SUMMARY
The article was last updated in June 2018.
As part of our Indian Startup Hubs Series in past few weeks we have discussed about the startup ecosystems in Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. This week, we will be covering about the growing Startup Ecosystem in Delhi & NCR.
In India, Delhi is at second position in terms of number of startups and investors present. According to AngelList, Delhi is home to more than 1500 startups, of which many have managed to get seed funding and even followup Series A rounds.
In this article we will be talking about Delhi based growth stage startups that have managed to raise their initial Seed round. (The list includes only startups that have raised uptil Series A round.)
MeetUniv
Founders: Keshav Munjal, Nitin Kapoor and Debal Chakraborty
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $950k in May 2015 from Peesh Venture Capital
MeetUniv is an education organization, where students can search, shortlist and connect with the world’s top university and their (MeetUniv) expert counselors will provide online career guidance to get spot admission in the top colleges of UK, US, Australia, Germany, Canada, Singapore and Russia.
Zostel
Founders: Abhishek Bhutra, Paavan Nanda, Akhil Malik, Siddharth Janghu, Chetan Chauhan and Tarun Tiwari.
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $1 Mn from in May 2014 by Sol Primero
Zostel is a branded backpacker hostel chain under the brand name Zo Rooms, which offers a safe, hygienic, centrally located and affordable place to stay.
As of February 2018, the startup is fighting a court battle with OYO Hotels which earlier announced to acquire Zostel, but later called off the deal. Reportedly, a Gurugram-based district court has rejected an arbitration petition filed by budget hotel aggregator ZO Rooms against OYO on the grounds that it lacked jurisdiction.
Instalively
Founders: Prakhar Khanduja and Karthik Vaidyanath
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $120k in Seed funding in March 2015 from Rajan Anandan, Amit Ranjan and Rajesh Sawhney.
InstaLively helps broadcast events LIVE in just a single click and links up directly to your Youtube Channel.
Smartairtrip
Founders: Rajiv Bhatia and Soumik Datta
Funding: $10 Mn funding from US-based investment firm Deutsche Capital Holdings
Smartairtrip focuses on providing exclusive deals to travel agents with rich airline and hotel content with the highest commissions in the travel industry. The startup offers the best discounts to the consumer directly through its website.
Primaseller
Founders: Mohammed Ali and Vivek Subramanian
Founded in: 2013
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Angel funding in December 2014 from investors Aniruddha Malpani and Mumbai Angels
Primaseller is a simple easy to use multi-channel platform which allows retailers to sell offline as well as online from a single platform. Small and medium retailers are quickly beginning to appreciate the necessity of being online as well as offline and Primaseller intends to manage this entire process.
Youth4work
Founders: Rachit Jain
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $500k in December 2014 from a group of investors including Dan Sandhu, Sanjay Bansal, GAP investments and Aurum Equity Partners
Youth4Work is an exciting and innovative skills platform which offers pre-assessed talent-for-hire to companies in India and individual candidates are ranked accordingly. These pre-assessed profiles are made available to companies to make suitable hires.
KartRocket
Founders: Saahil Goel, Gautam Kapoor and Vishesh Khurana
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $2 Mn in Series A funding in October 2014 from Nirvana Venture Advisors, 500 Startups and Japan-based Beenos; Undisclosed amount in Seed funding in July 2013 from 5ideas and 500 Startups.
Kartrocket is a DIY ecommerce platform which provides storefront designs, domestic as well as international payment options integrated with logistics.
Postergully
Founders: Bharat Sethi
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $160k in Angel funding in June 2015 from Natarajan Iyer, Nish Bhutani, Vivek Mulchandani, Vikram Saxena, Anuj Chowdhary, Rajesh Sawhney and few others.
PosterGully is an online Fan paraphernalia store with artists that helps fans and followers buy Posters, art prints, and other merchandise of who and what they believe in – in simple words, it is a one stop gully where you can take an enthralling walk and find everything you need to tell the world who you are.
Meritnation
Founders: Pavan Chauhan
Founded in: 2008
Funding: $4 Mn in January 2015 from investor Info Edge; $4.69 Mn round in February 2013 ; $1.56 Mn in December 2013; Around $3.2 Mn in September 2011 from existing Info Edge; Around $782k in May 2010 from Info Edge; Around $1.5 Mn in July 2008 from educational content company, Applect Learnings Systems.
