SUMMARY
Most of the startups selected for the programme are bootstrapped at present
The current cohort of startups come from four different sectors
The accelerator programme is held over 100 days
Bengaluru-based early stage seed fund and startup accelerator Axilor Ventures has announced the names of 20 startups who will form its Winter 2018 cohort. Most of the startups are bootstrapped at present.
According to Axilor, the participants had joined the accelerator program in October 2018 and will be graduating later this month.
The current cohort of 20 startups come from four different sectors – consumer, global SaaS, enterprise, marketplace.
“With every batch, we continue to see the ambition levels of founders growing. While the macro trends indicate a slowdown in the number of new startups and fall in investing activity at the seed funding level, we continue to attract the best founders building category leading businesses,” said Ganapathy Venugopal, cofounder and CEO of Axilor Ventures.
The Axilor Accelerator Programme is held over 100 days which helps startups achieve three most important outcomes needed in early stages — growth, access, and capital.
Recently, Axilor also made a joint partnership with Mazumdar Shaw Medical Foundation and Narayana Hrudalaya, for encouraging innovations in healthcare.
Here Are The Selected Startups For The Winter 2018 Cohort
Consumer Sector
Cuddl: Cuddl which was founded by Shashank Palli in June 2018, is an online first sleep products startup with a focus on pillow design and manufacturing. Cuddl’s flagship product is their shredded latex pillow with features that provide elevated sleep experiences. Launched 3 months back the startup’s products are now listed on Amazon.
Headfone: Headfone was founded by Pratham Khandelwal and Yogesh Sharma in January 2018. It is a social audio platform where you can listen to stories, talk shows, podcasts, radio channels and more. Headfone uses machine learning to build personalised audio feed in order to provide a better listening experience. According to the startup, a user spends around 50 minutes in a day listening on Headfone on an average. It has an active user base of 50K users.
Krate: Founded by Siddharth Reddy and Suprathik Reddy in May 2017, Krate is a subscription-based men’s fashion brand that personalises men’s fashion. The designs are created by a team of in-house stylists and data from a customer’s style quiz. According to the startup, till date, they have 5,000 subscribers and are growing at over 40% per month.
Skipy: Skipy was founded by Ajay Das in March 2018 and is currently in beta stage. It offers mixed reality gaming kit that plugs into any tablet or a mobile turning it into a toy for children. A user can take draw in front of Skipy and watch their images replicate digitally. It aims to give the sensory feeling of drawing on a paper along with digital interactive experience.
WhatsCut Pro: Founded in October 2017 by Vipul Jain, Vikas Shrivastava, Sushin PV, Rizwan Sadath and Ramees P, WhatsCut Pro is a mobile video or audio creation application for social media and chat messenger platforms. It has processed more than 2.3 Mn videos and 700K audio files and has more than 500K organic downloads from Playstore.
Enterprise Sector
CashPositive: Cashpositive was founded by Aniruddha Verma, Dhruv Sharma and Nitish Mehta in 2017. Its proprietary credit platform is being used by mid-market suppliers to speed up the collection of receivables from distributors. Insights from the platform also help lenders fix liquidity gaps in the supply chain. After reducing overdue receivables by 40% for an automotive aftermarket supplier, CashPositive is now experimenting with the industrial equipment and IT hardware sectors.
DeepSight AI Labs: Founded in February 2018 by Satya Tadimeti, Nishant Veer and Rakesh Channaiah, DeepSight AI Labs is an intelligent and predictive surveillance platform. DeepSight’s product, SuperSecure is an AI-powered smart surveillance platform — universally compatible retrofit solution, works with any CCTV camera – analog, IP or hybrid that adds intelligence to any CCTV system — to detect potential threats from multiple video streams. Once it finds any threat, it sends five-way alerts instantly to prevent incidents and save human lives and protect valuable assets. Currently, DeepSight is signing up with top Indian and global banks. It also works with Indian and global high value retail, insurance industries & public utilities and the Government.
Dynamove: Dynamove was founded in 2017 by Rohan Rao and Abhijit Gupta. It is an AI-enabled driver assistance and telematics module. It aims at making vehicles safer, smarter, connected and more reliable. Currently, in the pilot stage, the startup will work with the freight and passenger logistics sectors.
