Most of us have that one celebrity who we would like to meet someday. However, it is difficult to get a picture of a famous person, especially if he or she has a large fanbase.
Now, celebrity engagement startups are using technology to make these dreams come true.
Here are six startups in the segment that are seeing traction:
CELEWISH
Mumbai-based CELEWISH, founded in 2021 by Mohsin Khan and Anvarul Hasan, facilitates celebrity meet-and-greets, video shoutouts, personalised direct messaging from stars, and brand endorsements.
The startup aims to bridge the gap between celebrities and fans via social media.
The startup has on boarded more than 1,500 actors, singers, influencers, sportspeople, and musicians, both national and international.
CELEWISH has collaborated with brands including Nivea, Dream11, Behrouz Biryani, and Biryani By Kilo.
The startups can book these services in exchange for a fee that ranges between Rs 500 and Rs 20,000.
Some of the platform's well-known users include music composer duo Salim and Sulaiman Merchant, international actors such as Enrique Arce, who played Arturo Roman in the Netflix series Money Heist, and wrestler and MMA fighter Ritu Phogat.
GoNuts
Founded by Vinamra Pandiya and Mayank Gupta in 2020, Mumbai-based video shoutout startup GoNuts helps users get a personalised video message from celebrities for themselves or their loved one.
It allows fans from across the world to book personalised shoutouts and greetings from celebrities, via its app and website.
The startup aims to make a difference by creating a ‘more personal and meaningful connection" that the fans can share with their friends, social circle, and family.
Some of the popular celebrities on the platform include Meet Brothers, Shaan, Shankar Mahadevan, and Usha Uthup; sports stars like Lance Klusenser, Babita and Geeta Phogat, and Jonty Rhodes; TV stars like Cyrus Broacha, and Annu Kapoor, among others.
In November 2020, GoNuts raised Rs 3.5 crore in a seed funding round led by marquee investors Sweta Rau and Archana Priyadarshini to onboard more than 5,000 of the most influential and inspirational celebrities.
Unlu
Delhi-based unlu, founded by Himanshu Periwal, Vipul Agarwal, Akshay Pruthi, and Anurag Dalia in 2020, is a celebrity-to-fan connect platform that lets users directly request advice, a heart-to-heart comment, or a greeting from their favorite celebrity.
The startup claims that the app is designed to give fans across the country a unique and personalised experience.
Unlu has onboarded celebrities including Sania Nehwal, R Madhavan, Kalki Koechlin, Nupur Senon, and Harbhajan Singh, among others.
In February 2021, the startup raised Rs 9 crore in a seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners, Mumbai Angels, Expert Dojo, and TiE to build a technological base, fuel market expansion, and support product development.
Tring
Founded by Akshay Saini, Rahul Saini, and Pranav Chabhadia in 2019, Mumbai-based Tring helps users connect to their favourite celebrities through personalised shoutouts, messages, and videos on their anniversary, birthday, and any other special occasion.
In addition, the startup provides DM (direct message) on Instagram as well as Q&A with celebrities.
Tring says its aim is to bring fans closer to celebrities. The price depends on the celebrities. Its average ranges from Rs 2,500 to Rs 6,000.
In October 2020, Ekta Kapoor’s ALT Balaji acquired a 17.5 percent stake in Tring for an undisclosed amount.
TrueFan
Founded by Nimish Goel, Devender Bindal, and Nevaid Aggarwal in 2020, TrueFanTrueFan connects Indian fans with celebrities through interactive and personalised experiences.
The startup enables users to play simple quizzes around celebrities, and the winner gets a personalised video message from those stars.
It claims it caters to the everyday Indian audience who’ve grown up enacting dialogues from copied hairdos and Bollywood movies of their beloved ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ to turn into bathroom-singers with their favorite love songs.
In August 2020, Truefan raised $4.3 million in a seed round of funding by prominent investors like Ronnie Screwvala, Mayfield India, and Seema Capital to grow the business, scale the user-base to one core, and sign up to ten big celebrities from sports, Bollywood, etc..
Wysh
Founded by Mahesh Gogineni, Manan Maheshwari, and Varun MS in 2019, Hyderabad-based Wysh provides celebrities with a way to engage with their fans.
Wysh enables fans to get personalised video messages from their favorite celebrities.
It also allows users to gift their loved ones or friends a video directly from their favorite stars.
In January 2020, WYSH raised $2 million in a Series A round led by Kalaari Capital, Whiteboard Capital, AngelList, Touchstone Equities, AET fund, GEMBA Capital, and IIMK to focus on marketing and celebrity acquisition for the platform.
The pandemic brought a new generation of shoppers online - those who demand personalisation at every point in their customer journey, including the promotions they recieve. In fact,a whopping 91 percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them. Moreover,at least 85 percent of consumersget influenced by personalised promotions.
Despite this, most brands opt for a "one size fits all" approach that fails to provide the right discount or promotional offers to the individual shopper, leaving them dissatisfied and at the same time, shrinking your profit margins.
By leveraging new-age tools like AI, brands can pinpoint the most effective promotion for each visitor session, and expect at least a 25 percent reduction in promotion costs while achieving a 15 percent increase in revenue. It can replace generic promotions with individualised incentives.
To understand how marketers and brands can predict shoppers' intent in real-time and offer them personalised discounts, Namogoo and YourStory are presenting the webinar 'Increase revenue with AI recommended promotions personalised to your customers.’
What to expect?
Experts will deep-dive into the current D2C space, the importance of understanding customer intent, and how Namogoo’s AI-backed Intent-Based Promotions can help brands predict shoppers' intent in real-time.
The webinar will feature panelists Ohad Greenshpan, Co-founder and CTO, Namogoo; SaurabhBhandari, VP of D2C, boAt Lifestyle; and Saket Agarwal, Founder and CEO, Onnivation, who will share their own unique insights about the future of e-commerce promotions.
Why should you attend?
The discussion will shed light on how AI-backed tools can help brands decide which promotional offers shoppers need, all based on their intent. By doing so, brands can significantly save promotion costs by only offering discounts to those shoppers who need them to convert.
To be a part of this session and boost your business in the new normal
While being a content creator can be exciting, getting discovered among millions of other creators can be tough.
Noticing this gap, Joel Alexander and Drishti Chawla started CrowdPad, a tokenised community-building tool for content creators—powered by blockchain. The startup enables creators to create, discover, and manage their communities all in one place using a video-first approach to community discovery.
Using social tokens, the platform helps creators monetise or build a community who are ready to invest in the creator, thus, eliminating the need of platforms like Spotify or YouTube.
“As most of us spend our time on our mobile phone, we decided to opt for a mobile-first approach as CrowdPad is the first mobile social token app," co-founder Joel explains to YourStory.
Editor’s Pick: 100x Podcast
100x Entrepreneur founders Nansi Mishra and Siddhartha Ahluwalia kickstarted the 100x podcast to share the experiences and journeys of entrepreneurs. This week, they give a peek into their own journey of entrepreneurship, parenthood, running the 100x fund and podcast, and staying inspired one episode at a time. Read more.
Upon discovering that he was lactose intolerant, former Barclays executive Rishabh Gupta decided to switch to plant-based milk products, but found that they were not as easily accessible in India.
He teamed up with Akash Wadhwani and incorporated WG Corp in November 2020. The startup’s product OatMlk is now present across 25 cities. Read more.
Credit: YourStory Design
News & Updates
Bucking the trend of lay-offs in the edtech sector amid funding crunch, upGrad on Wednesday said it is looking to add nearly 3,000 people in the next three months and is close to securing a fresh funding.
Conversational messaging startup Gupshup has acquired Sequoia-funded OneDirect—an omnichannel customer-service platform—for an undisclosed amount. This is the San Fransisco-based unicorn’s fifth investment since September.
In a series of tweets, former cricketer Sourav Ganguly announced that he teamed up with edtech startup Classplus and launched a new initiative to promote educators, teachers, and educational content creators.
Before you go, stay inspired with…
“Our future is in the next generation, and we have a phenomenal opportunity to shape it.”
Attracting and retaining talent is one of the biggest issues faced by companies today. Most employees are leaving companies due to negative or toxic environment or due to culture misfit. Hence, successful organisations are recognising the value of their workforce and are constantly looking for strategies that will help them hold onto top performers.
Innvocon Learning Solutions, founded by Taranjeet Singh (CEO), Pragyanam Kumar (COO), and Nancy Bagla (CTO) in 2019, is focussed on solving problems for companies like high attrition rates, increasing cost per hire, or problems such as lack of new-age industry relevant skills.
The Dehradun-based startup helps new candidates in a company adapt to new processes, know about the vision, expectations, opportunities, and the purpose of the company.