Meritnation is an elearning platform which targets K-12 students across various educational boards like CBSE, ICSE and State Boards such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The platform which can be accessed on iOS and Android platforms, has study related apps like Tables App, IIT JEEnius Mobile Apps to make studies easy and interactive for students.
Eattreat
Founders: Arjun Sawhney
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $350k seed funding from 15 investors including Divitas Capital, filmmaker Homi Adajania, fashion editor Bandana Tewari, interior designer Sussanne Khan and others.
Eattreat has an online community with around 50,000 members who inscribe about their food journeys. It has around 6K likes on its Facebook page, and currently are present on Facebook. Eattreat offers a platform that serves as a bridge between consumers and professionals. The startup is planning to launch its website soon.
Vyomo
Founders: Poonam Marwah and Abhinav Khare
Founded in: 2014
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Seed funding in April 2015 from YouWeCan Ventures; Undisclosed amount in seed funding led by co-founder of TaxiForSure, Aprameya Radhakrishna.
Vyomo is a mobile marketplace for beauty and wellness. It helps customers connect with the best stylists in town at any convenience and can easily search as per their location. They can also discover salons and spas, compare prices, read customer reviews and book the service needed within a few taps.
Findyahan
Founders: Snehil Khanor and Rachit Mathur
Founded in: 2013
Funding: Undisclosed amount in April 2015 from The Phoenix Fund; Undisclosed amount in angel funding in February 2015 from Parvesh Bareja and Karan Bajwa.
FindYahan is a location-based discovery platform that connects skilled individuals and home businesses with their target audiences. In simple words, it helps its users find the right people they are looking for at the right time.
GlobalCollect
Founders: Jan Manten
Founded in: 1994
Funding: Undisclosed amount of funding in May 2015 from CEO of GlobalCollect, Jan Manten.
GlobalCollect offers cloud-based payment gateway, which enables merchants to accept payments easily and securely from their website or app. It also provides a single reconciliation for all payment types, regardless of the payment method: online, mobile, card present or cash on delivery.
Crown-It
Founder: Sameer Grover
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $5.5 Mn in Series A funding in May 2015 from investors Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners
Crown-It provides technology to local businesses to run marketing programs to attract consumers. The app-only platform has listed local merchants in categories like florists, gift shops and even local kirana stores. The app allows users to click photograph of the bill, upload it on the app as they visit on a listed outlet and redeem their cashback for shopping, phone bill payment or movie ticket. These offers can also be availed at a number of ecommerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Jabong and BookMyShow.
Roposo
Founders: Mayank Bhangadia and Avinash Saxena
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $5 Mn in Series A funding in March 2015 from Tiger Global Management; $1 Mn Seed funding in July 2014 from India Quotient and Binny Bansal
Roposo lets one discover and shop trending fashion items from every store across the internet, and share it with others. The platform offers fashion choices from across 150 web stores with categories ranging from apparel, footwear, accessories and lingerie. All of these products are curated and recommended to each user as per their individual taste.
OYO Rooms
Founder: Ritesh Agarwal
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $25 Mn Series A funding in March 2015 from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks Capital Management; $650k in Seed funding in May 2014 from Lightspeed and DSG Consumer Partners; Undisclosed amount Angel round funding in January 2013 from VentureNursery
OYO Rooms is a branded network of technology- enabled budget hotels. It currently operates in 15 major business and travel destinations including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Goa, Jaipur, Gurgaon, Noida, Ghaziabad, Manesar, Neemarana, Kolkata, Varanasi and many more to come.
As of June 2018, it is being known as OYO Hotels and has also expanded its operations internationally to Malaysia, China and Nepal.
Trulymadly
Founders: Hitesh Dhingra, Rahul Kumar and Sachin Bhatia
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $5.7 Mn Series A funding in March 2015 from Kae Capital and Helion Venture Partners
TrulyMadly is a matchmaking service that brings together a proprietary compatibility algorithm for compatibility and a host of other cool features revolving around privacy and safety of the user to help them find their true match. Basically it is a platform that brings singles together based on common interests and psychological matching.
Printvenue
Founder: Gagan Arora
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $4.5 Mn funding in January 2015 from Asia Pacific Internet Group
Printvenue provides printing, graphics and marketing services for micro-enterprises, professionals and small business in India. They also offer best pricing, integrated dealing, finer quality and service.
Shaadisaga
Founders: Manish Garg and Himanshu Kapsime
Founded in: 2014
Funding: Undisclosed amount in seed round funding led by Outbox Ventures.
