This is the age of convenience where fortunate people like us can have needs and demands met at our fingertips. At the first sign of any inconvenience -- be it traffic, potholes, garbage, noise pollution -- we get on social media to vent. But what about those who don't have access to these conveniences that we take for granted? Especially folks living in remote areas of the country.

The litany of challenges that ail rural India -- illiteracy, lack of sanitation, poverty, female feticide and dowry – is familiar. While a lot needs to be done and can be done to improve the situation, there are only a handful who step up and get their hands dirty to bring about a real change and improvement in the lives of the marginalised.

Those who can be counted among these ranks are fellows from SBI Youth for India Fellowship, a programme funded and managed by the State Bank of India (SBI) in partnership with well-known NGOs. The fellowship aims to solve rural India’s most pressing problems by giving educated Indian youth the opportunity to touch lives and create positive change at the grassroots in rural India. In the last eight years, the programme has seen around 295 youngsters partner with NGOs to bring about the much-needed change. YourStory spoke to five SBI YFI Fellows to know more about their transformative stories and the powerful initiatives they orchestrated in these five sectors.

Water: Ashvath Kunadi

Ashvath was born and raised in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, where noted environmentalist Rajendra Singh’s work reviving Johads in rural areas of the state, earned him the title of Waterman of India. Inspired by this, and also by David Attenborough’s narration of nature’s wonders, Ashvath decided to work in the environmental sector.

After completing his undergraduate course, he enrolled for the SBI YFI programme and worked with Central Himalayan Rural Action Group (Chirag) in the Takula block of Almora district in Uttarakhand. As part of the 2016-17 batch, his project involved recharging and reviving natural springs.

Ashvath says during the programme he learnt that there is a dearth of scientific exploration in the area of spring recharges in the Himalayas. “There is inertia that needs to be overcome to progress in this field and optimise the work that is being done.” He believes that the contribution and involvement of people living in the areas is invaluable to the project.

However, he did find that the caste system still played a part in the day to day lives of people, but adds that it did not impact his work.

Ashvath believes that good people from anywhere can improve the lives of other people, no matter where they are from; urban or rural, rich or poor. “If the urban youth want to serve the needs of rural India, they’d need to live amongst them, understand their problems honestly and not try to fit their problems in predefined boxes in their minds. They need to humbly work towards generating a solution by recruiting opinions and facts, and be grateful for the opportunity to do so.”

He shares a story about Jitendra Singh, or ‘Jitda’, as Ashvath fondly refers to him, who worked alongside Ashvath during training programmes. “I didn’t enjoy the fact that despite doing most of the grunt work he’d take a back seat in the bigger events. He is certainly a capable individual and as it would turn out, a great speaker. Slowly we started developing training modules together, rehearsing and perfecting them. We became the people who would be invited by other areas to conduct their training.” The wow moment was when Jitda went to Nepal and demonstrated to another organization how their training module worked.

Ashvath has just completed his Master’s programme in environmental engineering from Berkeley, and will now pursue a PhD in Australia to solve even tougher problems and learn skills that are even more advanced. “My experience with YFI and Chirag played no small part in my acceptance to the best programme in the world for environmental engineering. After my PhD, I want to finally come back to India and honestly solve the toughest problems in the water domain.”

Livelihood Generation: Natiya Vashanthakumar

Natiya hails from Tamil Nadu where her father works as a rural veterinarian for the state government. While working for Goldman Sachs, she realised that while the work and pay were great, she did not like being cut out from the real problems of life and living in a virtual world of stock markets and electronic currencies. She quit her job, and pursued a master’s programme in anthropology as she had made up her mind to work in the development sector. That’s when she stumbled upon the YFI fellowship.

A fellow from batch 2018-19, her project involves creating livelihood opportunities for tribal women, and empowering them. “The word ‘rural’ is the spine of our country and there needs to be no justification for the need to strengthen our rural economies,” she says.

Natiya is located in a place called Jawhar, a taluk in Palghar district of Maharashtra, where 91 percent of the population are Scheduled Tribes. Agriculture is the primary occupation but cultivation is highly dependent on the monsoon, with the major crops being rice and millets. According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, as many as 396 children died due to malnutrition and other reasons in Palghar district of Maharashtra in 2017-18.

After repeated visits to multiple villages and discussions with women self-help groups, youth groups, government officials, etc. it was clear that the community was desperately in need of a source of livelihood besides agriculture.

Noticing a good prospective market for millets nearby cities, Natiya put together a small women’s group in the village of Wanganpada to produce finger millet ladoos. The women were trained to purchase raw materials, make, package and deliver the ladoos by themselves. “The USP of our model is that the surplus ladoos from every order are freely distributed in the village Anganwadi.”

After seeing how well-received the laddoos were by Anganwadi children, they approached private and government agencies working in the area of children’s health and nutrition to include millet laddoo as a part of their programme. They even succeeded in serving children of 14 Zila Parishad schools with these for a brief period.

When she initially reached Jawhar, communication was a barrier. She slowly started picking up Hindi to convince the community about their need for an alternate form of livelihood. A fitness freak, she adapted to having to eat vada pavs for breakfast. Natiya even survived two episodes of typhoid and one episode of malaria during this yearlong journey. “I have transformed into a stronger version of myself. I feel more confident to take a stance for the good even when the majority thinks otherwise.”

Natiya says that the average yearly income of an Adivasi family in the area is about Rs 20,000 to 25,000. Their intervention has helped six women earn more than R. 12,000 in nine months as a supplementary income source. She says that today’s urban youth need to empathise and think beyond their needs, and be receptive to local products.

She says that while YFI has given her the reality at the grassroots level, she plans to continue working in other areas within the development sector that will give her a perspective from the thinktank level.

Education: Sanjana Yadav

Born in Haryana, Sanjana did her Masters in English Literature. Growing up in an orthodox patriarchal environment, when she lost a cousin to domestic violence, it motivated her to join the SBI YFI programme. “This sector shows a different world. There are so many problems which allow you to make a difference. The social sector is more sustainable than any other sector,” she says.

Sanjana is part of the 2017-18 batch and her project took her to Tilolia in Rajasthan to work with schools in gender sensitization. She says that it’s imperative that school curriculum lays strong emphasis on inculcating values of equality, inclusivity and diversity, all of which are essential for building a healthy society. “It’s easy to break stereotypes at a young age, rather than when they grow older and are rigid to new ideas.”

Though initially she planned to work with adolescents, when she took the baseline survey, she realised that six-year-old boys believed that it was okay to beat a woman if she commits a mistake, 10-year-old girls only aspired to become a wife, and almost 30 percent of the children were married off very young and more than half of them were victims of child abuse. She realised that it is important to engage with young children to put an end to discrimination and violence and create champions of equality.

The biggest challenge she faced was the resistance from the community. “It is difficult to make them understand the importance of conversations around gender. Most of the communities we work with are very patriarchal and backward.” But coming from a conservative background herself, she was able to connect easily with them.

Even within schools, she noticed that girls and boys wouldn’t sit, eat or play together. It was important to get them to acknowledge the issue in their classes and community and create solutions themselves. “Young minds have so much potential to bring change through small actions,” says Sanjana. She narrates an incident where as part of their holistic curriculum, boys were asked what they hated the most about being boys. “Most of them wanted to wear makeup and henna, get dressed up, so we created a day in a month for them to do that. The idea was to make them tolerant to diversity, to help them understand the nature of clothing,” she says. One of the boys said he felt liberated because he liked wearing such clothes but feared being ridiculed. Through this, he understood that a garment doesn’t define his gender. Another boy who usually wouldn’t play with girls and would abuse them, now teaches cricket to girls and is fine with them winning. At the end of two years, she has built a gender-sensitive curriculum in 57 schools and colleges, and recently piloted a project in 11 states across 20 NTPC locations. In 2018, she received a UN award for this project.

Sanjana says that when you live in urban areas, you live in a cocoon and conveniently ignore the problems and talk about development, “The rural areas need us more than urban. Unless we provide for their basic needs, we can’t talk about development.” She plans to continue working on the same project in Rajasthan. She has also collaborated with Starbucks to implement the gender curriculum in Assam.

Technology: Siddhant Gupta

Siddhant hails from Uttar Pradesh and is an alumnus of Mayo College, Ajmer, MIT Manipal and IMT Ghaziabad. While working as a Product Manager at Axis Bank's Merchant Acquiring Business, he realised that he always had an inclination toward the social sector. During his MBA, he had the chance to work in a slum in Ahmedabad. He even tried to build a medical device startup for the development sector during his engineering days. He came across SBI’s YFI programme on social media. “I was looking for the right place to plunge into, and this sounded perfect. By then, it had also begun to sink in that corporate life was not for me,” he says.

Siddhant is part of the 2017-18 batch of SBI YFI and his project included working on a technology-oriented approach to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) assessment in Gram Vikas Intervention villages in Orissa. Although he joined the fellowship with no intent to work in this particular area, he soon realised how much availability of clean drinking water and a toilet can positively transform rural life. “This sector deeply impacts every aspect of development. Most diseases in this area are water-borne and women and young girls have to spend hours to fetch water for their families, when they could easily spend time working for their livelihood or going to school.” He feels that India’s growth story is meaningless without equality when it comes to the most basic necessities in life like access to clean water and sanitation.

His project was to conduct an assessment of WASH work done by a partner NGO in 1,200 villages. Seventy-three youth volunteers from villages were trained in conducting surveys using smartphones. Speaking about the challenges he faced, he says, “It was difficult to get people to accept technology and see value in this project. However, once the results were clearly visible, things changed.” Although there are too many metrics to measure if there has been any transformation in this sector, Siddhant says, “We need credible data around the prevalence of diarrhoeal diseases with respect to the degree of change in WASH behaviour - that's what matters.” He adds, “Successfully implemented WASH programmes can truly transform many aspects of people's lives.”

He feels that today’s urban youth can empower rural India by involving themselves in student projects with institutions that have rural immersions. After the fellowship, Siddhant briefly worked with a partner NGO as a consultant, continuing to work on the project, and with a Netherland-based women's health startup. Currently, he is an Aspirational District Fellow in Garhwa, Jharkhand, and plans to continue working in the development sector with the government and non-profits.