Taranjeet says, “With these traits and parameters made clear before being employed by a company, the employee will be familiar about the structure and vision of the company, and hence both the employer and employee will have clear expectations from each other. This leads to better growth opportunities within the organisation for the employee, increased productivity, and lowers down the urge for employees to look out for other job opportunities to a great extent.”
The startup also offers training alongside technical and soft skills requirements of the company.
How it started?
The co-founders got the idea to start up when they were in their third year of engineering. They personally experienced the problem of lack of practical and industry exposure while studying.
Taranjeet states, “Upon analysing the problem, its scale, and after doing the market research surveys with multiple companies, colleges, and hundreds of engineering students, we concluded that companies are suffering big time from the unavailability of skilled talent. Not only this, the attrition rates among Indian firms hiring for tech and IT is too high. The reason for this is not just low proficiency of the candidates, but culture misfit of the candidates in the company, which is largely ignored during the training and hiring process.”
After realising the actual scale of problems faced by companies, colleges, and students, the startup came up with a ‘Smart Hiring’ solution for companies.
For colleges, the startup came up with ‘Center for Project Based Learning’, and for students, it launched a ‘Workplace Learning Program’, which are interlinked to each other.
An IIITD-IC and NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore incubated company, Innvocon partners with organisations to build reliable and pre-skilled teams with top talent curated, tailored, and trained specifically as per the hiring objectives of the companies.
“We curate the candidates on the basis of the workplace culture of the company so that the company finds the culturally fit candidate employable right from Day 1,” adds Taranjeet.
The startup also partners with academic institutions to help them achieve better placement figures and high mean and median packages for the freshers from these institutions.
“We are helping colleges by increasing their placement figures as well as increase in median and mean packages. We are establishing a ‘Center for Project Based Learning’, thus helping the institutes impart project-based learning by creating an industry-oriented learning ecosystem right from the first year of college, thus creating a learning path for students for the entire four-year degree programme,” adds Taranjeet.
“We take the requirements from the companies and on the basis of these, the entire course is customised. So, we train candidates on the basis of these requirements,” states Taranjeet.
The team
The co-founders have known each other for nine years. Taranjeet and Pragyanam were school friends, and Taranjeet and Nancy were batchmates and friends in college. Working towards a common goal of solving large scale problems made them start their entrepreneurial journey together.
The startup has a pool of over 200 highly skilled mentors, proficient in Data Science, AI and Machine Learning, and Full Stack Web Development.
These mentors are professionals currently employed in reputed companies like Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Unacademy, MPL, etc., and are working at Innvocon as freelance trainers for different skills in which they have high level industry proficiency.
YS Design team
Taranjeet says, each mentor is onboarded after following a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and each mentor should have at least five years of industry experience in the aforementioned domains.
Currently, the startup has a 12-member team, including the co-founders.
Course structure and target audience
The entire content structure is customised according to the hiring needs of the company. The domains in which they train the candidates and hire for companies includes Data Science (for computer science/IT graduates); AI and Machine Learning (for computer science/IT graduates); Full Stack Web Development (for computer science/IT graduates); and Data Analytics (any graduate).
The fee structure for the job inclusive programme for students is Rs 15,000, which is offered to the final year students, and for first, second, and third year students, introductory to advanced level programmes are offered, wherein the pricing ranges from Rs 5,999 to Rs 9,999. The duration of the programme ranges from three to six months.
The candidates are trained through live classes on their web application platform and they can also refer to the recordings of live lectures, interact with the mentors live, and attend the interviews. The colleges can take their entire training and placement cell online, track the companies recruiting their students, number of students hired, and those in pipeline to be hired.
The business and competition
According to various market experts, the Indian IT Industry is battling an all-time high attrition rate of around 25 percent. For the quarter ending December 2021, IT major TCS saw an attrition rate of 15.30 percent, while Infosys and Wipro’s numbers stood at 25.50 percent and 22.70 percent, respectively.
According to Taranjeet, the startup competes with players like AccoJobs and FunctionUp. However, the startup’s USP lies in its custom-made Project Based Learning designed according to the hiring needs of the company.
“Our training programme is designed to provide maximum hands-on experience. Industry experts who train the candidates on the tech stack and projects make them interview ready and HR leaders help them get familiar with the structure, processes, and vision of the company,” highlights Taranjeet.
The startup has around 30 partner colleges, over 50 companies as partners, and has placed over 250 students in both tech and non-tech profiles.
The company makes revenue by charging 5 percent of the annual CTC of the candidate who gets hired by a company through Innvocon. It claims to have generated a revenue of Rs 50.3 lakh in FY22 with a run rate of Rs 1.3 crore.
The co-founders started the company with their personnel investment of Rs 1 lakh, and they have infused Rs 8 lakh of their funds till now. Innvocon has also raised Rs 10 lakh from IIIT Delhi Innovation and Incubation Center and has also raised an undisclosed amount from HNIs.
“We plan to raise our seed round in the next 10-12 months with at least an infusion of Rs 2 crore in the company through external investors,” adds Taranjeet.
Plans ahead
In the coming months, the startup plans to scale its college network to Delhi-NCR and Haryana.
“The target is to onboard at least 250 colleges and universities from this geography and onboard another 100 companies. We also have a milestone target of placing 700 students in the next 12 months, and train over 10,000 students in the next 12-18 months,” states Taranjeet.
Innvocon has also started cross border hiring for companies based in the USA and Canada. The candidates will be curated on the basis of the hiring needs of the company, and will be based out of India, working remotely for these companies in the USA and Canada.
Indian social video platform ShareChat reportedly raised $300 million from Google, Singaporean state fund Temasek and Times Internet at a valuation of nearly $5 billion last week. Now, it is being reported that Chinese investment firm Tencent is also interested in investing an additional $100 million in the startup.
According to Mint, this new source of funding will be used to power ShareChat's short video app Moj, the Indian equivalent of TikTok.
Due to new foreign investment rules implemented in April 2020, Tencent has decided to invest via convertible notes. The new rules state that all fresh foreign direct investments (FDIs) from bordering countries must secure prior approval.
Following border clashes in June 2020, the Indian government banned Chinese apps such as ByteDance-owned TikTok and Tencent-owned WeChat in the country.
However, despite these restrictions, Tencent has been able to continue investments in India via indirect means such as convertible notes. In April 2021, it was reported that Tencent invested $225 million into ShareChat through convertible debentures via two European special purpose vehicles, Zennis Capital BV and Hlodyn BV.
Over the years, Tencent has also invested in other Indian startups such as Khatabook, Flipkart, Udaan, and Practo.
Accenture announced that 5 women founders have been selected for the 2022 edition of the Women Founders Program. The cohort are Kausambi Manjita (Co-Founder & CEO, mason), Chandralika Hazarika (Co-Founder & Managing Director, Bigthinx), Ketaki Ogale (Co-Founder, BHyve) Nida Sahar Rafee (Founder & CEO, Nife) and Sharmila Saha (Co-Founder & Head of Engineering, Doppelio).
The selected women founders emerged from over 100 applicants to the program and were selected by leaders from Accenture on the basis of product differentiation, disrupt-ability quotient, leveraging of deep technologies, commercial viability and founder profile.
Accenture had launched the Women Founders Program in early February this year, a unique initiative for early-stage women led Indian startups in the B2B deep tech and enterprise SaaS domain. The program aimed to create a more supportive ecosystem for women tech founders and entrepreneurs.
The selected women founders of the 2022 edition of the program will benefit from the equity-free grant of USD 60,000. The program also connects them to Accenture leaders, experts and ecosystem partners. The program will help the selected cohorts to pave their way to greater success through access to tech expertise, global & Indian clientele, mentorship, industry and investor communities and new markets.
The 2022 batch of Accenture Women’s Founders Program include the following women founders:
Kausambi Manjita, Co-founder and CEO of Mason, a no-code store automation engine for modern e-commerce brands and marketplaces. Kausambi is a no-code evangelist and serial product builder, with over 15 years of experience in product development for platforms like Paytm, Myntra etc.
Chandralika Hazarika, Co-founder and Managing Director of Bigthinx, an AI firm focused on fashion retail, wellness, and the metaverse that builds cross-platform digital tools to help profitability and sustainability for fashion retailers. Chandralika also owns a fashion label called Velvet Piano.
Ketaki Ogale, Co-founder of BHyve, a Future of Work SaaS platform that makes an organisation's collective knowledge accessible in real-time. Ketaki holds an MBA graduate from Fordham University in New York. She has 8 years of experience building products in India and the US.
