30 Startups To Watch: The Startups That Caught Our Eye In April 2020

The entire month of April 2020 has been overshadowed by the Covid-19 pandemic and these are particularly tough times for startups that are still trying to make it big. As coronavirus cases have risen, investors have tightened their corpora and layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs have become the startup way of life.

Several stakeholders in the Indian startup ecosystem have time and again cautioned about early and growth-stage startups facing the brunt of the funding slowdown. Siddarth Pai of 3one4 Capital had highlighted that ‘Portfolio-Protection’ is going to be the top priority for the investors for the time being. He went on to add that venture capitalists (VCs) would also use this time to reassess a lot of their priorities, and review their portfolio closely to eliminate inefficient investments.

“Survival is the top priority,” Pai said

Meanwhile, Siddharth Talwar of Lightbox Ventures has also raised similar concerns for the early-stage and growth-stage companies, looking to raise funding at a time like this. Talwar elaborated that it’s not because of the lack of money, but because of the fear of what’s going to happen next.

Well, the fear of the unknown is definitely a major hurdle for startups, but beyond the many impacted sectors, such as hospitality, travel, retail, fashion commerce, non-essential ecommerce, food delivery and shared mobility segments, there are some sectors which are poised for growth due to the behaviour of consumers and businesses changing.

The quarantine is going to affect consumer behaviour irreversibly. Most consumers have already started our journey towards a virtual world with everything going online — work, workouts, and even dating.

“A year from now, the world we will live in will be very different. It will impact how we live, how we work, and how we use technology,” said Biocon’s Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. 

While there definitely is a lot to think about — business strategy, revenue models, the road ahead, and more — Inc42 brings to you a curated list of 30 early-stage startups that have been navigating with momentum through the crisis.

30 Startups To Watch: April 2020

The list below includes startups across sectors and geographies, that have been in the Indian ecosystem for the past two years. Amid the pandemic and economic crisis, there has been a significant rise in the enterprise tech with nine entries, but media and entertainment startups were close in the second spot with five startups.

Editor’s Note: The below list is not meant to be a ranking of any kind. We have listed the startups in alphabetical order.

Aavenir

In an attempt to automate the source-to-pay (S2P) process, Jesal Mehta founded Aavenir last year to offer solutions for contract lifecycle management and procurement management. It has three products — RFPflow for requests for proposal management solutions, Contractflow for contract lifecycle management solution, and Invoiceflow for accounts payable automation solution. The company relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to simplify the procedures for the businesses.

Launched in 2019, the company is still focussed on its initial set of customers and is targeting enterprises working in departments such as IT, procurement, purchase, legal and compliance, accounting and contracts. It envisions streamlining the strategic sourcing and procurement processes for businesses of all kinds. Till now, the company has partnered with four platforms like digital workflow platform ServiceNow, and tech solution providers Brightleaf and Mainspring.

Adverto

Learning from his own bad experience with billboard advertisements, Anurag Soni, who had previously founded YourWeddingKnot, decided to venture into the unorganised sector. In 2018, Soni along with Sourabh Soni and Shrashabh Sahu started Jabalpur-based Adverto to make billboard ads smarter. Adverto is a web-based platform that allows users to place smart billboard ads for geotagged audiences.

With the geotagging feature, the advertisers can get the maximum return on their investments as they can specifically target the areas based on their demographics, creating more impressions at a less price. It also allows users to get insights on their ads, and have complete control over it. For this, the platform relies on IoT and Adverto’s cam-bot. It is currently connecting 100 screens across Madhya Pradesh. For Covid-19, the company has customised its algorithm to even detect face masks and more. Currently, the startup is building a proof of concept at the Jabalpur Incubation Centre.

According to the report ‘Digital Advertising In India 2020’ by Dentsu Aegis Network, the digital ads market is expected to reach INR 17,377 Cr in 2020, noting a 27% hike from the previous year’s INR 13,683 Cr. The digital advertising space is expected to reach at INR 58,550 Cr by 2025.