ShaadiSaga is a one stop wedding solution for people to share, plan and celebrate their wedding journey. The startup connects couples with quality merchants to plan their big day & help merchants build their business online and provide various tools for people to share their wedding, tips and ideas for making the wedding affair more special.
Near.in
Founders: Lomesh Dutta, Akshay Khanna and Sunil Goyal
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $290k Seed funding in January 2015 from Akash Agarwal, Himanshu Aggarwal, Manish Vij and Anupam Mittal; About $168k from a group of investors including Anupam Mittal and Manish Vij.
Near.in allow users to discover service providers in their vicnity. The startup covers over 100 categories including health, home needs and wellness, among others.All a customer has to do is type in the specific details related to the services he/she requires and the platform will connect them to providers that fit best. Since its launch, it has already managed to get over 2,200 service providers listed on its site.
Triotech
Founders: Rajesh Kaul, Munish Dhingra and Pankaj Agarwal
Founded in: 2009
Funding: $3 Mn in Series A funding in December 2014 from Singapore-based venture capital firm Bluehill.
Triotech is a mobile payments startup which is basically into value-added services, mobile commerce service delivery and software solution development. The company is based on the vision to innovate and deliver cutting-edge Mobile Application, Enterprise Solutions in the area of Mcommerce, education and health.
Vliv
Founders: Vaibhav Suri, Ashish Chadha and Kiran Kulkarni
Founded in: 2012
Funding: Undisclosed seed funding in December 2014 from Mumbai Angels and a group of CEOs & MDs such as Manish Dalal of Verisign, Pari Natarajan of Zinnov, and Srini Raghavan of Scientific Games and few others.
Vliv is mobile video startup and is involved in the development and marketing of cutting edge multi-modal, cloud-based, video mobile applications. The idea behind the company is to create a web mobile based platform where users can express themselves using videos.
Limetray
Founders: Akhilesh Bali and Piyush Jain
Founded in: 2013
Funding: Undisclosed amount funding in Series A round in October 2014 from Matrix Partners, Umang Kumar (CEO Gaadi.com), Ankur Warikoo (Head-APAC, Groupon), Ankur Singla (CEO, Akosha), Anurakt Jain and Kunal Khattar.
LimeTray is a web-presence and web-marketing platform for local businesses. They provide suite of tools that helps merchants in building a consistent brand presence across the web and to engage better with the local audience.
Holisol
Founders: Manish Ahuja, Naveen Rawat and Rahul S Dogar
Founded in: 2009
Funding: $1.5 Mn in its first venture capital funding in August 2014 led by oil and gas professional Sundeep Bhandari.
Holisol provides backend logistic support to ecommerce companies including Fabfurnish, Jabong, Urbanladder, among others.
SeekSherpa
Founders: Sukhmani Singh and Dhruv Raj Gupta
Founded in: 2014
Funding: Undisclosed Seed round funding in July 2014 from VentureNursery, Amit and Arihant Patni, Anand Ladsariya, Shravan Shroff and Ravi Kiran.
SeekSherpa is a mobile travel marketplace which connects travellers and locals over information and experiences. Its Sherpas offer local information and cool experiences around Food, Shopping, Nightlife, Heritage and Music.
Adpushup
Founders: Atul Agarwal and Ankit Oberoi
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $632k in angel funding in October 2014 from Sunil Kalra, Vikram Kapur, Shubham Gupta, Ravi Srivastava, Ashim Mehra and Krishna Jha.
AdPushup is a New Delhi-based startup company, its A/B testing platform allows web publishers and bloggers to create and test different ad placements, sizes, and types to see which ones make the most revenue.
Posist
Founders: Ashish Tulsian and Sakshi Bhasin Tulsian
Founded in: January 2012
Funding: $600k in seed funding from Sameer Guglani of Morpheus, Arun & Muthu of Murugappa group, valley based Bhupen shah, Singapore anglel’s Satveer singh, Hiraco ventures, Steven sule, deepak gupta of intel capital, LetsVenture.
Posist offers cloud based POS for the Restaurant industry. It helps standalone food outlets and large food chains manage functions like Billing, CRM, Inventory control, Recipe and Wastage management. In simple terms, it helps restaurant owners in simplifying and cleaning up their operations. Its ability to offer real time mobile reporting helps restaurant owner keep a watch on their business. Adding to that, POSist also provides reports and key customer analytics to the restaurant owners.
