Founded in 2012 by Rajesh Sawhney, GSF Accelerator has announced the list of startups graduating from its fifth batch.
The graduating five startups have also received $65K to $100K as Seed funding, the startups are currently working out of Gurugram and are being mentored. The startups will travel to San Francisco and Tokyo next month with an aim to explore tech ecosystems outside of India.
The accelerator provides promising startups with unparalleled access to venture and business networks, intensive mentoring, and initial capital. It is a multi-city programme and extends beyond India, with partners in London, Silicon Valley, and Singapore.
Commenting on the development, Rajesh Sawhney, founder, GSF Accelerator said, “This is our fifth iteration and we have chosen 5 startups. This year our focus has been on deep learning, AI, chat-tech, health, and fintech. Each startup in the current batch is led by exceptional founders who have demonstrated a deep commitment to solving a specific domain problem with cutting edge technology.”
The investment team for this batch of startups includes GSF founder Rajesh Sawhney; Hiro Mashita, M&S PTE; Anand Chandrasekaran, Head of Platform and Product Partnerships at Facebook; Sumesh Menon, founder of U2opia Mobile and Woo; Dinesh Agarwal, founder of IndiaMart; Ashish Toshniwal, founder of Y Media Labs, San Francisco; and Sri Peddu, Powerhouse Venture.
The Selected Five Startups Are
YellowAnt: Launched in June 2015 by Vishwa Krishnakumar and Ankur Rawal, the startup offers an intelligent bot-assistant that connects users with apps at their workplace. It provides a holistic view of work and attempts at easing its users for multitasking. It currently helps users manage apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Github, Bitbucket, Trello, and Freshdesk.
The YellowAnt bot is available on Slack and will extend its offerings to Skype and Facebook by 2018.
HeyMojo: The startup was launched in 2016 by Avinash Dutt and Rahul Chandra. The Gurugram-based startup offers AI-driven conversational chatbots as a service for hotels and restaurants. It helps hotels increase direct bookings and reduce customer support costs with the intelligent AI bot.
It works via a Unified Messaging Service to help hotels cut through the daily complexities and deliver a superior guest experience. Using artificial intelligence, it interacts with guests and strings along throughout their journey, without having them to download a hotel app.
Some of the brands HeyMojo is currently engaged with include: Joey’s Hostel, Hotel Rogge, Trinity Grand Hotel, Hotel Atrio, InnerChef, DiGhent Café, The Beer Cafe, The Darzi Bar & Kitchen, OldSchool Brewhouse, Asha Market among others.
Silversparro: Founded in April 2015 by Ankit Agarwal and Abhinav Kumar Gupta, Silversparro offers an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) solution using deep learning technology. It allows businesses to automate their manual processes using AI. The startup specialises in providing solutions in automation and classification problems.
It further offers its services in the domain of face recognition, text detection, object detection, and question similarity search as well.
Breathe Well-being: Founded by former ClassHop founders Rohan Verma and Aditya Kaicker, Breathe Well-being (BW) offers its services to small and medium organisations through a holistic well-being programme with an aim to revitalise employees’ mind & body. BW’s proprietary well-being programme deploys gamification and an integrated rewards platform to drive engagement and connectivity among the employees.
Via its mobile app, the employees get to participate with each other in a variety of activities and track their personal health statistics. The employers can track the impact of the programme through a proprietary index. The founders are former McKinsey and Accenture consultants with a technology background and previously built ClassHop, an online fitness venture.
Oro Wealth: Founded in 2016 by Nitin Agarwal, Vijay Kuppa, Swati Aggarwal, and Yogesh Powar, Oro Wealth claims to be India’s first zero-commission B2C investment platform that offers low-cost and quality wealth management services to retail customers and financial intermediaries like banks, brokers, and wealth managers.
As per an official statement, ORO has received over 3,000 registrations and has processed transactions worth more than INR 10 Cr on its platform. The company has further partnered with two financial institutions to offer ORO’s automated wealth management tools to their customers.
The startup was also selected amongst the top 10 early-stage fintech startups by IBM SmartCamp in August 2016. It also won the Dell Start-up Challenge in September 2016.
How The Accelerator Works
The GSF network has three major components: an accelerator, an angel network, and tech conferences. Till date, it has made 45 investments with 5 exits. Little Eye Labs, a startup from the first batch GSF Accelerator was acquired by Facebook. It also raised Seed investment from GSF and was Facebook’s first acquisition in India.
Some of GSF Accelerator’s portfolio companies are Little Eyes Labs, Pokkt, Silverpush, Dailyrounds, Docsapp, Browntape, Flinto, HackerEarth, Plus, Zapr and Gamezop.