Bolo Indya

The internet can serve people with all kinds of knowledge, but the reach is limited by language. As per a BBC report, there are 125 Mn English speakers in India, which is a small percentage in a country of 1.38 Bn people. Yet, knowledge sharing is majorly limited to English or other universal languages.

In order to empower Indian regional language speaking users, Varun Saxena and Tanmai Paul founded video-based knowledge sharing platform Bolo Indya. The platform enables the users to create and watch short videos up to 120 seconds long. These videos can range from interest areas like life, relationships, career, motivation, finance, technology, sports, and more. Bolo Indya has more than 4 Lakh monthly active users, spending more than 27 minutes on the platform on daily basis.

So far, more than 140 Lakh hour of content has been consumed on the platform since its launch. The platform also allows the creators on to monetise their video content, gain social capital, and network with others sharing the same common interest areas.. However, it also depends on the quality and popularity among the users. Bolo Indya offers content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, and Odia.

To make it in the digital space of India, going vernacular is the new mantra. Even the tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Flipkart and Amazon have started taking this approach, whether it’s through bringing in a new vernacular interface or bringing more content creators on board. Indian language internet users are likely to grow to 536 Mn by 2021 compared to 199 Mn English language users.

ClassPlus

As remote learning has taken off due to the national lockdown, Classplus has been coming in handy for traditional coaching institutes, tuition centres and private tutors to take their courses and classes online. The edtech startup has on-boarded over 3K institutes across 50 cities and gets traction from  500K students in India regularly.

For this, it offers a software suite that can handle class communication, payments, assessments, online learning programmes and attendance. This allows the management to focus on the educational side of the business, while reducing their time spent on managing other aspects of the business. The product also helps its clients to act as an online content repository and distribution platform.

The company aims to enhance the productivity of both students and teachers across India. Given that almost 70 Mn students in India opt for entrance exam training every year, of which almost 98% opt for coaching centres, Classplus has a big market to cater to.

ClearMeat

“Call it whatever you like — meat substitute, mock meat, clean meat, lab meat, veg meat or culture meat — this is big business. The trend that started off in the west in 2013 has now reached Indian shores as well, with the entry of Delhi-based ClearMeat.

Claiming to be the first mock-meat startup in India, ClearMeat has been working on creating a meat-like product is cruelty-free and environmentally friendly ways. The company, founded by Dr. Pavan Dhar and Dr. Siddharth Manvati, emphasises that its products taste the same and have the same texture as real meat.

The company is looking to supply its mock-meat to individuals and businesses and is in talks with potential customers as well as the Indian government to implement a cultivated meat industry. Besides ClearMeat, Udaipur-based GoodDot is another popular player in the segment.

Earlier, the meat-substitute industry was expected to reach $8.1 Bn by 2026 globally, but the segment is expected to get a further boost with the rise in consumer awareness and cautiousness around animal-derived products after the coronavirus pandemic, which is thought to have originated in a live animal’s wet market in China.

Convosight

After building and scaling Baby Destination as a parenting community, Tamanna Dhamija and Tarun Dhamija, along with Kartik Bansal, have now turned their attention to helping brands and communities manage online interactions on Facebook groups through Convosight.

The platform relies on data analytics and machine learning to allow admins and brands to increase brand engagement and, in turn, grow the business. The tools offered by Convosight can help brands and other organisations moderate community engagement and take decisions that affect the bottom line through the insights gathered from this engagement.

Since its launch in 2019, Convosight has over 2,500 communities and  30 Mn community members. It currently works with some Fortune 100 companies like Nestle, J&J, Reckitt Benckiser, P&G, and Abbott, among others. With the lockdown and businesses coming online, Convosight has noted more engagement from its customers on Facebook and other social media platform.

The company’s founders have 20 years of collective experience of working in finance, data analytics, and technology in the US and India. While Tamanna and Tarun started their entrepreneurial journey in 2016 with Baby Destination, Bansal has had stints at Microsoft and several other early-stage startups before Convosight.