Nida Sahar is Founder and CEO of Nife.io, a unified public cloud edge platform to manage, deploy, and scale applications securely. A serial entrepreneur and a published poet and writer, Nida has more than 15 years of experience in enterprise infrastructure space working with HPE, Oracle and Dell-EMC. She has built women-centric tech communities in Bangalore. Currently, does pro bono work with startup communities like Startup Leadership Program, IotMatrix and India Deeptech Accelerator
Sharmila Saha is Co-founder at Doppelio Technologies, a test automation platform for IoT applications. She has more than 30 years of work experience in the areas of embedded systems, parallel database systems, wireless protocol stacks, video analytics and IoT. Sharmila is also the co-inventor for three US-granted patents and lead inventor of the patent filed for Doppelio.
Accenture promotes and supports the drive toward greater gender diversity and inclusion. It believes in the potential of technology startup founders and entrepreneurs to create change that benefits society. Increasing women’s participation and encouraging entrepreneurship are key levers for continued economic growth, and nurturing women-led startups are essential to realizing India’s innovation potential. To create a more supportive ecosystem for women tech founders and entrepreneurs, we need to take more steps to break gender constraints and stereotypes.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Interactive, Technology and Operations services — all powered by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. Our 699,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities.
When Devashish Goyal, Founder & CEO of OhLocal, was struggling with the product and business development for his venture, he turned to PedalStart—a startup accelerator and founders’ community platform.
He had the idea—an AI (artificial intelligence)-enabled smart bidding platform for buyers and sellers—and an MVP (most viable product). However, it was PedalStart, he says, that helped him take his idea to the next level.
“They helped me with my product strategy and its development to place the startup better in the market,” he says.
Like Devashish, many entrepreneurs across India struggle to launch their startups due to a lack of ongoing mentoring and funds. This is especially true for people who are not from top-tier colleges.
PedalStart, launched in April 2021 by Aditya Darolia and Manas Pal, removes these hurdles by guiding founders from the ideation stage all the way to their first funding.
The platform’s USP, according to Aditya, lies in its continuous engagement with the founders.
“Our community-based model where we work and enable all startup enthusiasts with our wishlist concept. We do not select anyone based on PPT and a few interview rounds. Weekly we organise 1-to-1 brainstorming calls with experienced peers that helps a lot of founders to move faster with their own speed and stage,” he adds.
The Gurugram-based startup says it offers founders mentoring and help startups get funds without random dilution of equity.
“These startup founders now have a choice to not dilute the equity at Day-1. They can simply join PedalStart with a subscription and see how PedalStart is adding values in their startup life and then only take the decision to further move ahead with the equity dilution,” adds Aditya.
PedalStart, the co-founder says, provides entrepreneurs access to experienced peers. “Secondly, after the successful journey from ideation to POC (Proof of concept) /MVP, we open an investment round for raising angel/pre-seed investment,” Aditya tells YourStory.
Earlier this month, the platform launched an Internal Company Fund of Rs 2.5 crore for early stage startups.
Aditya says, “With these Rs 2.5 crore funds we will fund some of the best performing startups and promising founders from our community. The main aim with these funds is to smooth & fasten the process of raising angel and pre-seed investment for founders so that they can solely focus on startup building.”
The onboarding process
To join PedalStart, founders are required to sign up for a wishlist. The startup’s team then screens applicants based on their ideas before onboarding them into the community.
Speaking about the platform, Aditya says, “Founders join our wishlist after that our team connects with each founder on one-hour call to understand the idea.”
Apart from one-to-one brainstorming with experienced peers, PedalStart provides live learning, peer-to-peer connects, group brainstorming forums and investor connects.
“We are also working on a platform for the community with live learning and idea movement tracking and investors portal for new investments and portfolio tracking,” adds Manas.
Market size and traction
According to YourStory analysis, India's startup count stood at 66,359 as of March 21, 2022.
With only organic marketing, over 2,000 founders joined PedalStart in the last two months, out of which about 600 founders have joined the community.
Explaining further, Aditya adds, “We work on a wishlist model where startup enthusiasts share details of their idea and then we connect with them on a detailed call to understand it in-depth after that we select a few founders and allow them to join PedalStart community. For the rest of the founders, we try to give them some free discussion with domain experts and successful founders.”
YS Design team
According to PedalStart, 35 startups on its platform have already started generating early revenue while four others have raised initial funding—$400,000 in total. The platform has 150 startups exploring POC/MVP.
On the other side, the platform has 50 successful startup founders and domain experts as well as 250 angel investors, 10 micro VCs, and VC firms.
Some of them include Mandeep Manocha, CEO, Cashify; Vivek Aggarwal, CTO, SquareYards; Mayank Jain, CPO, Snapdeal, and Abhinav Kumar, VP of Marketing, Paytm.
Business model and revenue
The startup works on a subscription model and a form of equity and investment commissions.
“It is a process that starts with Rs 1,000 monthly subscription fee, until the founder reaches the POC/MVP stage after that we charge 2 percent-4 percent equity and a successful investment charge of 2 percent -4 percent investment commission. We work on an outcome-based model where founders only pay when they're convinced enough to deal in the long term,” highlights Manas.
Currently, PedalStart has touched $50,000 ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) with its subscription model and charged equity in over 15 startups worth $0.5 million.
“We are planning to expand our reach with 4× subscription numbers (Onboarding startup enthusiasts) and 2× startup equity (Onboarding/building some mature ideas),” states Aditya.
Funding and way ahead
The startup closed its strategic investment round of $50,000 in April this year.
Aditya says, over the last few months, the company has been receiving traction from the US, UAE, Southern Asia and South-Eastern Asia.
Speaking of competition, Aditya says, “Our competitors are all the accelerator platforms but we are building a unique model with our outcome-driven charging model with hand holding the founders till they reach fundraising.”
If installing yourself for half a day in front of a Bernini to appreciate the lifelikeness of marble, gaping with wonder at the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, or losing yourself in Renoir’s Summer is your definition of an ideal vacation, you probably have more than one reason to anathematise COVID-19: for restricting global travel.
Although parts of the world are opening up to tourists—and some already have—there are still too many restrictions to grapple with, including mandatory isolations, frequent COVID-19 tests, mandatory vaccination proof, etc., all of which have still managed to keep tourism subdued to a large extent.
But thanks to technology, you don’t need to be in the US anymore to enjoy Cezanne’s Peppermint Bottle, or in Jerusalem to take in The Tree by the Bend (although that maybe have been ideal!).
Google’s Arts and Culture app is a great way to explore art from around the world, from the safe confines of your hopefully well-sanitised home.
Rated 4.3 out of 5 on the Google Play Store, with over 10 million downloads, the Google Arts & Culture app enables you to interact with art like you would in real life via augmented reality, peppering in a lot of interesting information that makes the experience more enjoyable than “some physical guided tours”, as per one review on the app’s Google Play Store listing page.
The app is available on both Android and iOS, as well as on the desktop, although the AR experience is not accessible on the web browser.
Up, close, and personal
Google Arts & Culture lets you do a lot of things on a single platform, including some fun games and activities. You could either just click around on the homepage, or, if you’re a meticulous organiser like me and prefer symmetry, the offerings on the app can be broken down into the following ways:
Paintings
The app helps you discover new paintings, including some rarer pieces by famous artists, eras of painting, and landmark pieces from that era, new artists, etc. Every day or so, the app picks a new relevant topic pertaining to paintings, such as the Renaissance art period, or post-modern art, and throws up a wealth of information pertaining to that theme— so you can learn about art movements, cultural epochs, famous painters who adopted certain styles, and also how all of those things affected the microcosms around it.
Using augmented reality, you can project thousands of art pieces onto the walls of your home, and, thanks to Google’s excellent high-res image collection, even walk up to the painting to see minute details such as brush strokes. (I admittedly fondled my wall once because the AR looked so realistic, I thought I could actually touch the painting—the image quality is sublimely crip to the point of looking 3D-ish).
You can discover paintings as per your favourite colour and even star signs.
Galleries
This is just a brilliant way to armchair travel to some of the world’s most prominent art galleries for free, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which contains a lot of Van Gogh’s works, and the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, famous for its renaissance paintings, among several other prominent and frequently visited ones.
Each gallery page tells you the most famous pieces you could come across in the museum, as well as extremely interesting stories behind some of the paintings—almost as if you were walking around with an art historian in real life (who, by the way, from personal experience, can cost nearly €250 per hour for a tour that lasts nearly three hours).
Where Google Arts & Culture truly blows you away, reigniting a childlike wonder is when it lets you step inside a gallery from your home, like a Google Street View but for art galleries!
Some of them are real-world galleries, while others are curated virtual reality experiences, such as an exhibition comprising all of Kandinsky’s works, or the ‘Brushes with the World’ gallery where you can do a virtual walking tour of an art gallery that contains paintings depicting different parts of the world, along with audio commentary and background music that play as you “step” closer to an art piece.