Self-governance: Shubham Gupta

Shubham hails from Faridabad, Haryana and is a B.Tech graduate. He started developing an interest in social causes and rural development from a young age, majorly influenced by movies and news based on social causes, as well as the lack of political will towards the causes of poor and underprivileged sections of the society. When everybody around was discussing campus placements and packages, he was wondering how to pursue his interest in the rural development sector, and that’s when he came across SBI YFI.

A part of batch 2017-18, he worked on digital literacy and local self-governance in Madhya Pradesh, where his project involved empowering and facilitating the Gram Panchayat in setting up a community-run Nagrik Soochna Kendra (NSK) for cost-efficient delivery of various ICT and e-Governance services at the village level.

He observed that village youth knew how to use YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp, but their parents were unaware of various beneficial government schemes because nobody taught the youth how to use a smartphone to access that information. Sixty-five percent of the Indian population i.e. approximately 840 million, lives in rural areas, out of which only 200 million has access to the internet. Shubham realised, “If we can ensure the reach of the internet to each and every person and make them digitally literate and empowered, then it will open a whole new world of opportunities for them, like online education, business opportunities, agriculture and government schemes, services-related information, grievance redressal, banking and finance, etc. This will also help the government in making people aware of their rights and responsibilities and help in ensuring the accountability of village panchayats through video conferencing and other means.”

He was able to impart basic computer literacy to more than 100 high school students of a tribal village, trained three youth to access information over the internet related to government schemes and services, jobs, important information, form filling, and basic troubleshooting, and provided benefits of e-Governance services to more than 300 people in the village. On the local self-governance front, he was able to increase public participation in Gram Sabha meetings from 15-20 people to a consistent figure of 110-130 people and successfully mobilized people to actively influence decision-making in village development plans.

Talking about the challenges he faced, he says a major struggle was adapting to the village environment and winning the trust of the people. He says, “There is a dearth of facilities in rural India required for a comfortable living, but despite all kinds of challenges, they enjoy and celebrate life and even look after the well-being of their guests. Though their houses are small, their hearts are very big. I might never have had the opportunity to live with them, eat with them, to have so many conversations with them, had I not taken this ‘road less travelled’.”

He says educated youth of this country have a collective responsibility to come up with ideas to generate better livelihood opportunities in the villages itself. “When the people in the villages have money in their hand, when their purchasing capacity increases, and when the government can see the opportunity to earn some taxes from them, development will take place automatically.”

Shubham is still exploring successful governance models and ways in which he can contribute effectively to the lives of the underprivileged. Currently, he is preparing for the Civil Services examination to bring changes in the system.

These five young Indians realised that change begins with themselves, and dedicated time to uplift some of India’s most backward communities. You too can help take India’s development story to those who need it most.

India's largest restaurant search and food delivery platform Zomato is on the verge of cracking its maiden profits on the back of rapid expansion into newer cities that has brought more business to both established outlets and 'dark kitchens', creating thousands of jobs, its Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said.

The company on Saturday laid off 540 employees at its head office in Gurugram across its customer, merchant, and delivery partner support teams, but Goyal insists Zomato is creating more jobs than ever before.

Starting off in 2008 by scanning and putting restaurant menus online, Zomato has expanded to 24 countries and services 10,000 cities globally, he said.

In India, it serves 25 million customers in over 500 cities, and is valued by analysts at between $3.6 billion and $4.5 billion, he said.

It is backed by Silicon Valley venture fund Sequoia Capital, Singapore government's Temasek Holdings and Indian ecommerce player Info Edge.

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Zomato, he said, delivers orders from 250,000 restaurants and hundreds of 'dark kitchens' where restaurant food is cooked, but no restaurant actually exists.

Free from the consumer-facing elements required in their bricks-and-mortar parent restaurants -- chairs, tables, toilets, sheer space -- these kitchens exist purely to serve the growing food-delivery market. Orders come in, meals are cooked, and Zomato delivery boys whisk them immediately away on bikes.

"Our losses per month have come down by 50 percent in the last three months. We are still investing heavily in the food delivery business, which has grown 6X in the last year, and is now present in more than 500 cities," Goyal said.

The company can "make a profit any month" it wants but right now is focused on expanding the food delivery business, he said.

"We touch 25 million customers every week, generate 0.5 million jobs directly, indirectly. We are all set for 10X growth in five years." 

Besides bringing business to restaurants and 'dark kitchens', most of which do not have their own delivery service, Zomato is also creating direct employment through riders, he said.

On Thursday, Goyal had tweeted that its delivery partners' monthly income crossed Rs 200 crore for the first time, with the number of delivery partners rising to 2.3 lakh this month against 74,000 in September 2018.

"Milestone alert: Our delivery partners' monthly income has crossed 200 crore for the first time. And we have just hit 230,000 delivery partners in India," he had tweeted, adding that the company aims to add 10,000 new jobs in September alone as a "result of direct employment and contracts with Zomato".

That tweet came before the layoffs on Saturday that the company said were due to improvement in its technology interface across functions leading to reduction in support-related queries, thereby making several roles redundant.

Post layoffs, the company's employee strength is an estimated 5,000 people across the organisation (including international markets).

Goyal, however, said the company was still hiring people for its technology, product and data sciences teams. Zomato has hired over 1,200 people in non-delivery teams and another 400 off-rolls positions besides creating jobs for hundreds of thousands of delivery partners.

Zomato's food delivery service is now eyeing a presence in 1,000 cities. It is aggressively launching across tier III and IV cities for wider reach and scale.

Some of the latest additions include Alappuzha and Malappuram (Kerala), Pushkar (Rajasthan), Ankleshwar and Mehsana (Gujarat), Kanyakumari, Kodaikanal, and Cuddalore (Tamil Nadu), Itarsi and Ashoknagar (Madhya Pradesh), Fazilka and Nawanshahr (Punjab), Vrindavan and Azamgarh (Uttar Pradesh), Silvassa (Daman), Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh), Daltonganj (Jharkhand), Pataudi (Haryana), Osmanabad and Sawantwadi (Maharashtra) and Shillong (Meghalaya).

Goyal, a former management consultant at Bain & Co, said traffic has been growing. Zomato in 2018-19 saw revenue shoot up to $206 million from $68 million in the previous year, primarily driven by its food delivery vertical, according to the company's annual report.

It spent $500 million during FY19, a six-fold jump from the $80 million spending in the previous year. Its losses stood at about $294 million in the fiscal.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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Seed-stage incubator Investopad Founders Rohan and Arjun Malhotra have launched Good Capital, a new venture capital firm that will invest in pre-seed to Series A funding rounds.

The firm made a first close at $12 million two months ago, and is expected to have a final close in 10 months. 

Good Capital aims to raise a total of $25 million for the debut fund. The sector-agnostic fund will invest in both B2C and B2B opportunities with deal size between $100,000 to $2 million.

It has already invested $1.5 million seed fund in video-based e-commerce startup SimSim and an undisclosed sum in Spatial Inc, a cross-reality platform that addresses challenges for the distributed workplace era.

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The Mauritius-registered fund counts Hong Kong and Singapore-based strategic investment company Symphony International Holdings as one of its anchor investors. 

The firm has also onboarded a host of European family offices and Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurs, including Sunny Madra, Co-founder of Autonomic, among its list of Limited Partners. 

Good Capital tends to invest in technology products solving India-centric problems. “We’re generally quite excited about software that can enable middlemen, traders, and micro-SMEs through technology,” the firm said on its website.

Rohan and Arjun, through Investopad, have earlier backed promising startups like Meesho (now backed by Facebook, Naspers, Sequoia and SAIF), Autonomic (acquired by Ford), Katerra (now backed by SoftBank), and HyperTrack (now backed by Founders Fund, Social Capital, and Nexus) among others. 

Good Capital fund will be overseen by an investment committee of former Airtel CEO Sanjay Kapoor, who is now a senior advisor at BCG; Rahul Khanna, former managing partner at Cannan Partners and now Founder of Trifecta Capital; and HyperTrack Founder Kashyap Deorah. 

This July, entrepreneur-turned-angel investor Sanjay Mehta set up 100X.VC, a new venture capital firm that aims to invest in 100 early-stage startups in one year.  

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)

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“One has to remember that every failure can be a stepping stone to something better," said Colonel Harland David Sanders, founder of KFC.

Today, KFC is infamous. It is the world's second-largest restaurant chain with over 20,000 outlets all over the world. But Sanders's journey wasn't smooth. In fact, his recipe was rejected over 1,000 times before anyone accepted it and he started KFC in 1952.

He famously said, “I've only had two rules. Do all you can and do it the best you can. It's the only way you ever get that feeling of accomplishing something.”

That's an emotion Druva founders Jaspreet Singh and Milind Borate would agree with. After 11 years, the B2B startup finally achieved the 'unicorn' status but the duo is not resting. In a conversation with YourStory, Milind says, "It is a nice milestone (unicorn status) to reach but we have a long way to go.”

Inspired? We also have a bouquet of startup stories for you to boost your day!

Why buy when you can rent customised furniture

Founded in 2016, Fabrento, which offers office furniture on rent, has partnered with accommodation providers such as CoHo, Aasha Hostels, and Stanza Living. The startup also offers furniture for homes along with appliances.

This startup uses tech to help startups validate business plans

Gurugram-based startup Numr Research is helping startups increase their chances of success by providing market research that can analyse human opinions, and predict business outcomes. The market research firm leverages technology to analyse human choices and opinions, and predict business outcomes. 

How Matrix-backed DealShare is capturing Tier II and III India

Jaipur-based startup DealShare is a social commerce-based deals platform, which provides discounts on grocery and other daily use items on its app. It has raised $3.4 million from Matrix Partners and other investors.

Minocular is breaking new ground using drones, IoT to map mines

Raipur startup Minocular is an integrated platform that hopes to simplify the process for the mining industry by leveraging new technologies like IoT and drones. The startup is now looking for funding to the tune of Rs 5 crore for research and development, expansion, and to strengthen its existing technical and sales team.