DeepSource

Y Combinator-backed DeepSource is an enterprise tech startup that offers an automated tool to review codes and discover bug risks, anti-patterns, performance issues, and security flaws — before they land in production. The platform takes an average of 41 seconds to go through the codes.

Founded by Jai Pradeesh and Sanket Saurav, it has also launched an Autofix feature that acts like an autocorrect for error in codes, making the process quicker and more efficient.

DeepSource claims that its solutions reduce back and forth code reviews, and keeps a track of several real-time metrics of the codebase —test coverage, documentation coverage, direct and indirect dependencies — to get complete visibility of the state of the codebase. DeepSource is used by open-source teams at Uber, NASA, Slack, Intel, and DGraph, among others.

Since its inception, DeepSource says it has conducted 132K analyses and solved over 2 Mn coding errors. Besides this, the company also assures that it has installed a comprehensive set of practices and policies to make the systems secure by design. This includes deleting user data, once the account is cancelled, sandboxed analysis environments, source code security and data center security.

Fasal

Even though agriculture is one of the biggest sectors in India, employing almost 50% of the Indian workforce, the segment has been prone to crises due to varied reasons. Reasons which can easily be tackled through the intervention of technology. Bengaluru-based Fasal is working on the same intervention through its AI-powered IoT-SaaS platform that captures real-time data on several growing conditions.

The company relies on IoT sensors installed in farms to deliver farm-specific, crop-specific actionable advisories to compile the data. Fasal is currently serving over 1K farmers working in over 100K farms with more than 6,500 acres of land. It works with grapes, pomegranates, citrus fruits, chillies and peppers, and tomato farms in the horticulture belt of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka.

For this year, Fasal plans to add tech-solutions for more crops and expand its geographies. Besides this, the company also plans to focus on the reselling (sourcing from businesses to provide farmers) model in 2020 by entering the supply chain and reverse chain market. The company has already started off the process by partnering with supply chain companies to help out the distressed farmers during the disrupted market.

Flixjini

With so many choices across online video streaming platforms, it is difficult to choose what to watch, this is why Komparify.com founders Ankit Chhajer and Jigar Doshi have rolled out Flixjini, a digital TV guide for OTT platforms.

Flixjini relies on AI-driven content classification systems and recommendations to tailor content that can be personalised to the taste of the user. It also collects multiple data points like reviews, ratings, awards, box office collections to allow users to decide.

Besides this, the company also allows users to track multiple channels where a particular TV show or movie might be available for free on subscription or as rentals. The company is aggregating content from more than 30 streaming services.

Flixjini told us on average, a streaming platform has more than 2K movie titles and 500 TV shows across all genres and languages. In total, there are over 50K movie titles and 12K TV show titles across all streaming services on the platform for users to browse through. The company claims to have a user base of 4.5 Mn and noted a 2x jump in daily traffic during the lockdown.

GIGI Benefits

The reliance of Indian startups and corporates on gig economy workers has only increased in recent years. According to a study by KellyOCG, more than 56% of Indian firms employ more than 20%, temporary workers. The number is expected to grow as 71% of organisations are likely to hire more contingency workers over the next two years. In an attempt to offer the same benefits to gig economy workers as regular full-time employees, Sowmya Rao and Nandini Vishwanath founded GIGI Benefits.

The company provides financial services like insurance, saving account and investment options to 150 Mn gig economy workers in India, ranging from domestic help and the ones that work in the corporate sector. GIGI Benefits are available in three categories — goal-based savings in mutual funds, digi gold solution to encourage asset purchasing, and health insurance. It also offers its service to startups and small enterprises with less than 20 employees.

Meanwhile, ride-hailing giants Uber and Ola also use GIGI Benefits to increase worker retention. The company also claimed that its product has helped in increasing week-on-week retention, while reducing the hiring costs. GIGI financial service partners include Aditya Birla Capital. Augmont, Birla Sun Life Insurance, Digit, Thyrocare, and more.