Cleartax
Founders: Archit Gupta
Founded in:
Funding: $120k in seed funding in July 2014 from Y Combinator and undisclosed amount in seed funding in June 2014 from Y Combinator.
ClearTax is a product designed for Individuals to prepare and file their Income Tax Returns in the shortest time while maximising their tax deductions. Their aim is to delight their (our) customers with simplicity, accuracy and getting rid of the notion that taxes are complex. ClearSharp are the makers of ClearTax Enterprise Edition which is trusted by hundreds of Chartered Accountants for large scale tax return preparation and e-filing.
Touchtalent
Founders: Mohd Wassem and Ankit Prasad
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $675k in undisclosed funding in June 2014 from Amit Ranjan, Prashant Malik, Binny Bansal, Sachin Bansal, Deep Kalra and SAIF Partners; $35k undisclosed funding in February 2013.
Touchtalent.com is a global community of creative people. It enables creation, secure storage, appreciation and monetization of creativity. All features are designed keeping the interest of creators in the mind. Features focusing on copyrights, sharing, quality enhancement, multiple uploads and network with other platforms are giving significant tractions to the community. Currently there are creative users from 192 countries who share their creativity under 19 different categories on which includes Painting, Photography, Sketching, Design, 3D Art, Music, Comics, and Sculpting etc.
Overcart
Founders: Saptarshi Nath and Alexander Souter
Founded in: 2012
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Series A funding in June 2014 from Rajesh Sawhney and K Ganesh.
Overcart is a marketplace for over-stock, unboxed, refurbished, and pre-owned products. It provides a comprehensive quality-check process, expert product knowledge, and unparalleled customer focus. It is the safest place to purchase secondary products.
Popxo
Founders: Namrata Bostrom and Priyanka Gill
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $500k in angel funding in November 2014 from investors Navin Fabiani, Hussein Kanji, Tej Lalvani, Chris Mathias, Mithun Sacheti and Rajan Anandan; $300k seed funding in July 2013 from investors Kamal Haider, Aadil Ebrahim and Priyanka Gill.
POPxo is a dynamic digital media startup which provides content around fashion, beauty and lifestyle website for women. They have over 1.5 Mn loyal and engaged readers per month. Since launch, it has become the go-to lifestyle resource for young women (18-34) across India.
Squadrun
Founders: Vikas Gulati, Kanika Jain and Apurv Agrawal
Founded in: 2014
Funding: Undisclosed amount in seed funding in February 2015 from Powai Lake Ventures, Zishaan Hayath, Deepinder Goyal and Amit Ranjan.
SquadRun is a marketplace that allows businesses to outsource small tasks (‘missions’) to a smartphone enabled, intelligent workforce (‘players’). From the player side, it is a real life game where they get paid to complete quick fun missions using their smartphone.
Tripoto
Founders: Michael Pargal Lyngdoh and Anirudh Gupta
Founded in: 2013
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Series A funding in March 2015 from investors including Outbox ventures and IDG Ventures India; $400k seed funding in November 2014 from investors Palaash Ventures and Outbox ventures.
Tripoto is a social publishing platform for sharing and discovering user generated travel itineraries and stories. The company’s aim is to solve problems covering the entire lifecycle of a travel consumer with user generated content and community being the core of our product.
Frankly.me
Founders: Abhishek Gupta and Nikunj Jain
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $600k seed funding in January 2015 from Matrix Partners.
Frankly is for frank conversations that have never taken place. Conversations that people want to have with public figures. Be it politicians, authors, singers, directors, social activists, actors, sportsmen, IAS officers or even entrepreneurs. These conversations take place in the form of anonymous/open/user’s questions and public/private video answers.
Wigzo
Founders: Himanshu Kaushik and Umair Mohammed
Founded in: 2015
Funding: $100k in seed funding in August 2014 from Guerrilla Ventures, Outbox ventures and Nikunj Jain.
Wigzo is a Contextual Marketing Platform that helps marketers send Smarter Communication in Email or In-App. It changes content dynamically based on User behaviour on Website and App. It helps companies to produce dynamic content blocks which automatically populates in emails based on User behaviour and Context. Wigzo comes with built in connectivity with more than 40 Email Services.
Voxapp Pvt Ltd
Founders: Ritesh Kadmawala and Madhu Sudhan
Founded in: 2012
Funding: Undisclosed amount in angel funding in August 2013 from Blume Ventures, Narayanan Shadagopan, Palaash Ventures and Sachin Bhatia; Undisclosed amount in seed funding in August 2013.
