work as an entrepreneur to Women in Foreign Policy in 2018, she said,
“I wanted to become a social entrepreneur because I wasn’t happy with how the world was organised and wanted to be a part of creating positive change in the system.”
Simon (his last name and picture have been kept confidential to protect him and his family in Syria) was an engineering student in Syria who could not complete his studies due to the war. He had to flee his country and settle in Australia, which was not an easy feat. But Simon managed to get a scholarship to complete his studies at the Western Sydney University.
Determined to not let anyone else go through what he had to, he co-developed an app with Alice and Remi called SettleIn, which helps newly arrived refugees in Australia to transition to their new lives. The app helps them connect with case workers, share paperwork and documentation, and plan better future goals.
Simon said he wants people to learn from his experience, and added, “If this app had existed, it would have helped me. It would have saved a great amount of time and money.”
The trio was selected at a startup incubator programme at Pollenizer and won Australia’s Techfugees in 2018 - the country’s first hackathon for refugees.
Amar Nagaram took charge as the head of India’s online fashion market leader Myntra early this year. Amar succeeded Ananth Narayanan, who was in charge for three years, after spending six years at Flipkart, which owns Myntra.
Talking to YourStory in one of his first media interactions since taking charge at Myntra, Amar says his current role was one he had never expected to be in. “I was in Category at Flipkart in my last role there, but Myntra is hard core fashion. Now, I am a techie doing fashion business,” he says.
Recently, the workforce at Gurgaon-based Jabong, which Myntra acquired in 2016, was absorbed into Myntra, taking the company’s total strength above 2,000 people. US retailer Walmart last year acquired the Flipkart Group, which includes not just Myntra and Jabong, but also PhonePe, Ekart, and Jeeves, among others.
Amar spoke to YourStory when Myntra is readying for its annual flagship sale event – the End of Reason Sale (EoRS) to be held from June 21 to 24. This is Amar’s first EoRS, and supposedly Myntra’s biggest sale event ever. This is the 10th edition of the EoRS, and 32 million customers are expected to shop on Myntra during the next eight days. He opened up about not just the preparations for the EoRS, but also on Walmart and Jabong’s synergy with Myntra.
Kiosks that are more than pick up centres
Although Myntra’s average deliveries on a normal day stand at 300-400, over 1,600 daily deliveries are expected during EoRS. Myntra has set up five first-of-their-kind kiosks across Bengaluru, Delhi, and Hyderabad, in high density areas like tech parks.
In fact, Myntra is launching 30 kiosks by mid-August across key cities to enable easier delivery in high-demand areas. This is expected to lessen the number of delivery attempts, and make it easier for customers to collect at their convenience.
Returns are also accepted at these kiosks, which will be manned by Myntra. Its tailor-partners enable alterations in case of demand, as a trial room is part of the kiosk.
Myntra claims that, on an average, these tailors can undertake 10 alterations per day per center. It also says their pilot at the Manyata Tech Park in Bengaluru over last year led to 7 percent lesser returns. During this EoRS, it will have five centres for kiosks.
Unique strategies
Myntra’s game plan for the EoRS includes games on its app. Amar elaborates, “We started engaging users on our platform 10 days before the event. With three games on our platform, we saw 3.5 lakh users engaging with our platform, playing these games. We also incentivise the gameplay; users win insider coins, which they can redeem during the sale (on top of the sale discounts).”
Another unique approach is to reveal prices days in advance (before the sale officially starts) to provide users the option of ensuring that they get the product that they want without fear of it stocking out. Myntra is expecting three lakh orders in this EoRS through early access.
“The 10th edition of EORS will be the biggest ever with over 2.2 million unique customers. We expect over 5.5 lakh customers to shop on Myntra for the first time... and over 8 million products to be ordered for EoRS 10 with the platform geared to handle a 12,000 orders per minute at peak,” Amar adds.
Innovation for India
Myntra expects about 50 percent of its sales to come from Tier II and III towns of India. To boost its delivery network, Myntra is collaborating with 12,500 stores, which Amar claims, manages 70 percent of the deliveries for EoRS 10.
“The kind of consumer satisfaction we are getting via this network is phenomenal. In fact, we have hit our highest net promoter score (NPS) last month, in terms of last-mile delivery. Under this network, the customer can pick up the order from his nearest kirana store, which has partnered with us, or get it delivered at home from there. Their familiarity with the neighborhood makes it easier for kiranas also,” Amar says.
Walmart has already helped Myntra’s private brands enter Canada. Asked about Myntra’s plans for this year, Amar says the company has not set any targets in terms of expansion to the US. The company has opened offline stores in Bengaluru for its private label Roadster, but he did not elaborate on plans in this regard.
Amar says that this year, Myntra is seeing the consumer experience through the technology lens, more than ever. “We will do deeper investments into technology to enable an enhanced seamless consumer experience. We're looking at very sustainable growth targets for this year. That is growth powered by sustainable investments by being an efficient organisation, and also being smart, driven by data, and technology,” Amar adds.
Nruthya Madappa is the Managing Partner of The CoWrks Foundry. Her passion is in technology and scalable solutions for emerging markets. She was earlier Head of Business Development and Strategy at Cuemath, Product Manager at TeachAIDS, and Senior Associate at Keystone Strategy. She graduated from Harvard Business School and Stanford University.
Nruthya joins us in this chat on the vision of the coworking space and accelerator, challenges facing Indian founders, cohort profiles by sector, international partnerships, and success factors for founders.
Edited excerpts below:
YourStory: What was the founding vision of your accelerator, and how is it supported?
Nruthya Madappa: The CoWrks Foundry was established with the vision to forge resilient and unsinkable companies.
Silicon Valley and countries like Israel, China and Singapore have garnered the support of the government, private investors, and accelerators, and have therefore created ecosystems where startups thrive. Despite a tangible surge in India’s startup community, businesses in the urban tech, enterprise tech, and social enterprise space in particular face unique challenges.
With the rapid expansion of cities, the urban tech sector has ample opportunities to create solutions to leverage this growth but is constrained by high barriers to entry and inaccessibility to qualified industry experts.
The enterprise tech front is confronted with a lack of exposure to global mills, and product and design frameworks. As a result, there lies a huge untapped global market and these startups remain confined to local geographies.
Startups in the area of social enterprise are built with the intention to maximise social impact but their business models do not focus on sustainable growth, leaving this sector severely underfunded and without the ability to attract private sector interest.
Aside from these sector-specific setbacks, there is a range of other issues that plague these high-potential industries. To begin with, there is a dearth of quality industry knowledge. The content of the curriculum provided lacks depth and is rarely crafted by experienced industry veterans. The quality and consistency of mentorship are detached and irregular.
Additionally, entrepreneurs are faced with the dual task of selling to and educating investors, who are unaware of the intricacies of the industry. The CoWrks Foundry addresses all of these bottlenecks by providing unparalleled supervision and support to early-stage startups.
YS: How does this fit into your plans and operations of the co-working space?
NM: CoWrks was established with the vision of creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem - the perfect office space, a network, and partnerships.