Flytta: The startup was founded in January 2016 by Rahul Kanuganti and Gokulavasan Murali. Flytta is a next generation mobility platform. Its product, E-Map is used for mobility of household goods during employee relocation. With over 2500 moves in the last two years of operations, it has optimised the cost by 18%, saved over 50K hours of time. It has also helped increase its logistics partners efficiency by 30%.
Neurotags: Founded by Nitin Gupta, Yogesh Miharia and Abhishek Agarwal, Neurotags helps brands eliminate counterfeiting of their physical products. With their foolproof, patent pending, AI-based anti-counterfeit solution, they also help brands digitise their supply chains while enhancing transparency and efficiency. With more than 1.5 Mn tags used, Neurotags is currently live with some of the big FMCG brands. Further, it is also exploring global pilots.
Quikepic: Quikepic was founded by Ruchir Inamdar, Alok Singh and Harsh Sharma. It is a tech platform for API based secure and traceable exchange of financial information across financial institutions. Currently, it is piloting with seven customers which according to the startup, includes three large banks.
Vyakya: The startup was founded by ex-big4 professionals Jayendran and Aarthi. Vyakya’s product, Prudent.ai is a platform that brings the power of AI to accounting and audit services. Currently, the service is in the pilot phase with one audit and accounting firm in India.
Global SaaS Sector
Airpix: Airpix was founded by Neeraj Waghchaure, Aniket Tatipamula and Shinil Shekar in May 2013. It offers a cloud software suite to convert drone data into business intelligence and decision support systems. The online platform allows users to upload drone data, visualise, extract information, annotate, collaborate and generate analytics & curated reports. Currently, Airpix works with the Indian Railways and Tata Projects and has previously delivered more than 700 drone data projects for more than 70 customers.
Archsaber: Archsaber was founded in June 2016 by Arpit Jain, Apoorv Garg and Ashish Gaurav, ArchSaber provides outage prediction and incident post-mortem for cloud enabled IT companies. It has over 100 enterprise beta signups and ongoing projects with some of the biggest ecommerce and logistics companies in India.
Clappia: Founded by Ashutosh Kumar and Sarthak Jain in November 2017, Clappia provides a cloud workplace (SaaS) where enterprises can build a suite of custom process apps with zero coding skills. It also enables non-coders to create custom business process apps just like they work on spreadsheets. According to the startup, it has more than 20 paying customers across India, Europe and the United States.
Flinkhub: Founded by Ashish Rajput, Jerrin Joy and Ananth, Flinkhub is a relationship driven sales intelligence platform that helps sales teams get a comprehensive view of their relationship graph with prospects from a large pool of companies. The platform is currently live with over 100 businesses.
Instoried: Instories was founded in June 2018 by Sharmin Ali and Anit B. It offers an AI powered augmented writing tool to help content marketers. The startup predicts the emotional engagement of marketing content. It is now also going vernacular. With about 100K users, Instoried is adopted by content marketers in BFSI, FMCG and the Travel industries.
Securden: Founded by former Zoho executives, Balasubramanian and B Kumaran in October 2018, Securden is an AI driven IT security platform for SMEs to prevent cyber-attacks. Securden has paying customers from the USA, UK, and Australia in financial, education, eCommerce, and IT services sectors. According to the startup, it also has over 50 pilot deployments across 17 countries.
Marketplace
Pluspin: Pluspin was founded in November 2017 by Gopal Krishna Panigrahy and Santosh Kumar Panda. It converts standalone pharmacies in a micro locality into a one-stop shop for all basic healthcare needs such as diagnostics, home-healthcare, prescribed and OTC drugs. It also has an added layer of converting the pharmacy to an OTT platform for brand promotion and activation for health and wellness players.
The Design Cart: Founded in November 2017 by Apaar Gupta, The Design Cart is a B2B sourcing marketplace for the fashion industry. Garment manufacturers, fashion designers and fashion boutique owners can now purchase fabrics, beads, laces, buttons and other trims from over 80+ product categories and 40000+ SKUs with a click. The Design Cart is working to build India’s largest digital catalogue of supplies for the Indian fashion industry. It has fulfilled over 10,000 orders to date with a repeat purchase rate of over 40%.
