Coming from a sports background, friends Abhimanyu Rishi (38) and Kusum Bhandari (42) are strong believers in natural health care.
Their startup, Bhookha Haathi, was born out of a realisation that there were no true 100 percent natural products among the existing health solutions available in India. These entrepreneurs’ primary aim was to help people replace unhealthy and harmful chewing products.
Founders Kusum Bhandari and Abhimanyu Rishi
Bengaluru-based Bhookha Haathi was thus founded by the duo in 2018, with the vision of creating products that would help people do away with the widespread vice of tobacco-chewing.
Says Abhimanyu,
“There are around 232 million tobacco-users in India, of which 30 percent are into the habit of chewing tobacco. Bhookha Haathi has a vision for 2050, where it would want to reduce the consumption of tobacco by more than 50 percent. Also, there is a need to limit the consumption of unhealthy mouth fresheners which are full of additives and preservatives and cannot claim to be 100 percent natural.”
Apart from natural mouth refreshers, Bhookha Haathi, at present, offers a range of health foods that, according to the founders, not only cures many long-term and hereditary diseases but also, resolves a range of nutritional deficiencies with no side-effects.
The startup claims to have pioneered a nutraceutical-tech domain powered by its proprietary AI software. With this technology capability, Bhookha Haathi also provides subscription-based, personalised health solutions at an affordable cost to consumers who wish to substitute or replace their dependencies on expensive, strong, processed, and chemical-based products.
Its offerings are 100 percent natural compositions based on dried fruits, nuts, herbs, spices, seeds, grains, and honey, among other whole and natural ingredients.
Abhimanyu and Kusum recount that they met each other through a common acquaintance and, over a few cups of coffee, ended up sharing their thoughts on the need for affordable nutraceutical solutions.
Abhimanyu has held various management, leadership, and strategic positions during his stints at Snapdeal, Tastykhana, and Styletag over two decades. Kusum, on the other hand, has over 18 years of experience. She has previously worked in various leadership and strategic-level positions at Images Bazaar, Triton Communications, and the Sahara Group.
Today, including the founders, Bhookha Haathi is a 15-strong team.
Its offerings
“We believe that a healthy lifestyle starts with selecting healthy food. We are constantly thinking of our consumers and looking for innovative ways, to help them make healthier food through alternative food products. Bhookha Haathi takes its consumers one step closer to a healthier diet by offering them nutritious, wholesome, and tasty choices as an alternative to the nutrient-deficient ingredients in the average daily diet,” explains Kusum.
The startup’s products include dry-fruit mouth refreshers, a dry-fruit health-booster starter pack (natural, daily health boosters for sports, fitness, and health enthusiasts), and pro-health booster packs (for gym, yoga, and bicycling experts). The range is priced between Rs 199 and Rs 399 per 100 gms.
Adds Kusum,
“Dry fruits are a great source of energy, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and dietary fibre. Our popular range of dry fruit- and nut-based health boosters is a great alternative to the unnatural proteins, vitamins, and other powders commonly available in the market.”
Consumers also have a range of speciality honey to choose from, which can serve as a healthy replacement for the sugars used in beverages and for other daily consumption.
“Sourced directly from farmers and producers, our range of proprietary health food products celebrate pure, powerful, healing, and health-promoting ingredients which are 100 percent natural and organic without any preservatives, added colours, or artificial flavours,” shares Abhimanyu.
The startup’s personalised subscription plans for medications involve plans that are set based on the lifestyle the customer follows. The customers can get these services by signing up on its website.
Its AI works between profiling and the current medication patterns and it suggests a nutraceutical package which includes nutraceutical products based on subscription.
“We believe that we are India’s first AI-powered personalised subscription-based platform with various proprietary products, services, and solutions under the nutraceutical umbrella,” says Kusum.
The plans are priced between Rs 4,999 and Rs 19,999 per annum, depending on the ailment, tests conducted by its AI software and frequency of treatment.
According to the founders, the health food products are sold to customers through chemists, retailers, and panwalas across north and east Bengaluru, some parts of Mumbai, and Hyderabad. Its personalised subscription plans are available to consumers across the country.
Some of Bhookha Haathi’s repeat B2B partners are Easy Day and Natures Basket, apart from enterprise and individual partners like yoga centres, gym trainers, and medical practitioners. It is also selling its products on online platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart.
According to research on global markets, the nutraceuticals segment was valued at Rs 26,000 crore in 2017 and is expected to reach Rs 80,000 crore by 2023 at a CAGR of 17 percent.
Says Kusum,
“While there are many big and small nutraceutical product-based players like Nestle, Amway, etc. providing health supplements, we strongly believe that none of them have yet explored AI technology the way we have and plan to in the next few years.”
She adds that 70 percent of its customers, currently numbering around 25,000, are in the age group of 25-45.
"We have generated 4,000 pre-sales orders from the US market and are expected to reach 30,000 by the end of our pre-sales campaign in January 2020. We also have aggressive plans and strategies to expand to other international markets," says Abhimanyu.
Talking about the revenue, the Co-founder says, “We have seen 10X growth since inception, with around Rs 3 crore generated in total revenue. We made a revenue of Rs 30 lakh in FY18, Rs 1.34 crore in FY19, and Rs 1 crore till Q2 of FY20.” The team is targetting revenue of close to Rs 3 crore for FY20.
Bootstrapped so far, the company has plans to raise funds in the coming months to scale up its operations, expand its customer base, and advance its proprietary AI technology.
It has plans to automate the AI technology to an API-based system that its partners can lease for a minimal cost to enhance their consumers’ health experiences.
An MBBS from All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi in 2007, Nikhil Sikri practised as a doctor for a while in Singapore’s Institute of Mental Health (IMH). However, his calling seemed to be away from the world of medicine.
After completing an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, Nikhil took the entrepreneurial plunge.
Hailing from Haryana, Nikhil always wanted to build something that would create an impact in the everyday life of an individual.
To begin with,he started a medtech company with his younger brother Akhil Sikri, but realised the product just didn’t reach the number of people he had hoped. The brothers, along with Nikhil’s wife Sneha Sikri, then decided to look at the education space and started AugBrain in 2014.
“At that point in time, I was only moonlighting for them. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the right model for the product,” he says.
But the trio were still focussed on building something that truly impacted people’s lives. Digging deeper, they realised that one of the biggest problems people faced was in the real estate space. The paying guest market in India was largely unorganised, with a huge gap in affordable living space. With dirty rooms and no focus on food or community, they realised the space needed a shift.
The eureka moment
“Today, people are changing the way they live, and it just isn’t students or singles looking at the co-living space, but it is also the need of the strong transient population and couples. Yet, the market didn’t have many safe and reliable options. It was a highly broken space, and it led us to start Zolostays,” says Nikhil.
Founded in 2015, Zolostays originally started as an aggregator of PG accommodation by on-boarding existing suppliers on its platform, and unifying these under its branding. But within six months and despite touching a scale of 20,000 beds, it decided to pivot the business in order to control the entire experience.
“When we were in the aggregator model, we didn’t have control over things like maintenance and repair, food, cleanliness. Because, the property wasn’t owned by us and we didn’t have much of a say. Training works only up to a certain extent. Our whole premise of starting up was to give our tenants the best co-living experience. This we couldn’t promise with an aggregator model, so we pivoted to a lease model,” says Nikhil.
At present, Zolostays currently has over 350 properties across 10 cities including Bengaluru, Chennai, Kota, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Coimbatore, Pune, Gurugram, Noida, and Hyderabad. It works through two kind of models - Zolo Standard and Zolo Select.
Zolostays, which raised $35 million in two rounds of funding, has 45,000 live beds and has locked-in 2,00,000 beds for the near future. Its target customers are students and early professionals.
For a very long time, consumers never regarded tablets as productive devices. That, of course, changed with the large-sized (9.7-inch and above) iPads, though they still weren’t considered a good enough replacement for laptops.
Plus, iPads are restricted to the iOS universe. In the Android universe, perhaps only one brand has consistently come up with reliable tablets: Samsung.
In October, Samsung launched the Galaxy Tab S6 along with its Galaxy Watch 4G and the Galaxy Watch Active 2 devices. The tablet is bundled with an SPen stylus and pre-loaded with Samsung DeX computing platform.
It looks and feels premium. In comparison, prior tablets from the Samsung stable feel flimsy and tiny.
Let’s take a look at how the device fares:
Premium unibody design
The Galaxy Tab S6 boasts of a unibody design with subtle curved corners. The tablet weighs just 420g and is carved out of a single block of aluminium. You can easily grip it with one hand or slip it into a pouch or a regular backpack.
At a thickness of just 5.7 mm, Galaxy Tab S6 is lightweight and one of the more portable laptops out in the market. This is one of its USPs.
Samsung gets the design and button placement right.
The volume rocker and power buttons, and the SIM card slot are placed on the right, while the speakers and charging ports can be found at the bottom. This is helpful if you’re using the tablet in portrait mode.
External keyboard
It takes a few minutes to boot the Galaxy Tab S6 and attach the Book Cover Keyboard. If you intend to use the tablet for heavy-duty typing, then an external keyboard makes sense.
The Book Cover is a perfect fit for the Galaxy Tab S6, but there is a catch.
The keys are too crampedand could pose some problems if you need fast typing. Getting used to the trackpad and the shortcuts can be a pain and sometimes you just end up hitting a wrong button. Many other Bluetooth keyboards actually do a better job of this.
Even then, the Book Cover does a decent job and prevents your fingers from the damage that comes with long hours of typing on a tablet. The only thing to note is that it needs a flat surface to function to its fullest.
Fantastic S-AMOLED display and fine audio
The Galaxy Tab S6 comes with a 10.5-inch Super AMOLED (or S-AMOLED) panel (of 2560x1600 resolution). The bezels around the display aren’t razor thin, which helps with the grip, and also prevents any accidental touches.
It is no secret that Samsung makes some of the best displays in smartphones, and that is extended to its tablet range too. The AMOLED panel has colours that pop, some great viewing angles, and good sunlight legibility. Watching videos, reading and typing text are a real pleasure.