The idea of The CoWrks Foundry was forged to strengthen this vision. It is the missing link between entrepreneurs and the right mentorship in the ecosystem and creates a symbiotic ecosystem within the CoWrks community.
A cycle of startups, SMBs/SMEs, and large enterprises feed off of each other. The companies at The CoWrks Foundry could help the companies in the community, and the industry veterans in the community guide these startups.
With CoWrks, early-stage entrepreneurs can leverage the large network of corporations and enterprises within all our centres. We can support India’s thriving startup ecosystem by providing them with the space, educational resources, mentorships, and connecting them with the rest of the world through our global network.
YS: How many cohorts have you had, and which startups have graduated from your accelerator so far?
NM: In the past ten months, The CoWrks Foundry, as a part of its core programme, has invested in 18 companies across three cohorts. In our Core Programme Cohort 1, four companies graduated in December 2018.
UnderstandBetter, founded by Pankaj Harita and Swaathi Kakarla, helps companies manage people intelligently with an AI-powered HR solution that provides customised, contextual solutions for employee engagement. With the ability to grasp the context and adapt to situations, UnderstandBetter addresses broad-based human resource needs. The platform continually monitors and evaluates employee sentiment through contextual questions tailored to each employee. This is, in turn, converted into retention mapping and engagement insights.
Ayasta, founded by Ravi Teja Avasarala, Saideep Reddy Kandakatla and Raghu Kumar Manchukonda, combines sensors, ML, and computer vision. It ascertains deterioration, and predicts faults and impending risk within a facility and in the external electrical grid. Relevant, timely information and a comprehensive library of signatures help to prevent failures, reduce downtime, and eliminate the need for intermediaries.
Betterly, founded by Lakshmi Sreenivasan and Sandeep Malhotra, is an anonymous, personalised and economical tech-enabled platform to address mental health issues. Certified professional counsellors and psychotherapists interact with users through text, audio, and chat. With over a hundred users, the data gathered helps to build a smart platform that can deliver improved mental health care.
T-Scale Hub, founded by Nagalapuram Harshvardhan and Pravasith Kumar, is an online marketplace for architects and vendors. Firms or individuals can review the work of desirable candidates by paying a subscription fee, and vendors can advertise their products and services to the architecture community, generating additional revenue.
The second Core Programme Cohort 2 has eight companies as part of the ongoing programme. The Urban Works Innovation Challenge Cohort 1 has six companies that graduated in May 2019. Five of them are Indian startups and the sixth is a student team from Columbia School of Engineering.
ValetEZ, founded by Prashant Chandrasekaran and Smit Kant Raturi, is a smart parking and mobility solution. It builds and operates a mobile, cloud and IoT-based parking management system to digitise and organise parking infrastructure.
Synapptra, founded by Anil Bhatnagar, Vikram Yadav and Dheeraj Batra, has developed a hybrid edge computing device that provides predictive intelligence for improving the performance of workplace assets. It aims to reduce energy costs and wastage by 30 percent and improve air quality through efficient control and management of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and lighting in buildings.
Suchitha, founded by Shyam Sasidhara and Momy Saikia, has designed a bio-waste processing technology that offers a decentralised waste management solution and can convert wet waste into organic manure in just a few hours. The solution aims to address the problem of waste that is produced on a daily basis, thus reducing the need for disposal and transport of waste. Furthermore, the organic manure produced from recycled waste will create a source of income and help foster organic farming.
Hexpressions, founded by Abhimanyu Singh and Shilpi Dua, has created a new construction material and process involving composite-paper honeycomb panels. By applying this to wall spaces, furniture systems, and other workspace infrastructure, the company aims to promote green buildings that are not only sustainable but also durable, soundproof, affordable, fast, flexible, and modular. The use of honeycomb panels can help reduce the world’s carbon footprint by reducing the dependency on damaging construction materials.
Indra, founded by Krunal Patel and Amrit Om Nayak, focusses on the treatment of wastewater and the purification of industrial and chemical effluents by using advanced automation and analytics.
BinIt, the Columbia student team led by Raghav Mecheri and Ajit Akole, has developed a recycling station that uses elements of machine learning as well as mechanical sorting to sort out waste. It eliminates the need for humans to decide what to put where in recycling bins.
We launched applications for Cohort 2.0 in December 2018 and completed the selection process in February. Companies in the portfolio include Ayasta, Huviair, and Betterly. Companies like Ayasta (Cohort 1) and Huviair (Cohort 2) work with enterprises to use their data more intelligently, thereby minimising inefficiencies, improving safety, and enabling businesses to focus on their vision of transforming urban development.
Focussing on the people that drive successful businesses, Betterly (Cohort 1) aims to build a high-performing and resilient workforce by providing employees with access to mental health care solutions through a tech-enabled platform.
YS: Which startups are currently being accelerated?
NM: The following companies are a part of Cohort 2.0 of the Core Programme.
Instoried, founded by Sharmin Ali and Anit Bhandari, is an AI-based augmented writing tool optimising emotions in content to evaluate writing standards. It is now also going vernacular. With about 100,000 users, it is adopted by content marketers in BFSI, FMCG, and travel industries.
Huviair Technologies, founded by Arjun Janananda and Vikshut Mundkur, offers drone data analytics software for enterprises. The company refines custom unmanned aircraft service and software solutions for survey and workflow management.
Bhorzvan Motors, founded by Nishant Kalbhor and Rohan Shravan, is an EV platform providing high performance customisable electric motors, motor controllers, battery management systems, and related electronics.
Lockn Technologies, founded by Tharun Reddy Chinthala and Krishna Teja, has developed SIMSIM, which is a hardware and software infrastructure for homeowners to manage their property and remotely grant access to visiting guests.
BotSpace, founded by Bilal Chaglani and Mayur More, is a B2B platform that lets businesses deploy end-to-end chat solutions to automate customer service without coding, training, or bot deployment knowledge. The company has pre-designed conversational templates that can be deployed within seconds.
Yogya, founded by Sugam Malviya and Agam Malviya, provides an online corporate learning platform with self-paced mobile-friendly courses. The courses include interactive content and gamification. They provide job-oriented skills with specific curated learning paths for the employees.
HappyLocate, founded by Ajay Tiwari and Sainadh Duvvuru, is a one-stop solution for end-to-end employee relocation services. With over 25 relocation partners, HappyLocate also takes care of service delivery through the partners.
YS: What are the selection criteria for startups in your accelerator?
NM: We look for formidable founding teams, innovative and disruptive ideas, product-market fit, and scalable product and technology stack.
Founding team: The founding team should consist of not more than three capable, driven, and self-aware individuals. We place a huge emphasis on discovering the mettle of our founders. We don’t want people who settle, who take the obvious route. We see them for the unique combination of talents and drive that they inherently possess.
We look for teams that aren’t afraid to break their stereotypes, notions, ideas, and the status quo because they have the resilience to build it up far stronger than it was before. In a changing, unpredictable world, coming up with quick yet brilliant ideas is an uncommon skill.