Places and architecture
The app allows one to virtually tour various must-see landmarks of the world such as the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Kyoto’s most celebrated temple, the Kiyomizu-dera, and Rome’s Colosseum, among many others, without throngs pushing and pulling you in different directions.
You can also do really cool things like step inside Nina Simone’s childhood home in Washington DC, or walk the stage at Paris’ Opera Garnier, stepping into the shoes of a performer looking out at the 1,979 seats.
And when the offerings of planet Earth fail to hold your attention, you can step inside the International Space Station or tunnel your way through CERN’s large hadron collider.
Interactive
This is what you can do beyond the aforementioned three categories, and it includes several things:
Pottery: You can learn about all kinds of pottery-related topics, such as Greek pottery, Italian ceramics, etc. There’s also a really cool game you can play to create your own virtual pots based on famous designs.
Music: Discover new artists, and learn about the history of music and some of its most noted movements, such as jazz and classical. A game that lets you compose melodies with the help of maestro composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven using machine learning will, in equal measure, delight and give you an ego boost (who doesn’t dream of playing with the greatest pianists and composers in the world on a daily basis?).
Games and quizzes about paintings, music, architecture, etc.
Discovering fashion, virtually visiting botanical gardens, learning about indigenous flora and fauna of a particular region, discovering chairs, puppets, and rings of different eras and countries.
This app is a must-download for art aficionados and anyone interested in learning about our world a little better. There’s just so much information that every time you use the app, you come away feeling you’ve earned a doctorate in a particular painting, artist, architecture, or gallery.
Where Google Arts & Culture shines is the degree of immersiveness it offers–it doesn’t feel like information overload at all because you’re constantly moving around an art gallery, for example, or watching a video about one small part of a multi-faceted sculpture.
The discovery feature is an eye-opener, truly, and it introduces you to some of the most inane things about culture.
I recently stumbled upon a whole unit on Manga, which, shamefully, after recently binge-watching Naruto, I knew little about. The unit not only talks about the history of Manga, but also lets you create your own Manga characters, discover museums where the artform was birthed, and even learn to create “music” in a Manga (for the uninitiated, Manga is a popular form of Japanese comics. It is largely hand-drawn.)
There’s a beautifully illustrated story about how Osamu Tezuka, a legendary Manga artist, collaborated with artificial intelligence to create a comic, and, as someone who enjoys tech, it left a deep impression on me.
The AR and VR features are extremely captivating, and it’s hard to not spend hours being a virtual art appraiser.
“Love this app! The imagery is stunning. For example, the 3D view of artefacts is so detailed that you can literally see the texture as if you're physically in the museum browsing these works of art,” says one reviewer of the app—a sentiment vehemently echoed by millions of people in the review section.
While nothing can truly replace the experience of physically visiting seeing a Matisse, a Munch or a Magritte in person, the Google Arts & Culture app comes within inches of it. Be warned though—for the genuinely interested, it’s an addictive app.
In an update to FDI( foreign direct investment) laws implemented in effect from April 2020, the government released a note on June 1 stating that individuals appointed as directors on boards of Indian companies from bordering countries will need a security clearance.
Individuals from Hong Kong will also be within the purview of this new regulation. First reported by Economic Times, this change will most likely affect Chinese or Hong Kong-based manufacturing firms with subsidiaries in India as well as venture firms with investments in Indian-situated companies.
In April 2020, the government declared that all FDIs from bordering countries would need to secure prior approval to prevent opportunistic takeovers of companies. However, with organisations circumventing these laws through a variety of means such as convertible note investments and special purpose vehicles based in Europe, America, or the Cayman Islands, the government has seen fit to expand the regulation.
Earlier, on May 30, the government had declared that any company seeking to merge or be acquired by a firm based in a bordering country would require prior governmental approval.
Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous edition here). Share these 25 gems and insights from the week of May 23-29 with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights. See also our special compilation of quotes related to India’s coronavirus responseshere.
India is such a large [consumer credit] market, and it's such an untapped market. There is room for several large companies to actually be there and coexist. - Puneet Agarwal, Money View
E-invoicing is a positive move for the country's prosperity as it will boost compliance and income. - Rahul Meena, Teflo
Credit for MSMEs is a misnomer. B2B (business-to-business) supply chain credit today is limited to only large enterprises. - Prayank Swaroop, Accel
In the form of drones, we have a smart tool that is going to be part and parcel of people's lives. - Prime Minister Narendra Modi
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the lifeblood of our economy. One of the major problems holding them back is that they lack access to proper technology. - Ankit Kumar Agrawal, NeoDove
India has a lot of gaps in the product development area. The personnel are technically skilled, but not good enough in marketing, which is not letting them go global. - Tamizh Inian, Frigate
People are not aware of the Rights of Persons with Disability Act. They are not aware that places like parks, theatres, and other public places should be made accessible. - Suvarna Raj, para-athletic champion
The focus of the government so far has been on accessibility and inclusion. It must now move on to address issues related to sustainability. - Vaishali Samanta, Veddis Foundation
Police should treat all sex workers with dignity and should not abuse them, both verbally and physically, subject them to violence or coerce them into any sexual activity. - Justices L Nageswara Rao, BR Gavai, and AS Bopanna
India needs to adopt a combination of extended producer responsibility (EPR) models that are adopted by different countries. It cannot be just one solution for a vast country like India. - Nimit Aggarwal, EcoEx
The skilling requirements for a relevant and future-ready EV landscape make it imperative for us to make quick and sizable revisions to the status quo. - Suryanarayanan Paneerselvam, Skill-lync
The market is still fairly unorganised when it comes to post-sale appliance management. - Shashwat Agarwal, TOTOKO
The moment you go beyond urban settlements in India, everybody speaks a dialect…Language is an urban concept. - Vinay Singhal, STAGE
Every 100 km in India, the weather and lifestyle of people changes. However, they still use the same kind of shampoos, oils, or conditioners, which may not always be good for their hair. - Dhruv Sayani, Crystal Plastics
Engineers from Tier III colleges are equally smart, but they do not get an opportunity. - Jay Vijayan, Tekion
There is a white space within luxury skincare as a category in India, and it is growing 2-3X faster than the personal care category because it is brand starved. - Nikhil Vora, Sixth Sense Ventures
There has been a huge growth in the demand for bottled and convenient products, especially cocktails and craft spirits. - Rincy Varghese, Mr. Jerry’s
On the one hand, we have a highly unorganised [food] sector, where quality is unreliable, and on the other hand, we have a highly organised sector, where the essence and naturalness of food is completely lost. - Chakradhar Gade, Country Delight
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple,Android).
Launched in 2012, YourStory's Book Review section features over 340 titles on creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and digital transformation. See also our related columns The Turning Point,Techie Tuesdays, and Storybites.
A practical guide to design thinking and its broader contributions is well-provided in Innovator's Playbook: How to Create Great Products, Services and Experiences that Your Customers Will Love, by Nathan Baird.
Based in Sydney, Nathan Baird is Founder of innovation consultancy Methodry. He has over 20 years of experience in customer-centric innovation, and was earlier at KPMG. He was also a consulting programme director for UTS in design innovation and creative intelligence.
Check out YourStory’s d.Zen (‘Design Zen’) section for more articles, interviews, book reviews, and conference coverage on design thinking, and our ‘8 Is’ Framework for Design Thinking.
Foundations
Nathan builds on Doblin’s framework of Ten Types of Innovation (see my book review here). It classifies innovation into ten types, based on three clusters: configuration (network, process, structure, profit mode), offering (product performance, product system), and experience (service, customer engagement, channel, brand).
Innovation challenges the status quo, creates new value, and satisfies human needs. Unfortunately, many innovations fail due to a lack of quality in the way real market needs are identified, Nathan cautions.
The innovation process should have a strong market orientation, with the voice of the customer built-in, according to Robert Cooper (Winning at New Products). The product should be clearly differentiated, and leverage the company’s competencies.
Many FMCG companies have been doing customer-centric research and development long before the field of design thinking became formalised and spread to other industries.
Prof Sam Bucolo draws on the Danish Design Ladder and identifies several stages in design maturity: design as styling, innovation process, business strategy, organisational transformation, and even national competitive strategy.
“Design Thinking and Business Model Thinking are predominantly frontends of innovation methods. Agile and Lean Manufacturing are predominantly back-end methods, with Lean Startup being the glue between front and back,” Nathan explains.
“Jumping to the solution results in more defects, more rework and more costly failures overall,” he cautions. Customer need identification and concept testing are key in this regard.
Time pressure and human nature can lead to haste, but passion needs to be coupled with a rigorous framework and systematic developing, Nathan advises.