The OnePlus 7 Pro and the OnePlus 7T have spoiled consumers with displays that come with higher refresh rates (the number of times a screen redraws an image).
Even the iPad Pro has one, but the Galaxy Tab S6 is devoid of this feature. This is perhaps the only thing lacking in an otherwise premium and sturdy device.
The Galaxy Tab S6comes with a quad-speaker setup manufactured by AKG Acoustics. This sound is loud and clear and can fill a room with ample ease.
Camera: Good enough for video calls
The tablet houses an 8-megapixel selfie camera and a dual-camera setup at the back. It is made up of a 13-megapixel primary sensor and a 5-megapixel secondary sensor.
Most people aren’t going to whip out their tablets to take pictures, because smartphones do the job pretty well. But, if they do, the Galaxy Tab S6 puts up a decent performance in daylight.
Tablet cameras are largely used for making video calls, and that is a surprisingly good experience with the Galaxy Tab S6.
Allows smooth multitasking
We didn’t face too many hiccups while testing out the Galaxy Tab S6. We didn’t do heavy gaming, because tablets really aren’t tailored for that.
But, the device holds up well for all your other needs - social media, text typing, web-browsing, video-watching, etc. The SPen is particularly useful for taking quick notes.
The Galaxy Tab S6 also runs efficiently for over 24 hours without heating up.
Stellar battery life
The Galaxy Tab S6 is packed with a massive 7,030 mAh battery. In terms of endurance, it is absolutely stellar. A single charge lasts for nearly 36 hours even after streaming, browsing, editing and casual gaming.
The device supports a 4G SIM, which will surely impact battery life, but not so much that it cannot take a single day usage.
Verdict: best tablet Android has to offer
The Galaxy Tab S6 retails at Rs 59,900, which is on the steeper side for an Android tablet. The Book Cover Keyboard is sold separately for Rs 10,999.
That’s over Rs 70,000 off your wallet. Some users might argue that you can get an older MacBook Air or a newer iPhone at that price.
But, if you’re bound to the Android ecosystem, then the Galaxy Tab S6 is the only tablet that matters irrespective of its hefty price tag.
Plus, it has got an exceptional display, good multitasking prowess, superb battery life, great audio capabilities. Basically, all one needs in a tablet.
Also, few non-smartphone devices are as lightweight and portable. So, look no further than this!
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of YourStory Media.)
Ecommerce marketplace Flipkart in collaboration with Women in Product, a San Francisco-based non-profit organisation, held a conference in Bengaluru on Saturday to encourage the participation of women in the area product and technology.
The conference called “#Include – Building Bharat” witnessed participation from experts such as Jeyandran Venugopal - Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart; Sairee Chahal - Founder of SHEROES; Kunal Shah - Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CRED; and Anuj Rathi - Vice President of Product, Revenue and Growth, Swiggy.
Jeyandran Venugopal - Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart
Speaking about the role of women in 'Building for Bharat', Smriti Krishna Singh, Chief Human Resources Officer, Flipkart, said, "At Flipkart, we are committed to empowering women across the ecommerce ecosystem. From tech and engineering to our marketplace itself, we make a concerted effort to boost the participation of women. Our marketplace platform is home to thousands of women entrepreneurs, with many working out of their homes, and we undertake several initiatives to make them a key part of our ecommerce journey as we build for Bharat."
The speakers at the event shared their key insights and learnings in building products for Bharat and strategies to include the larger participation of the women in this journey. It stressed on the need for organisations to adopt core inclusivity in the ecosystem.
Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Flipkart,
"The collaboration with Women in Product gives us a chance to initiate a dialogue and exchange ideas on how we can encourage women in India to further participate in technology and innovation, and make them
an integral part of this endeavour to build solutions for the Indian market."
Women in Product Chief Executive Officer, Elizabeth Ames, said,
“Women represent an untapped opportunity for companies to increase innovation and insight within product teams. We are delighted to collaborate with Flipkart in highlighting their skills, successes, and leadership.”
Flipkart has various learning programmes such as INSPIRED, a platform for women engineers to network and learn what’s breaking edge in technology and ‘Girls Wanna Code’, a campus initiative to attract more women engineers through hackathons and case challenges. Flipkart’s work policies reflect the company’s efforts to create a progressive work environment that drives inclusion and innovation.
Like last week, this week also saw the participation of venture debt funds. Startups raised $18.5 million through venture debt. The equity funding amount raised this week was down 20 percent, to $150.7 million, compared to last week’s $189 million. The flavour of the week were the six Series B deals (considered to be growth-stage deals) that together raised $104 million.
Fintech startup Perfios Software Solutions has raised about $50 million (about Rs 359 crore) in funding, led by an affiliate of private equity funds managed by Warburg Pincus LLC and Bessemer Venture Partners. The investment amount includes primary capital infusion into the company and purchase of shares from early angel investors, a statement said. The funds from the Series B round will be utilised for continued technology innovation, international expansion, and potential acquisitions.
Early-stage deals
Gurugram-based Wingreens Farms Private Limited (Wingreens) raised Rs 125 crore (or $17.37 million, as per current exchange rate) as a part of its Series B funding round led by Zurich-based private equity fund responsAbility Investments AG. Existing investor Sequoia India also participated as a part of this round.
B2B platform for medical supplies Medikabazaar raised Rs 112 crores ($15.8 million) in its Series B funding round, led by healthcare-centric VC firm Health Quad, Belgium-based Ackermans & van Haaren (AvH), and Rebright Partners and Toppan Printing Co Ltd from Japan.
Diagnostic testing startup Healthians raised Rs 85 crore, or about $12 million, as a part of its Series B funding, led by DG Incubation and DG Daiwa Ventures from Japan. The round also saw participation from Mistletoe and Tokio Marine from Singapore, Kotak PE and Trifecta from India along with other existing investors.
Bengaluru-based social commerce startup WMall raised about Rs 64 crore (approximately $9 million) in a Series B round of funding from Chiratae Venture Partners (formerly IDG), SAIF Partners, and VH Capital.
Delhi-NCR based coworking space startup myHQ raised $1.5 million in its pre-Series A funding round led by India Quotient. Singapore-based family office RB Investments, Ashish Goenka from Suashish, and other investors also participated in the round.
Mumbai-based FMCG startup Svami, which sells non-alcoholic aerated beverages, raised Rs 7.5 crore (about $1 million) in its Pre-Series A funding round led by Rukam Capital Trust and Niren Shah, MD of Norwest Venture Partners India. Ashish Chand’s Family Office, Yukti Securities, also participated in the round.
Mumbai-based OneLife Nutriscience Pvt Ltd, which owns consumer healthcare brand OneLife – Live it right, raised pre-Series A funding of Rs 5 crore ($0.69 million) from a group of HNIs in the pharma, healthcare, and chemical industries.
Tech platform Do Your Thng (DYT) raised $1,50,000 from angel investors Puneet Chandra (Founder and Joint Managing Director at Skootr Global Private Limited), Sorabh Agarwal (former MD of Copal Partners), Amit Dharod, and Girish Minocha, among others.
New Delhi-based fintech startup Quikkloan raised an undisclosed amount as seed funding led by a series of angel investors, including Arun Diaz, advisor of Aavishkaar; Aasif Ahsan Khan, MD and CEO Of Fab Technologies; and Sanjay Budhwar.
Fintech startup Kaarva raised an undisclosed seed fund amount from angels such as Naveen Tewari, Amit Gupta, and others.
Mumbai-based And Nothing Else (ANE), a 100 percent clean-label food brand aiming to rebuild the world’s trust in food, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Matrix Partners India.
Health and fitness startup Curefit raised $0.47 million as part of its Series D funding round from Bengaluru-based FPGA Family Foundation.
Equity International, the real estate focused investment firm founded by billionaire investor Sam Zell, has invested an undisclosed amount in Delhi-based student housing startup Stanza Living, it was announced in the media.
Other deals
Online grocery startup Grofers raised $20 million in a funding round from Bennett Colemen & Co via warrant issue. In May this year, the startup raised $220 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund. South Korean investment firm KTB Ventures and existing investors Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital also invested in the round.
Jaipur-based language learning platform Multibhashi raised an undisclosed amount in its latest round of investment from a set of investors led by Rarejob Inc, a leading online English learning player listed in Japan.
Virtual ecommerce platform Digital Mall of Asia (DMA) raised close to Rs 22 crore ($3.06 million) in a fresh funding round. The investment was made by Satish Jain through Amour Infrastructure. With this funding, DMA plans to scale up its product development and branding initiatives to create large-scale awareness about its key offerings, followed by an upcoming launch in the Indian ecommerce space.
Furtados School of Music (FSM), a Mumbai-based music school brand operated by FSM Education Pvt. Ltd., secured Rs 20 crore ($2.7 million) in funding from IAN Fund and DSG Consumer Partners.
Innovation in Food and Agriculture Fund managed by Sathguru Catalyser Advisors invested about $4 million in early-stage life sciences company, Telluris Biotech India. With this, Sathguru will also hold a minority stake in the startup.
US-based tech major UST Global has invested in Cogniphi Technologies, an AI and cognitive technology startup in India. The amount was undisclosed.
Mumbai-based Pareto Capital, a boutique investor relation, advisory, and asset management company, has forayed into the wealth management business by acquiring a minority equity stake in Mumbai-based Crescita Investment Management Private Limited.
Debt funding
Fintech startup Aye Finance raised Rs 125 crore from Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO through issuance of non-convertible debentures. With this fundraising, Aye plans to expand its outreach in providing credit, specifically to women-owned microenterprises in India.
There were five exits and acquisitions this week. Online-offline edtech startup Azent Overseas Education, announced the acquisition of Bengaluru-based admission assistance platform Admission Table.
In yet another deal, S4 Capital Plc, the digital advertising and marketing services company, announced that its global content practice MediaMonks had acquired Delhi-based content creation and production company WhiteBalance.