This SaaS startup uses software to make your customers pay up

Mumbai-based startup TimePay is a cloud-based application that can help customers understand their working capital cycle and collect their receivables on time. This ‘SaaS virtual collections manager’ reduces the credit cycle by 12 days because it nudges the vendors through reminders to pay up.

Love dogs & cats? These pet startups show how to mix business with pleasure

The India pet care industry has skyrocketed with its diverse products available for those furry animals that love lolling around your home. The industry is expected to cross $2.7 billion by 2019, according to a research curated by Indian Pet Food Market Forecast and Opportunities. 

This startup uses deep-tech to decipher human emotions to help brands

Bengaluru-based Entropik Tech uses Emotion AI and patented technologies like brainwave mapping, facial coding, and eye-tracking to decipher cognitive and emotional response of consumers. In July 2018, the startup raised its Pre-Series A round with $1.1 million from Bharat Innovation Fund and Parampara Capital.

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Markets regulator Sebi is working on a mobile app for e-voting by retail investors of listed companies to facilitate greater participation in management proposals, especially those related to corporate governance.

Further, the regulator said it plans to provide relevant links to the recommendations of registered proxy advisors to retail investors in a to bid facilitate such investors in taking informed decisions on the proposals of listed entities.

These moves are aimed at strengthening the corporate governance norms of listed companies.

"In order to ease the process of casting e-voting thereby facilitating greater participation of the retail investors, the designing of a common mobile app for e-voting is in progress," the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) said in its annual report for 2018-19.

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Further, Sebi said "the option of providing relevant links to the recommendations of Sebi registered proxy advisors is also under consideration." This move will help investors in taking informed decisions on the proposals of the listed entities.

Continuing with the initiatives taken in previous years to strengthen the norms for governance in the securities market, in 2019-20 Sebi will review the existing disclosure framework pertaining to environmental, social and governance based disclosures relating to business responsibility report and integrated reporting.

"Effective governance is a necessary and important tool for protecting the interests of various stakeholders, particularly small investors, in the market. This has been and will always remain an important area of focus for Sebi," the regulator noted.

Besides, Sebi said Indian investors will soon be provided with the facility to hold securities issued overseas in their demat accounts in India.

Recently, the markets regulator also announced a new set of norms to allow startups to shift after one year to regular trading and expanding their shareholder base to at least 200.

The startups will also need to have a profitability or net-worth track record of three years or at least 75 percent of its shareholding should be with qualified institutional investors.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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Flipkart, India’s leading ecommerce marketplace, has signed an MoU with the Government of Jharkhand to onboard the Jharkhand’s artisans, weavers and craftsmen onto Flipkart Samarth – an initiative aimed at enabling and handholding craftsmen from across India to set up an online business.

According to a press release from Flipkart, the MoU will bring thousands of artisans, weavers, and craftsmen from Jharkhand into the ecommerce fold, ahead of the state’s Bamboo Artists Conclave on September 18 and 19.

Rajneesh Kumar, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Flipkart Group, said,

“We are delighted to join hands with the Govt. of Jharkhand to give the state’s artisans and weavers the opportunity to showcase and sell their products to a pan-India customer base of over 150 million. Flipkart Samarth has been designed to help underserved communities break social and demographic barriers and participate in the formal economy."

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Raghubar Das, Chief Minister of Jharkhand, said,

"Artisans, handloom weavers and craftspersons of Jharkhand are having an enormous skill which is passed on from generation to generation. I am sure that association with Flipkart will provide national market exposure to Jharkhand's craft and traditional skills.”

To begin with, products and handicrafts from Jharcraft and Khadi Jharkhand are present on the platform, with several other Jharkhand-based NGOs and artisans preparing to join in a few weeks.

As part of the Flipkart Samarth program, eligible entities and artisans will receive time-bound incubation support in the form of onboarding, cataloguing, account management, business insights, reduced commission (where eligible), and warehousing.

The Jharkhand government is supporting the initiative by fast-tracking collaboration between Flipkart and state-run enterprises that are already working in the arts and handicrafts space. 

This development coincides with other initiatives and schemes by the Jharkhand Government to promote the bamboo, khadi, and handloom industries in the state. It also comes just ahead of the online festive season in India, one in which artisans from Jharkhand can participate in for the first time.

(Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta)

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Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous post here). Share these 45 gems and insights from the week of September 2-8 with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights. See also our compilation of Top 50 Quotes from 2018 here.

A bold approach can help you overcome anything. - Jasmine Lulla, Cakes N' Craft

Never stop experimenting, have a bindaas attitude and come what may, don’t give up. - Sonali Mullick, Bayroute

No great company has been built very quickly. It takes time to set up a decent company in India, and probably 10 years to become something. - Deep Kalra, MakeMyTrip

Keep one eye on the future and move forward but not at the expense of today. - Rushabh Parikh, Black & Green

Keep looking for talent that can take the burden off you and execute independently, so you can think! - Harsha Kumar, Lightspeed India Partners Advisors

It is important for one to feel connected to something larger and this is only possible when an organisation has a larger vision and each employee feels involved and contributes towards larger goals. - Sukanya Misra, Mastercard

Automation and data are surely helping to enhance the experience travel platforms provide to users, but it is the human touch that is the ultimate key to making their trip the best that it can be. - Rahul Singh, Ithaka

AI promises to be the most disruptive class of technology in the next 10 years due to advances in computational power, volume, velocity, and variety of data, as well as advances in deep neural networks. - John-David Lovelock, Gartner

With amazing advancements in spatial computing combined with artificial intelligence, we are looking at a new era of intelligent, interactive, and immersive content that will change the way we learn. - Subbarao Siddabattula, 3rdFlix

The development of the digital economy is a tremendous opportunity, as long as the big marketplaces respect competition and consumer protection rules. - French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire

Platforms are neither neutral nor value-free constructs; they come with specific norms and values inscribed in their architectures. - Jose van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, 'The Platform Society'

How will we conceive, design, manage, use, and govern algorithms so that they serve the good of all humankind? - Kartik Hosanagar, ‘A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence’

The technology, telecom, internet, and payments tsunami that’s sweeping across the country presents big new opportunities in a wide range of industries. - Rajeev Suri, Orios Venture Partners

There is never going to be a better time than now. - Dinesh Agarwal, IndiaMart InetrMesh

A methodical study on the prospective customer’s opinion about your idea, offering, or pricing can give life-saving insights to a new startup. - Amitayu Basu, RebusCode

Customer experience is the key. It is much more important than the product. - Girish Mathrubootham, Freshworks

Consumer behaviour research by emotion recognition technology is required to decode a consumer’s subconscious. - Ranjan Kumar, Entropik Tech

Agents in contact centres need consistency in user interface when they address tickets. - STS Prasad, Freshworks

Multi-cloud data management is a hard problem for customers to solve. - Crawford Del Prete, IDC

Capital is a means to achieve the vision of the founder and not the end goal. In fact, excess capital can be counter-productive in certain cases. - Jerry Li, eWTP

Existing credit products need to be more digital, flexible, transparent, ubiquitous and fair priced to end-consumers to build scale. - Anurag Sinha, FPL Technologies

There is strong potential for inclusive fintech startups to reach historically underserved communities while generating returns. - Vikas Raj, Accion Venture Lab

In India’s ecommerce industry, businesses face the significant challenge of the lack of clear timelines to refund customers’ money. - Akash Sinha, Cashfree

A set of new brands from India are entering the market to ride on the trend of true wireless devices at affordable prices. - Anisha Dumbre, IDC India

If good quality content is available in local languages, the demand far exceeds English. - Vikrant Pande, translator

There is an explosion of digital content in various Indian languages and most of them use visual elements. - Jeyandran Venugopal, Flipkart

There is a generation of people who worry far more about their online profiles than they do about themselves in real life. - Kavin Bharti Mittal, Hike

From being page 15, we have become page 1 and page 2. - Harish Iyer, LGBTQ rights activist

Healthcare today should be beyond treating the symptoms. - Manas Mehrotra, NestaVera Group

Shared workspaces have created a transparent relationship with both the landlord as well as the end consumers. - Amit Ramnani, Awfis

Car leasing is a huge gap in the Indian auto industry. - Sanjay Swamy, Prime Venture Partners

There is a huge demand supply mismatch when it comes to availability and supply of cabs. In Mumbai itself, there is a shortfall of 35,000 cars. - Abhishek Agarwal, RCIF

IPL has a monopoly over the ecosystem. But it takes up only two months. How do you sustain fan engagement for the rest of the year? - Anto Binish Kaspar, Roanuz

Space debris is found in all of the Earth’s orbits starting from 300 km in LEO to geostationary orbits. - Anirudh Sharma, Digantara Research

An average T-shirt uses 400 to 600 gallons of water to be produced, while a pair of jeans needs 1,800 gallons of water. - Nitin Kapoor, Indian Beautiful Art

Everyone has a different interpretation of fashion but the way a person carries herself or himself tells us a lot about them. - Manjula Tiwari, Future Style Lab

Work towards getting fit and not thin. - Shery Salis, Nurture Health Solutions

There are so many positives inside each one of us that we can focus on but somehow we end up focusing on what the world tells us we don’t have. - Sminu Jindal, Jindal Saw

Building capacity on the ground can affect real change. - Caroline Boudreaux, Miracle Foundation

Build things. It may not be a startup, it may be something really small, but build it with your hands. - Sushil Kumar, Loco

Creativity is like a flowing river and will take its own course, will find its own medium of expression, and that makes each life unique. - Ratna Vira, 'Why People Give’

Any time you develop a creative insight, your brain releases dopamine, making aha moments very pleasurable. This is a great addiction to have. - Shalini Lal, ‘The Secret Lives of Organisations’

Happiness doesn't always come from a pursuit. Sometimes it comes when we least expect it. - The Dalai Lama

Happiness is not a goal… it's a by-product of a life well lived. - Eleanor Roosevelt

The more diverse your network is, the more complete a person you become. - Sanya Khurana, 'One Action'

YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).

