To mark its 20th anniversary Wharton India Economic Forum (WIEF), a student-run India-focused conference is hosting the annual conference for the first time in India.
The conference is scheduled for January 5, 2016, at St. Regis Hotel, Phoenix Mills, Mumbai.
It is generally hosted by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which will lay emphasis on profuse growth of established startups like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Zomato and Ola cabs along with comparing their success with established corporate like Tata, Reliance, and more. It will have keynote addresses and panel discussions featuring eminent speakers like Ronnie Screwvala (founder of UTV group and Unilazer), Harsh Mariwala (Chairman of Marico), Haigreve Khaitan (Senior Partner at Khaitan & Co.)
Apart from panel discussions and keynotes addresses, the conference will feature pitching of ideas by Wharton India Startup Competition finalists.
Here are the 10 finalists to pitch at WIEF
ACUITY
Acuity is a Visual Web Analytics startup which has a Cloud-based scalable platform that enables minimising web-scale massive visual data sets, using latest advancements in Computer Vision and Machine Learning and delivering valuable, actionable insights to enterprises and consumers.
Art & Found
Art & Found is a marketplace for artists where they can sell their art for free. Using their own personalised dashboard, they get to manage their art, track orders, sales, connect with customers, follow artists, like their art, get followed, use promotion tools and other useful features. The startup only takes care of all the logistics.
Greensole
Greensole is a startup that refurbishes discarded sports shoes to comfortable footwear and provide them to the neediest. Refurbished shoes are donated to the neediest paid for by the NGOs/corporates/schools. The startup also sells carbon and auction sports shoes of famous personalities to spread awareness about the cause.
iFreedom v2
iFreedom v2 is an app that saves users’ internet data. It has an infrastructure that sends and receives compressed data over the internet thereby saving much Mbs. It helps by using less data transmission without affecting internet usage experience and also increases the speed with its new SpeedBIT technology. One can save up to 100Mb for every 1Gb of internet one uses.
Ketto
Ketto is a crowdfunding platform for social and personal causes. It provides a democratised platform which gives every individual an equal chance to raise funds for any project of their choice. The startup defines that the need for such platform arises because of lack of access to funding.
Kheyti
Kheyti offers “Greenhouse-in-a-Box (GIB)”, an affordable 4000 sq. ft. greenhouse integrated with services that increase farm yields by 7 times and ensures consistent weekly income of $20* to a small farmer’s household, thereby ensuring that a small farmer becomes smart farmer. (*poverty line for 5 member household is $17 per week)
LoanMeet
LoanMeet is a peer-to-peer lending marketplace that enables credit-worthy borrowers, especially who could not get loans from banks due to lack of credit history or payment delays in past, get personal and business loans by connecting to lenders and financial institutions.
Pratilipi (Nasadiya Technologies Private Limited)
Pratilipi is Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing for Indian Languages. It acts as a bridge between the two sides viz writers via a web based easy to use self-publishing platform and readers via a device independent platform to discover, read and share content in their own languages.
Trebene
Trebene is an ethical luxury label of Cashmere scarfs from Kashmir. The label invests up to 20% of profits into the education of weavers’ children.
FRS Labs Research Systems Pvt Ltd
FRS Labs helps organisations cut down fraud losses and provide a superior experience to their customers at an affordable cost. It has a unique voice biometrics solution for the Indian Market.
These startups were shortlisted out of 750 startups on the basis of having a product or service for the Indian market, both for profit and social ventures.
They will be judged by Kirthiga Reddy (MD of Facebook India), Ravi Gururaj (Nasscom) and Sasha Mirchandani (Founder and MD of Kae Capital).
