10 Student Startups Caught Our Eye At IIM Lucknow’s Ten-Minute Funding Challenge

IIM Lucknow hosted the first-ever edition of ‘Venture of the Year (VOTY): 50 Mn Challenge’ – an initiative by the institution’s enterprise incubation centre to help student startups across the country. Held as a part of its annual event Manfest-Varchasva, the challenge aimed to help entrepreneurs pitch their ideas and get the opportunity to raise funding from a potential net pool of INR 5 Cr.

IIM Lucknow’s enterprise incubation centre focuses on aiding early-stage startups through a combination of providing seed capital, corporate venture capital fund, coworking space, and mentoring and training programmes.

The sector-agnostic challenge was geared towards two categories of student startups — early-stage startups that had an MVP and had not raised post series A and growth-stage startups that had raised post-series A funding and were generating revenues for the past three years.

IIM Lucknow received more than 150 applications. The challenge had an extensive selection criterion where, in the first round, the registered startups had to send their pitch decks detailing their value propositions, business models, financials, financing requirements and their future strategies along with how they would go about executing these.

These decks were sifted through by a panel consisting of investors such as Unicorn India Ventures’ Ruchi Pincha, India Angel Network’s Sandro Stephen, Campus Fund’s Anirudh Toshniwal, Lets Venture’s Vamsi Bhogi,  Pranav Khanna and SIDBI’s Manish Sinha.

Post a comprehensive assessment of the entries, the following 10 student startups were selected to make a live pitch on 19th and 20th February. 

It is to be noted that Audrix Finance, Eunimart, Curer, Kyte Energy, Enerlly, IQ Arena, and CricInShots were invited by the jury members for further funding negotiations in an offline setup. 

10 Student Startups From IIM Lucknow’s Ten-Minute Funding Challenge

Kyte Energy

• Founded In: 2017
• Founder(s): Kush Arora
• Headquarters: Mumbai
• Sector: EV

Kyte Energy is an EV 2W startup, that claims to provide consumers with affordable electric scooters. It has more than 50 stores in the country and has sold over 7.8K scooters till date. The startup has four variants of scooters named Magnum, Magnum Pro, Stella and Stella Pro. It also separately deals in EV motor, controller, battery and charger technology.

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Enerlly

• Founded in: 2019
• Founder(s): Vikram Kalaskar
• Headquarters: Pune
• Sector: Cleantech

Enerlly is an IoT based software platform that provides energy efficiency analytics, monitoring, auditing and consultancy services for industries to reduce energy waste & costs. The startup offers an easy-to-install solution that records the energy consumption information on various KPIs for a bird’s eye view of an industrial plant’s performance.

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AUDRIX Finance

• Founded in: 2021
• Founder(s): Pramodh Chandrashekar
• Headquarters: Bengaluru
• Sector: Blockchain

To address the issue of increased scams in the crypto space, AUDRIX Finance has built a cybersecurity forum to simplify audits in the DeFi space. It has combined AI and Blockchain to aid security audits and smart contracts checks.

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Bikecart

• Founded in: 2019
• Founder(s): Chintan Patel, Chetan Gawande
• Headquarters: Mumbai
• Sector: Ecommerce

Bikecart is an ecommerce store that uses an omnichannel approach to sell bicycles and related accessories such as fenders, grips, bells, bags, locks, etc. In addition to its own brand, the platform stores other major brands such as Outdoor 91, Hero, Kross, Schnell, and Cosmic among others.

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CricInShots

• Founded in: 2021
• Founder(s): Harsh Savergaonkar, Aditya Kasibhatla 
• Headquarters: Pune
• Sector: Egaming

An online gaming startup, CricInShots is a blockchain cricket card collectable game. The players collect different player cards, skill and modifier cards to build their deck. They can also battle, trade and transact with other players using these cards in a virtual marketplace.

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FinanceKaart.com

• Founded in: 2018
• Founder(s): Ganga Ram Gupta
• Headquarters: Lucknow
• Sector: Fintech

Neobank startup FinanceKaart is a financial services aggregator offering easy and one-stop access to financial services and products to MSMEs based in Tier 3 and 4 cities. Independent of traditional underwriting principles, FinanceKaart uses alternate data and works with credit bureaus, partners and financial institutions to deliver tailor-made products and services to more than 25K retailers.

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IQarena

• Founded in: 2021
• Founder(s): Dhruval Ramani, Piyush Sakhareliya
• Headquarters: Ahmedabad
• Sector: Edtech

IQarena is an edtech platform with a ‘learn & earn’ concept. It offers a platform to students where they can compete with other aspirants in mock tests of competitive exams such as JEE, NEET, UPSC, SSC, and earn cash rewards after participating in the competition. It claims to have over 30K active users and 250K downloads till date.

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Taught Academy

• Founded in: 2021
• Founder(s): Georgey Jacob, Anantha Padmanabhan
• Headquarters: Bengaluru
• Sector: Edtech

Targeting children between the age group of 5-15 years, Taught Academy is a gamified edtech platform with a focus on extracurricular education. The startup which already boasts over 2K registered users, offers main courses such as doodling, painting, dancing and other activities. It also ensures that students can master a course post which they get a chance to become a creator on the platform and build up their portfolios.

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Eunimart

• Founded in: 2017
• Founder(s): Shayak Mazumder, Archana Shah
• Headquarters: Hyderabad
• Sector: Enterprisetech

Eunimart offers businesses ecommerce services such as supply chain management, along with catalogue, shipping, and marketing automation among others. The SaaS platform claims to have 240 companies in its portfolio including the fashion brand, Mango. With a focus on helping small and medium-sized businesses reach the global markets, Eunimart helps brands to streamline their operations and bring down their costs.

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Curer

• Founded in: 2021
• Founder(s): Akshay Bansal
• Headquarters: Delhi
• Sector: Healthtech

Healhtech startup Curer offers 360-degree healthcare solutions such as virtual consultation, diagnostic lab tests, ICU at home, 24×7 nursing assistance, home visits by specialist doctors, dialysis and physiotherapy. The startup also provides recovery and follow-up services to ensure easy recovery for patients. It claims to have more than 900 app downloads.