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Fintech is essentially the collaboration that financial companies do with technology companies. This sector is in its infancy and nascent in the digital era but set to skyrocket in the years to come. Among the leading fintech companies that are performing well in India are Paypal, PhonePe, Paytm, Google Pay. Trading companies like Share Khan and Money Control too have a large presence in the market. Insurance companies like Policy Bazaar can also be included in this list. Yet, there is a huge vacuum when it comes to the different fintech categories, and those with financial acumen would be wise to invest in these options.

As per a NASSCOM report, in 2018 there were around 400 fintech companies operating in India. This number is constantly growing. NASSCOM predicts that the revenue generated in India due to fintech companies will touch $2.4 billion by 2020.

Due to the reforms made by the Reserve Bank of India and the Government of India, fintech investments are also growing tremendously and have increased to make the Indian fintech growth market more digital and user-friendly.

Still, there is a necessity to invest more in fintech as startups and small and medium companies. As per the recent analysis, digital payments are just about 13 percent of the total volume and currently, 87 percent of the volume of transactions happen through cash transactions. Thus, fintech is a lucrative sector to invest in and is set to grow exponentially in the India growth market.

Furthermore, this era is ripe to understand the different fintech markets to invest in India, creating a space in this disruptive industry. The specific markets where one can invest in the fintech field can prove to be very profitable in the time to come.

1.Peer to peer lending

You can invest in P2P lending startups which connect lenders to borrowers directly, and create a platform for people to connect for digital transactions. Borrowers have access to easier and faster capital with this particular category.

2.Payment services

This platform connects banks and users, within user base as well. This mainly includes digital wallets to enable quick transactions. As soon as a payment is credited, it reflects into an account instantaneously. There are three types of payment apps in this category

a) Standalone apps

b) Bank-centric apps

c) Social media-centric apps

3.Mobile banking applications

Due to the secure digital push by RBI and the Indian Government, many governments and private sector banks have enabled cash transactions that are done digitally through banking apps and net banking software. According to recent reports, 25 percent of the 50 global banks have adopted fintech for user transactions.

Several banks still need to adopt digital technology for transactions.

Therefore, a tremendous investment potential awaits to be tapped in this sector.

4.Remittance services

Remittance services are used for transactions between banks (remittance providers) and users to transact money smoothly, in different currencies, and geographically diverse areas. Many startups in the global arena have started to break the monopoly of large remittance providers such as Paypal, Western Union, and Money Gram. There is a huge potential to invest in this fintech as startups or as medium scale bankers.

5.Insurance technology

Many insurance companies are adopting fintech to smoothen otherwise cumbersome processes. As insurance companies increase their digital footprint, customers need not wait for days for insurance premiums to be calculated. Based on analytic data, insurance calculations is now faster, through apps and software. For example, in life or car insurance, after collecting and analysing data online, the apps provide metrics like the required amount and analytically correct information. Investment in startups in these areas is the need of the hour.

6.Crowd funding and equity funding services

In many western countries like the US and UK, crowdfunding is a lucrative business for raising venture capital for startups. In India, this trend is also gaining momentum as one of the fintech areas to invest in. The growth potential globally in crowd funding fintech is $16.2 billion.

7.Platform to connect buyers and sellers

There is a dire need to develop platforms to connect buyers and sellers digitally or online though apps or software where safe and secure transactions in large volumes can be done. This is an area with a large investment potential among the fintech categories.

8.Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency is a nascent and fast-growing area of fintech. Those with the right business acumen can invest in this area to make money quickly.

Final takeaway

The fintech sector has huge investment potential, and low risk compared to many other investment options. Growing at a rapid pace, it is an area that is set to grow steadily in the future. In India, there are many investment options in fintech. “Make hay while the sun shines,” is an apt proverb for investing in fintech companies in India. Choose this field which is the most promising of disruptive technologies across the globe today, will pay huge dividends. If you have the business acumen for finance and app development, then fintech investment is the way forward.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

(Edited by Suruchi Kapur- Gomes)

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HealthifyMe is an app-based Indian health and fitness platform founded in 2011 by Tushar Vashisht, Mathew Cherian and Sachin Shenoy. The idea behind starting up HealthifyMe was to connect people virtually with nutritionists, fitness trainers and yoga instructors.

As a company that consumed a lot of user data, team members would end up spending a lot of time handling the infrastructure. They wanted a provider who would manage everything for them, in a way that would benefit their users.

That’s when they decided to go with AWS. Sachin Shenoy, Co-founder and CTO, HealthifyMe says,

"Moving to AWS meant we could focus on business requirements rather than tech requirements. We were scared that we would have to go through tons of documentation. But when we moved to AWS, everything was plug-and-play. We wanted reliability and stability of the platform and a breadth of services, and the support AWS gave us was mind-blowing."

Their uptime has gone up to 99.99 percent after using AWS services. "One of the best services we built using AWS is “Ria”, the world’s first AI-powered virtual nutritionist," says Sachin. Ria learns from 150 million food logs and 50 million workout logs on the platform, and has automatically created a model that answers user's questions.

Watch this video to know more about how HealthifyMe leverages AWS solutions to benefit their users.

Driving in India is a painstaking task where people are stuck in traffic for hours on congested roads, which at times, are also filled with potholes. For example, the traffic jams at Whitefield, a suburb in hi-tech city Bengaluru, that houses the world's best R&D centres in software, is legendary.

The drive to the suburb saps the energy out of every employee travelling there on work. On an average, a person spends three hours per day getting to and from Whitefield. Not to mention the particulate matter hurting the lungs. 

If you ask Ambee, a Bengaluru-based environment startup, they would tell you that the particulate matter levels in India are well over the EPA prescribed norms of 15 micrograms per cubic metre, which means even children are not breathing clean air. 

So, why does YourStory raise this topic? Battery technology will remove the pollution caused by vehicles and at the helm of that change is Chetan Maini. 

The Co-founder of Sun Mobility and the Founder of India’s first electric vehicle Reva, Chetan Maini is leading the charge to bring battery swaps in India to drop the pricing of EVs by encouraging collective ownership of electric mobility. 

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Like Ratan Tata, overseeing the introduction of the Nano car as a change agent for aspiring Indians, Chetan believes that he can dream big. One of the harbingers of shared mobility with shared energy in the country, he has laid out the blueprint and is readying for massive expansion. The company has already clocked well over Rs 15 crore in the first year. 

However, Chetan knows this platform-based approach is no Reva, which he founded in 1994. Sun Mobility needs far more capital than the $100 million invested in Reva, which he does not disclose. 

Chetan says, "This requires a significant amount of investment because we are looking at changing the very fabric of Indian commute. It is significant because ownership models and financial models would change in the B2B space."

Sun Mobility has collected one million kilometres of driving data from battery swap-based vehicles and is now ready to scale. 

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Chetan’s audacious plan includes a full-stack of an Android platform for the battery swap business. It involves Internet of Things (IoT), software, telematics services, hardware manufacturing, and fintech services (as payment service for the ecosystem, which will happen in its own closed-loop wallet). It is for the first time that such a plan has been put in place. 

This entire stack is modular and the automotive ecosystem can plug services at any time. Sun Mobility is already making its experiments kick off in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Pune. 

Sun Mobility, a startup jointly owned by the Sun Group and Virya Mobility, has been granted two out of the 10 global patents that it had filed. Virya Mobility is wholly-owned by the Maini Group of companies, which have funded the Reva project for a very long time. 

The rise of Sun Mobility and Maini's big bets

Tucked away in the concrete jungle of Whitefield, Sun Mobility was founded in 2017 after Chetan sold his first company Reva to Mahindra & Mahindra in May 2010.

However, Chetan’s focus has shifted to managing and providing energy for the future of mobility. 

"It has to be a standard platform on which others can build services on top of," he says, while showing the facility where 170 engineers are building the software and hardware to manage the shared mobility through battery swaps. 

In India, the ways of commuting are rapidly evolving with the government trying to create a sustainable narrative by pushing public transportation to adopt electric mobility. Niti Aayog, the policy think tank of the government, wants all three-wheelers to go electric by 2023, two-wheelers by 2025, and four-wheelers after 2030. 

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"Everyone wants to reinvent themselves into providing mobility-as-a-service, which means a completely new business model," says Chetan. 

Sun Mobility helps OEMs create a road map towards electric mobility by helping them with designing future vehicles and set up their entire EV infrastructure. It offers battery swaps for buses, two-wheelers, and three-wheelers. 

The basic concept of battery swap is associated with the change of batteries at a battery station, instead of the battery being permanently fixed in the vehicle. The batteries used in the EVs are simply replaced at a battery swap station by using an IoT-based keychain, given to the customer.

The keychain, once in contact with the swap station, opens up a pigeon hole in which the used Lithium-ion battery is placed for recharging. The customer pays for the miles consumed per battery discharged digitally and then another pigeon-hole opens up with a new battery, which the customer replaces in the housing unit of the vehicle.

"My argument for using swap batteries is this, you can manage the lifecycle of the battery better if it is a swap. If it is fixed in the vehicle the battery performance will drop over a period of time," says Chetan.

Collective business for buses, two-wheelers, and bikes

At present, the startup has a partnership with Uber for three-wheelers, which will be announced soon. It is also working in Gujarat, for the past five months, in partnership with Ashok Leyland, where its buses are plying on a single route on this technology. 

There are over 10 buses plying 220 km per day in Ahmedabad. These batteries have a capacity of 350 kwh and weigh only 650 kgs. Robot arms swap the batteries in the buses and a large freight container acts as the storage and charging room for these batteries.

Eight more buses will be added over the next year. All these batteries are thermally managed and are prepped to work in 45 degree Celsius. Each bus plies around 30 km per route before the battery is swapped. As per Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) data, there are only 100 electric buses in the industry.

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 "Usually batteries of that capacity are three tons. We have been able to drop the size and pack more power, which means more customers can travel on the route as the bus can take the load," says Chetan. 

This model will help the state and the city bus corporations come back in the black after years of being in the red, as the battery cost is taken off the pricing of the asset and it becomes a variable cost - since it is swapped - and is monetised only for its usage. 

