The late American best-selling author, physician, producer, director and screenwriter, Michael Crichton, once famously said, “They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything.” “They” were absolutely right; it’s all a matter of keeping track of things and that’s why our predictions are spot on.
Last year, we made a series of predictions about the top startups and apps to watch out for in 2015. We don’t just predict and leave it at that; we put our predictions to test and understand if these startups and apps really kicked ass or fell flat on their asses. This article is a progress report of the apps that we claimed would fare really well in 2015 – let’s see how they performed in the past one year.
CloudMagic
It’s an email management app for iOS and Android. It works for all types of email which are displayed in a well-designed unified inbox which can be customised as per user’s needs. In terms of security, there is an option of adding passcode lock to secure data.
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Bootstrapped
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: The app is currently free and the team hasn’t monetizing yet.
App-install growth in the past one year: 50% YoY (Android downloads in 2014 – 1,000,000 – 5,000,000)
Current team strength vs. last year’s: 30% increase in team strength.
Founders: Rishit Jhunjhunwala, Rohit Nadhani
Founded In: 2014
Ringo
Ringo is a flagship product of Directi. It lets users make international calls at cheap rates, without using the internet. Also, the call received doesn’t need to download the app. It is available on Android, iOS and Windows. In November this year, Ringo introduced local calling service in India priced at 19 paisa/minute.
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Ringo is a self-funded app. Directi, in itself, is a completely bootstrapped company.
Increase in revenue in the past one year: A steady growth of 50-60% since the launch in May 2014.
App-install growth in the past one year: The overall app downloads (Android, iOS, WP) has been over 1.04 Mn since its launch in 2014. The total call minutes registered by Ringo is over 7.6 Mn per month.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: The team has grown almost double in size, from a 35 members’ team in 2014 to a 75 members’ team in 2015.
Founders: Bhavin Turakhia
Founded In: 2014
Walnut
Walnut tracks credit cards, banks and bills. Unlike other expense tracking apps which require inputs from users, Walnut scans SMS’ and acknowledges transactions. The app can not only help users manage all their financial data in one place, it also provides insights and visualizations about their expenses.
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Raised Series A this year; founders declined to disclose any more details.
Increase in revenue in the past one year: Pre-revenue stage.
App-install growth in the past one year: 500K in 2015 from 50,000 – 1,00,000 in 2014.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: Current team strength in 20.
Founders: Amit Bhor, Patanjali Somayaji
Founded In: 2014
SquadRun
SquadRun combines playing with rewards by providing missions which can range from clicking a restaurant’s menu to visiting an ATM to withdraw money. It is an amalgamation of crowdsourcing, mobile technology and gamification. Squadcoins earned at completion of missions can be redeemed for mobile recharges or online shopping vouchers.
Current Stage: Operational and scaling
Funding scenario: Raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding, this year, from a group of investors including Amit Ranjan of Slideshare, Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, Zishaan Hayath, founder of Toppr and Girish Khera, co-founder at Scientific Animations.
Increase in revenue in the past one year: 30 times increase
App-install growth in the past one year: 10 times
Current team strength vs. last year’s: 3 times
Founders: Apurv Agrawal, Kanika Jain, Vikas Gulati
Founded In: 2014
MomoE
It is a mobile payments app for users to pay at brick and mortar (offline) merchants like restaurants, grocery stores and pharmacies. The app works by using credit-card details; it enables users to pay with their smartphones across urban areas of Bangalore. With the Momoe app, users can see live tab, split bills and pay via their smartphones without having to wait for the bill to arrive at the table.
Current Stage: Operational and scaling
Funding: Raised $1.2M in December 2014 (disclosed in February 2015) by IDG Ventures, Jungle Ventures and India Quotient.
Increase in revenue in the past one year: It processes about INR 2 Cr. worth of transactions every month.