Jodo

As private schooling becomes more and more expensive, there is a gap opening up in the quality of education and access to education. In many parts of India, half of the family budget is devoted to school fees. Crafting a tailored financial product for middle-income households, Bengaluru-based Jodo aims to help families manage the academic expenses of their children.

Jodo is founded by Atulya Bhat, Raghav Nagarajan and Koustav Dey, who were previously working in Matrix India Partners. Bhat is an IIT Madras and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, Nagarajan founded a lending startup Rupeevest, whereas Dey has worked in companies like Morgan Stanley, McKinsey.

To make the payment schedule easier for the patents, Jodo offers the customer the option for the customer to convert the two-three month installments into a monthly payment plan, which will be easier for families to manage. It has also partnered with multiple schools in Bengaluru to roll out the product in the upcoming academic year.

Meanwhile, the company is also looking to provide other lending and savings products for several use-cases like education and health.

Joynt

There is a surge in demand for virtual entertainment, education, and self-improvement courses. Focusing on all three is a video-first talent marketplace Joynt that allows trained talent and professionals to conduct paid virtual sessions and classes for regular users. The platform is founded by Gaurav Tripathi, Vivek Kumar, Saurav Ramteke, and Vijay Goel.

The talent can create short, vertical selfie videos of themselves and share it across the portals. Interested customers can choose to pay for live sessions or video calls with the talent base listed on the platform. Currently, Joynt lists celebrities, sports and fitness stars, musicians, artists, and fashion influencers as some of its trainers.

The company claims that it is built on piracy-free technologies as all offerings are paid in advance. The talents get 75% of the amount within 48 hours of completing the booking. With this model, Joynt is looking to build a reliable community of talented people from diverse backgrounds, providing them with a common platform to monetise their craft.

Kawa Space

With national lockdown and almost no scope of human interactions for on-ground activities, several companies are looking for tech solutions to tackle the problem. Vijay Shekhar Sharma-backed Kawa Space is solving this problem with its simple ‘drag and drop’ tool to utilise earth observation satellites allowing authorities and customers to manage their business activities without any coding.

During the lockdown period, Kawa Space has not only onboarded new customers, but has also helped them verify, monitor their business operations and assets. Its clientele largely includes financial services, government departments, strategic risk management and companies from the agriculture sector. Companies working in the financial service sector can use the Kawa Cloud to improve their Key Performance Indicators (KPI) as well.

Taking cues from its anchor customers and the features that have shown the most traction among them, the company is not set to launch its services to a larger set of customers. The company, founded by Kris Nair and Bala M, has recently finished the design and architecture of its space system and will roll out the new features in September this year.

Kitchens Centre

Kitchens Centre claims to be a one-stop solution for cloud kitchens looking to establish their multiple ventures and expand their operations. The company offers infrastructural help with commercial space and kitchens, along with business assistance through branding, order management, delivery, and maintenance services. It claims to cut operational expenses and boost sales by 25% by streamlining solutions.

The company has set up centres across north India with brands like BTW, WOW! Momo, Asian Haus, Burgrill, 34 Chowringhee Lane, Wok Me, etc. Moreover, it also acquired F&B technology-driven management solution provider Posify, which allows its customers to manage orders on a single platform, while also helping with inventory management, billing and delivery tracking, and more.

A DataLabs by Inc42 report on cloud kitchens estimates that the market size of cloud kitchens would reach $1.05 Bn by 2023 in India alone, recording a growth rate of 12%. The report highlights that at present only 13% of the total market size has been tapped, showing a massive potential of growth for this business.

Lightcat

Bengaluru-based LightCat was founded by Utkarsh Apoorva and Ahmed Zain in 2018. The platform uses data science to help its customers optimise their growth. The company relies on data analysis using machine learning (ML) algorithms. It claims to create invisible customer polls, activating them at the right time, right action, and for the right type of user.

Lightcat says its product is at the intersection of Uber’s “why did you cancel this ride” feature and customer interviews. With this, the company aims to target the $15 Bn customer experience market, which is growing at a rate of 22.5%.