Tulip Diagnostics, an in-vitro diagnostic firm, acquired Mumbai-based Biosense Technologies, a medical devices maker, for an undisclosed amount. The details of the fifth deal were also undisclosed; Mumbai-based financial services group Centrum acquired the business operations of Delhi-based microlender Altura Financial Services.
Raghavendra Kumar Ravinutala was at a leisurely breakfast with a few friends one day in 2014 when one of them started complaining about his telecom operator and its shoddy customer support. He expressed his wish to be able to just message the operator on WhatsApp and get support, rather than calling several times and being put on hold endlessly.
Around this time, Raghu was already contemplating entrepreneurship and his friend's wish propelled his dream to start up further.
"It seemed obvious that messaging with business is an area nobody has touched, and something that every business and consumer around the world would need," Raghavendra said.
Raghu was then managing integrated circuit (IC) design at Broadcom, an American manufacturer of semiconductors. Jaya Kishore Reddy, the Co-founder of Yellow Messenger, was working at Myntra as a software developer.
Thanks to Raghu's brother, the duo happened to meet with each other and found common interest in the idea of making a product that would connect users to the core systems of an enterprise.
They started to build a conversational AI product as a weekend project. An MVP was built in four months and a prototype was soft-launched to a few B2C users by March 2015. By June, traction started to amplify and the number of users doubled every month. Thus started the journey of Yellow Messenger.
By January 2016, nine months after its launch, Yellow Messenger had 50,000 users interacting with the product. As of today, Yellow Messenger offers an always-on, intelligent conversational automation on text and voice across multiple channels like WhatsApp, Google Assistant, Alexa, web, and mobile apps.
"These intelligent conversational bots are trained on vertical market and process knowledge. They are formulated into pre-built, ready-to-use bot templates and can be customised for each customer with minimal code."
With more than 75 enterprises, Yellow now has a huge clientele, including biggies like Adani Power, Bajaj Allianz, Tata Power, HDFC Bank, Asian Paints, Byju's, Dr Reddy's, Unilever, Tata Motors, Accenture, Cisco, Deloitte, Royal Challengers Bangalore, Reliance Infrastructure, PepsiCo, and Aditya Birla Group.
In June this year, Yellow Messenger's Series A round was led by Lightspeed Ventures and backed by angel investors like Phanindra Sama, Founder, redBus; Kashyap Deorah, Founder of Hypertrack; Anand Swaminathan, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Co.; Prashant Malik, Co-founder of Limeroad; Nishant Rao, former MD at Linkedin India; Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, co-founders of Snapdeal; Monisha Varadan of Zephyr Ventures; and Alap Bharadwaj, APAC Innovation, Google.
The startup, which was at an ARR of $100,000 in January 2016, now makes revenue of close to $2.5 million.
With an outstanding lineup of keynotes, panels, pitches, workshops, and installations, the annual DesignUp 2019 conference wrapped up in Bengaluru. There were also experience zone exhibits, morning walks to cultural sites, and visits to design studios – ending at the quintessential Bengaluru microbreweries.
In Part I of our coverage of DesignUp 2019, we featured takeaways on design teams and creative cultures. In Part II, we dig deeper into emerging trends and ethical practices for designers. While it has not been possible to cover every single session at the conference, many useful links are available from the event website and Twitter feed.
Data, digital and design
There is a deficit of data about the behaviours and aspirations of poorer people, whereas there is a data glut about a smaller population of Westerners, cautioned Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life beyond the West, and Associate Professor at Erasmus University, Rotterdam (see my book review and author interview).
Instead of relying too much on frameworks like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Payal advocated a design framework for the next billion users based on the ‘5 Fs’ - fun, flexibility, fusion, fabulousness, and removal of friction.
Instead of expecting to see poor people use digital media only for pragmatic purposes, it is important to accept that they use it to escape from tediousness, fatigue, and boredom. “The net is the only leisure economy for the poor,” Payal observed.
Digital media plans and features should have flexibility built into them. This can help accommodate the unpredictability and financial constraints in the lives of the poor, many of whom are migrants.
Digital ecosystems in China and Indonesia are showing the power of super-apps, with a fusion of features and capabilities across digital ecosystems for transactions, content and messaging. Design also helps reduce or remove friction in a number of activities. “Design is an art of effortlessness,” Payal said, pointing to the rise of fintech as an example of inclusion for the unbanked.
The poor also spend disproportionately more on luxury and leisure as compared to middle classes, Payal explained. Well-designed products and services should therefore give them a sense of status, dignity and pride. She pointed out how ‘gold phones’ were made in Shenzhen 12 years before Apple’s gold iPhone, reflecting the insight that Asian consumers see status in gold.
“Paternalistic and condescending design will fail,” Payal predicted. Design for the next billion digital citizens, mostly in the global South, should be humane, empathetic, and aspirational, and embrace diversity.
“We need a higher standard of what data means,” she added. In different ways, citizens in various countries are also negotiating the tradeoff between data privacy and the conveniences afforded by social media platforms.
Design and data storytelling
Data skills are becoming increasingly important in a world powered by and embedded in digital technology. Journalists use design methods and code to help turn statistics into stories, explained Gurman Bhatia, data journalist at Reuters in Singapore.
She shared examples from visualisation and pattern extraction from elections data, pollution reports, and even female solos in Bollywood songs. She cautioned, however, that it is important to first question the source, authenticity, and limitations of the data used in stories.
“Question the data. Interview it. Think like a journalist. Stories and design complement each other,” Gurman advised designers. Everyone should be data literate, be able to trace data’s path, and have research skills.
She showed how certain data points leave out crucial contextual information. For example, people may not accurately report their age in census data, due to ignorance or superstition. Crime statistics should be analysed to see how crimes are defined and reported.
Finally, it is the humans in the story and in the audience that matter. Think about how the story ultimately matters to “Joe in New York” and “Diljeet in Amritsar,” Gurman advised, as framing tips for narrators.
Humans and technology
The “good, bad and ugly” of digital media were debated in a number of panels. Digital media are empowering and entertaining for users, but have also led to the rise of fake news, hate speech, misinformation, spam, cyber-bullying, and digital addiction. Designers can and should play an important role in correcting this imbalance.
Some may view the digital world as a monster, but others have faith in the ability of humanity to socialise and tame technology, though this takes time, effort, and learning. Governance and ethical foundations of the digital world call for responsible regulation that lies above the corporate giants who control much of our media ecosystem.
Growth, scale and profits should not be the only mantras of business. Quality, relevance, inclusion, sustainability, transparency and accountability are more important.
In a separate interview, John Kolko, Partner at Modernist Studio, and Founder, Austin Center for Design, explained that when designers do their job well, they humanise technology and make the unfamiliar familiar.
This happens in layers. “One is in the details of the thing that's made – the user interface, the aesthetics, the piece and parts. And the other is at a strategic level, always asking the question What should we make?and being highly selective in the answer,” he said.
AI and the Future of Work
AI and ML are shaping digital tools in ways that make them more intuitive and anticipatory in nature. AI in design systems will improve productivity and amplify human creativity, explained Rufus Deuchler, Principal Manager of Creative Cloud Evangelism, Adobe Systems.
He showed how the combination of AI and cloud is enabling new features in Adobe tools that make it easier to select and extract objects in frames and videos. AI can also establish authenticity of online content and increase trust through attribution and authority. Deep learning can be used for digital forensics, and improve ethical practices.
AI and automation will take away some jobs, but not those that call for creativity. “Therefore, we need creativity for all,” Rufus urged. AI will lead to emergence of new kinds of creativity. Rufus advised designers to strengthen soft skills such as customer sensitivity, and improve their sense of self-awareness.
Automation should also be accompanied by explainability. Workflows should not just guide users to the next steps, but also explain why that step is needed, explained Sruthi Sivakumar, Head of Design at Bounce, drawing on examples from the bike-sharing startup’s consumer journey.
In a world of bots, only the designer can bat for the users, urged Anupam Taneja, Digital Designer, Designit. By keeping the focus on consumer emotions and intent, designers should champion human needs.
Designers should speak up more, Anupam added. They should have a say in the use of tools, and focus on the underlying methods and impacts. “This is an exciting time to be a designer,” he enthused.
A sense of humour in the exploration of the human-machine relationship was highlighted by Simone Rebaudengo, Shanghai-based partner of design collective automato.farm. He regaled the audience with images of a chandelier made of smartphones, and an AI algorithm that can “measure superstition.”
He asked a number of provocative questions as well. What happens when you lobotomise a neural network? What object is the mid-point between two other objects? What is the difference in the way German and Italian self-driven cars would park themselves?
‘Think of AI as a material or craft to play with, and not something which is perfect or scary,” Simone advised.
Cultivating curiosity
Rather than drowning in data, designers should cultivate a sense of curiosity that can be sharpened even more with data insights. Offline and online observation can strengthen customer profiling, and enable more frequent and creative experimentation.
“Insights are all around us, we just need to be curious and observant,” said Arindam Mukherjee, Senior Director of Product, User Experience and Growth, Flipkart. Quantitative data explain ‘what’ is going on, but qualitative insights and mental models explain ‘why’ it happens.
He cited Clayton Christensen’s ‘Jobs to be Done’ framework as a useful tool in this regard. It helps unearth not just the main functional task that consumers want to complete, but also the emotional fulfilment that they seek in terms of personal and social goals.
Arindam showed how this framework helped understand why products like thin diapers failed in some markets. Parents thought thick diapers were better because they felt they also kept babies warm.
Flipkart is using this framework to design “smart, assistive interfaces” to make ecommerce easier to understand for new users and senior citizens. For example, some users fear that the ‘Buy now’ button may mean that money will be immediately withdrawn from their account.
Design for resilience in crises
Digital platforms can be effectively designed for planning and relief during crises, explained Eriol Fox, Design Lead, Ushahidi. She divided such activities into three phases: resilience, response and recovery (mapped onto periods before, during and after a crisis).
This involves not just web platforms and mobile apps, but community mapping for capacity building. Citing examples from Nepal and the UK, Eriol showed how peer group assessment can help improve digital skills and volunteer connections. Surveys and AI/ML can help scale and share learnings from across communities to rapidly create a foundation of trust.