Working with huge doses of imagination allows a founder to keep an open mind, leading to greater flexibility and adaptability, which is a great recipe for success. We want to work with resourceful teams, who can accomplish great things with very little. They are also more likely to have a better sense of value as they assess possible scenarios and outcomes.
We need founders with a sense of self-awareness, who play to their strengths and will ask for the support they need to overcome their shortcomings. We provide mentorship unlike any other accelerator programme in the market. To get the most out of it, entrepreneurs will need to willingly dedicate significant amounts of time and effort towards acquiring the expertise they need to drive a company. Founders who take feedback well and adapt quickly will benefit the most.
Innovative and disruptive ideas: We are looking for novel ideas in a growing or disruptive sector that are born from intensive research and insight. We will work with teams that can demonstrate a deep understanding of their industry.We are looking for products that have already been developed, with the potential for rapid scalability — the product must be extendable into a distinct brand or company.
Product-market fit: What is vital to a product’s success is its ability to address the pain point of customers. The product should offer customers a compelling solution, turning them into advocates. Founders must exhibit a deep understanding of the market and articulate their market research, experiments, iterations, and findings in their quest to develop a solid product.
The product must be extendable into a distinct brand or company. Startups should have dedicated a significant amount of time and research to identify a large, viable, and growing market, and validate the need and prospects for their product in the target market.
Scalable product and technology stack: We carefully select startups building products that can scale globally. We analyse products that can be integrated into our own larger product portfolios or open up new lines of compatible business. We are looking for commercially sustainable business models that can significantly scale up from early customers to a larger market
YS: Who are some of your institutional partners, and what kinds of agreements are in place?
NM: In addition to the biannual core accelerator programme, The CoWrks Foundry has built dedicated programmes with top global universities like Columbia, Yale, and Brown University to support innovation around complex issues in the developing world.
These unique partnerships bring smart capital, research mindsets and frameworks, impactful mentorship, academic expertise, and access to global networks to the chosen startups. The university partnership programmes are aimed at creating enduring tech companies out of young startups through exposure to global standards in research, technology, product design, and business acumen.
For example, our Urban Works Innovation Challenge with Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science is focussed on interdisciplinary design-concepts for transforming 21st-century workspaces into innovative, sustainable, and productive environments.
The six startups from the first year have built solutions in construction, parking, building intelligence systems, recycling and composting, and wastewater management. The coming year will focus on supporting startups innovating for inclusion and security in the workplace.
The Sustainable Health Initiative with Yale School of Public Health and the Yale School of Medicine addresses innovation for long-term social, health, and environmental impact in emerging economies. This year, we are investing in eight innovative startups that are building new age solutions across maternal health, infectious diseases, and healthcare accessibility and affordability.
YS: What support and services do startups receive in your accelerator?
NM: We provide smart capital, interdisciplinary curriculum and programming, targeted coaching, events, transformational networks, space and community, and post-programme support.
Smart seed capital up to $50,000 is available in the form of convertible preferred shares. The preferred shares will be converted into equity upon the next round of funding, depending on the issue price, valuation and such other terms and conditions. In addition, we provide technology credits up to $75,000 to the chosen startups.
Our unique curriculum holistically re-engineers founders and their companies, focussing on building the former’s knowledge, skills, and mindsets while evolving a thriving community that stays engaged beyond our six months together. We support startups to stress test their ideas, teams, and business model, and level up.
We connect our startups with an elect group of veterans and industry experts to help them navigate rough waters, receive tough advice, and test for long term endurance. Dedicated coaches are assigned based on the needs and progress of each startup. Founders have ongoing office hours and coaching conversations with their external coach, our panel of internal coaches, and programme speakers. Our commitment is towards building capacity in founders through actionable frameworks and tough practitioners, not gyaan or personal anecdotes that might not add value.
We also curate exclusive spaces where our founders interact with the larger ecosystem. We go the extra mile to ensure that we open doors and provide our startups with high-level access that will change the company’s growth trajectory. Apart from networking with fellow founders and the larger startup ecosystem, teams can leverage strong market access with warm, personalised introductions across the extensive CoWrks member network and coaches across our various international programmes, and investors aligned to each domain.
All our startups have access to the innovative workspaces at CoWrks and the diverse community who serve as their consumers, potential clients, and partners. Our founders also have the space to interact and support each other after our time together, through alumni groups, regular Founders’ Salons, access to our internal coaches, and exclusive event invites. Founders can pay it forward by becoming our next Entrepreneur Emeritus as well.
YS: How would you differentiate your accelerator from the other accelerators in the field?
NM: We believe companies can thrive when led by founders who are self-aware, gritty, and highly skilled. Our secret sauce is a programme that keeps our founders’ learning as individuals and as part of a close-knit, curated community.
We overcome the shortcomings of models simply ported over from abroad and lean towards building solutions from the ground up. We help go beyond jugaad and shortcuts to overall competence, integrity, and skills.
We have a founder-centric curriculum, designed to build bulletproof basics with a keen awareness of the self and the company. We help founders go beyond unconscious incompetence to effortless competence, in areas from business models to sales teams, via founders’ roundtables, Acid Test monthly report cards, and feedback from coaches.
YS: How can better partnerships be forged between accelerators, industry, and universities?
NM: There is a trust deficit in the industry. We need to build a much larger ecosystem together, by playing to each of our specific strengths to support and scale startups building solutions for complex problems. This collaboration lies at the centre of everything we do at The CoWrks Foundry through our partnerships with top global institutions and large enterprises.
As mentioned earlier, we have built programmes with Columbia, Yale, and Brown University. At CoWrks, we also bring together some of the largest corporations in the industry to power the growth of our startups by shaping the industries in which they are building solutions.
YS: What are your recommendations for Indian policymakers to make business easier for accelerators, investors, researchers, and startups in India?
NM: There is a lot of money floating in the industry that could be plugged-in to power innovation. We need more participation and intentional and in-depth mentoring.
YS: What are your plans for the coming three to five years with respect to new startups?
NM: In the next three to five years, we want to expand our industry focus areas. At present, we accept applications from startups building solutions within enterprise tech, urban tech, social enterprise, and healthcare.
We want to get to a point where we have talent and network to support startups solving complex industry problems. We run multiple programmes across our core programme and university partnerships where we find, fund, scale, and support up to 40 startups each year. We also plan to take The CoWrks Foundry to other cities.
Automobile classified startup CarDekho Group announced its foray into the motor and health insurance sector by launching InsuranceDekho. The online insurance platform has a tie-up with more than 20 health and motor insurance companies. With this, CarDekho is eyeing a target of selling 10 lakh policies per month in the next three years.
Healthians, an online diagnostics startup, was founded in Delhi-NCR in 2014. The team began operations with funding from cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan Ventures in 2015. The startup ended the first year of its operations with a revenue of Rs 1.1 crore and by FY18, this touched Rs 40 crore. In fact, it claims it will reach 250 percent growth this financial year with a revenue of Rs 100 crore. So, why B2C?