Lightcat was also a part of the Axilor Accelerator programme. “We want to build products for growth teams that will help them focus solely on growth and worry less about process and workflows,” the company said.

Locale.ai

Targetting customers from logistics and mobility segments, Locale.ai allows businesses to gather the most critical on-ground location analytics using geospatial data. Its solutions allow customers to get insights like areas where vehicles are unable to venture into, redistribution of fleet, warehouse capacity, and loss-making shipments. With these metrics, customers can easily optimise and streamline their operations by focusing on good turn-out areas.

For this, Locale.ai ingests the location that its clientele collects from users, vehicles, trips and more. Then, it converts the raw location data into meaningful insights for decision-makers and business users in simple languages, without relying on codes of SQL. The company currently serves companies across India, France, Israel, UAE and the US, and can ingest over 1 Mn location events per day across all its engagements and pilots.

Its clients are using the platform to understand last-mile delivery patterns, monitoring real-time KPI, analysing the gap in demand and supply, and expansion based on latent demand and user churns.

MoneyOnClick

To offer unsecured loans to the underserved segment, former LendingKart executives Vishal Chopra and Himanshu Gupta founded MoneyOnClick back in 2018. The company relies on a social-selling distribution model to provide joint-liability unsecured family loans to over 100 Mn lower-middle-income families in small cities. For this, it has also on-boarded a network of micro-entrepreneurs and small businesses to sell the loans for MoneyOnClick.

The loan amount starts from INR 50K, and the customers can get loans of up to 10 times their monthly salary. The customers do not need to visit the company’s branches and can get their loans sanctioned through digital processes — from application, submissions, verification and disbursal, everything is managed online.

As per DataLabs by Inc42 estimates, the credit demand in India is expected to be worth $1.41 Tn by 2022. Notably, the estimated growth rate in credit demand is 3.73% between FY17 and FY22. With the crashing rural and did economy, the demand for the credit for the vulnerable sections is expected to rise. Even the Indian government is looking to offer loans worth $39 Bn to small, medium businesses (SMBs), with an additional 20% of credit limit.

Near.Store

Kirana is definitely a magic word for major startups and big businesses today as they look to expand their repertoire of grocery delivery. Whether it’s Amazon, Flipkart, BigBasket, Grofers or the companies of their likes, all are focussing on getting the undervalued section of 6.65 Mn Kirana stores on their side as India turns to order essentials online. Did you know that almost 90% of the retail trade in the company is carried out by general trade stores, whereas only supermarkets and organised grocery stores only make up for 10%.

Tapping on the market is Near.Store, which is allowing neighbourhood stores — small businesses, pharmacies, and mobile phone stores — to create their own digital presence without relying on any third-party platforms. Interestingly, the store owners do not have to spend the time, money, or manpower ongoing online, the platform enabled them to do so simply. Once a customer places an order through WhatsApp, Near.Store aggregates all the orders from society and sends it to the nearest stores. This not only saves time but also helps the stores generate anywhere between INR 25K to INR 73K.

During the pandemic, the company has pivoted to a B2C model temporarily as onboarding new stores have been a task. Near.Store has partnered with several big brands like Cadbury, Oreo, Epigamia, P&G, and more and is currently supplying directly to 22K customers from 55 housing societies in Mumbai. During the lockdown period, the company noted a 353% hike in their sales.

NewsReach

Giving a voice to local publishers, NewsReach is an Ahmedabad-based news aggregation portal that aims to create a stronger ecosystem of original and local news content and revive the local news industry.

For this, the company is partnering with newspapers, publishers, reporters, and public grievances commission (PGCs) from rural and semi-urban areas to reach out to global audiences. So far, it has digitised the content of over 1,500 publishers across more than 15 cities.

It has over 700K monthly active users and 3 Mn page views a month. Besides a greater reach, NewsReach also provides a way for the local publishers to monetise their content. To keep its reaches in the local regions intact, it is aggregating content in English, Hindi, and four other Indian languages.