“Your attitude towards culture and trauma matters,” she explained. This depends on a community’s prior experience with natural disasters and mob violence, and imbibed behaviours and attitudes.
The inner journey of a designer
Param Venkataraman, Chief Design Officer, Fractal Analytics, spelt out a three-layer pyramid for design leadership: business, craft and self. He described a T-shaped map of skills and knowledge, where the vertical dimension represents expertise at three levels: learning, fluency and mastery.
Param cited his own journey where he successively added competencies such as interaction design, design ethnography, and digital-led transformation. “The higher you go, the deeper you will need to look inward into yourself,” he explained.
Questions that designers should keep asking themselves involve their relationship with authority, ability to let go and learn something new, and visions of their future. For example, at the end of each year, Param reflects on the achievements, challenges, and emotions of the year gone by, and goals, priorities and practices for the next year. Zooming in and out in this manner can help in personal and professional growth.
The higher purpose of design
Outstanding design transcends product and service features, and can galvanise a higher sense of purpose. Language-learning app DuoLingo has become the top choice for many immigrant communities to learn the languages of their newly adopted homes, such as Swedish and English, explained Jack Morgan, Lead Product Designer, DuoLingo.
The language-learning platform allows multiple unique language tests to be generated in realtime, provides certificates for learners, and is often a key route to broader education and employment for many refugee children.
“Education is a lifesaver,” Jack said. He also showed how DuoLingo is being used to preserve endangered languages such as those of the Native Americans in the US and Canada. Language teaching is effectively crowdsourced using the DuoLingo platform, in a manner similar to Wikipedia.
“By saving dying languages, we can save entire cultures,” Jack explained. “We can design a future with digital equality,” he summed up; this calls for creative and inspired combinations of design and technology.
In addition to equality, other principles that designers should hold in the highest regard are love, belonging and compassion, urged Alysha Naples, CXO, Tin Drum. “The 2D and 3D worlds will combine and cohabitate,” she explained, describing the convergence between offline and online environments.
Design should keep long-term safety of humanity in mind. Design and art should also be used to help humans slow down and reflect on the precious things in life, and not just speed up all the time.
Design should maximise impact, and help humans think in all three dimensions: mind, body, and heart/spirit. Alysha drew on examples from the Saatchi Gallery in London and the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic to illustrate how they help focus on precious human awareness and connections.
DesignUp: The road ahead
The insights and advice delivered by this wide array of speakers has been made possible by a committed group of volunteers: the DesignUp team, headed by Jay Dutta, SVP of UX at MakeMyTrip. One of their upcoming initiatives is called DesignUp Tribe, a membership programme with subscription benefits and community activities.
“The DesignUp conference started with 230 attendees in 2016, and has now crossed the 1,350-mark. Last year, we estimate the number was 780,” Jay explained, in a chat with YourStory. But beyond the numbers, the big impact is in the people and projects inspired by the conference.
These include initiatives like Happy Horizons and People’s Power Collective (community radio) from 2018. The 10-minute lightning talks this year also surfaced several individual stories of change. Many people have found deeper meaning in their work and even switched career paths because of what they heard and saw at DesignUp, Jay explained.
This year, the experience zone supported community crafts projects by giving them exposure and enabling connects to larger commercial players. On a heart-warming note, the conference community also supported the design school entry for a student from a tribal village in Madhya Pradesh. The conference showed how design can have global impact as well, seen in the work of Ushahidi and DuoLingo.
“Look beyond your focused world of practice – into the bigger world of impact, into inclusive change and growth,” Jay advised the design community. There is growing pride in the regional design community in India and Southeast Asia. “The more we learn, the more we integrate, the more we include and share – the more we grow collectively,” he added.
Jay also called for more cooperation between the design, tech, business and government communities. “Designers have some very different toolsets at their disposal and the best we can do is to multiply forces,” he said.
“Finally, we are all a community of creators – we create businesses, products, features, data-sets – and as long as our goal is to add value to the lives of our users, then ours is a shared mission,” Jay signed off.
Founded by arts and culture manager Suprita Moorthy, the second edition of the Bengaluru ByDesign Festival (BbDF) is back with 10 days of workshops, panels, and exhibitions in venues across the city. See Part I,Part II, and Part III of our coverage of the 2018 edition, as well as our d.Zen section on design.
The Bangalore International Centre features a range of creative works by Liz West, Jane Withers, Anupama Kundoo, Vitek Skop, Jakub Szczesny, John Gollings, Mariel Manuel, and designers from JD Institute and Pearl Academy.
Other venues of BbDF include Titan Campus, Workbench Projects, and CoWorks (Residency Road). The programme is about the layering of stories, not just installations but the talks, education, the conversations that take place around it, according to Suprita Moorthy.
There are workshops on 3D printing, design thinking, wire weaving, leather craft, and mobility design. A range of panels addresses the future of architecture, inclusivity in arts festivals, design of products for accessibility, and trends in home design.
Mariela Manuel has been working in Paris for a number of fashion houses for the past decade, and designed the installation with upcycled material called Garbage Dreams. “I can definitely say "sustainable" has become more like a trend rather than a reality in fashion,” she says, but stresses that we need to go beyond trends to make sustainability a reality.
“The location of the installation in the BIC balcony is also very beautiful, there is wind blowing through the textiles, and it makes it alive and connected to the elements. There are eagles flying above. I like this connection,” she explains.
Mariela was invited to BbDF via Pro Helvetia in New Delhi, and is on a three-month residency. She will giving a workshop next at AOD in Colombo, and is working on a range of side projects. Her works can priced at € 300 for a painting or € 3000 for a dress.
“Success for me is having the courage to keep walking my path and exploring what I feel I need to explore. Success is having opportunities to share what these findings are. And the biggest success is if I can inspire others to become seekers and walk down their own road,” Mariela explains.
“I think art and design are everywhere around, and maybe it's the seeing that should be improved,” she says. Mentors can play an important role in illuminating passion and even changing lives. “We just have to give people the right keys to understand their potential and possibilities,” Mariela says.
“Art speaks when you are open to receive. And art is everywhere. It is in the most respectable galleries and museums, but it is around every day. How you approach life is how you approach art,” Mariela explains. She advises aspiring artists to dig deep inside themselves, and reveal and nurture the unique gems that are hidden.
Over the past five years, Liz West has been commissioned for artworks be leading institutions and festivals in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. “I grew up with both my parents working as artists, and so have never known a world without art,” she explains.
“I feel art in all its forms is crucial to the enjoyment of life. As an artist, I feel a great deal of responsibility to make work that people can enjoy, as I want them to be transported out of the everyday and into the extraordinary,” Liz says.
The inspiration for her site-specific installation (Our Colour Reflections) was based on her research into luminous colour, colour theory, and light fields. The BbDF organiser saw her works at last year’s Dubai Design Festival, which led to an invitation to come to Bengaluru.
“I hope that the work will encourage a sense of self-awareness among viewers through the reflections and a sense of wellbeing, joy, discovery, and meditation when viewing and immersing oneself in the experience of the work,” she says, describing her exhibit at the festival.
“Festivals are crucial is providing an open platform for artists and designers around the world. The short duration and fast-paced nature of a festival mean that people flock to visit when the artist is present, therefore allowing for relationships to be fostered,” Liz explains. Festivals thus bring people together in unexpected ways.
She regards the London Design Festival as one of her favourites. As trends in art and design, she points to collage in sculptural form, and the use of house plants in interior decoration, retail, public spaces, and art.
Liz conducts workshops in colour theory as well. “I learned colour theory before I could read, thanks to my artist’s parents and have seen the benefit of this throughout my life,” she recalls. She is now planning her next exhibitions in the US, Italy and China.
Success for her is not just being able to practice fulltime or win awards and deals, but in making a lasting impression on the audience. “Success is educating people through your work and enabling people to question why. It is having a wide reach to art audiences and beyond, across all cultures, religions, backgrounds, and identities,” Liz explains.
“More pop culture figures should embrace or bring art into the mainstream. Beyoncé and Jay Z filming their music video in the Louvre increased visitor figures tenfold,” she suggests. Making art accessible by encouraging audience participation in the creation of the work is another example, as in the case of Anthony Gormley’s ‘Field’ exhibition.
Liz sees the creative mindset is the connection between art and design. “I believe the two are interchangeable skills,” she says.
“Art and design are the abilities of a human being. I would say art captures the essence and design refines the form. It is a way to immortalise the past and predict the future,” explains Debabrota Das, Assistant Professor at Pearl Academy, Mumbai.
The Academy’s exhibition at BIC (By Bengaluru) was to intended to engage the people of Bengaluru to express their candid thoughts about themselves and the city. “The idea also explores the context of creating the contemporary history of Bengaluru,” Debabrota adds.
A similar social experimentation by Pearl Academy was done in Mumbai during the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival (KGAF) in 2019. “The idea is to take it as a measure to establish interactive spaces in different cities,” Debabrota says.
He calls for arts and design to be incorporated in the basic education system of India. “Today, we need creative thinkers who can think into the future and lead productivity and efficiency,” he explains.
Debabrota sees sustainability as a major trend in design. His other projects include research on ways to generate critical thinking via design education, and planning an installation for KGAF 2020 (see YourStory’s coverage of the festival’s editions in 2019,2018 and 2017).
He advise audiences to “build a visual vocabulary which comprises of form, space, colours, and concepts” to enable better appreciation and interpretation of art. As tips for aspiring artists, he suggests that creativity has no end or boundary.
“However, creativity without individuality is a mismatch. So, I would say be creative and be yourself,” Deobrata signs off.
Now, what have you done today to stop in your busy schedule, and find ways to tap the real designer or artist deep within you?
See also the YourStory pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups,’ accessible as apps for Apple and Android devices.
When city dwellers spend considerable portions of their day commuting, they tend to inadvertently stare at the back of the vehicle in front of them. Mumbai-based startup Wrap2Earn realised this is the perfect canvas for brands to advertise their products. Their marketing efforts will be seen all over the city since, unlike standard billboards, cars move around.