Preparation
“Too often in organisations we work in our siloed departments, doing handovers from one team to the next,” Nathan laments. It is better to have a team (six-10 people) throughout the innovation journey with roles such as project leader, project manager, facilitator, visualiser, and business specialists.
The team should have purpose, imagination, trust, respect, and resolve differences constructively. There should be eventual alignment in how they feel, think and act, through the four stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing (a framework developed by Bruce Tuckman).
The project brief should specify terms of success, scope, customer, research, constraints, stakeholders, timing, and budget. The innovation opportunity should be described in ways that are not too specific, but spur interest in finding a solution. Zooming in leads to the solution, zooming out or up leads to the broader purpose.
Nathan suggests examples (How might we?) like addressing the financial needs of SMBs, improving long-haul flight experience, serving healthy food to busy families, addressing the fitness needs of youth, getting more women to ride bicycles, getting more citizens to vote, and improving HR onboarding.
For example, How might we make your jobs easier? got more answers at Toyota than How to increase productivity?
In terms of creative space, Nathan advises having movable furniture and lots of wall space to post, view and assess ideas.
Discovery
Speaking directly to customers in the field to understand their needs, pain points and delights leads to better real-world insights and potential success. It also motivates teams and gives them meaning.
Effective customer researchers show curiosity, empathy, objectivity, rapport, and respect, Nathan affirms. The knowledge review should cover existing research and identify knowledge gaps.
It is important to talk to the mainstream as well as extreme customers, as seen in the design of the Zyliss pizza cutter. Spend a day in the customer’s life, Nathan advises; this can even involve home visits.
Talking to people around the customers also helps (eg. Brylcreem talking to the male target audience’s girlfriends). Required roles are interviewer, note-taker and observer–but the customer should not be intimated by all this, Nathan cautions.
School immersion by a food company yielded the important insight that children during school recess want to eat quickly because they want to play with their friends for the rest of the time. Snacks that can be eaten with one hand could be a good solution.
Distil insights
Nathan defines insight as a revelation (a-ha!) about underlying customer needs. “Insight is our inspiration for innovation, a penetrating truth that unlocks opportunity and inspires action,” in the words of Steven Melford.
An observation (breakfast is being skipped) can yield an insight (there is no time), and thus an idea for a solution (breakfast drink, portable breakfast).
Team members should share stories of their observations and findings, and build the empathy map by inferring customer thoughts and feelings. The Customer Profile Map conveys tasks, pains, and gains/benefits, which can be ranked (eg. important, nice to have, insignificant).
Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie, co-authors of Designing for Growth, have listed several needs of customers. They include universal needs (eg. acceptance, belonging, love, security), autonomy (choice, space, freedom), and meaning (contribution, growth, purpose).
Examples include BBC’s Top Gear programme realising that audiences wanted not just tech features of cars, but also banter, humour and camaraderie.
Insights can be framed into opportunity statements which connect needs to causes (with words such as because and so that). Insights should be tested to see if they are compelling, actionable, recurring, and evoke passion.
Ideate
Care should be taken to get into an incubative state that lets effective ideas emerge, eg. during semi-automatic activities like walking, running, having a shower, or preparing to cook.
The ‘white noise’ of a café can also help. A ‘creative safari’ can include visits to other related practitioners.
For example, a Sainsbury team study on freshness included a visit to fishmongers. Some of them bought only from day boats, which led to ideas like baking bread daily only from fresh local ingredients.
Nathan suggests that the creative brief include headline, context, customer insight, and solution directions (eg. how might we make snacks that can be eaten on the run?).
Emotional and mental creativity blockers should be removed by suspending quick judgment on others’ ideas, removing distractions, lateral thinking, and boosting creative confidence.
“Signal that failure is okay,” Nathan advises; there will be some inherent messiness in ideation. Music and food can be creativity enablers as well.
A trained facilitator must now lead an idea generation workshop to build on the creative briefs. Mind maps, idea sprints, and a gallery of ideas are suggested approaches here. Concepts and best practices from other fields can also be adopted, eg. the roll-on deodorant drew inspiration from the ballpoint pen.
Attributes, benefits and contributions to strategy, desirability, viability, and feasibility can be voted on and ranked, eg. using coloured sticky dots. The value proposition can be one of the offered benefits, or a combination of them (eg. on-demand ride of your choice at your convenience).
Nathan suggests the idea canvas as an effective tool here, with six components: customer insight, solution idea, benefits, value proposition, differentiator, and risky assumptions.
Experiment
The idea canvas is now used to launch a series of prototypes (“brainstorming with your hands,” in the words of David Kelley).
These could include concept boards, storyboards, roleplay, and physical prototypes. “Be sure to move quickly between prototypes to avoid getting too emotionally attached to it,” Nathan cautions.
For example, James Dyson developed a series of prototypes to solve problems like emptying messy vacuum cleaner bags, and loss of suction power as the bags filled. The Nespresso customer is a coffee aficionado who may not always want to go out for a good coffee experience but wants something better than instant coffee.
Prototypes should be tested across at least three focus groups per customer category. Nathan suggests roping in field recruiters at this stage to bring in a diverse target base.
Once desirability has been established, the next phases are to determine feasibility and viability using the Business Model Canvas. Feasibility relates to resources, activities and partners, while viability relates to cost structure and revenue streams.
Nathan suggests modifying the original canvas in the following two fields: customer (adding needs and insights) and value proposition (expanding it using the idea canvas). Experiments should be designed so that prototypes can address the risky assumptions.
Nathan describes a two-dimensional risk matrix of uncertainty versus importance to map out the degree of risk, eg assumptions that private car owners will offer rides to strangers. Testing should be specified in experiment briefs, with a hypothesis, success criteria, and action (eg. 5 percent of test customers agree to share rides, and will pay).
Solution features should be developed and tested using the Lean Startup framework of Eric Ries (see my book review here). These experiments can involve landing pages, demos, videos, MVPs, wireframes, and prototypes.
Such approaches were used by Buffer app (landing page), DropBox (video), Food on the Table (concierge MVP), and Zappos (Wizard of Oz MVP).
Metrics to keep in mind are TAM (total available market), SAM (segmented available market), and SOM (share of the market). Business estimates should be drawn for up to three years to determine breakeven point.
Findings from the experiments should be captured in a test learning board, which connects learnings to decisions (eg. there is supply, proceed to the next assumption).
Weekly snapshots of the evolving canvas should be captured to assess evolution. “It’s also possible through your journey that you may have uncovered other opportunities that look for further exploration in future projects,” Nathan observes.
The next steps in the journey include full product development, launch, and branding. In the long run, such practices and cultures should be sustained. Design sprints are useful for incremental optimisation, while evolutionary and revolutionary innovation take longer.
Each chapter in the book ends with provocative questions for innovators and leaders, and it would be apt to end this book review with some of these questions.
Does everyone in your organisation regularly spend time with customers, observing and interviewing them? Does the leader role model the importance of customer insights? Is there an opportunity for reflection and getting fresh inspiration?
Is there space in your organisation for people to conduct the messy, tactile and visual front end of innovation? Do your innovation teams have access to prototyping tools?
“Mastery involves experimenting with new methods and leading others in their adoption and proficiency to run it,” Nathan signs off.
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple,Android).
When it comes to online shopping, everything boils down to delivering an outstanding consumer experience. While there are several factors that ensure a good user experience, your choice of payment gateway has a significant impact on whether a consumer will come back to your store.
A shopper is more likely to repeat a purchase if offered a smooth checkout experience. A lag or a glitch while making a payment can quickly erode brand trust. Therefore, startups today integrate multiple payment gateways to provide ease of payment experience and convenience of choice to consumers.
There are several known benefits of having multiple payment gateways. However, its integration can be a cumbersome task for startups and enterprises. From higher costs to operational changes, the complexity of the process can be an issue for online businesses. The only way out of this is to use an efficient routing solution that allows distribution of payments between multiple gateways.
Reducing cost and complexity
Payment routing is essential for scaling businesses having multiple payment gateways to ensure better success rate. The router ensures sending each transaction to the optimal payment gateway on the basis of selected parameters. It can effectively reduce both the transaction cost and complexity by integrating with multiple payment gateways with a single click which usually takes 28 days (as per industry standards).
Different types of routing – explained below – can be used by businesses to distribute transactions on the basis of priorities.
Cost-based routing: Different payment gateways charge varied fees based on the payment method. Through cost-based routing, merchants here can control the various payment options shown to their buyers to optimise the processing charges, thereby minimising costs entailed during payments.
Transaction-based routing: This helps eliminate payment failures by focussing on coordinating between the payment gateways to boost uptime. Different payment gateways often display higher performance for a given payment mode. Businesses can accordingly set up routing in a way that the combinations result in better success rates.