VoxApp, execute enterprise surveys on mobile. Its current product consists of website to create surveys, create respondent acquisition campaigns, validate data authenticity, data analytics. The surveys are distributed via mobile (web/sms) and native apps.
Pressplay
Founders: George Abraham and Anand Sinha
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $2.2 Mn in seed funding in April 2015 from investors including Amit Bhatiani, Jarett Posner, Jason Hirschhorn and Sequoia Capital. $500k in angel funding in August 2014.
PressPlay is a technology company innovating at the intersection of entertainment and travel. The startup is trying to change the way people travel – personalized and memorable entertainment experience.
Airwoot
Founders: Achal Aggarwal, Prabhat Saraswat and Saurabh Arora
Founded in: 2012
Funding: Undisclosed amount in angel funding in August 2013 from Kae Capital
Airwoot is a real-time customer support provider enabling brands to provide customer support on social media by notifying the customer engagement in real-time. It is an intelligent customer experience platform using natural language processing and machine learning to automatically identify customers who need engagement and help brands reduce response time, uncover business insights behind conversations, know the customers like never before, and increase customer satisfaction.
Dogspot
Founders: Rana Atheya, Shailesh Singh
Founded in: 2008
Funding: Undisclosed amount funding in February 2013 from early-stage investment fund India Quotient; Undisclosed amount in 2011 from Vikas Saxena (CEO of Nimbuzz), Vaibhav Gadodia (VP, Tech-Nagarro) and Ritesh Chauhan. In 2012, Tanjai Ventures and Kibo Partners had also invested in the company.
DogSpot.in is an ecommerce website for pet supplies. The startup has also developed private label products for pets from accessories to food to daily use pet items.
Bluegape
Founders: Sahil Baghla and Ayush Varshney
Founded in: 2011
Funding: $200k in angel funding in April 2015 from ah! Ventures and Rudy Gopalakrishnan. $250k from Venture in Jan 2014 from LetsVenture; Undisclosed amount in seed funding in May 2013 from Aniket Khera and Rahul Bhatia; $20k in seed funding in February 2012.
Earlier known as one of the top merchandising startup, Bluegape has now turned into a website working at the intersection of content and technology. Users generate content in different interest driven communities like Health and Fitness, Travel, Entertainment, Movies, Music, TV Shows, Sports, Relationships etc. The company basically studies their Data Science Lab (DSL) on how the content should be consumed by users based on multiple data points that they get when a visitor browses through their website. Their aim is to make content creation and consumption easy and fun.
Chaayos
Founders: Nitin Saluja and Raghav Verma
Founded in: 2012
Funding: $313k (in small tranches) in angel funding from Powai Lake Ventures; $5 Mn in Series A funding in May in 2015 from Tiger Global Management.
Chaayos works on a theme i.e. “Experiments With Chai”, it serves over 25 varieties of tea, ranging from Indian teas like Pahadi chai and Irani chai to international teas like camomile and Moroccan mint tea. It also allows people to customise their chai in their own way; in simple words, it helps people to discover their “meri waali chai”.
Traveltriangle
Founders: Prabhat Gupta, Sanchit Garg and Sankalp Agarwal
Founded in: 2010
Funding: $8 Mn in series B funding in April 2015 from SAIF Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners; $1.7 Mn in series A funding July 2014 from SAIF Partners. $200k in seed funding in June 2012 from Neha Singh, Abhishek Goyal, Aneesh Reddy and Akshay Saxena.
TravelTriangle provides a platform for buying trips online in India. They promote local travel agents and get you best trips from them. The startup also empowers local travel agents to come online and on the other side customers get customized trips at cheap prices.
Gigstart
Founders: Madhulika Pandey and Atit Jain
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $210k in Seed funding in December 2014 from Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Undisclosed amount in Seed funding in July 2014 from TA Ventures.
Gigstart is an online marketplace that facilitates quick and transparent connect between entertainers and party planners. It’s a booking service where all the artists are verified and reviewed in order to ensure that they(Gigstart) offer you nothing less than the best. In simple words, Gigstart is a two way street that facilitates both clients and artistes and takes care of both in every way possible.