Out-of-home (OOH) or outdoor advertising has always been a great way to capture the attention of potential customers on the road, but Wrap2Earn, which was set up in 2016, is reinventing it a tad bit. The startup functions as a tech-enabled moving billboard marketplace that connect brands with car owners allowing for high-impact exterior and interior car advertising campaigns.
From the many cars dotting our streets, let’s look to the stars dotting our skies for the moment.
They say it is all in the stars, and if somebody can quite accurately predict something good or bad is going to happen in your professional or personal lives, then why not build a business around it?Especially when there is technology available to reach a wider audience. AstroTalk is one such technology-driven astrology startup based out of Delhi. It was started in 2017 by Puneet Gupta, a techie, who never believed in astrology. But after certain emotional turbulence, his faith became stronger because somebody predicted that he would go through a rough patch.
Now, for the star of our week. Our Techie Tuesday column this week saw featured Anand Jain of CleverTap.
In 2013, when Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas, and Suresh Kondamudi left Network18, they knew one thing: communications in the digital world needed to be timely and quick. This thought led them to start CleverTap, a SaaS-based mobile analytics and mobile marketing company based in Mountain View, California. Today, as the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of CleverTap, Anand works on larger organisational and strategic goals of helping brands leverage user data, automation, AI/ML, and personalisation techniques on CleverTap. But his tryst with technology began when he was in his early teens.
In keeping with the theme of great entrepreneurs chasing disruptive ideas is our feature of this startup that realises that the future is digital. The co-founders of StratBeans Consulting, Sameer Nigam (CEO), Prasoon Nigam (CTO), and Pradeip Agarwal (VP–Marketing), knew this way back in 2009 and decided to start up with an e-learning startup that improves employee performance using digital products and solutions. Ten years down the line, Gurugram-based StratBeans Consulting, a leading provider of customised e-learning, learning management systems (LMS), and marketing content, claims to have served more than five million users worldwide.
And with today’s competitive business environment focusing on employees’ upskilling and its relevance to the overall growth of a business, StratBeans seems to be in the right place, at the right time. Speaking of the problem statement, Sameer says, "A major challenge most companies faced at the time was to strengthen customer relationships, which involved a detailed process.
The employees needed to continuously learn and evolve to deliver a superior customer experience, and lead to business growth.” The three co-founders saw an opportunity 'to create a platform that provides a holistic digital strategy for enterprises'. Today, the startup offers learning and training products to enterprises to train and upskill their employees, with an end goal to help them achieve better customer success.
Now a little bit of English for everyone. In 2014, Ninad Vengurlekar, a Harvard graduate, was volunteering with the Teach India English Learning Initiative as an English tutor. Also a trained tutor by British Council, Ninad was teaching 12 English learners between the ages of 18 and 35 at BDD Chawl in Worli, Mumbai. Although his students attended the classes regularly, Ninadrealised that they were hesitant to speak in English for fear of being ridiculed, even in a class where everyone was struggling to learn the language. Ninad resolved to do something about this.
After repeated attempts to make his students speak in English, he started a WhatsApp group with all the 12 learners. He recalls, “In the first day itself, the students exchanged over 400 messages in English – including texts, recorded audios, videos, and memes. Over the next one week, over 600 messages were being exchanged every day by the same learners who refused to speak in the classroom.” He soon realised that the everyday habit of messaging was ideally suited for improving learners’ conversational fluency in English.
Over the next two-and-a-half months, Ninad integrated WhatsApp chatting in his daily teaching curriculum and observed a marked improvement in the spoken and written skills of his learners, which a traditional classroom model had not come close to achieving. Ninad then set out to rope in his former colleague, Amit Bhadbhade, to map the data from these WhatsApp chats to understand how the learning levels of the students had improved.
Of all the ‘hungry-for-disruption’ segments where technology has made its presence felt in the last decade, the apartment security market might be the least glamorous. But it has undoubtedly sprouted newer opportunities and greater market potential with the influx of biggies like Reliance Industries (which has entered the segment with its apartment-management app JioGate), NoBroker, and Adda, to name a few. In this episode of UpClose, watch Vijay Arisetty give his take on competition from big names such as Reliance, NoBroker, and Adda in the apartment security market.
It all started—at least in the Indian context—with a former Indian Air Force pilot trying to bring a sense of security and safety into the ever-expanding world of gated premises. Vijay Arisetty, CEO and Co-founder of Bengaluru-based MyGate, launched his security management startup in 2016, at a time when the concept was fairly new and when apartment security was more or less marked by ‘man guarding’.
Cut to 2019, and, today, app-based security management is a boiling pot of opportunities. From prominent players in the real-estate business to multinational conglomerates, everyone wants a slice of the pie. Residential security looks set to grow as an opportunity, poised to reach a whopping $74.7 billion in global market size by 2023.
Nineteen years ago, Lara Dutta was crowned Miss Universe. And the actor-turned-entrepreneur tell us that the whole thing is still fresh on her mind. In a tête-à-tête with YS Weekender, Lara Dutta takes us back to her Miss Universe days, her emotional win, and the journey so far as she hustles her way to build a beauty and skincare business.
With Ford v Ferrari smashing box office records in the theatres, here’s a look at what Hollywood’s top actors, artists, and real-life racers drove before they became famous.
Known for acknowledging the best of best in music, the Grammys announced their elaborate list of nominations on Wednesday, stirring quite a furore for its unexpected shutout of South Korean boy band BTS.
Is Amish Tripathi your favourite author? Do you think that discipline is an overrated virtue? If yes, meet Namita Ambani, COO of The Heal Institute, who feels the same. Namita started her career as a marketer and spent around four years in the retail industry.
Until now, you may not have heard of HiFiMAN Electronics - a Chinese designer and manufacturer of audio products. Not many people on Indian streets are seen carrying their products.
But, HiFiMAN’s latest pair of “truly wireless earbuds” (TWS 600) gives you reason to not ignore it anymore. Even though the pair is priced at a steep Rs 12,999, its unique design and sound quality will appeal to real audiophiles.
The HiFiMAN TWS 600 comes with a great Bluetooth range, a strong battery life, and a crystal-clear listening experience. Even though it is a product placed at the higher end of the market, it will make competition sit up and take notice.
Let’s take a closer look at it.
Design: Flawed, will take some getting used to
The TWS 600 earbuds are fairly odd-looking. They come in a metallic, egg-shaped case. The earbuds do not feel premium. Instead, they appear plastic. There is also a small sectional cutout for the LED lights. We are not really sure what purpose the LEDs serve.
The in-ear fit, however, is super secure and it never feels that the buds will fall out. It takes some time getting used to the TWS 600, mostly because the product isn’t as sleek as Apple’s AirPods or Samsung’s Galaxy Buds.
But, HiFiMAN comes in 10 pairs of silicone eartips, across shapes and sizes. So, you will eventually find a perfect fit for your ears.
The on-ear controls are a bit of a problem. The button is absolutely tiny and very hard to press. Whenever you press it, the earpiece seems to go deeper into your ear, and that’s not something you would want.
You also need to use multiple fingers to press the button properly. Most competition offer capacitive touch controls on the buttons that work a lot better. HiFiMAN could take a leaf out of that.
A single tap on the earpiece can pause or start a song. A double tap on the left earpiece lowers the volume, while a double tapping on the right increases it. Three taps on the left earpiece lets you move to the next track, and three on the right takes you back to the previous one. You can also hold the right earpiece down to give a voice command to perform these actions.
The egg-shaped case isn’t designed well either. It’s clunky and hard to open. There’s an LED indicator on the inside, and a USB-C port for charging.
Once you can get past all the design flaws, the sound department will pose on some pleasant surprises.
Audio quality: One of the best for music and calls
The TWS 600 provides one of the best calling experiences for any wireless earphones in the market. And, we aren’t saying this lightly. There is no loss of audio, and the sound is crisp and clear on both sides.
Listening to music on the TWS 600 is a great experience. The voices and the background instruments are distinctive. The sound is rich and vibrant. There is a good emphasis on all octaves across folk, jazz, and rock music.
However, the product lacks in the bass department, which is a tad bit disappointing for an earphone at this price. You don’t get the boosted bass one is accustomed to in a lot of modern earphones and headphones. The TWS 600 lacks the ‘oomph’ factor here.
Another minor issue was the soundstage (which allows you to hear the location of instruments in a music piece). It felt narrow and not well spread out. Maybe with the next software update, the sound will loosen up a bit.
Battery life: Way ahead of competition
HiFiMAN claims about 5.5 hours of battery life per charge and an extra 33 hours with the charging case on the TWS 600.
These numbers are way better than most competition. During our testing period, we had to charge the earbuds just once, and that’s saying a lot.
We had them on for a 10-hour YouTube playback, and the battery went pretty strong. On a higher volume-level though, you get a little less out of the battery.
But, the TWS 600 still ranks high on the earphone radar compared to other devices in the market.
Verdict: Design aside, this among the best earbuds
At a retail price of Rs 12,999, the HiFiMAN TWS 600 sets itself apart from the competition in this segment.
If you can ignore the flaws in product design, these are some of the best earphones in business, especially for those who love bumping to pop or classical tunes.
There are other products such as Klipsch T5 True Wireless, RHA TrueConnect, Jabra Elite 65t, Samsung Galaxy Buds, and 1More’s Stylish True that compete in the same market segment.
However, if you get comfortable with the TWS 600’s design, you may not want to switch! Not unless noise cancellation is your biggest requirement. Then, get the Sony WF-100XM3 earphones.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of YourStory.)
Did you know the youngest cricketer to debut for India wasn’t Sachin Tendulkar as popular belief goes, but it was Gargi Banerji, a woman cricketer? She made her international debut at the age of 14 at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata in a World Cup match against England in 1978.
With cricket being followed like a religion in India, other sports news often gets shadowed. Today, most offline and online media platforms only cover cricket and some other international tournaments. But most of this is limited or event oriented. Rarely do we see people or the game being truly celebrated.
This interest and passion for sports knowledge and information led Arshi Yasin and Shuvro Ghoshal, former colleagues at The Logical Indian, to start The Bridge in 2017 in Bengaluru.It is a new-age sports media publication that is focused on Indian sports.