Intel India’s Maker Lab is focussing on innovations in hardware and entrepreneurship. In a video interview with YourStory Business Editor Vishal Krishna, Jitendra Chaddah, Senior Director, Operations and Strategy, Intel India, reveals why startups are important in the hardware ecosystem.
Postman, the Bengaluru-based platform for API development, completed its Series B funding round with $50 million, led by CRV and Nexus Venture Partners. The company had earlier raised Seed funding of $1 million in 2015, and Series A funding of $7 million from Nexus VP in 2016. With the fresh round, Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, will join the board of directors at Postman.
The world tends to operate through a binary lens acknowledging only two sides of gender - man and woman. Breaking this stereotype is Teenasai Balamu (24) aka GrapeGuitarBox, a musician from Bengaluru who identifies as non-binary. In a conversation with SocialStory, watch Teenasai Balamu talk about music, gender, and the LGBTQIA+ community, and catch them performing Run.
When Reshma Saujani ran for public office at the age of 33, it hit her that she had done something truly brave. She had taken a big risk without worrying about failure. Reshma didn’t win but the fight gave her a sense of courage. In Brave, Not Perfect, Reshma explores how and why women are conditioned to chase perfection and why it is important for them to get out of the mould and try to be brave.
Education-focused fintech company Finwego raised $1.7 million in its seed round from SAIF Partners. A group of HNIs and angels also participated in this round. Finwego will be using the funds to expand its geographies, focus on developing products, and to expand its team. It is looking to double its team size of 30 members within the next three months, and also planning to apply for an NBFC licence.
When a situation or atmosphere in the workplace tends to make us uncomfortable, we all have those little voices in our head telling us to speak up. But coming forward to talk about it makes us break into a cold sweat for fear of the fallout. This is why Sonali Siddha, Founder and CEO of Woices, believes people should be able to fearlessly voice their opinions.
India ranks among the lowest in the world when it comes to workforce readiness. There is a large gap between what the market needs and the supply of a ‘skilled workforce’. This is primarily because the workforce available lacks the skills required by industry to be employed, especially in the healthcare sector. Traditional healthcare vocational training industry is highly fragmented and has failed to bridge this gap. And hence the need for an intervention!
That intervention is Virohan, an innovative healthcare vocational training solution for Bharat Inc.
(L to R) Kunaal Dudeja (Co-Founder & CEO, Virohan), Prof. Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Laureate, Founder of Grameen Bank), and Nalin Saluja (Co-Founder & CTO, Virohan)
What the Faridabad-based startup provides is a technology-led solution to standardise and aggregate the offerings of the highly fragmented healthcare vocational training industry. It uses a technology stack to lower operational expenses and increase viable penetration by providing standardisation and improved efficiency across operations. The outcome is two pronged: long-term careers with progressive livelihood for youth along with profitability at scale for healthcare vocational training providers.
Nalin Saluja, Co-founder and CTO at Virohan, says,
“While vocational training received a lot of funding from the government and CSR over the last five years, many of the operators who provided training operated low-quality institutions with opportunistic business models and a short-term view. That has negatively impacted the sector and its reputation."
The bottom of the pyramid
With its goal to impact lives at scale, Virohan has focused largely on the low-income segment of the population. More than 70 percent of their students come from households with an income of less than Rs. 2.5 lakh per annum.
As Nalin points out, the healthcare industry doesn’t just offer aspirational career opportunities to students, but great career progression too. According to him, technicians who might start their careers with a starting salary of about Rs 1.7 lakh - Rs 2 lakh a year can start earning Rs 6 lakh to Rs 8 lakh within five to eight years, and even more with the right experience.
“This allows youth from low-income groups to break class barriers and rise up all the way up to upper middle class in one generation. There are very few such opportunities for low-income youth today,” he adds.
What’s even more encouraging is that half their students are women.
But here’s the clincher: 85 percent of Virohan trainees have achieved gainful employment after completing their training programme.
“The majority of our female students who found jobs in the healthcare sector through Virohan have said they feel financially empowered and are usually the first in their families to step out for a job,” Nalin says.
According to IBEF, in 2015, the Indian healthcare sector became the fifth largest employer, employing close to five million people. It is also growing at a CAGR of 22.87 percent over 2015-2010 to reach $289 billion. The number of trained personnel needed too is pegged at 7.4 million, according to the National Skill Development Corporation. This is double the size of the existing workforce, and yet the sector remains under-served.
As Kunaal Dudeja, Co-founder and CEO at Virohan, explains,
“Our goal is to connect at least 250,000 youth with jobs in the healthcare sector by 2024. While that itself is perhaps small, given the scale of the problem, this target itself means an impact on over a million lives. That would definitely mean success to all of us.”
Using apps for the ground network
Virohan has broken down all operational workflows at a vocational training centre into different technology products, each one designed for a different user type. For example, there’s the admissions app for field agents such as 'anganwadi' workers, ‘asha’ workers, etc. Then there’s the mySales app for telecallers and counsellors, a separate platform for financing, and the myClassroom product for delivering blended learning. In the works is a myCareer app for students.
Working with the government
Virohan has also received funding from the National Skill Development Corporation for capacity building and regulatory approval to train and certify students in the country under the aegis of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship of the Government of India. It has also tied up with the Indian Medical Association to run co-branded diploma programmes.
“As a premier healthcare body in India, a diploma endorsed by the IMA gives a fillip to our students’ careers,” Kunaal says.
In the private sector, Virohan works with partners like medical equipment maker GE Healthcare and is starting a partnership with Siemens Healthineers soon, besides 350+ hospitals and labs across India.
It has also expanded its associations to the social impact space. Yunus Social Business, a profit and non-profit venture fund that turns philanthropic donations into investments in sustainable social businesses, is also an investor in Virohan.
Then there is Social Venture Partners (SVP), a global philanthropic movement guided by a simple yet powerful idea: as individuals we make a difference, together we change the world. Through SVP, Virohan gets regular mentorship and strategic advice from two lead partners: Vikas Gambhir (Director at Grant Thornton) and Joydeep Bhattacharya (Partner at Bain & Co.), besides other support from several senior members at SVP India. Apart from that, Priya Shah (Principal at Yunus Social Business) and Paarul Dudeja (Director at Accion Venture Lab) are on Virohan’s board.
The organisation also works with AWS EdStart, an edtech startup accelerator that helped Virohan quickly scale up its technology capabilities, especially in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Technology-first approach
Other players in the skilling space within healthcare vocational training include large corporates such as Vivo Healthcare, Apollo Medskills, and Max Institute of Health Education and Research, among others. There are also startups like Capacita Connect, a Jaipur-based skill development startup that helps students with counselling and skilling and placement/employment to helping industries with the right manpower.
However, Kunaal believes that Virohan’s technology-first approach allows them to provide the skills that are in demand and deliver these programmes at scale because of their deep understanding of consumer behaviour. “This is very different from what our competitors are focusing on,” Kunaal points out. He adds,
“We believe that in the next five years, the healthcare vocational training sector will undergo consolidation where all players with high-quality training will scale...That is exciting for us as the only way this model succeeds is if we are all focused on outcomes.”