Vidooly
Founders: Nishant Radia, Ajay Mishra and Subrat Kar
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $1 Mn from Bessemer Venture Partners, it had also raised $18k from TLabs
Vidooly offers a suite that helps content creators, brands and MCNs to grow their views, audience base and earn more revenues on YouTube platform. One can use Vidooly as a platform to get deeper analysis of any YouTube channel or video such as different tags used in a video or channel, most popular influencers, subscribers/views growth, performance of video on social media, forecasting & some more that YouTube does not provide publicly.
Cashkaro
Founders: Swati Bhargava and Rohan Bhargava
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $750k in angel funding in July 2013.
CashKaro is a Cashback and Coupons website. The company works with 150+ top websites in India and you can earn cashback on all of them.
We Are Holidays
Founders: Harkirat Singh, Deepak Wadhwa, Mohit Piplani, Harkirat Singh
Founded In: March 2011
Funding: Undisclosed amount in funding from Blume Ventures and GSF Superangel Investors in August 2014; Undisclosed amount from TA Ventures, Mumbai Angels, Blume Ventures, Sachin Bhatia in Seed in June 2013.
WeAreHolidays is an online marketplace for booking customized holiday packages, it works on a technology enabled managed marketplace model to help people get inspired, research, plan, customize, book and share their holidays.
GrownOut
Founders: Sumit Gupta, Harsimran Walia
Founded In: 2013
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Series A from Matrix Partners India and before that it had raised undisclosed sum in funding from Outbox Ventures
Grownout is a referral hiring solution that enables companies to leverage their employees’ professional network. It has a vision of solving the hiring requirements of the industry using the latest available technologies. It utilises well researched techniques of referral hiring to make candidate sourcing easier and more efficient. It manages the whole process from finding the best match to completing the hiring cycle to monitoring applicant’s status.
NewsInShorts
Founders: Deepit Purkayastha, Azhar Iqubal, Anunay Pandey
Founded In: April 2013
Funding: $4 Mn in Series A round of funding led by Tiger Global Management & few others in February 2015; Undisclosed amount in Seed funding in 2014
Started as a Facebook page in 2013, NCR-based news aggregator app News In Shorts is betting on sharing the whole news story in just sixty words. News In Shorts publishes about 60 articles per day and is growing aggressively to take it to upto 300 articles per day.
Silverpush
Founders: Hitesh Chawla, Alex Modon, Mudit Seth
Founded In: 2012
Funding: $1.5 Mn from IDG Ventures and Unilazer Ventures.
Silverpush is a target advertising startup which uses its mobile app product and helps business owners who experience from post-download dormancy & abandoned transactions. They aggregate and analyse multiple sources of data, such as app usage, location, social graph and search history and identify the most lucrative opportunities to deliver targeted advertisements. The current technology helps target the same user travelling across multiple screens such as TV, Mobile and Desktop.
Englishleap
Founders: Saurabh Chopra and Apar Sureka
Founded in: 2011
Funding: Undisclosed amount in funding from financial technology firm ANALEC
Englishleap focuses on imparting fluency in speaking, reading and writing English. The startup presently offers web-based learning propositions, along with an English grammar app. It claims that the app has seen over three lakh downloads to date.
Updated
Lybrate
Founders: Saurabh Arora & Rahul Narang
Founded In: 2013
Funding: $1.23 Mn in seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners; It is also backed by prominent angel investors such as Gokul Rajaram, Vispi Daver, the co-founder of Unicorn Venture Capital.
Lybrate is a mobile-first healthcare information, access and delivery platform. By seamlessly connecting doctors and patients through its first-of-its-kind health app, it is making healthcare more accessible. The app connects around 80,000 doctors and health experts from varied branches of medicine to millions of users in India. With such strong network of medical professionals, Lybrate acts as the world’s largest online Out Patient Department (OPD), allowing people to reach out to them from anywhere, anytime.
TargetingMantra
Founders: Saurabh Nangia, Rahul Singh
Founded In: 2012
Funding: $1.1 Mn in seed funding led by 500 Startups, Nexus Venture Partners, and One97 Mobility Fund; Rajan Anandan; Ankur Warikoo; Gaurav Agarwal.
TargetingMantra provides a personalization platform for online businesses and helps increase ROI by delivering more relevant customer experience. Its personalization platform tailors the customer’s online experience to his/her unique interests. By doing this, it not only increases customer loyalty, but also boosts sales and conversion rates, aids discovery of tail items, and enables promoting relevant campaigns. It provides features like similar products, personalized recommendations and automated targeting to achieve this.