According to the founders, The Bridge mostly covers content of lesser known sports in India, for India, and by India. From para sports and news from the grassroots to voices of former players and coaches, Arshi explains the platform celebrates each and every story on Indian sports.
“Most of the media platforms talk only about the success story of an athlete, but we at The Bridge focus on the struggle to the entire journey. We talk about other aspects of improvising the sports ecosystem. We have a diverse category of content on the website, which have been very well accepted by our readers so far,” says Arshi.
The idea was to create a one-stop media platform for Indian sports with a vision of bringing every lesser-known sport and sportsperson into the limelight.
“The tagline is ‘bridging the gap in Indian sports’ and the vision is similar to that. The Bridge is here to bring about a change in the sports ecosystem by highlighting issues that prevent us from creating a global presence across a wide range of sports,” says Shuvro.
Starting up
Being their first venture, the founders had their fair share of challenges. Shurvo says they started with a five-member team, with all five moonlighting as writers, editors, designers, and managers. The aim was to stay true to the name and bring every sports discipline into the limelight.
Speaking of how the duo got together, Arshi says,
“Both of us started The Bridge after we quit our respective jobs at The Logical Indian. Shuvro had worked in the digital space with organisations like Sportskeeda and Storypick, and was last working as an Associate Editor at The Logical Indian. I worked with The Logical Indian in a senior business development role, and have worked with multiple successful digital campaigns like #ProfileForPeace before. I had a stint with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) digital leadership team as well”.
In the past two years, Shurvo says they have come a long way – from starting with zero followers to an audience base of over a million users, with monthly impressions of 25 million across all social media platforms.
“In the past two years, a little over 2,500 stories have been published on the website, steadily increasing traffic, which now stands at around 25 million impressions every month,” he adds.
The team focuses on advertising and native content as its source of revenue. “We have worked with a couple of leagues, been a content strategist for corporates like HCL and Gatorade, and have produced videos for international sportswear brand Hummel among others,” says Arshi.
The team is also working on a few properties which it intends to take live early next year.
Funding and market
The Bridge received an undisclosed round of funding early this year by social entrepreneur Narendra Firodia, who is based out of Ahmednagar, Maharashtra.
Speaking of the funding, Narendra says: “The kind of work The Bridge was doing was outstanding. Currently, there are very few platforms which are covering sports at this micro level in India. The Bridge is not only covering sports stories but also trying to be the bridge between the players and sponsors or the players and government. Hence, it was not a difficult decision to make. I feel The Bridge is the right platform for the growth of sports in India. With the rise of social media and awareness, The Bridge can really create an ecosystem for the growth of sports, and more importantly for sportsmen in India."
The focus on sports content is also fast growing in India. In August this year, Mumbai-based gaming platform Nazara Technologies invested Rs 44 crore for a 67 percent stake in Sportskeeda, a media platform for sports.
Today, Sportskeeda curates over 10,000 articles per month, crowd sourced from a network of journalists, and serves personalised content to over 25 million monthly active users globally. The startup covers mainstream sports like football, cricket, esports, basketball, kabaddi, WWE, MMA, and more.
Nazara also has a majority stake in Nodwin Gaming Pvt Ltd and Next Wave Multimedia Private Limited.
Plans ahead
Speaking of their future plans, Shuvro says, “The next plan is to make a mark with our coverage by the time Tokyo Olympics is here (next summer). Right now, we offer content in two languages - English and Hindi. We are working on moving into three other regional languages by the end of this year - Marathi, Tamil, and Bengali. Additionally, we plan to increase our properties by creating more elements that will help us to bridge the gap in Indian sports between the stakeholders and masses”.
"I never had the desire to enter politics, but now that I am a part of it I give my best on how to work for the people," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Sunday.
Interacting with a group of National Cadet Corps cadets during his "Mann ki Baat" radio programme, Modi also said that as an NCC cadet in his school days, he never got punished.
Modi admitted that "due to Google", his reading habits have suffered as there is a shortcut available to find references.
When one of the cadets asked him "had you not been a politician, what would you have been," Modi described it as a "difficult question".
"Now this is a very difficult question because every child goes through multiple phases in life. Sometimes one wants to become this, sometimes one wants to become that, but it is true that I never had the desire to enter politics, nor I ever thought about it," he said.
He said but now that he is a politician, "I keep thinking how I can work for the welfare of the country."
The thought that had he not joined politics, what would he be doing never crosses his mind, Modi said.
"Now, wherever I am, I should live life to the fullest and I should wholeheartedly work for my country ... I have now dedicated myself for this purpose only," he said.
Responding to a question on whether he gets time to watch television and read books, he said he was always fond of reading. He had little interest in watching films and he watches very little TV.
"I used to read books. But these days I am unable to read and due to Google, the habit of reading has deteriorated because if you want to seek a reference, then you immediately find a shortcut. As is the case with everyone, certain habits of mine have also been spoilt," he said.
In response to a question on his NCC days, he said he was never punished "because I was in a way quite disciplined."
He said once a misunderstanding had crept up when he climbed a tree at an NCC camp to save a bird entangled in a kite string. People first thought he would be punished for indiscipline but his action later earned him praise, he recalled.
During the programme, the PM also talked about the significance of Armed Forces Flag Day on December 7.
Paying tributes to the valour of the armed forces, he appealed to the people to contribute towards the well-being of the welfare of the personnel of the armed forces.
He said on the basis of feedback, the 'Pariksha Pe Charcha' programme will be held earlier, sometime in January.
Last year, students had complained that the programme was held just before examination, he said.
Premium smartphone maker OnePlus opened an experience store in Coimbatore. The company is aiming to open 100 experience stores across 50 cities in India by 2020, a company official has said.
At present, the brand currently has over 25 experience stores in the country, nearly 70 service centres, and is present in 2,000-plus large format retail stores across India, OnePlus India Regional Marketing Head, Darshana Bala said in a press release on Sunday.
Bala, here to open its first experience store on Saturday, said the new store launch was in line with the company's increased focus on expanding its offline footprint across India.
OnePlus was now looking forward to operating 100 such experience stores across 50 cities by the year 2020, with special focus on Tier-II cities and beyond as well, the official added.
The new store was inaugurated by actress Shruti Haasan and is a part of its ongoing offline expansion plan, the release said.
Since its launch in 2014, OnePlus has had a dream run in India. Counterpoint Market Monitor reveals that it has conquered the premium segment of the industry with a 40 percent market share.
In an earlier conversation with YourStory, Vikas Agarwal, General Manager, India, OnePlus, said, "India is a unique and must-win opportunity for us. India is the least-tapped market for brands, and everyone has an equal opportunity to capture this market. The fundamentals are strong here because 65 percent of the population are youth and we have a very stable government."
"India is a soundboard for all experimentation. I think through India we understand the pulse of the customer. Globally, we are offline first and have partnership with telecom operators. In India, the next wave of growth comes from offline customers. This new audience wants to experience OnePlus. Take the OnePlus TV, for example. The audience would like a touch-and-feel experience before buying," he added.
(Disclaimer: Additional background information has been added to this PTI copy for context)
One97 Communications Limited (OCL), parent company of Indian digital payments leader Paytm, on Monday announced an equity fundraise from a group of investors, including existing shareholders such as Ant Financial and Softbank Vision Fund.
New investors, including funds and accounts advised by T Rowe Price Associates Inc. along with Discovery Capital also participated in the round.
Sources close to the fundraise confirmed that the equity raised by the company is around $1 billion. Following this transaction, the valuation of OCL stands at around $16 billion.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of One97 Communications
This is a markup from the valuation of $10 billion the company was ascribed to in August 2018, when it raised about $300 million from American multinational conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway. The transaction marked Berkshire Hathaway’s first investment in an Indian technology firm.
In a statement to the media, Paytm said that it is currently serving merchants in over 2000 towns and cities spanning across 650 districts in India. With this investment, Paytm hopes to bring low-cost mobile enabled financial services to rural India.
According to the company, it will invest and support millions of rural Indians towards self-sustainability through job creation. It looks to invest Rs 10,000 crores (about $1.3 billion at current exchange rate) over the next 3 years to bring financial inclusion to the more underserved users in the country.
Speakingabout the recent investment, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder & CEO of Paytm, said,
"At Paytm, we are committed to bringing half a billion Indians to the mainstream economy by on-boarding them in the formal financial ecosystem. This new investment by our current and new investors is a reaffirmation of our commitment to serve Indians with new-age financial services."
Earlier this month, a few media reports announced that Paytm’s investor Softbank Vision Fund is pushing the company for an IPO within five years from the time of the completion of this round. However, YourStory sourcesin the company have denied this, stating that the matter has been "misconstrued by the media".
Pouring in heavy investments
In September, an official statement from Paytm said that the company has been (for the last two years) investing close to $1 billion each year to expand the digital payments ecosystem in the country.
In August, it said that it is allocating Rs 750 crore this financial year, only to acquire new customers and merchants in small towns and cities.
The firm, which claims to have touched 400 million users in India, is targeting to reach 250 million monthly active users and achieve over three billion sessions of users logging onto the application for payments and money transfers (P2P) this fiscal year.
Earlier in June, it said that it tweaked its infamous cashback strategy to focus on offline merchant payments at offline retail kirana stores.
The company has also taken an audacious goal this fiscal to enable 20 million retail merchants to accept digital payments through Paytm QR.
At present, Paytm has been facing a tough competition from Google Pay and Walmart-owned PhonePe. If industry analysts are to be believed, Google Pay currently owns half the market in terms of P2P UPI transactions, followed by Paytm and then PhonePe.
In addition to just its core payment business, Paytm recently announced that it will be investing Rs 500 crore in early stage startups, which will provide value to its ecosystem.
Earlier in August, it also won the bid and acquired sponsorship rights for BCCI's international and domestic cricket matches for 2019-23 home season at the winning bid price of Rs 326.80 crore.