Intelligent routing: It is an automated routing system that ensures that the payment provider is most likely to accept and approve the payment. Intelligent routing is particularly useful in cases where shoppers are based in a different country.
Paytm Super Router: Automating decisions and optimising payments
India’s leading payments gateway company has designed an intelligent tool especially suited to help businesses create a user-friendly experience and reduce transaction costs with the help of routing. Paytm Super Router lets businesses integrate multiple payment gateways without any hassle. It acts as a single point of control for all transactions, refunds as well as settlements.
Further it can help businesses:
Increase in payment gateway uptime: Paytm Super Router’s robust technology leverages billions of transactions across all factors to ensure a 10 percent increase in payment gateway uptime.
Save costs: With no additional cost to manage or maintain the router, Paytm Super Router is easy to integrate with all payment gateways and aggregators. Irrespective of the traffic on the checkout page, the router ensures that there is no transaction failure. Even if a single payment gateway is down, transactions are automatically directed to another one to avoid downtimes.
Provide a seamless checkout experience: When basic glitches are removed, checkouts become faster and customers can experience a seamless exit on your shopping website. This increases the chance of shoppers returning to your store.
Gain better control over payments: With the Paytm Super Router dashboard, businesses have the flexibility to modify routing strategy within minutes and set up new transaction rules.
Super fast integration: It allows you to add new payment providers and bank gateways within 24 hours against the industry average of four weeks.
With Paytm’s intelligent and completely automated Super Router, businesses need not worry about payment failures or checkout glitches and put the focus on taking the business to the next level of growth.
According to a new report by fintech startup PhonePe and the Boston Consultancy Group (BCG), India's digital payments market is set to triple in the next half decade. The study states that the country saw $3 trillion in digital payments processed in 2021, and that number is set to hit $10 trillion by 2026.
According to the study, 40 percent of all payments in India were made digitally in 2021. However, this does not include payments made for financial services, corporate business payments, or government payments.
The study states that India's united payments interface (UPI) technology has supercharged the industry, especially when it comes to peer-to-peer (P2P) and low amount peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions.
“UPI saw about a nine-fold transaction volume increase in the past three years, from five billion transactions in FY19 to about 46 billion in FY22, accounting for more than 60 percent of non-cash transaction volumes in FY22,” the report said.
Quick response (QR) codes are responsible for the merchant growth, with the study stating that the number of merchants who have a QR code payments system has increased from 2.5 million five years ago to 30 million today. As such, P2M transactions on UPI have grown from 12 percent in 2018 to 45 percent in 2021.
The report stated that the biggest challenge to the continued growth of digital payments in India are the extensive know-your-customer (KYC) norms needed to onboard new users and merchants.
New-Delhi based Arata is a personal care brand founded by Dhruv Madhok and Dhruv Bhasin in 2018. The brand was created with a vision to replace harmful, carcinogenic skin and hair care products with chemical-free alternatives and is creating natural, vegan and plant-based products for both men and women. It is committed to building an honest personal care brand offering organic hair and skin products made from superior quality ingredients.
Arata is currently operating on a D2C-based model with its products available on the website. One of the biggest challenges in this business is to retain a customer that once makes a purchase.
“We wanted to work on a solution that helps us retain customers, and send them personalised communication based on the products they like. Moreover, by identifying funnel leakages, we wanted to ensure that a customer completes their purchase journey,” shares Dhruv.
Signing up with WebEngage
“We were looking for a marketing automation provider with experience of working with leading e-commerce D2C brands, that’s when we decided to sign up with WebEngage,” says Dhruv.
WebEngage is a user engagement and retention platform that helps businesses like Arata drive retention by enabling them to analyse data and engage with customers via multiple digital channels. The platform's analytical capabilities also make it possible for businesses to get a 360° view of their users, products, campaigns, and compare the impact of each channel of engagement.
“The onboarding process with WebEngage was executed seamlessly and a Customer Success Manager (CSM) started working closely with our team to help us understand the platform better,” adds Dhruv.
Spotlight on customer retention
To enable hyper-personalised communication at scale, CSM helped the team at Arata to consolidate the shopper data on the WebEngage dashboard for effective, multi-channel user engagement. The consolidated data on the WebEngage’s platform was then used to identify shopper engagement opportunities to maximise conversations and increase the focus on customer retention.
“By choosing WebEngage as our growth partner, we’ve adopted a retention-first approach that shall help us scale our business faster than before. One thing that stands out about WebEngage is their Customer Success team. Their support is unmatchable. This partnership has made it easy for us to implement critical use cases and go live with the campaigns faster,” shares Dhruv.
WebEngage further helped Arata in solving critical issues such as cart abandonment, converting unknown shoppers into known ones, driving repeat purchases, and more. Features like Funnel analysis and Cohort analysis ensured seamless execution of the above-mentioned use cases.
“Using the WebEngage dashboard, we can now create automated shopper journeys based on how and when the shoppers engage with our website. We can execute and manage these campaigns without any tech dependency. Cart abandonment and interesting trigger based communication have given us great results and continue to impact our bottom line,” said Adnan Ali, E-commerce Marketing Manager, Arata.
The impact
As an emerging D2C brand in the personal care category, Arata faces a lot of competition. For brands like Arata to stay ahead in the game, it is important to put the focus on customer engagement and retention strategies. With WebEngage, Arata successfully carries out various customer engagement activities and has maintained a cart abandonment recovery rate between 13 -18 percent.
To Know more about how Arata drives retention-led growth with WebEngage
Used-car leasing company Pumpumpum has raised $2 million inequity funding from LC Nueva Investment Partners, Founder’s Room Capital, LetsVenture, Manish Agarwal, Founder and CEO of Nazara Group, and Uday Sodhi, former Business Head of Sony Liv.
Founded by Sameer Kalra and Tarun Lawadia, PumPumPum recently introduced electric vehicles on its used-car subscription platform. It has a base of more than 650 customers, which is growing every month.
“Our business model ensures that we extend a hassle-free experience, and give customers the same feeling of owning a car without the added worry of vehicle maintenance and financing,” said Tarun Lawadia, Co-founder and CEO of Pumpumpum.
The used-car segment has immense untapped potential in India,” said Sohil Chand, Founding Partner of LC Nueva Investment Partners. “We believe it will be easy to drive home success with the right leadership and a well-thought-out model.”
Pumpumpum provides mobility solutions to corporate and retail customers. Its single-lease subscription includes end-to-end service, maintenance, insurance, and other vehicle-related issues.
Performing arts venture Kafqa Academy has acquired online dance academy Verb Studio.
Verb Studio is one of the largest dance academies in India, with more than 350,000 customers, over 150,000 subscribers across social media channels, and 300+ original content from top dance instructors in India.
It was founded in 2018 by Bharath Kumar J and Ilangovan KS, two graduates of the National Institute of Technology (NIT). The acquisition gives Kafqa access to larger distribution and content on social media, and a complimentary age group of 15+ years as a demographic, said a press release from Kafqa Academy.
The Verb Studio team will join Kafqa taking the total strength to 160 people.
"The team has carefully built and nurtured a dance community providing them with relevant content,” said Shariq Plasticwala, CEO and Founder of Kafqa Academy. “We felt their strength in community building within the young adults’ age group of 16-25 complements our current strengths. We look forward to partnering with Bharath and his team to create the world's largest performing arts academy for learners across ages.”
Rural commerce platform Hesa has raised $2.3 million from Venture Catalysts, with participation from Venture Catalysts USA Chapter, Faad, IPV, WFC, and other angel investors.
Founded by Vamsi Udayagiri and Hema Nandiraju, Hesa’s API integrations enable services on thein fintech, agri buy-sell input/ output, insurance, and education. API is short for application programming interface that enables two distinct computer systems to be interoperable.
“Our primary objective is to provide a connection between financial-services providers with their last-mile target consumers using a phygital approach,” Vamsi said. The funds raised will be deployed to expand to more geographies, and strengthen the technology platform along with increasing the offerings on agri-fintech and commerce, according to a press release from Hesa.
“This is our second round of investment in Hesa that has created a very effective agri-financial services marketplace to plug the demand-supply gap,” said Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder of Venture Catalysts.
Kandee Factory raises Rs 1.5 crore
Plant-based confectioners KANDEEFACTORY raised Rs 1.5 crore from ah! Ventures Angel Platform, Keiretsu, and the Polaris family office fund.
The startup clocked revenue of Rs 2.68 crore for FY 2022, growing 70 percent over the previous year. It has sold a million candies online and through 750 stores. Kandee Factory makes confections using only plant-based ingredients, without gelatin and milk.