Piggy-banking on the JAM trinity
The idea for the Virohan Tech Stack is to create an India Stack-like infrastructure for the vocational training industry. There are huge similarities between the design of the two frameworks. Virohan’s Tech Stack leverages the JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) trinity to be able to solve for the healthcare vocational training industry across aspects like mobilisation, financing, training, certification, and placement. For instance, their trainees receive an accredited digital certificate at the end of their training, which is linked to their digital IDs.
“It is a modular platform with open APIs that enables the plug-and-play installation of any module at any training centre. We use machine learning to leverage the data repository to deliver differentiated insights to various stakeholders. This means we are also able to provide timely intervention for students to improve their engagement and overall likelihood of success,” Nalin says.
He adds that the Tech Stack is built with a deep understanding of user behaviour and future-ready architecture to provide affordable, accessible, and quality training with speed at scale.
Hopeful of a bright future
Virohan wants to re-engineer and lead healthcare vocational training and become the preferred partner of the healthcare industry to meet its workforce requirements, ranging from OEMs to hospitals, labs, diagnostic centres, and clinics.
Overall, this should allow them to train over 250,000 students in the next five years with grassroot-level penetration across the country. While that number itself is perhaps small, given the scale of the problem, this target itself means an impact on over a million lives. And that’s a great start.
The Indian startup ecosystem is thriving and contributing towards a digital India. Today, almost anything can be done online. From ordering food to making payments, getting your groceries, and even getting healthcare services, startups have managed to fill most of the needs of the hour.
And who are the people at these startups building these services? Engineers! And guess what? Startups and companies are looking for more engineers to work with them at various roles. YourStoryhas curated a list of available jobs.
Amazon Web Services
AWS Managed Services-Operations Engineer
Experience needed: 4 years
As a member of the managed services team, the candidate will be working with operation engineers, database engineers, and network engineers. The candidate will have to work on critical, highly complex customer problems that will span multiple AWS services. The candidate will also have to collaborate and help build utilities and tools for internal use to enable AWS engineers to operate safely at high-speed and a wide scale.
As a DevOps engineer, the candidate will have to conceptualise, architect, and build a containerised infrastructure using Docker, Mesosphere or similar SaaS platforms, and also build a secured network utilising Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) with inputs from the security team. The candidate will also have to interface with developers and triage SQL queries that need to be executed in production environments.
The candidate should have a deep understanding and expertise with highly transactional, large relational and complex systems. The candidate should also have hands-on understanding of technology and architecture in a highly scalable environment. The candidate should also be able to provide technical leadership to major projects, build and manage a team of 10-15 top notch engineers.
As Site Reliability Engineer, the candidate should have a good understanding of handling big data technologies like Hadoop, MapReduce, Oozie, Spark, Storm, HBase technologies and should be able to adapt to new technologies as well. The candidate should also have a good knowledge of various NoSQL storage technologies including KeyValue, ColumnFamily.
The candidate should be able to utilise programming languages like Java, Python, and Open-Source RDBMS and NoSQL databases. The candidate should be familiar with leveraging DevOps techniques and practices like continuous integration, continuous deployment, test automation, build automation, and test-driven development to enable the rapid delivery of working code utilising tools like Jenkins, Maven, Git, and Docker. The candidate will have to collaborate as part of a cross-functional agile team to create and enhance software that enables state of the art, next generation big data and fast data applications.
The candidate will join CureFit’s app and front-end team, which is responsible for delivering an exceptional product experience to users, both in terms of usability and performance. As a front-end engineer, the candidate will be involved in feature development, performance improvement, and experimentation. The candidate will need to have hands-on experience working with or building ecommerce products or platforms.
The candidate should have a sound knowledge of electrical distributor system, electrical protection, fault identification and reification, LT panels, and HT side among other things. The candidate will have to carry out on‐site field visit to properties for fault rectification and preventive measures and must ensure minimum blocked kitchen due to maintenance issues. The candidate will also have to prepare and submit timely reports on breakdowns, preventive maintenance schedules, and turnaround times.
As software engineer, the candidate will have to build structure, reusable code and libraries for future use. The candidate should also optimise applications for maximum speed and scalability. The candidate will also be responsible for maintaining, contributing, and adhering to programming practices and guidelines. The candidate will have to create new, world-class user experience using the latest in frontend UX platforms and technologies.
Indian digital payments company Paytm is changing its ‘cashback’ strategy to focus on offline merchant payments at retail kirana stores, rather than giving it for P2P UPI payments. Paytm said it was looking to develop the buying behaviour of customers by using Paytm at offline stores through this change in strategy.
The company said UPI P2P payments, often done by users to gain some extra money, gamify the system and can be detrimental to a cashless economy. The payments giant added that UPI users on Paytm have been using a host of Paytm services for long and don’t need cashbacks to make payments.
Deepak Abbot, Senior Vice President – Paytm, said,
“Paytm will be investing money in offline merchant expansion instead of driving incentive-led P2P transactions. Our offline merchants create high-frequency usage and an important use case for Paytm consumers. By investing in real merchant payments even in the remotest part of our country, we will help expand the vision of Digital India to the grassroots.”
The news comes at a time when the the company is looking to go deeper into Tier IV and V geographies to activate its next phase of growth.
Just last week, Paytm said it would invest Rs 250 crore for the expansion of Paytm QR in Tier IV and V towns this year. Paytm expects to reach more than 20 million merchants across India by the end of this fiscal with this investment. The company at present claims to have more than 1.2 crore (12 million) merchants across the country that already accept payments through Paytm QR.
Pushing offline transactions to merchants would also allow the payment major to activate various financial products for SMEs and kirana stores.
Paytm will invest further in lending and insurance, rather than on P2P payments to help merchants get better access to capital and provide more financial security.
Recently, the payments major claimed that it had achieved a Gross Transaction Value (GTV) of more than $50 billion, while clocking 5.5 billion transactions in FY19. The Noida-headquartered company is aiming to double its growth this year and is looking to cross 12 billion transactions by the end of FY20.
Wysa, a Bengaluru-based AI conversational agent that helps in improving mental health, on Thursday announced it has raised about $2 million (Rs 15 crore) in pre-Series A round led by pi Ventures, with participation from Kae Capital and other investors. The company plans to use this funding to further strengthen its technology and for expansion.
Speaking on the announcement, Jo Aggarwal, Co-founder, Wysa, said,
“Wysa has been co-designed by therapists, users, and designers over hundreds of iterations and 80 million conversations. What people want most is to feel heard, without judgement. Anonymity is the key – people are scared to be seen or judged for what they are going through. We combine the free AI with unlimited support from a qualified therapist, still anonymously, over chat to make it easy to get help.”
Wysa Co-founders - Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati
Founded by Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati three years ago, Wysa is an AI-based ‘emotionally intelligent’ bot, a virtual coach that combines empathetic listening with evidence-based therapeutic techniques like CBT, meditation, and motivational interviewing to make mental health accessible at scale.