1MG
Founders: Prashant Tandon
Founded In: 2014
Funding: $6Mn from Sequoia, Intel, Kae, Omidyar, Deep Kalra in April 2015
Previously part of Healthkart, 1MG is a drug search engine that currently has a database of about 100k medicines with detailed information regarding the prescribed medicines, substitutes, usage and also direct users to the nearest drug stores where it will be available. It also has a price comparison feature.
LittleBlackBook
Founder: Suchita Salwan and Dhruv Mathur (co-founder)
Founded In: 2012
Funding: $150K from 6 investors including Rajan Anandan, Sachin Bhatia, Niraj Singh, Singapore Angel Network, Aseem Vadehra and Aashti Bhartia
Little Black Book is a website that creates and curates recommended information about cities. Covering food, lifestyle, events, culture and more, the website is a one-stop to find out what’s new and interesting in Delhi and Gurgaon.
UrbanClap
Founder: Varun Khaitan, Abhiraj Bhal and Raghav Chandra
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $1.6 Mn Seed funding in April 2015 from Rohit Bansal, Kunal Bahl, Accel Partners and SAIF Partners
UrbanClap is a mobile services marketplace that helps consumers find and hire trusted services such as a plumber, wedding photographer, yoga teacher or an interior designer. UrbanClaps aim to organise the services in India with the help of technology and smart processes.
Karma Recycling
Founders: Ghiya Akshat and Aamir Jariwala
Founded in: 2013
Funding: Total funding of 500k, including undisclosed amount in Seed funding in October 2013 from Rubal Jain; Undisclosed amount in Series A from Infuse Ventures and Low Carbon Enterprise Fund.
KarmaShop is an online shopping site that procures old smartphones, tablets, and laptops from various retailers including Future Group, refurbishes them, and sells them on its website.
FRSH
Founders: Badal Goel and Sumit Kumar
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $518k Seed funding in February 2015 from Kae Capital and India Quotient; $100k Seed funding in September 2014 from India Quotient.
FRSH helps consumer to order fresh and healthy food online without any issues of payment or minimum order amount. All preparations are done just-in-time at a centralized location ensuring freshness and best quality.
Curofy
Founders: Pawan Gupta, Mudit Vijayvergiya and Nipun Goyal
Founded in: 2014
Funding: Raised funding $150k-$200k in 2014 from Rajul Garg, Alok Mittal, India Quotient, Spice Labs, Dinesh Agarwal, Dr Shuchin Bajaj, and Presha Paragash.
Curofy is basically a medical networking app that helps doctors find other doctors online or offline. Doctors can provide referrals, share cases, call other doctors without actually accessing each other’s numbers and have access to the most recent, speciality-wise, developments taking place in the fields of medicine, surgery and dentistry.
IndianRoots
Founders: Rahul Narvekar
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $5 Mn in Series A funding in May 2015 from KJS Group; $5 Mn in Pre-Series A funding in September 2014 from Astro Malaysia.
IndianRoots aim to connect Indians to their roots. It brings together some of the best Indian designers, the finest traditional weaves and the brightest Indian colours. The website offers a handpicked selection of high-end designer wear, hand crafted home linen, exquisite accessories and more.
Bite Club
Founders: Aushim Krishan, Siddharth Sharma and Prateek Agarwal
Founded in: 2014
Funding: $500k in Seed funding in March 2015 from Alok Mittal, Ashish Kashyap, Aneesh Reddy and Powai Lake Ventures .
Bite Club is food ordering startup. It helps users to order fresh and handmade food with a new menu everyday through its app (available on iOS and Android). The food is prepared by aggregated people like home chefs, amateur chefs and professional chefs.
SocialCops
Founders: Varun Banka and Prukalpa Sankar
Founded in: 2013
Funding: $320k in Seed round of funding in July 2014 from 500 Startups, Rajan Anandan and Manoj Menon.
SocialCops aims to power decision making through better data sourced from the grassroots to solve problems facing humanity. It works in the public infrastructure, public health and education spaces with partners such as the Government of Karnataka, Digital Empowerment Foundation and Hindustan Unilever.
[Editor’s Note: Don’t worry if we missed out on your startup, we will keep on updating the list.]
Stay tuned for the list of Delhi-based startups that have crossed the Series B barrier.
[The article was last updated on June 2018.]
This is part of our special series, In Focus: Indian Startup Hubs, in which we highlight the numerous established as well as upcoming startup hubs in the Indian Tech Ecosystem!