Under the Faster Adoption and Manufacture of Electric vehicles scheme, Indian states are going to order 5,500 buses. Currently, Indian states spend Rs 100 per kilometre for running on fossil fuels.

Chetan believes batteries would bring the cost down to one-tenth of the cost. Sun Mobility has partnered with Ashok Leyland on bringing in buses that would adopt to battery swap technology. 

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Uber/Zoomcar

Chetan’s company is in talks with US ride-hailing service provider Uber, where it would add its technology to three-wheeler vehicles. 

The billion-dollar shared mobility company will order a fleet of battery-powered vehicles which will be using Sun Mobility's battery packs. Sun Mobility has tied up with nine OEMs and 10 fleet operators to make swap batteries usage in three-wheelers. 

The changing time from replacing the battery and getting a new battery is 30 seconds. It would be an economic approach by Uber as the partner driver would no longer pay for the batteries and the rickshaw cost would drop to less than Rs 1.50 lakh. 

Last year, Sun Mobility tied up with SmartE to deploy its energy infrastructure in the latter’s 500 electric three-wheelers in Delhi-NCR. It also has a partnership with Piaggio for its three-wheeler vehicles. 

"SmartE plans to roll-out 100,000 vehicles by 2022. At 100,000 vehicles, SmartE will help reduce close to a million tonnes of carbon emissions, an equivalent of planting 17 million trees per year," says Goldie Srivastava, Founder of SmartE. 

According to sources, car rental company ZoomCar is experimenting with swap batteries for its two-wheeler rental business. Even food-delivery major Swiggy can be part of the EV ecosystem.

According to SIAM, there are close to 1.5 million EVs in the country, half of them in the electric two-wheeler segment.

While Chetan did not disclose the business model of the company, the startup charges Rs 15 to run 100 km on an electric battery. The cost is then shared with the energy provider, the city corporation or council, the operator and the OEM.

"All B2B businesses should go electric, it is the only way for them to save costs,' says Dhivik Reddy, owner of GoGreenBoV, which supplies electric bikes to logistics business. 

Ather Energy, Euler Motors, Autovert, Ultraviolette, Polarity, GoGreenBov, and Orxa Technologies are all looking at the consumer. Most of these companies will work on fixed battery technologies. As per sources, Ather has already sold more than 1,000 vehicles and has close to 10,000 bookings. 

Sun Mobility has taken a high stake bet and the industry is supported by the government. Now only OEMs have to take the plunge into this journey by partnering with startups, which would create collective ownership for a sustainable environment free of toxic particulate matter. 

(Edited by Suman Singh)

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Affirma Capital, a private equity firm spun out of Standard Chartered Private Equity earlier this year, has invested in Prodapt Solutions Pvt Ltd, a specialised IT services company serving global digital services providers including telcos, cablecos, etc. 

Prodapt is Affirma Capital's fourth investment in India in the past 12 months. Its previous investments include, Tirupati Medicare for about $50 million, Northern Arc Capital for about $130 million with IIFL and Travel Boutique Online for about $50 million. 

Udai Dhawan, Co-Founder and Head of India at Affirma Capital, said,

“The global telco and digital media industry is changing rapidly and offers a significant growth opportunity, and Prodapt is uniquely positioned to help its clients manage this transition and growth. We look forward to working with Prodapt and use our global franchise to help them grow, both organically and inorganically.”

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Affirma Capital, which has $3.6 billion under assets under management (AUM) and over $700 million for new investments, is actively seeking investment opportunities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East region.

Prodapt enables the digital transformation of its clients by designing and developing digital portals, mobile applications, and end-user-based products for linear TV and OTT applications. It provides end-to-end IT/software architecture consulting, application development, systems integration, testing, maintenance and support. 

Founded in 1999, the company focuses on the digital service provider ecosystem and delivers products and services leveraging next-gen technologies such as RPA (robotic process automation), AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning), SDN-NFV (software-defined networking/network function virtualization) and next-gen OSS/BSS systems.

Chennai-based Prodapt employs close to 2,000 people across North America, Europe, and India.

Abhi Dhall, Executive Director at Affirma Capital, said, 

“Prodapt’s niche focus and differentiated capabilities, is a great fit for our Technology/IT sector thesis. What impressed us about Prodapt was the consistent endorsement by Prodapt’s global clients of its domain knowledge, flexibility and a partner mindset. We are very excited to back the founders and the Prodapt family in their upcoming phase of growth.”

Mumbai-based Avendus Capital was an exclusive advisor to Prodapt on this transaction.

(Edited by Suman Singh)

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The real estate market in India is highly localised, and the industry is driven largely by individuals living and working in their own cities. For an outsider coming to a new city, finding a house/apartment for rent and then furnishing it is no less than a nightmare. The problem is worse for business travellers or executives when they require a furnished house for a short period of time.

As per a report by CBRE, an American commercial real estate services and investment firm, nearly 10.2 million residential properties are lying vacant in India, out of which only 10 to 15 percent are furnished. 

It is to solve this problem of finding premium furnished apartments for short to mid-term that Relocatte was started by Deepanshu Sachdeva in December 2015.

The Gurugram startup mostly targets senior business travellers, expatriates, freelancers, and corporate executives relocating for one to 12 months to different cities with a monthly housing budget of Rs 50,000 or above.

“We observed there was a demand-supply mismatch of properly furnished apartments. The whole mechanism of searching and finalisation of apartments is very complex, disorganised, and tedious. Even apartments which were available in the market are not satisfying guest expectations. To resolve all these issues led to the formation of Relocatte,” says Deepanshu.

“We are on a mission to provide a large inventory of high-quality furnished apartments to global travellers relocating to Indian cities,” he adds.

The startup currently operates in Gurugram, Delhi, and Neemrana in Rajasthan.

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Laying the foundation

A global mobility administrator at KPMG, Deepanshu, during his tenure at the company, came across a programme where the company gave an option to its employees to relocate to India for six months to three years.

A lot of people were also looking to relocate to India to experience its economic growth, and its rich diverse culture and history. However, there was a serious lack of furnished apartments suitable for expats and senior business travellers. 

That is when the idea struck Deepanshu. He then left his job at KPMG and founded Relocatte in 2015.

Deepanshu was then joined by his childhood friend Harjit Ghai as the Co-founder in the company in 2016. Harjit has over 10 years of experience in hospitality and corporate sales.

“Currently we have a total of 16 employees in our team spread across technology, operations, marketing, sales, and product management. We are looking to expand the team further, especially in operations, marketing, and technology to meet the rising workload and match up with the roadmap,” Deepanshu says.

What does it offer?

Relocatte leases unfurnished apartments from landlords for long-term - typically for three to five years. Apartments are claimed to be checked on over 85 parameters, painted, cleaned, and furnished by its interior design team keeping long term requirements of business travellers in mind.

It offers ready-to-move-in apartments, which can be booked by clients from across the world through its website or app. An in-house client servicing team is also made available to provide post check-in services through its mobile app.  

All properties are listed on its website along with their prices. The clients can either chose from the properties shown on the website or can request the team for assistance to help them find a place.

All the properties have their USPs, amenities and details mentioned within the dedicated page for it. These pages also have professional photographs of the apartment that lets the customer have a fair idea of the place. The amount mentioned for the apartment on its website is the maximum amount that a user has to give.

Relocatte audits all the properties before taking them on lease and emphasis on the properties that are furnished. "If a property is tastefully staged, it can generate 30-40 percent more revenue when compared to the unfurnished ones," says Deepanshu.

The startup has over 125 apartments spread across the four cities (77 units in Gurugram, 29 in Delhi, 15 in Manesar, and 4 units in Neemrana, respectively).

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The market and revenue

According to IBEF, the real estate sector in India is expected to reach a market size of $1 trillion by 2030 from $120 billion in 2017, and contribute 13 percent to the country’s GDP by 2025.

Currently, there is Airbnb Business and Oyo Silver Key operating in the space, but Deepanshu says they are more focused towards short term stays, whereas Relocatte’s priority is towards medium to long term stays.

Explaining further on the differentiation, Deepanshu says, “Our USP is hassle-free booking of premium, ready to move-in apartments through a single window for mid to long-term stays. We are the only ones in the market meeting all these parameters. Other companies in the market either do not support long term stays or do not provide completely furnished apartments.”

The startup is currently bootstrapped with Rs 20 lakh, and says it reinvests from its profits. In March this year, it raised a debt funding Rs 35 lakh from banks and individual investors. It clocked a revenue of Rs 8.4 crore at the end of FY 2019.

The team is, however, in talks with various VCs for Series A funding.

Future plans

Deepanshu says, to accomplish our roadmap for the next two years, we plan to expand geographically to four more cities, adding around 2,500 apartments supported by a high-end tech platform.

In the next two years, the company plans to expand to five other cities including Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru to reach a target of over 2,500 apartments.

“Our long-term plan is to build an inventory of over 7,000 apartments spread across 12 cities by 2024. Our team expansion will mainly be in the operations, technology, and marketing fields. We are focussed towards the development of a high-end web portal and mobile app for seamless and enhanced user experience,” says Deepanshu.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of Paytm, India’s top digital payments firm, invested a disclosed amount in a Mumbai-based startup Kawa Space in its Pre-Series A funding. Earlier, Bengaluru and Chennai-based SpecialE invested a disclosed funding in the startup.

The development follows the Rs 10.3 crore investment made by Mukesh Bansal, Co-founder and CEO, Cure Fit in Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace, a tech startup.

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At a time when India’s space programmes are making a name for themselves in the world, big-time investors in the country are shifting gears to space-tech startups.

Kawa Space is one among the few new-age Indian spacetech startups, that are gaining momentum alongside the ISRO. When asked about the funds raised, Kris Nair, Co-Founder Kawa Space, said,

“We will use the funds raised to expand our team in Bengaluru and San Francisco.”

Co-founded by Kris Nair and Bala M in 2018, Kawa Space designs and operates most advanced earth observation satellite constellations for its customers in financial services, government jobs, strategic risk management, and agricultural sector.

In a single cluster or constellation, Kawa Space will deploy 60 plus small satellites, starting December 2019, which have different sorts of application, from imaging to telecommunications.