The company has so far helped nearly 1.2 million people in over 30 countries.
Commenting on the investment, Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures, said,
“Mental health could very well be the next big epidemic to hit the human race. Training more human therapists will not bridge the massive supply and demand gap. This is where Wysa, powered by an AI engine, comes in. It is scalable and is available for anyone to chat at any time in total privacy.”
The government will not allow foreign companies to operate in multi-brand segment and necessary action will be taken against people indulging in predatory pricing, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said on Wednesday.
The minister said this in a meeting with representatives of associations of kirana stores, traders, and retailers here.
He "reiterated that India will not allow multi-brand retail by foreign companies and on the pretext of B2B (business-to-business) no entry will be allowed for multi-brand retail," the ministry said in a statement.
Goyal also "asserted that predatory pricing will not be allowed and necessary action will be taken against defaulters," the statement said.
He asked all the participants to send their suggestions on the draft ecommerce policy in the next five days.
The policy will be finalised only after taking into account every suggestion received by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), the minister said.
Goyal also asked the traders to use government e-marketplace and MUDRA scheme to promote their business.
Representatives of the associations of kirana stores, traders, and retailers discussed the need for a level-playing field and the impact of anti-competitive practices like predatory pricing and other discriminatory methods that are being faced by them from foreign competition.
In a separate statement, Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which attended the meeting, demanded early formulation of ecommerce policy. It said:
"A regulatory authority should be constituted to regulate and monitor the ecommerce business with adequate powers to penalise or take action against entity which violates the policy."
CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal also said that it needs to be be ensured that all kinds of malpractices, including predatory pricing and deep discounts by e-retailers, should be stopped.
According to FDI policy, India permits foreign direct investment in the multi-brand retail sector with a cap of 51 percent ownership by overseas players.
The government on Wednesday proposed to waive registration charges for electric vehicles to boost adoption of environment-friendly vehicles.
The proposal comes at a time when the country plans high penetration of such vehicles by 2030.
Issuing the draft notification to amend the Central Motor Vehicles Rules (CMVR), 1989, the road transport and highways ministry said battery-operated vehicles "shall be exempted from the payment of fees for the purpose of issue or renewal of registration certificate and assignment of new registration mark".
The exemption will apply to all category of vehicles, including two-wheelers.
The ministry has issued the draft notification for amendments in CMVR where the amendments in Rule 81 are proposed for such waiver.
The amendments will be done in exercise of the powers conferred on the central government under various sections of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. Comments from stakeholders have been sought in a month.
"The said draft rules shall be taken into consideration after the expiry of a period of 30 days from the date on which the copies of this notification as published in the Gazette of India, are made available to the public," the draft notification said.
The objections or suggestions that may be received from any person with respect to the said draft rules before the expiry of the aforesaid period will be considered by the central government, it said.
Last year, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said a blueprint has been drawn to boost production of electric vehicles in the country and take their share to 15 per cent of total automobiles in the next five years.
It is time India should think to promote green vehicles and curb pollution, Gadkari said.
Earlier, to promote electric vehicles in India, the government had approved green licence plates bearing numbers in white fonts for private e-vehicles and yellow for taxis.
News and local language content platform Dailyhunt, on Thursday, said that it has acquired LocalPlay, a hyperlocal video content and news content application.
The acquisition is a part of Bengaluru-based Dailyhunt’s aggressive strategy of attracting new users residing in Tier II, III and IV Indian towns and villages.
Launched in July 2018 from Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh by second-time entrepreneur Gunjan Kejriwal, and Prajwal P, Bengaluru-based LocalPlay has done significant process and product innovation for on-ground news collection and production.
LocalPlay has enabled all its journalist partners across the country to share news on its platform, give editorial inputs and manage their payments transparently through their journalist app.
It raised a seed round from Orios Venture Partners, and other prominent angel investors.
Virendra Gupta, Founder of Dailyhunt, said,
“We saw the need of hyperlocal content is still largely untapped despite the presence of a host of traditional and new age content platforms in India. The latest acquisition of LocalPlay is a part of our strategic focus to penetrate the next billion users of Bharat, and build deep sustainable moats around our business and position us even better as the go-to destination for local language content in India.”
In addition to this, Virendra added that Dailyhunt will scale up and produce five million pieces of hyperlocal content annually, which will be exclusively available on the Dailyhunt platform.
Gunjan Kejriwal, Founder of LocalPlay, said,
“I am really excited to be a partner on this journey with Dailyhunt. We were working on a specific use case of hyperlocal content and realised that users have broader content needs and given that Dailyhunt has the right mix of original, professionally generated and now hyperlocal news content.”
At present, Dailyhunt claims to offer more than 250,000 fresh pieces of news and content artefacts every day in 14 languages, licensed from over 1,300 publication partners.
The Dailyhunt group boasts of having 252 million monthly active users, and close to 188 million monthly active users. The time spent per daily active user is 24 minutes per day consuming over 19 billion page views of content and 2.4 billion video views per month.
Hospitality firm OYO on Thursday said it plans to invest $300 million (approximately Rs 2,085 crore) over the next few years in the US for growth, talent acquisition, competency building, and infrastructure development.
The company currently manages over 50 hotels in more than 35 cities in the US including Dallas, Houston, Augusta, Atlanta, and Miami; and is looking to soon expand its presence to cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, OYO Hotels and Homes said in a statement.
On an average, it plans to add one hotel building per day. This growth will be driven by two brands - OYO Hotels and OYO Townhouse, it added.
"We are already 50 plus OYO Hotels across 35 cities and 10 states and to celebrate our growth, we plan to invest $300 million over the next few years," OYO Hotels and Homes Global COO Abhinav Sinha said.
OYO is thrilled to see its business grow in the US - company's newest home market, he added.
The company is integrating its cutting-edge technology to improve services and enrich the experience of travellers and city dwellers, the statement said.
"As a full-scale hotel chain, we strive to bring real value to both real estate owners and guests, and we're convinced there is unlimited potential for rapid growth in our newest home market, the United States," OYO Founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal said.
Started in 2013, OYO Hotels and Homes has more than 23,000 hotels and 46,000 vacation homes in its portfolio. It is among some of the key names on the shortlist for the UK-India Awards this year.
The awards, which will mark the closing of UK-India Week between June 24 and 28, are being judged by an all-women jury for the first time, and covers a wide range of sectors including business, tech, trade, and social impact.
Last month, the company also launched a 'Cash-in-Bank' facility for its asset owner-partners across India under the company's ongoing OYO Partner Engagement Network (OPEN) initiative. With the 'Cash in Bank' (CiB) facility, asset owners across the country can benefit from quick, collateral-free business advances to upgrade or renovate their buildings, OYO said in a statement.
California and Bengaluru-based Jovian, a platform for data scientists to track and reproduce machine learning experiments, collaborate with teammates, and automate repetitive tasks, announced it has raised $450,000 led by Arka Venture Labs. The other investors who participated in the round include Better Capital, SenseAI, Axilor Ventures, and other individual angel investors from Silicon Valley.