EzeRx raises seed capital
Med-tech startup EzeRx Health Tech Pvt Ltd has got seed funding from some promoters of Mankind Pharma, including its CEO, Sheetal Arora.
Founded in 2018 by Partha, Chaitali Roy and Sudip Roy Chowdhury, EzeRx is a non-invasive screening solution to identify primary health parameters at an early stage such as ailments in liver, kidney, lungs and blood glucose levlevelsel, and common problems like anaemia, in less than a minute without withdrawing blood from the human body.
EzeRx will use the funds for scaling up its operations and marketing, apart from boosting its sales in markets across India, Africa, and Southeast Asia, seeking global certifications and boosting its R&D efforts.
“Proper detection of health problems is the very first step in curing the ailment," Partha said. "Therefore, we intensively worked toward developing and manufacturing advanced medical devices for the effective management of the curative and preventive healthcare ecosystem."
EzeRx has got grants from NIDHI Prayas by the Department of Science and Technology, BIG programme by the Department of Biotechnology, BIRAC, the SASACT Grant from MeiTy, and a startup grant from Indian Oil Corporation and Startup Odisha.
Indeanta raises $150,000 in bridge round
Electric-mobility startup Indeanta raised $150,000 from IvyGrowth Associates, in a bridge round that also had participation from Mehul Shah, Nine Spar, among others.
Having started operations in December 2020, Indeanta began with its in-campus mobility services. It offers multi-modal electric ride-hailing and ride-sharing services for university students.
The services include electric buggies, electric motor scooters, and electric bicycles for the in-campus commute and electric cars. All these services can be accessed through their mobile application. The company claims to be present in six states.
"At Indeanta, we firmly believe that electric-mobility as a service (EMaaS) is a vastly underserved sector," said Dr Aaron D'souza, Founder of Indeanta. "The electric-mobility space is crowded with OEMs, component suppliers and technology enablers; however, the service industry is where the change is taking place. And one cannot do without the other."
With the global pandemic blurring the line between home life and work life, employee well-being has transcended beyond just physical well-being to include mental health and holistic growth.
At the heart of this is workplace flexibility – where, when, and how employees work. Companies big and small are taking cognizance of the fact that employee well-being is a fundamental building block of an organisation, and a sound and robust policy in place increases productivity and helps employees develop better habits and routines in the long run.
Here are a few healthcare startups that are nurturing employee wellbeing through their solutions –
Visit Health
Delhi-based Visit Health, founded in 2015 by BITS Pilani graduates Vaibhav Singh, Shashvat Tripathi, Chetan Anand, and Anurag Prasad, allows corporate employees to manage their healthcare needs using their smartphones.
The startup enables people to connect with doctors on the go, while travelling or at work. It is a personal healthcare assistant to help users with health queries and a telehealth platform to connect to healthcare specialists.
Through its app, users can chat with a doctor or request a visit with a consultant specialist and connect over audio and video calls from the comfort of their office or home.
Visit Health claims to be a fully integrated, 360-degree primary healthcare platform. It helps corporations design primary care that includes medical services before hospitalisation and wellness solutions for employees and their dependents.
The Visit Health App uses a data-smart approach to engage and guide users throughout their care journey around the four wellness pillars: physical, emotional, legal, and financial.
Bengaluru-based Kenko Health, founded by Aniruddha Sen and Dhiraj Goel in 2019, is a subscription-based health insurer-tech startup that provides comprehensive plans focused on OPD expenses.
It offers monthly subscription plans, including individual, OPD family, and mini, and prices range between Rs 299 and Rs 1,999.
The startup aims to help customers save more on their regular healthcare expenses incurred outside the hospital.
For OPD, the startup provides a 20–90 percent discount on the total bill, which includes consultation, diagnostics, dental, mental health (select plans), and medical fees.
Kenko has partnered with diagnostic provider Thyrocare, and online pharmacy Tata 1MG to offer a discount to its customers.
The startup has served over 40 corporate players, including Shaadi.com, Rebel Foods, which owns Fasso’s and Ovenstory.
In February 2022, Kenko Health raised $12 million in Series A, led by Sequoia Capital India, to acquire customers, develop new products, and grow its team.
Nova Benefits
Nova Benefits core team
Bengaluru-based Nova Benefits, founded by Saransh Garg and Yash Gupta in 2020, is a B2B tech platform
that helps companies improve employee wellbeing via health insurance, wellness programmes, mental health counselling, and daily fitness.
With Nova, team members are provided with a single platform to access their company-provided benefits.
The startup has a direct insurance broking license from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), which allows it to provide businesses with a combination of insurers and coverage.
Nova has onboarded clients including Yulu Bikes, Snapdeal, CoinDCX, and Zenoti.
In September 2021, Nova raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Bessemer Venture Partners, Titan Capital, Multiply Ventures, and Better Capital to expand its product management, customer success teams, sales, and engineering to build a larger stack of wellness offerings on its platform.
Founded by Sanchit Malik and Manish Mishra in 2020, Bengaluru-based PazCare is employee benefits and insurance platform that works like a marketplace.
PazCare offers health benefits and insurance to companies, personal accident cover, starting with health insurance, team life, and doctors on call.
On the platform, employers can choose from different insurance plans based on their requirements and their budget. The PazCare application is available on both Android and iOS, and one can use the website as well.
The startup claims to be a licensed distributor by the IRDA under the Ministry of Finance.
In October 2021, PazCare raised $3.5 million in seed round funding led by BEENEXT, 3one4 Capital, and other investors to accelerate product development, growth, and hire.
eKincare
Hyderabad-based ekincareeKincare, founded in 2015 by Kiran Kalakuntla, Srikanth Samudrala, and Dr Noel Coutinho, is a health benefits startup that helps companies administer benefits efficiently, optimise their healthcare spending, and show real health outcomes.
The startup’s vision is to create a predictive, preventive, and highly personalised healthcare journey for professionals to help them adopt a healthier lifestyle, and empower the firms with relevant data and technology to reduce the overall health risks of their employees across the board.
Apart from insurance, it provides services via third-party operators (examples of which would include HDFC ERGO, ICICI Lombard, Apollo Munich etc.).
The startup offers an array of wellness and health-related products.
In March 2022, eKincare raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by HealthQuad, Sabre Partners, Siana Capital, Eight Roads, and Endiya Partners to help accelerate growth through marketing and branding and add products.
After making record-breaking investments in 2021—nearly $24.1 billion (a report by Nasscom and Zinnov) poured into the Indian startup ecosystem—it would be unfair if we don’t discuss the innovations made for the investment firms.
Venture capital (VC) firms are not alien to digitisation. Their interaction with technology is limited to their back-office operations, including administrative and accounting tasks, maintaining spreadsheets, recording analysis, evaluation, and tracking of companies. For this, they partner with tech support providers and pay them for the software.
However, only a handful of options are available for front-office tasks such as sales, portfolio management, client servicing operations, or middle-office operations, including risk management and corporate strategy.
PE Front Office , founded by Anup Kumar Adlakha and Ankur Agarwal in 2013, is solving this problem.
The Gurugram-headquartered company provides end-to-end solutions for private equity and venture capital companies—from portfolio monitoring to investor management, fundraising to deal flow, fund administration to investment management, etc.
Earlier, Anup and Ankur worked at UK-based private equity (PE) firm Actis, where they noticed a gap in the market—technology solutions available for this space only address the needs of the back-office, including fund administration and account.
“The technology solutions in the alternative investment space are either not end-to-end or very bulky in terms of cost, ease of configuration, and ease of use,” Ankur tells YourStory.
With a firsthand understanding of these pain points, the duo decided to solve the problem by themselves. Initially, PE Front Office was supposed to cater to all PE firms and their technology requirements.
Gradually, it moved to venture capital (VC) firms, real estate and debt funds, distressed debt funds, funds of funds, and family offices.
Addressing portfolio companies and investors
ver the last 10 years, the startup realised that VC firms have different workflows, albeit similar investment strategies.
Usually, a VC firm takes funds from investors to invest in companies that ultimately become a part of its portfolio. However, the process of deciding where to invest isn’t straightforward.
Investors, who give their money to PE, VC, or angel funds, expect higher returns than other asset classes because of the associated high risk.
Thus, before investing, these firms need to research, analyse, deliberate, and monitor the industry and company’s performances. They scout for numerous deals, decide what is promising, and do due diligence on these companies.
They require customisable offerings for monitoring, management, and communication. Ankur says the startup had to develop a solution—about 80-90 percent could be used the way it is, and the 10-20 percent gap accounted.
Although investing for a few years, these VC firms need to regularly monitor their portfolio companies’ financial health, their investment returns, etc. They also look for potential investors, track their investment strategies, share documents, and manage relationships with them.