Moreover, Paytm has also been making investments this year in subsidiaries like Paytm First Games, its foray into mobile gaming; its wealth management arm Paytm Money, along with startups like HungerBox.
The company has also increased its gamut of services to enter the education segment as well as the domestic hotel booking segment, with its acquisition of Nightstay.
At YourStory’s tenth edition of Techsparks, Paytm Founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma commented on this strategy, and said that the company is aspiring to introduce more services and be the internet ecosystem in India.
“I don't follow the fintech industry. I follow the journey of a customer. Over a period of time, we will be an internet ecosystem in India with the largest pool of users. It has happened in the US and in China,” Vijay asserted.
Paytm has been investing $1 billion every year to increase the gamut of its payment services in India's Tier 3 & 4 geographies.
Widening losses
While Paytm looks flush with funds, the financial situation of the company seems to be shaky.
According to recent filings, One97 Communications' consolidated losses soared to Rs 4,217.20 crore in the fiscal year 2018-19. This is a 163 percent increase from last fiscal year (FY’18), when the consolidated losses for the company stood at Rs 1,604.34 crore.
With mounting losses, the revenue of the firm hasn't grown significantly either.
One97 Communications’ consolidated revenue stood at Rs 3,579.67 crore in FY’19. This is not much of an increase (approx eight percent) since last fiscal (FY’18), when the consolidated revenue for the company stood at Rs 3,309.61 crore.
At present, Paytm counts Softbank, Ant Financial (Alipay), Alibaba Group, SAIF Partners, and Berkshire Hathaway, as its investors.
Report after report indicates that India’s youth isn’t job and future-ready. A pain point that Prateek Shukla, Nrupul Dev, and Yogesh Bhat aim to solve with Masai School, a coding bootcamp that offers learning programmes to create skilled professionals.
The Bengaluru-based startup, which was launched in June 2019, is open to anybody seeking training in coding. Interestingly, learners are enrolled for free at Masai School for the six-month, full-stack web development programme along with personality development and soft skills coaching. They can pay the course fee at a later date, after getting a suitable job.
The trio, who met in March this year, worked on one problem statement:
“Numerous engineering graduates are not capable of creating even a few basic lines of software code despite spending four years at engineering colleges.”
With corporates and companies now focusing more on skill sets rather than educational backgrounds, the Masai School aims to fill India’s coding-specific skill gap.
The six-member startup received undisclosed seed funding from India Quotient and a few angel investors, including Sampad Swain, CEO and Cofounder of Instamojo.
Getting started
Prateek, the CEO of Masai School, was previously the Co-founder and CEO of home rental startup Grabhouse. Later, he worked as the business head for Quikr, which acquired Grabhouse in an all-stock deal in November 2016. Grabhouse raised $10 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital, Kalaari Capital, and India Quotient.
Nrupul, the CTO, is a chemistry major from IIT-Kanpur. Prateek's senior at IIT-K, he was tech lead at multiple firms before he started teaching and orchestrating the stack at Masai School. Prateek met Yogesh, Senior VP of Masai School, through his wife; Yogesh now handles strategic alliances and programme design.
From left to right: Prateek Shukla, Nrupul Dev, Yogesh Bhat.
The trio met in March this year, and after spending a couple of months of brainstorming, launched coding bootcamp Masai School in June 2019. The first batch started at the 91Springboard facility on Hosur Road, Bengaluru; the 23rd week of the 24-week programme is on at present. The second batch started in August this year.
The bootcamp offers courses in Android development, full-stack development, and web development. The training model is divided into 100 hours each of coding, soft skills, math learning and data structures.
It operates between 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, out of its centres in Bengaluru and Patna. The mode of instruction is at the physical centres via Zoom, Slack, Github and Daily Scrum; Masai School doesn’t offer any online courses.
Speaking on whether it reverse engineers to design the curriculum, CEO Prateek says,
“Considering all of us come from a tech background, we are already aware of what the industry looks for. But we are keen to make the students holistic software engineers rather than train them with limited tools and languages in limited capacity.”
Apart from technical skills, the school also equips candidates with soft skills and analytical thinking.
The school operates on the basis of Income Share Agreement (ISA). Students don’t need to pay a tuition fee. All aspirants go through a pre-enrollment course for two weeks, before they are selected for the main course. The duration of the main course is 20 weeks, and it is designed to train learners and get them skilled and job-ready.
Instead of charging a fee, Masai School signs an agreementwith students. A student who finishes his/her course needs to pay Rs 3 lakh after s/he gets a job with an annual salary of at least Rs 6 lakh. The amount is to be paid back in instalments: 15 percent of the monthly income for three years (till they pay Rs 3 lakh).
If a candidate opts out of the ISA model, s/he can pay an upfront amount of Rs 2 lakh and enroll for the course.
After the training
After completion of the programme, the hiring partners of the coding school spend a week with the students to closely assess and shortlist candidates they would want to hire.
Prateek said, “The first batch had 17 students join the bootcamp, of which four dropped out and one student left for higher education. Off the remaining 12 students, 50 percent have gotten placed, while the rest are awaiting their offer letters.”
YourStory recently met Mahesh Pawate, a student of Masai School, who was rejected in 39 interviews, but was placed at a tech company after completing the course.
Mahesh, who belongs to Sangli, Maharashtra, has a master's in computer applications, and came to Bengaluru to find a job as a developer. He had undergone some training in coding from Udemy and put in a lot of his own time before joining the programme. But that wasn’t enough. But, after completing this programme, he makes 4X the money that he was supposedly worth at the 39 rejections.
Market landscape and future
A 2018 report by India Skills says around 48 percent of engineers in the country are unemployed. Pearson Research says 95 percent of Indian engineers are not equipped for development and coding jobs.
Aditya Malik, CEO of TalentEdge, believes that the edtech sector will see a lot of unique business models and will be tested in the future.
“Online real-time classroom is a valid education model in India. India is a growing market and there is a lot of scope for companies in the edtech sector across categories, though the dynamics are still nascent,” he says.
There are other players that follow the same model, including MountBlu Technologies, AttainU, Pesto Tech, and School of Accelerated Learning.
According to Verified Market Research, the global coding bootcamp market was valued at $399.91 million in 2018 and is projected to reach $889.37 million by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 10.70 percent from 2019 to 2026.
As of now, the Masai School founders want to cater only to startups in India, and not the corporate services segment.
“The absorption capacity for tech talent is considerably higher in startups, compared to the other side,” Prateek says.
The founders, who designed the courses from scratch and do the teaching themselves, are looking to expand further in faculty strength and open more branches soon.
In 2015, when Ankur Goyal was studying at Stanford Business School, his mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis, a condition where one’s bones become fragile and porous. Incidentally, data reveals that more women than men suffer from it.
Seeing her condition, Ankur started researching the disease. Soon, he realised that women have several unique health and nutritional needs because of menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause.
Ankur found that more than 54 percent of women in India are iron deficient versus 23 percent men, and 50 percent of women are calcium deficient versus 25 percent men. These nutritional deficiencies can be a result of lifestyle, social, and cultural factors.
And then, today’s hustle culture has also led to a rise in hormonal imbalances, Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), post pregnancy hair loss, fatigue, and severe menopause.
To address this alarming situation, Ankur co-founded Merhaki Foods (parent company of &Me) with Sheta Mittal in September 2017. A women’s health and wellness brand, &Me focusses on solving women’s functional needs across menstrual health, fitness, beauty, and wellness.
Founders of &Me- Ankur and Sheta
At present, &Me has over one lakh consumers and is present in more than 600 retail stores across five cities in India. Its products are also available across all online platform.
The startup claims to be seeing month-on-month growth of 40 to 50 percent.
In December 2017, &Me received an undisclosed amount of seed funding. This year, the startup raised a follow-on investment round from Matrix Partners India and Consumer VC Fund Sauce.vc. According to its Registrar of Companies (RoC) filings, Matrix Partners invested Rs 5.6 crore.
An obvious choice
Ankur has always been passionate about innovation in the food and beverage industry and the choice to start up in this sector was an obvious choice. Before taking the entrepreneurial plunge, he had worked at Nestle and Paper Boat. In fact, he almost bought a food company in Brazil during his Stanford days.
But then &Me happened.
The startup’s current portfolio includes five health drinks for women, including India's first range of PMS drinks. These help women during their pre-menstrual symptoms – bloating, cramps, and mood swings. &Me also retails a drink for PCOS aimed at hormonal balance, and range of beauty products focussing on healthy hair and skin from within.
In a conversation with YourStory, Sheta says, “We are innovatively combining the powers of ancient Indian Ayurveda with modern nutritional science for a holistic solution. Our bodies need vitamins and minerals on a daily basis for proper functioning and protect itself from diseases. Ayurveda complements nutritional science to re-establish balance and heal the body and soul from within.”
The startup claims that its drinks have five Ayurvedic super herbs, 12 vitamins and minerals, and two to four fruits and vegetables. Apart from solving functional needs, each 200 ml bottle supplies 30 percent of a woman’s daily micronutrient requirements.
"We add no preservatives, no artificial colours or flavours, no refined sugar, and are vegan (by nature) and gluten-free,” adds Sheta.
Blending the right way
However, starting up wasn’t easy. The first challenge was to get women to open up and talk freely about menstrual health. Ankur adds that while several companies, over the last two decades, are trying to spread awareness and solve for menstrual hygiene, it still is a taboo in India.
“Once we got to know what women are looking for, our second challenge was to combine ancient Ayurveda and Modern Nutritional Science, two supposedly different schools of thoughts together, for a holistic solution. Getting experts of each field in the same room to collaborate, brainstorm, and develop the product was tricky, but with the vision to solve for women’s wellness, we were able to come up with drinks that are not only healthy but also tasty for consumers! We continually outperform in blind taste tests with consumers,” says Ankur.
He recollects that the first attempt at mixing herbs with minerals and vitamins resulted in a scary product, which no one dared to taste.
Armed with one-and-a-half years of research, the team came closer to achieving the balance between herbs, minerals, and vitamins that go into a product. “We have done over 10,000 iterations on our products during the development stage. This balance is a de-risking factor for us against others who might try to perform similar experiments,” says Ankur.