Commenting on the investment, Radhesh Kanumury, CEO and Managing Partner of Arka Ventures said,
“With the proliferation of data scientists across the globe and Jovian providing DevOps capability in that area, it is a great space to be in.”
Owned and operated by SwiftAce Inc., Jovian was part of the Axilor Accelerator programme in 2018.
“Based on our experience and also of our portfolio firms, we had seen a huge gap for continuous collaboration between dispersed data science teams as well access to models under experimentation. We feel Swiftace is well positioned to be a true interactive platform for data scientists,” said Vinish Kathuria, Managing Partner, SenseAI.
The startup, founded by Aakash NS and Siddhant Ujjain in 2018, plans to use the funding to grow its engineering team and further develop the product. It is also looking for community development via meetups, webinars, online courses and hackathons, and customer development in India and the Silicon Valley.
Jovian is building the tools, workflows and collaboration stack to power the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). As per the startup, the platform is language, framework, and cloud-provider agnostic, and easy to try out, and it tracks everything (datasets, source code, hyper-parameters, trained models, etc.) in a simple yet powerful online dashboard.
Speaking about the venture, Aakash NS, CEO, Jovian, said,
“Data science is fundamentally different from software development, as it is much more experimental in nature, and requires you to keep track of many things like datasets, Jupyter notebooks, models, parameters, metrics, etc. apart from the source code. This is currently a very cumbersome process, which hinders productivity and collaboration. We’re trying to change that for the better.”
Using the platform, teams can also discuss and collaborate on their work, and create pipelines to automate analysis and evaluation of models.
“We’ve worked as data scientists for a couple of years, and as software engineers for several years before that. That’s how we realised there’s a huge gap in the quality of tools available to data science teams for managing their work. We started out by trying to solve our own problems, and soon found a lot of interest from the community in tools we were building," added Siddhant Ujjain, CTO, Jovian.
“We have also received interest from data science teams looking to use Jovian for collaboration within their companies, with a willingness to pay for more advanced features. We are currently in the process of on-boarding our first few paying customers,” Aakash told YourStory.
Going forward, Jovian aims to become the de-facto tool for the data science community to share and collaborate on data science projects online, similar to what platforms like Github have done for open source software.
“Our aim is to make Jovian really easy to try out and use for first time users, while at the same time we plan to provide all the advanced features large enterprises might require to manage their entire company’s data science work,” said Aakash.
“While there are many companies that offer cloud-based graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure for running machine learning jobs (e.g. AWS Sagemaker, Google Colab, Azure ML Platform, etc.), we do not compete with them, rather integrate with them and complement them by offering an experiment tracking and collaboration layer on top of these offerings,” he added.
Globally, Jovian competes with the likes of Comet.ml, Weights & Biases, and NeptuneML, among others.
“What sets Jovian apart is that it’s really easy to get started, it works in any language, framework, and cloud-provider, and also has a great support for Jupyter notebooks, a popular IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for data science,” Aakash said.
The startup is targeting a global audience of data scientists, machine learning engineers and AI researchers. While this is an emerging market today, it is expected to balloon to millions of users over the next few years, since many startups and large enterprises are increasing their focus on AI, and setting up in-house data science teams.
“Data Science will be at the heart of everything in the future, and we are likely to have more data scientists than software engineers. In light of that, building productivity and collaboration tools for the new world of data science presents a massive opportunity,” said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital.
Mumbai and US-based Arka Venture Labs has also backed startups like Revvsales and Primaseller previously. Both the startups are based out of the US.
Arka primarily invests in B2B startups that have a minimum viable product (MVP) with a strong potential in the US or in Europe. The new accelerator platform-cum-fund was started with a corpus of about $6 million (Rs 40 crore) with all three funds - India’s Blume Ventures and US-based two VCs (BGV and Emergent Ventures) anchoring the investment.
Biryani delivery startup Biryani By Kilo (BBK) has raised Series A funding of $5 million led by IvyCap Ventures. The company will use the freshly-raised capital to aid its geographic presence across West and North India, and for improving its platform, product, and technology.
As part of the transaction, Ashish Wadhwani (Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures) and Prayag Mohanty (Principal, IvyCap Ventures) will be joining the Board of Directors of Biryani By Kilo.
BBK focuses on Nizami and Mughlai cuisine, and makes different traditional dum style biryani and other complimentary products such as kebabs, korma, breads, and desserts. It delivers individually cooked Biryani in Handis (earthen pots) for every order. The startup serves three different variants of Biryani– Hyderabadi, Lucknowi, and Kolkata.
The company primarily operates under the cloud-kitchen model with few dine-ins at select locations based on latent demand. Over the last three years, BBK has expanded to 20 outlets, operational across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Mohali, and Ludhiana.
The startup is run by Gurugram-based Sky Gate Hospitality Pvt Ltd, and was founded in 2015 by Kaushik Roy, Vishal Jindal, and Ritesh Sinha. The company says that Biryani as a segment has huge potential and is already ranked as the most ordered food products by leading food delivery aggregators in India.
"The biryani market in India is estimated to be approx. Rs 1,500 crore in the organised sector, and Rs 15,000 crore in the unorganised sector as per Industry reports," claims BBK.
Vishal Jindal, Co-Founder & Director of BBK said:
“We are committed to making Biryani By Kilo leading premium pan India and worldwide Biryani and Kebab chain in next four to five years. BBK has the opportunity to be one of the biggest F&B companies in India going forward given the focus, professional team, Biryani Category size and commitment to growth. Biryani category worldwide leader should emerge from India, and BBK is best positioned for that leadership.”
Adding to this, Kaushik Roy, Co-founder and CEO at Biryani By Kilo said: "We have put the foundation of best SOPs, Technology, and operational efficiencies in Biryani By Kilo so we are able to scale as a world class F&B company."
Speaking on the milestone, Yuvraj Singh Shekhawat, Head of Offline BusinessGrowth at PhonePe, said,
“We are excited to reach this milestone and are humbled by the trust shown in us by consumers as well as merchant partners. We will continue to expand our reach across the length and breadth of the country, building innovative solutions that make the process of digital payments simple, convenient, and hassle-free.”
In April, the company announced that the total digital payment transactions on its app crossed the two-billion mark. At the time, PhonePe had attributed this growth to the increasing acceptance across large and small offline and online merchants across the country.
To grow its offline reach, PhonePe also said that it is also providing daily incentives to merchants in line with the auspicious daily ritual of ‘Bohni’, on the first transaction of the day done through the PhonePe QR code. According to the company, every retailer can earn a total amount of Rs 1,400 every month.
Surprisingly, just today, PhonePe’s arch-rival Paytm also announced that it was changing its cashback strategy to focus on transactions at offline retail kirana stores, instead of P2P UPI payments. The news comes at a time when even Paytm is looking to go deeper into Tier IV and V geographies to activate its next phase of growth.
At present, PhonePe is present in more than 150 cities across India and continues to expand into newer geographies. It has a merchant app to facilitate end-to-end control on the payment process for merchants including transaction confirmation and reconciliation.