App-install growth in the past one year: Currently, it registers over 200000 downloads with about 25000+ transactions every month. Back in 2014, the app downloads were between 1,000 – 5,000.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: Current team strength is 50
Founders: Utkarsh Biradar, Karthik Vaidyanathan, Neelesh Bam, Aiman Ashraf, Ganesh Balakrishnan
Founded In: 2014
SignEasy
The app allows users to sign PDF documents as well any other document format without the need of printing, faxing, scanning, pen & paper and documents. With SignEasy, users will be able to sign & send documents using email or their preferred cloud storage services with ease and convenience. The app is available on Android, iOS and Blackberry. It also provides Touch ID on Apple Devices for increased security.
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Bootstrapped
Increase in revenue in the past one year: 100%
App-install growth in the past one year: YoY downloads are same as the company has not invested in any marketing activities and all the downloads are organic.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: Team has doubled in size.
Founders: Sunil Patro
Founded In: 2010
Lookup
Lookup is a messaging app but with a twist. It is a local commerce messaging app which lets users chat with local businesses and shops, inquire about deals, product availability and prices. Reservations at restaurants, bars, hotels can be made in a jiffy with lookup. The app promises to get guaranteed answers from local businesses within 5 minutes.
Current stage: Operational
Funding: Earlier this year in October , Lookup raised $2.5 Mn in Series A round led by Khosla Impact, along with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and Global Founders Capital, the European investment fund from Rocket Internet’s Samwer brothers.
Earlier this year in January, Lookup had raised a total of $382K in its seed round from Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, DeNA Japan, Beenos founder Teruhide Sato and MKS Switzerland SA. They also participated in the Series A round.
Increase in revenue in the past one year: 100%
App-install growth in the past one year: The app has registered 1 Mn users with over 800K users on Android, within 9 months of its launch. The startup has over 250K monthly active users and over 70K merchants on the platform, with daily activity of 55-60,000 users.
Lookup has received over 15 Mn messages and handles about 100K daily messages ranging queries from food, medicines, groceries and electronics in a hyper-local area.
Android downloads in 2015: 1,000,000 – 5,000,000 from 1,000 – 5,000 last year.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: The current team size is 100, grown from 22 in 2014
Founders: Deepak Ravindran
Founded In: 2014
Bakfy
Bakfy is an app for college campuses all over the country. It provides a platform where you can share gossip, secrets or other experiences. It lets you bitch about your Hitler-professor or share what is on your mind. You can talk to anyone without having to know them. It helps all people belonging to same college/university connect with each other or you can share something anonymously.
CommonFloor acqui-hired Bakfy in January this year. As a part of deal, the Bakfy team joined the real-estate portal as Entrepreneurs-In-Residence and work directly with the founders to build social and mobile products.
It was founded by three young technology professionals Ashutosh Garg, Niranjan Bala and Rajesh Eswarlal.
Founded In: 2014
Flynx
Flynx is a floating mobile browser that does not hinder your app-in-use. It uses Fb messenger’s chat-heads like feature which sits on your screen inconspicuously loading your link and letting you focus on your original task. It has a reading mode which strips away unnecessary elements making it easy on eyes. There’s a Kindle-like feature too which provides an option of changing background colours for readability.
Current Stage: Operational
Funding scenario: Raised seed funding of $20K from TLabs
App-install growth in the past one year: Android downloads in 2015: 100,000 – 500,000 from 50,000 – 1,00,000 last year.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: The startup still has a lean team of four members – all the cofounders.
Founders: Unique Jain, Smit Patel, Arunangshu Bhakta, Brijesh Patel
Founded In: 2014
Bencho – Khulke Bol
Bencho is the first of its kind app-on-the-block that’s come out catering to the inappropriate and sometimes scandalous humor in the Delhi lingo market. Developed by a group of local indie developers, not willing to come forward, the app depicts everyday life from a Delhite’s point-of-view.
Unfortunately, this app has been shutdown.
Of the 10 apps that we listed, 8 have been performing really well, one got acqui-hired – which is also a success quotient – and only one was shutdown. This proves the mettle of our predictive algorithm. Stay tuned for more such progress reports in the coming days.
This is part of our special series, In Focus: 2015 In Review, wherein, we look back, contemplate, analyse, predict and come up with our series of year-end stories that would perfectly sum up the past year and offer near-perfect predictions for the next year. Stay tuned for more.