The next challenge was scaling. The co-founder adds that this has been an issue in the offline market where retailers are male. Ankur says the startup is lucky to have a phenomenal sales team who came up with out-of-the-box solutions like driving trials and making retailers understand the products.
Ankur says, “One always looks for familiarity and comfort, and my first hires were two people I had worked with at Nestle and Paper Boat. While hiring, I am looking for someone that fulfils three criteria: a strong personal connect, eagerness to be part of the grand vision, and proven skill sets (through reference checks).”
He adds that most hires have been inbound or were referred by friends, and friends of friends.
"Even my co-founder Sheta, who is passionate about health and wellness reached out to me via LinkedIn. Within the first couple of meetings, I was confident that she has the same amount of grit, passion, and craziness to get this vision going. Sheta was my 110th interviewee for the role of co-founder, and I don’t think I could have found anyone better than her,” says Ankur.
Setting up the operations
Having people from Paper Boat and Nestle helped the startup be well-positioned to establish a good manufacturing setup and supply chain with the right network. The team already knew the right suppliers for ingredients and packaging materials, and contract manufacturers with high standards.
“However, the challenge lay in holding strong to our principle of not using any preservatives or artificial flavours or artificial colours in the drinks. There are a handful of suppliers who have facilities that support that. But, with the right team in place and in-house R&D capabilities we were able to resolve a lot of our roadblocks quickly and swiftly,” adds Sheta.
It took the team Rs 60 lakh to Rs 1 crore to set the initial foundation.
Each 200ml bottle is priced at Rs 80 at retail. The average basket size is around six bottles, but for PCOS and beauty, the startup sees several consumers buying monthly packs of 30.
The market and future
This September, &Me launched two new products – a sugar-free dark chocolate with herbs and micronutrients tailored for period health, and a drink for urinary tract infections (UTIs).
According to data from Mettl and Euromonitor, the overall beverage market in India is worth Rs 43,034 crore, believed to touch Rs 130,000 crore by 2030. Of this, the health drink market will touch Rs 15,067 crore by 2023.
There are many players focussing on this market. Second-time entrepreneur K Vaitheeswaran launched Again earlier this year. Then, there is Raw Pressery focussed on healthy cold pressed juices, and Danone, too, is looking closely looking at health food and drink brands. It also invested in Epigamia.
However, &Me’s USP lies in its focus on women’s health. Sanjot Malhi, Vice President of Matrix India, says “We believe that the $1 billion plus market for functional foods and beverages is still coming of age in India. &Me's core differentiator lies within its exceptional product and brand positioning that targets urban Indian women whose daily lifestyle denies them the benefit of essential micronutrients. As early investors in &Me, we consider ourselves privileged to partner with Ankur. Our investment is true to our broader thesis of investing in home-grown consumer brands.”
Speaking of their future plans, Ankur says the team wants &Me to be a holistic women’s health and wellness brand, serving every woman between the ages of 15 and 60, meeting unique functional needs across menstrual health, fitness, and beauty.
“No one is striving to understand and serving her distinct needs,” adds Ankur.
Stephen Inoue once said, “Character is what you do after you’ve made a mistake."
Everyone makes mistakes and startups are no exceptions. But it's not about mistakes, it's all about what you do after that. That's what differentiates successful startups. Remember Myntra's decision to go app-only (followed by Flipkart) in 2015 and how the entire strategy backfired. But the leadership realised their mistake and corrected it in a few months time. Something which eventually fueled the fashion e-commerce giant to the much needed newer heights.
For more inspiration, we have a bouquet of startup stories lined up for you!
With its farming system that combines aquaculture with hydroponics, Agritech startup Aarpun Farms aims at ensuring safe produce, enhancing nutritional enrichment, and improving farmer income.
LetsTransport is a Bengaluru-based intracity logistics firm, which has on-boarded over 44,000 trucks. Founded in 2015, the startup, which focuses on retail, FMCG, and ecommerce, has raised $20.3 million across five funding rounds.
A bootstrapped startup based out of Toronto, Canada, Innstal has launched an app that acts as a digital library for product manuals and warranties, allowing users to access essential documents on their phones.
CamCom founders: (from left) Umesh, Mahesh Subramanian and Ajith Nayar
Bengaluru-based startup CamCom woke up to the enterprise market’s bigger opportunity, harnessing deep learning to automate quality checks and provide predictive and prescriptive solutions across a product’s life cycle.
Vtiger, founded in 2004, brings the best of technology to small businesses, which usually have limited budgets and limited or no IT team. Today, the Bengaluru-based company is taking CRM to the next level by bringing customer-facing teams out of their siloed tools.
Ensurity has been working with Microsoft over the last couple of years to integrate its ThinC brand of FIDO/FIDO2 certified biometric USB authenticators for password-less access with Microsoft Azure Active Directory, which are now available.
Noida-based CareCover sells pre-approved loan cards for health emergencies. In a country where 95 percent of the population lacks access to health insurance, here’s what the startup plans to solve.
Loanzen, a startup that provides financial solutions to logistics industry, on Sunday said it has raised funding from Zephyr Peacock India Growth Fund.
However, it didn't disclose the funding amount.
Existing investor Kae Capital also participated in the round, a statement said.
"Loanzen will invest the funds raised in development of technology, build data analytics teams, scale operations in existing locations across Karnataka and expand to new markets," it added.
While Loanzen declined to comment on the amount of funding or valuation, sources suggest the company has raised about $4 million-$5 million (about Rs 28 crore-Rs 35 crore) in this round.
Zephyr Peacock India Growth Fund is a private equity fund investing in small and medium enterprises in India.
Loanzen provides loans to purchasers of used commercial vehicles, including operators of small CV fleets, and first-time buyers. These purchasers have limited financing options due to inadequate credit history and lack of documented income.
It uses proprietary underwriting processes based on alternate data sources to meet the needs of its customer segment.
"Given the rapid growth in the logistics segment with increasing penetration of technology, we are looking to scale up over the coming year... We are planning to target a Rs 75 crore-Rs 80 crore loan book addressing a base of over 2,000 customers in the coming year," Loanzen Co-founder Madhu Sudhan said.
Headquartered in Bengaluru, the startup is currently serving customers in Karnataka and plans to expand to other states in South India in the coming months.
Abhijeet Kudva, Managing Director at Zephyr Peacock, said Loanzen's loans have helped over 500 drivers and vehicle operators already.
"We expect Loanzen to become a leader in logistics financing, supporting over 15,000 customers in the next three to five years," he added.
In February 2019, Zephyr Peacock India Growth Fund led a Rs 55 crore funding round in Shiksha Finance, a Chennai-based education finance company, said a senior executive.
(Disclaimer: Additional background information has been added to this PTI copy for context)
Truecaller plans to use its payments platform to foray into the credit business by early 2020, turning it into a complete fintech company, Co-founder Nami Zarringhalam said.
In an exclusive interview at his company headquarters, Nami said Truecaller was becoming a "superapp", providing a spectrum of services to its consumers.
On being asked whether the company was entering the fintech market by providing credit facilities on Truecaller Pay, Nami said he was looking at an early 2020 release of the service.
"We have tested with a limited set of users a while back and got an excellent response. Based on this learning and response, we are working on updating and improving the user experience for India. We are looking at an early 2020 release," he said.
Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam, the Co-founders of Truecaller.
Sitting in one of the conference rooms of the company's headquarters in the upmarket Kungsgatan locality in central Stockholm, Nami said he aimed at providing a comprehensive digital experience to Truecaller customers.
The alumnus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, who co-founded the company in 2009 with Alan Mamedi, said he was "excited" about the future of the firm as of the 20 million users on its Truecaller Pay platform, nearly 50 percent come from Tier II and III cities.
"We're working on making application-to-approval an end-to-end digital experience. There are exciting times ahead because our service will offer microfinance and credit to a huge under-served market in India," he said.
With Truecaller metamorphosing from a spam call filter to a platform offering payments, chat, credit facilities, threats from snooping software, like Pegasus, are always lurking around. Nami describes such threats as a "cat-and-mouse" game.
"Pegasus and other such things are actually very targeted attacks. And as far as we know, we have not been subjected to any one of them," said the second-generation immigrant to Sweden.
However, he did not rubbish the threats and said with more and more people living in the digital world, consciousness about privacy and security will grow.
Nami said while he was confident of his systems, vulnerability comes from devices where software, security patches, and applications are not up to date.
"So that's what I mean...the consciousness of the people who are active contributors in the digital era. They also need to be aware of the brands that they use...like for the devices they use, they get updates and that they keep getting the relevant security level on their devices and updating apps, which is equally important," he said.
He said technology has always been like that with hackers trying to be a notch above existing security protocols.
"But on top of that, when it comes to the way you handle encryption and the way you handle these kind of things, it's always kind of a cat-and-mouse game ...like you will push innovation forward," he said.
Reports of cash again becoming strong in India after three years of demonetisation do not seem to bother Nami as he terms it a natural cycle.
"Every now and then we see spikes, and we see dips in the usage of digital payments. And I think that's a natural kind of cycle. That the adoption will go through," he said.
On the digital payment culture in India, Nami said it will take the country probably over 10 years to build out right infrastructure and adoption among people to even dare to go cashless.
"You might use a lot of different payment products in India. But at the end of the day, do you dare to walk out of your door without any cash in your wallet? I think, it will take time for that adoption to happen.
"And we will continue to build on the experience, which I think is going to be the winning key for us, (and) not how much money we spend on cashback, which we don't, and how we try to inorganically acquire users, because users come to us organically," he said.
Lauding the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) introduced by the Indian government, Nami said it has given a level playing field to everyone.
"What I think matters is the experience that the consumers get, how much they trust that experience, and how safe they feel using that experience as opposed to handling cash, because there is a kind of native feeling of holding hard cash in your hand. And you need to translate that experience into something that fits in your smartphone. And that's the challenge that I think all of us need to overcome," Nami said.
1554717720954.png?fm=png&auto=format&h=100&w=100&crop=entropy&fit=crop)