PhonePe’s offering also includes instant settlements and zero processing fee on UPI transactions for merchants. It has also introduced a ‘stores' tab on the app, enabling hyperlocal discovery of partner merchants for users, and is also working on features that will allow merchants to showcase their offers to users.
Homegrown messaging application platform Hike has launched ‘ZeroTo2’, a programme to hire young engineers with 0-2 years experience. The hiring programme to on-board freshers and engineers who are just starting out was launched in January.
The first batch of nine engineers - selected from around 1,500 applicants - is currently in bootcamps, undergoing extensive training, says Anshuman Misra, Hike’s Head of Operations.
According to a Reuters report from March, engineers in India are struggling to find work, amid the worsening job crisis. Government data shows that the unemployment rate rose to a 45-year high of 6.1 percent in FY18.
Commenting on the company’s focused strategy to hire young people, Anshuman says, “It is easier to mould and shape young people. This can sometimes be a challenge with people who have been working for a while and have become set and rigid in their ways. One needs radical open-mindedness while walking into Hike.”
Hike Founder and CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal addressing ZeroTo2 candidates
He adds that since the nature of Hike’s product and its target audience are both young, it makes sense to hire young people “who would understand and relate to the customer’s needs better”.
Hike’s customer base has typically consisted of users in the 18-24 years age bracket. But earlier this year, the company decided to widen its focus to include even younger users starting with 16-year-olds.
Hike has a 4.5 rating out of 5 on Glassdoor, a platform that allows current and former employees to rate their experience of working in a particular firm.
Application and selection process
“Our existing relationship with institutes such as the IITs, Delhi Technical University (DTU), NITs, IIITs, and Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology (NSIT) helps us connect with candidates. Beyond this, interested candidates can also reach out to us at zeroto2@hike.in. We have been spreading the word through our social platforms as well. In fact, we received 40 serious resumes through Instagram stories,” Anshuman says.
The selection process is similar to any other hiring process including for experienced positions at Hike, according to Anshuman. The startup conducts an intensive screening process before on-boarding talent.
Kavin interacting with ZeroTo2 candidates
“It starts with resume screening, followed by on-site simulation where candidates are given an actual practical problem to solve. People who clear the simulation round, go through four rounds of interviews that gauge the candidate’s grasp on topics such as data science, algorithms, and java fundamentals among other things. Then there is a cultural round, where we screen people based on the cultural values we have,” Anshuman says.
Elaborating on Hike’s cultural values, he says, as a fast-growing startup, it is important for the company to have people who are result-oriented, value teamwork, and obsess over the customer.
“We found that if we hire sharp, culturally fit young people, it is a win-win for both them and our brand. We are able to extract world-class work and they get a great career opportunity to be exposed to areas where typically companies do not hire freshers.”
The positions covered under the company’s hiring programme for fresh engineers include client engineering, infrastructure, backend engineering, machine learning, data science, testing, and software development.
Currently, the company, which has around 150 employees, is looking to up the head count to nearly 200 by 2019. “A percentage of this hiring will be through our ZeroTo2 programme,” Anshuman says.
Founded by Kavin Bharti Mittal in 2012, Hike is a billion-dollar startup in terms of valuation. Till date, the company has raised $261 million. In August 2016, Hike raised its Series D round of funding led by Tencent and Foxconn at a valuation of $1.4 billion and managed to become one of the fastest to attain 'unicorn' status among Indian startups.
The annual cricket extravaganza, IPL, served as the perfect impetus for the popularity of fantasy cricket. And now the world cup is taking it a notch higher. Other skill-based games like Rummy have been consistently growing its user-base across the nation, with a brigade of online players engaging in an exciting game of cards from the comfort of their living rooms, instead of having to visit a casino in Goa. Together, the meteoric rise of these online games augurs glorious prospects for the skill gaming industry in India.
In a skill-based game, the final outcome doesn’t depend on mere chance or luck but is predominantly governed by the skill, adroitness and experience of the players. As part of the burgeoning online gaming landscape, the skill gaming industry presents a handsome opportunity for enthusiasts to monetise their skill while making a career in a field that ignites their passion.
Owing to the ever-changing social norms and the rise of online gaming, the skill gaming industry continues to grow worldwide at 100 percent year-on-year. The USA, the EU, and India are huge markets for the mainstreaming of skill-based games. Popular with the masses, especially the youth of the nation, let’s take a closer look at the future of the skill gaming industry:
VC investments in skill-based gaming
Skill gaming is going to be the next leading destination for VC investments, now that the sector is commanding the same interest and recognition as other verticals. As per Deloitte, while card-based games have grown at CAGR of 67.58 percent in the past three years to rake in total revenue of `730 Cr by 2017-17, fantasy games grew at CAGR 199.69 percent to be worth `67 Cr in 2016-17.
Money typically flows where the users are based, from merely 20 million gamers in 2010, India boosted 250 million gamers in 2018. As the skill gaming industry is presently worth $500 million, investors are certainly going to take notice of the sector. With venture capital flowing in, Indian start-ups would find it easier to upgrade their service offerings, introduce newer formats in the domain while leveraging emerging technologies like AR and VR.
Consolidation in the space
The growth of India’s skill gaming industry signals similar trends observed in other verticals such as e-commerce and travel. In a stark resemblance to its counterparts, a few large players like Junglee Games, Dream11, and Playgames own the majority share in the market. With nearly 300 online gaming start-ups and companies, the sector is now ripe for consolidation in the space through mergers and acquisitions.
The skill gaming industry is also generating interest from several media houses and wallet companies, who had earlier also ventured into the e-commerce space, sensing the right opportunity. However, the skill gaming industry may prove to be a rockier terrain to successfully navigate and hence, we shall see several media houses and wallet companies associating with larger players to ensure smoother and successful expansions.
The skill gaming industry as a key employment avenue
In addition to supporting the ambition of passionate gamers who are turning to skill-based gaming as an alternate career choice, the industry will also attract the top talent in the development and designing disciplines. As gaming companies continue to mature, the top-level talent that would have otherwise knocked at the doors of Amazon or the ilk is now joining gaming companies. The industry has a huge demand for talented PhD data scientists and mature UX designers. Furthermore, several international companies are setting base in India and would require top-notch talent to launch their Indian-centric offerings.
In a nutshell, the market in India is expected to keep up the same momentum for several upcoming years. As the industry matures, self-regulatory bodies like TRF (The Rummy Federation) and IFSG (Indian Federation of Sports Gaming) will have an important role to play in ensuring the integrity of systems, players and operators. I also foresee stronger network effects on the industry; while the gaming industry is already becoming larger than the top-grossing blockbusters across the world, skill-based gaming is also going to be at par, if not larger than the entertainment industry.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
15566164726401560937345538.png?fm=png&auto=format)
_Intel_India_Maker_Lab1560876160219.jpg?fm=png&auto=format)
15566164726401560937345538.png?fm=png&auto=format&h=100&w=100&crop=entropy&fit=crop)