PE Front Office’s software allows these firms to do all of these through its customer relationship management offering, which also generates analytics and reports.
Ankur says the startup ensured it removed bottlenecks related to cost, availability, and customer type. PE Front Office also worked to reduce the implementation cycle and can go live with any client in less than 10 days.
Moreover, it has added plug-ins with Gmail and Outlook to facilitate communication using the software, making it easier for customers.
Journey and Way Ahead
PE Front Office, a Software-as-a-Solution (SaaS) startup, charges its clients (VC firms) based on the number of users.
“Our customers don’t have a huge in-house technology or IT team to manage their system. They don't want to have the hassle of managing the system getting back-ups,” says Ankur.
Further, PE Front Office offers its solution on an open-source framework, removing the need for a long-term commitment and a technology licence. “This has helped us become competitive in terms of costs, and as a SaaS startup, we operate a pay-as-you-go model,” Ankur notes.
Offered on the cloud, users can access it on their desktop and Android and iOS apps.
PE Front Office—with over 40 employees—has over 100 customers across 15 countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, and India. Its clients include Chiratae Ventures, Fireside Ventures, Edelweiss, etc., who have made over 1,100 investments through its software.
Next, “We want to aggressively focus on the US as we have a lot of customers there,” says Ankur.
Bootstrapped with an initial capital of $250,000, PE Front Office aims to reach $1.5 million in revenue in FY23. It has not raised any funding yet.
According to the Registrar of Companies (RoC) filings, in FY21, the startup reported a revenue of Rs 3.35 crore, with a profit of Rs 22 lakh. Its FY22 financials are not available on the RoC portal yet.
The startup competes with the likes of France-based efront and US-based Dynamo Software.
Being a clean and healthy brand is not enough if we don’t take measures to protect the environment, believes Puru Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, True Elements.
Hence, True Elements, the D2C (direct-to-consumer) brand offering healthy breakfast and snacks, is ensuring sustainable practices are set in place to work towards a greener planet.
Founded by Puru and Sreejith Moolayil in 2014, True Elements has been certified as both ‘Clean Label’ and ‘100 percent wholegrain’ by leading US-based non-profit organisations. The company claims it is driven by providing ‘True Nutrition’ with ‘True Transparency’ and ‘True Sustainability’.
True Elements is re-charting the ethos of home-grown food businesses and is a responsible, sustainable, and conscious startup.
With a robust product innovation pipeline, rapidly increasing offline distribution in both domestic and international geographies, increasing brand awareness and salience, and high repeat rates of over 65 percent, it is important to look at sustainability along the way, believes True Element.
The Turning Point is a series of short articles that focuses on the moment entrepreneurs hit upon their winning idea. This week, we feature New Delhi-based plant bioscience startup Absolute, which helps farmers with precision agriculture solutions using phytology, microbiology, and AI technology. Read more.
Innvocon Learning Solutions, founded by Taranjeet Singh (CEO), Pragyanam Kumar (COO), and Nancy Bagla (CTO) in 2019, is focused on solving problems for companies like high attrition rates, increasing cost per hire, or problems such as lack of new-age industry-relevant skills.
The Dehradun-based startup helps new candidates in a company adapt to new processes, and know about the vision, expectations, opportunities, and the purpose of the company. Read more.
For bike enthusiasts and startup mentors John Kuruvilla and Gautam Khot, riding across the country became a means to cultivate entrepreneurs. As part of the StartupNRev ‘BharatMala’ initiative, the team travelled over 13,500+ kilometres across India.
Bengaluru is one of the most congested cities, not just in India but across the world. Enter Tummoc, whose multi-modal transit patented public transport app is helping people switch to public transportation with real-time information, and first and last-mile connectivity.
While creating content may seem exciting, only a few influencers and creators get discovered among the crowd. This is where CrowdPad helps content creators create, discover and manage their communities by leveraging blockchain and tokenisation.
For girls and boys of many disadvantaged communities, the pandemic disrupted their education, breaking many dreams. This is why Surabhi Yadav founded Sajhe Sapne, a non-profit founded that ensures women in rural India have the opportunity for a thriving career.
Before you go, stay inspired with…
“At early-stage, founders need a believer rather than an investor and remove a lot of fundraising headaches.”
Bigbasket to offer packaging-free deliveries in India
Online supermarket Bigbasket, a TATA Enterprise, started packaging-free doorstep delivery of fresh fruits and vegetables to drive sustainability, the company announced two days ahead of the World Environment Day on Friday.
Now run as a pilot project, it aims to completely remove packaging from its fruits and vegetable delivery across India by 2023.
Seshu Kumar Tirumala, national head of buying and merchandising for BigBasket said, “We have been observing how a lot of single-use plastic is used in packaging of fresh foods, and by eliminating it, a significant damage to the environment can be prevented.”
Stanza Living invests $10M to expand in managed apartments
Tech-enabled managed accommodation company Stanza Livingon Thursday announced it has invested $10 million to expand into managed apartments, beginning with Delhi, NCR (Gurugram), Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai.
It was launched with an initial inventory of 5,000 rooms and plans to reach 1,20,000 rooms by 2026.
Sahil Ludhani, senior vice president of revenue and growth at Stanza Living said, “We have always focused on understanding the nuanced needs of diverse consumers and deploying intelligent technology to craft their living experiences. With this vertical, we will continue to set new benchmarks in consumer experience.”
At the same time, the company will continue to deepen the footprint of its existing hostel-style managed accommodation businesses for students and young working professionals.
In March this year, it secured $57 million (~Rs 425 crore) in debt financing, led by Kotak Mahindra Bank and RBL Bank, with its existing debt provider Alteria Capital also participating.
Bengaluru-based performing arts academy Kafqa on Friday announced its acquisition of online dance academy Verb Studio, making it the largest performing arts academy in the country with 160 employees. It now serves over 5 lakh students combined.
Bharath Kumar, founder of Verb Studio said "The partnership allows us to magnify the impact of our work across Kafqa's large user base and leverage Kafqa's technology and content infrastructure to offer better experiences for customers and instructors."
Moving ahead, Kafka hopes to be the go-to destination for performing arts, having received responses from over 600 cities in India within a span of just two years.
Bangalore, June 2, 2022: In an unprecedented effort to showcase entrepreneurs from all walks of life and make entrepreneurship aspirational across India, 41 partners joined hands with Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) to share 1000 entrepreneurship stories from across India. This culminated in a Twitter Marathon from 7 am - 11:30 pm on May 31. Creating a mass entrepreneurship narrative through storytelling, the alliance shared stories of these unsung heroes, their successes and trials, hopes and dreams and moreover their relentless drive to achieve their entrepreneurial ambitions.
Conversations around entrepreneurship are usually connected to cities and tech enterprises. In an initiative to break this perception and broad base entrepreneurship to a much wider horizon, 1000 stories in 1000 minutes went beyond and showcased entrepreneurs across all categories demographics, classes and gender. The campaign aimed to foster greater entrepreneurial spirit, especially among women, by bringing their stories of grit, determination and relentless passion to the fore. The organisations that participated included global platforms, Entrepreneurship Development Organisations (EDOs), incubators, vibrant entrepreneurial communities and grassroot organisations.
“In India, entrepreneurship is still considered a risky profession and hence the attractiveness towards stable government jobs and established startups for employment. Through this campaign and by showcasing 1000 entrepreneurial stories from across categories and geographies, we want to make entrepreneurship aspirational where it becomes a top career choice and where job seekers are inspired to become job creators. A thriving ecosystem with millions of flourishing small businesses will lead to true economic transformation. We also believe these stories must be told and celebrated as much as we celebrate the success of the startup ecosystem” Sandhya Thukaram, COO GAME
1000 stories in 1000 minutes went live on the GAME twitter handle on the 31st of May where a story per minute was showcased for 16 hours. The alliance consisted of Yuwaah UNICEF, Head Held High, Thub, DeAsra, GUSEC, Business Blasters, Atal Innovation Mission, Dream a Dream, 1Bridge, Pollinate Group, TIE Bangalore, Frontier Markets, Jagriti Yatra, Institute of Inspiring Innovation, Medha, TRIF, Buzz Women, Tie Global, AEGF, Sattva, YNOS, Sheroes, Josh Talks, NICE, Inunity, CINI, SRLM, Network Capital, Pink Lemonade, SIDBI, Sygenta Foundation India, UBUNTU, Sewa Bharat, TEOI, Yourstory, Udhyam Learning Foundation, Kinara Capital, Pradan, Data Leads, and Poornatha.
About GAME
The Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) is a non-profit organization that works to build powerful coalitions to improve enabling conditions for broad-based entrepreneurship and rapid and sustainable growth of enterprises in the country.