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Speaking about the operation of the firm, Kris said,

“We are designing space systems in a way that solution can be deployed by the customers easily without worrying about a huge capital investment or lead time. We can deploy space-based solutions or space missions in seconds rather than years, through a simple API.”

Also, customers like in the agricultural sector can do missions in seconds, rather than waiting for years to design, build, and launch their modules or satellites for the desired applications. It is more like “pay as you go model rather than millions of capital investment.”

Spacetech startups will help the country gain a fair share of the $350 billion global space market, where one can test and build the launch vehicle before the take-off in India, as it costs one-third of what it takes to do it in the US and other countries.

(Edited by Suman Singh)

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Do you have an automation ethicist or an interactive chatbot designer in your company?

If not, chances are that you will be looking out for one sooner than you think.

Today, every business is a tech business, irrespective of the core offering. Updated Technology is no longer a competitive advantage but a must-have. That’s why businesses need to have a workforce which is skilled in these new disciplines. But, on the ground, the story is different with a marked gap in the supply and demand of skilled people.

Companies are finding it hard to find talent with the right tech skills. This is true for India, as much as it is for the rest of the world. According to a recent study by online edtech company Great Learning, today there are 97,000 data science and analytics positions currently vacant across India due to dearth of qualified talent. That number is estimated to grow in a couple of years. In fact, NITI Aayog’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence concurs that the country will have a demand-supply gap of almost 200,000 data analysts in the next few years.

And this has led to a dilemma for companies – should they look at skill acquisition or talent acquisition?

A tech talent war that is costing companies dearly

HR recruiters share that the race to find tech talent is so competitive that most companies have no choice but to pay a premium to hire candidates. In addition, the hiring process itself involves costs – recruitment, advertising and other intermediary costs. And, once a hire is finalised, then there’s the cost of induction and administrative training to help the new hire align with the company’s work practices and culture. In fact, according to WorkplaceInfo, companies are bearing recruitment expenses amounting to nearly 50 percent of a person’s first-year salary.

The dearth of skills extends beyond the company to the existing talent pool in the market. This means that there’s a long gestation period to find and hire talent with the right skill sets, leading to loss of productivity and estimated revenue.

The other two key disadvantages of hiring as a solution to plug the skill gap is the possibility of making a wrong hire, leading to early resignations or dismissals and new hires becoming obsolete over time.

This is not to dismiss the fact that hiring people with the latest technology skills in some cases might be inevitable. But it isn’t sustainable in the long run. At best, hiring is a short-term solution to enable companies to address the immediate skill gap.

This is why, many say, the answer lies in reskilling.

Why companies prioritise reskilling of home-grown talent

It would be safe to say that reskilling is the best way to bolster the workforce sustainably, irrespective of the hiring pipeline or requirement.

Today, a company’s workforce is its biggest differentiator. This workforce should be capable of constantly adapting to changes in the market so that the company can execute digital strategies that are in tune with advancements. The reality, however, is that unless it is championed by the organisation or a top leader, most employees hardly keep pace with the rapidly transforming digital advancements. That’s why businesses must reshape their talent strategy by leveraging skilling to improve employees’ performance and technology.

That said, upskilling and reskilling a company’s internal talent pool is not only a need but also the most practical talent strategy for businesses, considering the skill gap in the talent pool outside the organisation. For one, employees are already in tune with the company culture, its vision and goals, there is absolutely zero onboarding time and zero recruitment and induction training costs. Second, it helps to build a skilled workforce at scale, who are ready for deployment in a short period of time.

A case in point is a leading Operations Management and Analytics company offering insurance, banking, financial services, utilities, healthcare, travel, transportation and logistics services. In 2019, the company realised that they needed over 400 qualified members in their workforce who could take the company towards the next phase of growth. They also realised that they needed to hire people who could hit the ground running immediately after they joined, otherwise they would not be able to hit their targets within agreed timelines. The company saw reskilling and upskilling its current talent pool as the most practical and viable option.

The company teamed up with Great Learning, and its employees underwent a personalised learning experience that helped them learn concepts customised to the company’s needs and build skills that were holistic and relevant to their profiles. At the end of the training period of nine weeks, the company not only cut down on three months of job-training time, but also saved approximately Rs 12 crore which would have otherwise been spent on traditional training. The company also observed that the employees who underwent training were much better skilled, enabling the company to command higher billing rates for their services and thereby increase potential revenues by 2X.

This is just one example that shows why organisations are seeing reskilling as a smart and cost-effective strategy to plug the skill gap and as a growth driver.

A multi-fold advantage

Let’s talk about some of the other significant benefits of upskilling and reskilling the workforce – employee retention, employee engagement, a robust internal talent pipeline, enhanced employee productivity and efficiency.

Employees share that when organisations provide opportunities for upskilling, they feel there’s an increased level of job satisfaction, a sense of job security and a clear career progression in the company. In fact, it is said that training is one of the most effective ways of employee retention after salary and incentives.

But, employee retention is not only about saving costs. Happy employees are also more confident and inclined towards taking on new projects that can bring value to the organisation. In fact, introducing new technical concepts and skills helps them embrace innovative thinking, master data-driven decision-making and do their jobs better and faster, regardless of their role or function in the company.

Organisations that have reskilled their workforce have observed that the reskilled employees received promotions, while also reduced product development life cycle, accelerated time to revenue and significantly brought down the time for development and project roll-out.

Also, given that technology is ingrained in every aspect of the business today, tech literacy is no longer just for the tech workforce. When the non-tech workforce also gets tech skills, it paves the way for effective communication and stronger teamwork, leading to a more competitive and productive organisation.

How to future-proof your workforce

Today, everyone understands that the traditional training doesn’t cut it nor do courses that are solely video-based. They focus too much on theory and do not provide a clear pathway to learners on to how to leverage the new skills that they have acquired.

That’s why companies are opting for a mix of rigorous training with learning aids that reinforce what the employees have learnt. They are looking at specialised skilling and online ed-tech partners who can tailor programmes that help to build skills which are both holistic and at the same time relevant to the employees’ job profiles. For instance, one of the reasons why a platform like Great Learning is sought after by global companies is that its learning content is not only comprehensive but is also customised to the company’s needs. In addition, the learning experience consists of self-paced content along with mentored learning sessions. For instance, in the case of an Operations Management and Analytics company, Great Learning included quizzes, assignments, projects, and hackathons to encourage a company’s employees to come up with novel solutions through the application of the concepts that they’ve learnt.

In another instance, a subsidiary of a global insurance and reinsurance company was looking to upskill its analytics and quality team to enable them to make accurate predictions of policy renewals and ensure that the revenue stream remained unaffected. The challenge was that the group was a mix of technical and non-technical professionals spread across different locations. Great Learning teamed up with the company to design and execute a programme that was customised to the unique needs of the company. The programme included contemporary analytics trends that were being used by top companies, and was also modified so that employees without technical experience were able to follow the curriculum, while still being engaging and valuable to the technical professionals. In addition, a blended approach of an immersive classroom-based methodology, along with live-streamed online programme delivery for different locations was adopted. Participating in the programme enabled the employees to predict future insurance policy renewals with greater accuracy, and in turn the possibility of increasing the revenues substantially, while also reducing the human resource cost of having to hire specialists. 

In short, today ed-tech startups like Great Learning make it possible to not just personalise skilling programmes, but also execute them at scale, making it easy for organisations to become digitally skilled.

It’s time

According to a recent NASSCOM report, nearly 40 percent of the estimated four million workforce in India across every major industry will need reskilling over the next five years to keep up with technology trends like automation, cloud computing, Big Data, analytics, and Machine Learning.

To put it simply, if you are a business, it’s time to upgrade your workforce.

“How good a storyteller are you?” asks Praneet Khare, Co-founder, Avid Secure, a security startup that was recently acquired by Sophos, a global provider of network and end-point security.

A techie for several decades now, storytelling, says Praneet, is an important skill for all, especially techies. 

“When you’re selling a product, you need to be able to tell a story to the customer. And as techies, you need to understand that at the end of the day, you are building the product for a consumer. So, tell the right story. And this holds true even for the engineers you are hiring,” says Praneet. 

Praneet’s love to build products started very early, when he was just 13. At a time when most kids his age were playing video games, he created a small video game all by himself. And this interest to build products from scratch was also visible later in life.

In a conversation with YourStory, Praneet charts his journey from building something from scratch at SolidCore, a startup, to working with a giant like McAfee and his stint at InMobi, which led him to see success as an entrepreneur. 

He says that working with larger companies like these made him understand the importance of building a product with a bigger picture in mind, and why one must understand the fundamentals and the market they’re going after. 

Praneet, however, explains that his journey has just begun, and there still is a long way to go. And between his experiences in the corporate world and startups, Praneet says he will pick a startup any day. 

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Engineering - a childhood dream

Praneet, whose father was a BHEL hydro turbine engineer, spent most of his childhood in Haridwar in the gated BHEL community. He says that his love for engineering started in that very campus. 

“In the BHEL campus, there was a bus service that would run up to Roorkee. I would stand in the balcony of my house and see the bus, and as a child, I always wanted to be a part of the bus and head to the big university at Roorkee,” says Praneet. 

However, his first tryst with engineering happened during a ‘Vishwakarma’ day celebration at the BHEL factory. Praneet was simply fascinated with the lathe machine and fabrications of turbines. He would see his father work on the design of these machines - the big graphic computers - which completely fascinated him. 

Praneet’s interest in building products was also visible when he created a small video game after completing a computer programming course at the age of 13. It was this interest that finally got him to join the place of his childhood dreams - the big university in Roorkee - University of Roorkee in 1993. 

It is here that Praneet developed and built on his core fundamentals. He says his professor - Padam Kumar - would insist on it. 

“Tech keeps changing, no matter what you do, but if your base is strong you can pick anything. In the final year of college, we built wireless CDMA, which was only in research papers in the 90s. We built the hardware and software for the receiver and transmitter to do wireless transfer,” says Praneet. 

And soon, in 1997, under campus placement, he was placed at Hughes Software Systems.

