Inc42’s 2015 Wrap-up, On Turning Two and To 42 New Investors!

What started out two years ago as a simple idea discussed over a hot cup of coffee in Delhi’s chilly winters at the Indian Coffee House, situated in the heart of India’s capital, Connaught Place, has now evolved to become what many of you now may know Inc42 to be – the go to destination for all things tech in the Indian startup ecosystem.

From just a team 3 founders, we have now grown to a 20 member team (the number is growing rapidly and might have changed by the time you read this :P) of intrapreneurs, story tellers and enablers working out of our swanky new office space in New Friends Colony in South Delhi.

Since January 2014, Inc42’s journey as a startup has been a roller coaster ride with a lot of ups and downs, our own share of adventure and a lot of learnings. Running a media company has been a very different kind of experience from a pure play product or a service company – it’s more of a mix of building a product, service and network.

When we started out in 2014, a lot of people pointed out that the media industry wasn’t something worth getting into – “it’ll not work”, “it’s not scalable”, “how will you compete with print”. But over the past 2 years, a lot has changed. India is poised to be the largest internet population, the way people consume content and news has changed, digital content consumption has exploded and startups have received mainstream attention (thank you Startup India). And by the looks of it, the digital media industry is going to blow up over the next 2 years.

During our first year of operations we met many interesting people, friends, supporters, entrepreneurs and investors including Ritesh Malik, Nikunj Jain, Prabhu Ram, Singapore Angel Network, Dewang Neralla, Unicorn India Ventures and others who helped kick-off our journey. We’ve summarised that journey in last year’s wrap up post.

Now that we’ve recounted through some of the nostalgia, lets move on to some of the more recent developments.

Announcing Our Pre-Series A Funding

Entering the third year of our operations, we are pleased to announced that we have raised our Pre Series A round of funding from a number of (42 to be precise) well known investors and entrepreneurs backing and supporting our endeavour.

The round included institutional funds like Unicorn India Fund and Mohandas Pai’s fund, Aarin Capital besides angel groups/funds of the likes of Singapore Angel Network, Singapore based M&S Partners Pte Limited, Pranav Pai, Arihant Patni (Hive Technologies), Anirudh Damani (Artha Ventures), Anand Ladsariya (CEO and promoter director of Everest Flavours Ltd.) and entrepreneurs like Chandu Sohoni (Founder, Amigobulls and Ex-Founder of Newshunt), Freecharge founders – Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, InMobi founders – Mohit Saxena & Amit Gupta, Deepak Ravindran (Founder, Lookup), Salil Chaturvedi (Founders, Provogue brand), Dewang Neralla (Founder, Atom Technologies).

We are extremely pleased to have such amazing groups and entrepreneurs to become a part of Inc42’s family/journey.

Creating A Community Of Influencers & Founders

We are rethinking how ideas and stories are shared in the world of tech. We believe that besides great editorial and journalistic stories, experiential stories written by experienced founders and influencers provide the most value to founders. This type of content which actually helps startups solving their real life problems and even help them implement best of practices in their startups.

The purpose that drives us all is the belief to help founders and new age startups build sustainable businesses and enable them to create impact.

We want to help founders and new age startups build sustainable businesses and enable them to create impact!

We also wanted to share our core belief system that also serves as a guiding principle for the Inc42 family:

• Great ideas can come from anywhere
• People create better things together
• Design matters at a deep level
• Strive to create value, impact will follow
• Nothing is set in stone (including these values)

We believe that information is the new age currency and by empowering our readers with the right information, we are playing our part in fostering a healthy, vibrant, strong, dynamic and progressive ecosystem.

PS. If you want to become a part of the Inc42 family and help us help startups create an impact, we’re hiring! 

Besides producing great in-house stories, we encourage more and more founders, investors, thought leaders and industry experts to share their expertise with our readers in form of compelling stories.

Over the past two years, Inc42 has attracted over 500 contributors and influencers including investors, founders, product managers etc. from across the globe who share their domain knowledge and expertise regularly on various topics. Over this year we plan to bring in over 1000 new such domain experts on Inc42 and expand further to make our reach felt by a wider audience.

Our Events Philosophy

As a new age media company, events are an important part of our offering. We’ve all been to numerous tech and startup events, chats, conferences and found that they all had the same old repetitive formats, rehashed “gyaan” and a glamour quotient that offered no other value to founders.

So as a brand, we decided to lay away from those standard set of events and come up with fresh, innovative and creative event formats for the startup ecosystem. Last year, we launched three such new event formats that received a great response from the startup community.

Pulse42 – The Invite Only Tech Party

Pulse42 was designed to be an invite only tech party brand for serial entrepreneurs, investors, VC’s and the influencers of the startup ecosystem. We conducted six editions of Pulse42 last year across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore that attracted over 600+ influencers from the Indian tech ecosystem.

It has now grown to become the go to destination for the who’s who of the Indian tech ecosystem and to network with the most premium audience in a chilled out environment.

We will be announcing Pulse42’s dates for 2016 pretty soon!

StartupPulse

StartupPulse was another event series that we conducted in 2015.  The event was targeted towards growth stage startups looking to fuel their growth through mentoring or by raising funds. We conducted 6 editions of StartupPulse. Each edition had 15 startups who went through rigorous mentoring from industry experts from various fields including Design (UI/UX), Sales, Marketing, Technology, Infrastructure, Product Management, etc. All the startups were also trained on the art of pitching by seasoned entrepreneurs and investors.

The top 5 startups from each edition pitched in front of a jury of lead angels, investors, accelerator heads and industry veterans for fundraising.

Out of the 90+ startups which participated in the 6 editions StartupPulse held in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, over 70% of them have either raised funding through investors they met or pitched to during the events or have gotten acquired.

Inc42 Mixers

“An insanely diverse set of passionate and creative people, buzzing atmosphere, a fun evening accompanied with drinks to loosen people up, networking, bonding, peer to peer learning and new relations!”

The statement summarises what we do at Inc42 Mixers. A get together which acts like a medium for people from various walks of life that are directly or indirectly part of the tech and startup industry, to come together, bond and spend time with the sole purpose of learning in a relaxed setting.

Last year, we successfully piloted our first edition of Inc42 Mixer in Delhi and will be announcing the launch of Inc42 Mixers 2016 across the country soon.

We plan to launch many more event formats and creative ways of bringing the Indian tech community together this year. Stay tuned for some big announcements on this front as well.

A Lot More To Come

Helping Companies Make Better & Informed Decisions

Our team is working hard on a number of products (called experiments) that are currently being tested in a closed alpha with a selected set of users. With these products we intend to help founders and companies make more informed decisions in the journey towards building sustainable businesses.

We will be launching some of these into the beta stage and opening it up for a wider set of users.

PS. Our bi-weekly newsletter membership is now 45,000 strong and is a great way to stay updated with the Indian tech ecosystem as well as any updates on our new products/initiatives. 

Giving Young Entrepreneurs The Upper Hand

Quite many successful startups were launched by young starry eyed founders in college. College is the time when people start thinking about what they finally want to do with their lives. It’s the time when one discovers oneself and finds their passion. Keeping that in mind, we are pleased to announce the launch of our newest initiative targeted towards student entrepreneurs and the young Indians who want to kickstart their entrepreneurial journey with Campus Misfits, our campus ambassador program, and #NoBullshit, a series of events for college students.

We still have a long way to go to help make India a #StartupNation and we hope that we will have your support in this long journey.

Note: We’d like to assure our readers that our content will, in no way, be influenced by any of the new set of investors coming on board and will always be in complete control of the editorial team of Inc42.

You can download funding press release here.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.