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A sneak-peek into the world of startups 

Speaking about his time at Hughes Software, Praneet says, “We built different components in the telecommunications space, which we would sell to companies that had different needs. It was during this time that I was exposed to companies of different kinds and stages, and I came across different startups. I understood the challenges the startups faced while building the products,” says Praneet. 

For Praneet, it seemed exciting and challenging at the same time, and he felt the need to do something similar and look into the space and see if he could build a product of his own. While there were a few ideas, he didn’t come up with anything significant then. 

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However, his desire to create something from scratch became a reality in 2004 when he joined SolidCore, a California and Gurugram-based startup, as part of the core team.  

“SolidCore was my first step at building something from scratch. Till then, all the anti-viruses would work on the method of blacklisting, where I know the bad signatures and block them. The problem is unless you know the bad signatures, you can’t block out viruses. We thought of flipping the switch and decided that would work on a whitelist method, where we will let only the good signatures work,” explains Praneet. 

But, in 2008, the company was acquired by McAfee, which in-turn got acquired by Intel. 

Understanding from a larger giant 

According to Praneet, the best part of being at McAfee was they let the team be independent. 

“This helped us integrate into the McAfee team, and also build something of our own. We had become the McAfee India centre. It gave us the push, the momentum, and the speed we needed,” says Praneet. 

Being a part of McAfee, Praneet understood the importance of building a product with a bigger picture in mind. He says that while the team understood what and how the products needed to be built, they also built it with an understanding of a few customers. 

But large enterprise clients operate differently. Citing an incident, Praneet says, “I remember a tough meeting with a CIO of a large enterprise. It was an eye-opener of sorts. We realised that while building a product, you really need to understand the market you’re going after. As a startup, it is important to have a fast turnaround and understand how intently you listen to the feedback from your potential customers, mentors, and even current customers. You cannot afford to be rigid.” 

While McAfee gave Praneet the much-needed larger company expertise, he knew he had to get back into a startup-like environment. So, in 2015, he moved to InMobi, where he built the user and data platform. 

Here, he would work on targeted advertising and focus on which user gets what kind of message so that the chances of opening an ad is higher. “The time you get the information of a user, to the time it is made available in the ad survey would take a couple of hours,” says Praneet. 

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The InMobi journey 

InMobi had distributed data centres, and there was a hold where all correlations were made. The process would take a few hours. Praneet says that one of his first assignments was to change this into a screening mode. 

“It was about building a real-time access to all the signals. So, what would take a couple of hours would now take just a few minutes. It was a user platform built on real-time intuition and decision making,” explains Praneet. 

While his journey at InMobi was fascinating, Praneet decided to leave his cushy job as the head of data platform to start up again. 

And this time, he decided to venture into the experiential travel space and started Rizort, a tech platform, with a couple of friends. The platform helped users experience a place beforehand online, and would also give them packages and travel options based on their needs. 

“We built an VR and AR platform to understand the experiences better. We had curated destinations and experiences. But we realised that the market was too small, and the cost of the hardware was really high. There still was a long way to go, so I exited the company in 2017,” says Praneet. 

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Starting up again

After his first entrepreneurial stint, he decided to go back to the field that he felt passionate about – ‘Security’. And this led to the birth of his second startup - Avid Secure - which Praneet co-founded with his ex-colleagues and a few friends. 

The startup focussed on helping people build and deploy their products on scale without worrying too much about security. 

And in January this year, Avid Secure was acquired by Sophos. Praneet says that by the last quarter of 2018, they already had several Fortune 500 companies as their customers, who were giving them good traction. The team had just raised a small seed round.

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The team was also looking to raise Series A round of funding. “We were looking at a term sheet, but in the market the cloud security became a hot segment, primarily because of the breaches. So, large security companies started looking to pick up stake in smaller companies,” says Praneet.

And that is how Sophos came into the picture. When the companies started working together, they realised there was a sync. And after a couple of months, the acquisition closed. Sophos has now created a business unit around Avid, where they are working on a similar charter. 

Are you a storyteller?

Praneet says, "A startup journey has a lot of ups and downs. It is your persistence and belief in the idea that keeps you going. There are days you wake up smiling and then there are days where you wake up wondering why I am doing this. What is important is you have people who are walking in this journey along with you, and they share the same passion, enthusiasm, and positivity. So that when you are feeling down, there are others who can lift you up. It is a belief in what you’re building that keeps you going.”

Today, while hiring a techie, Praneet says, he looks for the attitude and the aptitude of the techie. He says, unless you have the right kind of aptitude to understand the problems and look at different perspectives, it is hard to build a good solution. And the same applies to attitude - how hard are you willing to try? 

Praneet says that while hiring, they ask open-ended questions to see what kind of questions the techie asks to understand the problem statement. And are they looking at different perspectives and alternatives. It is about how thorough one is. 

Advising engineers and techies, Praneet says, 

“Technology keeps changing and evolving. Understand the basic principles of the framework and what problems it can solve. You can then move from framework A to B very easily. Strengthen your fundamentals and nothing can stop you from building anything. Opportunities to grow and learn are everywhere, you just need to look. Also, do not disregard your gut feel.” 

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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India’s band-baaja-baaraat extravaganza is a spectacular $50 billion worth market opportunity. Second only to the US, this industry accounts for a significant amount of traction in related sectors as well, including luxury fashion (a whopping $1 billion industry), and the high-end jewellery segment. And to think of it, it all starts with the humble act of matchmaking.

While many would argue that internet dating has taken precedence over traditional methods of finding a suitable match, there’s a huge chunk of population which begs to differ. About 88 percent of Americans, in fact, said they met their partners offline, as per a Pew research report.

It’s not difficult to understand the dilemma – dating apps, as convenient as they are, continue to score low on the trust-metre and matrimonial services, despite the technological overhaul, and still remain archaic.

And finding a sweet spot between the legion of dating platforms like Tinder, Bumble, and Happn, and popular matrimonial services like Shaadi.com, JeevanSaathi, and BharatMatrimony is GoGaga, a friends of friends dating app.

Started by Neha Kanodia, 36, and Meet Kanodia, 31, in 2018 in Bengaluru, the network-based app, which is similar to meeting people offline, replaces a common intermediate with a trustworthy mutual friend who makes the introduction, and vouches for the connection.

“Think of it… how people make new friends in real life, via friends, over house parties,” says Neha, who is also the developer of the app.  

“While the matrimony apps are mostly parents-operated and caste-based, dating apps are predominantly hook-up in nature showing users strangers in their vicinity… GoGaga presents the solution as a pure-play ‘relationship app’,” she adds.

The brother-sister duo behind the app

Incepted to bridge the gap in the Indian market to cater to young singles looking for a serious relationship, GoGaga is the brainchild of brother-sister duo, Neha and Meet Kanodia.

Neha, a techie with 14 years of experience as a tech lead for global organisations such as Oracle, Goldman Sachs, and Software AG, serves as the technical backbone of the platform. And Meet, an Electrical Engineer from IIT Delhi, with six years of investment banking experience in London, looks after the business side of the service.

Together, the duo is using innovation to help a generation, who much like them, have struggled when it comes to finding their significant other (SO).

“The idea popped up when Meet was looking for a prospective life partner for himself,” recalls Neha. “His expectation was to find someone like-minded who he could connect well with. Now, caste-based filters on matrimony or distance-based searches on dating apps didn’t ensure trust and relevance. Even the expectations of people he found on these dating apps were short-term vs. his long-term.”

That’s when one of his childhood friends, Amar Jain, came into the picture, who introduced Meet to his now-wife. And this led to the idea, says Neha, that people introduced through common references are more real, have similar socio-economic background and credible information, which forms a better, stronger, and a longer connection.

The GoGaga team today is six-members strong (including the founding duo) with the app claiming more than 40,000 users, of which over 30 percent were brought in through word-of-mouth.

“Owing to the concept driven by matchmakers, GoGaga’s user base has more or less equitable distribution between men and women,” adds Neha, noting the platform has been growing at 22 percent MoM in terms of its user base.

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Incubation at Facebook and a $40,000 grant

With its unique mix of tech and human moderation, GoGaga claims to successfully mitigate the problem of fake profiles, authenticity verification, and credentials differentiation when it comes to digital dating.

On the app, users typically have two options: First, the friends of friends mode, where a user can find a match for themselves, and second is the matchmaking mode, where one can choose to be a matchmaker for their friends.

“All matchmaker profiles are invisible, so people in committed relationships can safely find matches for their friends. Their profile won’t appear in this section,” assures Neha.

GoGaga’s target audience is between the age of 21 and 33, with 90 percent of its current user base belonging to this demographic. Even as the team continues to experiment and explore with this model – a free-to-use app with some freemium features – its popularity has been steadily gaining steam.

The freemium model basically implies that the app is free to download, like most other apps in the market, but the user needs to pay to access certain features like ‘direct contact’, ‘remind’, ‘reconsider,’ and so on.

As Neha recalls, “We launched GoGaga during a cultural fest at IIM Bangalore. The app was very well received by the students and we got our first 100 customers as IIM Bangalore students.” The biggest validation for the Bengaluru-based startup, however, came from none other than Facebook.

In September 2018, GoGaga got shortlisted to be a part of the FbStart programme, which is an incubation programme from Facebook designed to help early-stage mobile startups build and grow their apps.

“We received $40,000 from Facebook as part of its incubation programme,” says Neha, “We are also selected to be a part of Facebook’s invite-only Pilot Programme, and are due to receive more support in September 2019.”

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Taking the Indian matchmaking market by storm

From classifieds and newspaper advertisements in the early 90s to online matrimony by the end of the decade, the Indian matchmaking market has evolved by leaps and bounds with changing tastes, and it will keep changing. Keeping up with a mobile-first generation, in fact, this industry has even traced its way to Android and iOS.

In this space, which is gradually getting crowded, for a new player like GoGaga, survival and scaling will boil down to sharp differentiators; whether it is the target user base or the means of monetising.

“We compete with the dating apps directly and matrimonial apps indirectly,” explains Neha, adding that by the end of 2020, GoGaga will be targeting a revenue of around $500,000 with a profit margin of 35 percent (approx).

She adds, “Since it is a new concept dating app, users do not really understand it quickly. We are trying to educate the users regularly, and are using interesting ways to help users build a network on GoGaga.”

The journey for GoGaga can be best described as ongoing. Of course, laced with challenges along the way and with moments, when the founding duo’s innovation seemed truly one of its kind. For instance, that one time when Neha was addressing Facebook’s SheLeadsTech meet-up and someone from the audience walked up to her and told her how she met her S.O on GoGaga.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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Last week, Apple sent out invites for its annual extravaganza to be held at the Steve Jobs Theater, a 1,000-seat underground auditorium located in its Cupertino HQ. ‘

'By innovation only’ read the curious invite for the September 10 event, where Apple is slated to unveil its iPhone 11 lineup. 

Naturally, it became a water-cooler conversation in the world of tech. After all, it has been a while since Apple really launched something innovative. That baton may have been passed on to the iPhone-maker’s peers from the Far East. 

But, 2019 promises to be different. Or so indicate the teasers. Apple usually ships the first batch of its new iPhones a fortnight after its stage event.

Here are a few things you can expect from tonight’s launch. 

Foldable iPhone

Tech geeks reckon Apple has something “radical” lined up this year. A foldable iPhone could be one of them. Renowned Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple could bring about an “all-new form factor design” in the new iPhone range.

This further corroborates the leaked concept photos of an “ambitious device” Apple was said to be working on. 

Additionally, in May 2019, the company was granted a new patent for a “foldable cover and display for an electronic device” by the US Patent and Trademark Office. 

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iOS 13 

There’s a brand-new operating system (OS) to look forward to. Apple claims iOS 13 will be its fastest OS till date.

Additionally, app downloads will be 50 percent smaller, and updates will also be lighter by 60 percent. 

Some of the features expected in iOS 13 are a system-wide Dark Mode, about a 30 percent quicker Face ID, family hotspot sharing, a swipe-to-type keyboard, and a single ‘Find My’ app combining ‘Find My Friends’ and ‘Find My iPhone’.

5G support

Apple insider Kuo thinks that all the new iPhones will be 5G-enabled. With 2020 expected to be the year of global 5G adoption, Apple will want to make its devices next-gen ready. 

However, its in-house 5G baseband chip may not be done until 2022, reveals Kuo.

Hence, the iPhone-maker will have to rely on Qualcomm’s chips to connect to high-speed 5G network.

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Triple-camera setup 

Even though Apple was the first handset-maker to bring about dual cameras with the iPhone 7 Plus in 2016, it failed to expand that cabinet even as its rivals took giant steps in that area. But, the iPhone 11 range could change that too. 

Teasers indicate the new iPhones could come with a triple-camera setup in a square cabinet. Kuo predicts that the rear cameras of the new iPhones will have 3D-sensing systems as well as augmented reality features.

Another prediction indicates that the iPhone 11 will sport a ‘best-in-class’ night mode too. Something to take on Google Pixel then?

‘Biggest’ battery ever

Apple has traditionally been chided for the poor battery performance of iPhones. Given the price it commands, that department deserves more attention — and ‘innovation’.

Predictions say the iPhone 11 Max could sport “the biggest battery ever on an iPhone” with a capacity of 4,000 mAh. This is a significant increase over the iPhone XS Max that came with a 3,174 mAh battery. 

Besides the iPhones, Apple is also slated to unveil the new Apple Watch series, Apple TV Plus, and Apple Arcade services, and maybe, a macOS update too. 

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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In February 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the India-Korea startup hub in Seoul. The one-stop platform aims to bring the Indian and Korean startup ecosystems closer and facilitate joint innovation between the two economies.

Earlier this year, Korean investor Smilegate Investment invested in Bengaluru-based payments company Cashfree. In a conversation with YourStory, Jungin Park and Minjung Kim speak about why they are keen on investing in Indian startups and what makes India so attractive.

Binny Bansal plans new VC fund of $300-400 million

Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal is stepping up his investment activity with plans to launch a new venture capital (VC) fund focused on startups with a size of around $300-400 million. The VC fund will focus on the capital requirement for startups in India and South East Asia region and will be operational by the end of 2019.

This 26-year-old serial entrepreneur is the director of 10 firms

Serial entrepreneur Tejal Pimpley heads companies such as CISB Facility Services Pvt Ltd and Green Eco Environment & Energy Pvt Ltd. The 26-year-old also runs two cafes and a dance academy in Mumbai.

Flipkart onboards 27,000 kirana shops to strengthen last mile delivery

For Flipkart, the nationwide kirana onboarding started about six months ago, undertaken keeping in mind the massive scale of the upcoming festive season, which witnesses heightened demand from customers from across the country, and also grow the business of its kirana partners.

How a housewife built a Rs 10 Cr business from Rs 50,000

Jyoti Wadhwa started her online business, Sanskriti Vintage, with money borrowed from her husband and broke even in the very first year of operations. From running the business single-handedly in the initial days, she now has a team of 30, most of them women.

Fitness startup Fitso raises $1.5M in Pre-Series A funding

Fitso, a YourStory Tech30 startup from last year, raised $1.5 million from SRI Capital. Fitso, a full-stack sports facilities provider, offers training for runners and triathletes with coaching and access to all-weather swimming pools in Delhi-NCR throughout the year.

Why Uber wants Chetan Maini-led Sun Mobility's battery swap tech

The Co-founder of Sun Mobility and the Founder of India’s first electric vehicle Reva, Chetan Maini is leading the charge to bring battery swaps in India to drop the pricing of EVs by encouraging collective ownership of electric mobility. 

NGO by former fashion designer is making differently-abled feel at home

Started by Madhu Tugnait (60), a former fashion designer, the Icha Foundation was registered as an NGO in 2010, which aims to foster security and dignity for the differently-abled kids. At present, it has 20 children and provides them with food, housing, medical facilities, and schooling.

Now get the Daily Capsule in your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter today! 

India and China have agreed on cooperation in R&D for developing new technology for manufacturing solar cells from alternate material and improvement of efficiency of solar cells, Niti Aayog said on Monday.

Both sides have also agreed on cooperation in the field of e-mobility and energy storage.

This among other issues was discussed during the sixth India-China Strategic Economic Dialogue, which was concluded on Monday.

"Both sides agreed on cooperation in R&D for developing new technology for manufacturing solar cells from alternate material and improvement of efficiency of solar cells," it said.

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Under this dialogue, there are six standing joint working groups which are appointed by both sides to address economic and commercial issues across infrastructure, energy, high-tech, resource conservation, pharmaceuticals and policy coordination in a structured and outcome-oriented manner.

The working group on pharmaceuticals decided that both the sides should explore cooperation for promoting Indian generic drugs and Chinese APIs (raw material for pharma sector).

Similarly, the working group on high-tech exchanged views on regulatory procedures of ease of doing business, development of artificial intelligence, high-tech manufacturing, and next-generation mobile communications of both countries.

On infrastructure, they held discussions on identifying the next steps in all areas of cooperation as well as on taking forward the study project exploring the possibility of Delhi-Agra high speed railway in the pilot section.

Senior representatives from policy making, industry, and academia participated in this dialogue from both the sides.

The Indian side was led by Rajiv Kumar, Vice Chairman, NITI Aayog, and the Chinese side by He Lifeng, Chairman, NDRC (National Development and Reforms Commission).

Also, India is now the leading fintech startup hub in Asia, attracting a larger volume of investments in the first quarter of 2019. According to CB Insights, fintech startups in India received VC investments of $286 million for the first quarter of 2019, whereas fintech startups in China received $192.1 million during the same period, a drop of 87.56 percent over the last year.

(Disclaimer: Additional background information has been added to this PTI copy for context)

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Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar on Monday urged Chinese businesses to look at India as an export destination from where they can sell their products to various countries.

"We will welcome all export-oriented investment from China. I am also pleased to hear the kind of opportunities we can have for the Chinese investment in our infrastructure, in our railways, in our roads, ports, airports, everywhere, even in our real estate," Kumar said at the India-China Economic Cooperation Forum organised by the CII here.

Elaborating on the export-oriented investment from China, he said it is akin to American investment in China, which is all about exporting back to America.

"Now, it is time therefore for the Chinese companies for investment in India, make in India and the export from India, whether it is back to China or is to Africa or to the US, as these goods will go from India."

"And I think that's the investment that we are really looking for because that will be helping us both in terms of our economy generation to make in India and increasing our exports," he said.

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Kumar also said that India and China, through this forum, have agreed to identify non-tariff areas so that it becomes easier for the Indian companies to make inroads into China.

"In several areas, specially for India, like say for pharmaceuticals and IT, the market access to China is affected by procedures and licences. So, we have agreed that we will look at these non-tariffs measures and try to address them so that we can achieve better market access," he said.

He also assured Chinese investors and businesses all kind of help the Indian government can lend for them to do business here, saying they can approach Niti Aayog as and when they feel there are issues to be addressed.

"I want to assure my Chinese friends and the Chinese companies...we have the CII, and the Indian companies can become the joint partners in JVs for bringing Chinese companies in India and making it easier for them, facilitate their entries.

"I can assure on my behalf, on Niti Aayog's behalf that if there is any time at all, any effort that is needed on the part of the government of India, do not hesitate to approach me. We will make sure that whatever stumbling block if you are facing, either in the central government or in the states, we will work towards getting it removed and try to getting it addressed," said the Niti Aayog vice chairman.

He also emphasised that the two countries can easily reach the $100 billion bilateral trade within the next two years with the governments and industries in both the countries working hand in hand.

"We can surely reach the target of $100 billion bilateral trade in the next two years. And I am sure that we will surpass the target of $20 billion foreign direct investment between the two countries in the fairly new future in the next two three years," he added.

Meanwhile, five memorandum of understanding (MoU) were exchanged during the occasion. These include, between CII and China Association of Circular Economy, China Datang Technologies and Engineering and Gujarat Electricity Cooperation, and Beijing Membrance Technology and Client Nature Tech Enviro Protection.

India-China bilateral trade stood at $87 billion during 2018-19.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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