The Indian media and entertainment industry grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.90% in FY1718. The sector is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.10% to touch $39.68 Bn by FY 2023, as per IBEF report. Meanwhile, DataLabs by Inc42, the media and entertainment sector recorded total funding of at $561.27 Mn in 2019. While it has made a strong start, NewsReach will be up against strong players in the news aggregation segment such as Google News, Apple News, Flipboard, Jio News, Inshorts and Dailyhunt.

Obviously.Ai

In times when businesses can shut down within the matter of weeks if the right strategy is not in place, instant solutions are something the emerging sectors are now seeking. By allowing businesses to get their key performance indicators predictions within a minute, Obviously.Ai is helping its customers save weeks or even months of work and reduces the need for resources such as a big team of data scientists.

Founded by Nirman Dave and Tapojit Debnat, Obviously.Ai is a non-code data science platform that enables customers to use their existing database to make business-related predictions. For instance, telecom companies can use their historical data of customer cancellations to predict the new customers that are likely to cancel, meanwhile, an ecommerce platform can predict their future sales.

The company converts simple languages into a structured query language (SQL) to give out the prediction, meaning a customer can simply ask  “Which customers are likely to buy again next month?” and get the response. So far, Obviously.AI has over 1,500 customers comprising large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses (SMBs).

The two most thriving segments for the company at the moment are ecommerce delivering essential goods and consulting firms. With a hike in demand for essential goods, ecommerce companies have started using Obviously.Ai to optimise their operations, whereas consulting firms are using the platform’s predictive analytics for their clients.

Plop

With the global lockdown and self-quarantine advisories, bite-sized entertainment platforms with short-form video or audio content such as TikTok or Likee are noting a massive rise in adoption, particularly from new users. Claiming to be a step ahead in terms of quality of content, Plop is an interactive, immersive storytelling platform that allows creators to express themselves through text, video, audio, simulations, and role-playing.

Targetting creators between 18 and 35 years of age looking to create their own brand, Plop has its presence across four continents. 50% of its traction comes from North America, 20% from Europe, and 10% from Asia including 10% from India. During the lockdown, the company said it has witnessed a 400% rise in its user activity, majorly in the US and UK, and an 800% spike in the in-app purchases.

The company aims to provide a medium for its users to monetise art and its content on social media platforms. The company was incubated in the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bengaluru and has also been a part of the Goldman Sachs Startup Programme.

Procol

Food companies spend over $200 Bn annually on procuring agri-commodities such as rice, pulses, sugar and more. Digital procurement platform Procol is helping companies reduce this procurement cost by helping them optimise and streamline their operations.

Gaurav Bhati, cofounder of Procol, highlights that almost 95% of the above-mentioned procurement cost is due to unstructured mechanisms —  price fluctuations, payment terms, commodity quality, and logistics terms — that arise due to the businesses conducted over phone or WhatsApp. Therefore, Bhati and cofounder Sumit Mendiratta came up with Procol.

Besides cost, the company also helps in increasing the speed of procurement. It also highlights that its digital platform has been designed, keeping in mind the use cases for Indian businesses. With this, Procal has an onboarding time of 48 hours and an adoption rate as high as 80%.

Procol has more than 10 marquee customers like Haldiram’s, BigBazaar, Bikanervala, Golden Harvest, and Akshaya Patra. During the lockdown and a curb on non-essential products, Procol has partnered with Arya warehousing to serve essential goods through its essential-commodities.com.

Qin1

Founded in 2019 by Ishan Gupta and Aarti Gupta, Qin1 is an online learning platform that focusses largely on building computer-oriented programming and robotics skills in kids between 5 to 14 years of age. The platform offers live classes across several disciplines like English speaking, coding and programming, and robotics.

Qn1 aims to make STEM learning more fun and engaging for kids and offer extracurricular activities to children through digital platforms. It claims to provide a more customisable and autonomous learning experience to each student by allowing them to select teachers, courses and also the medium of delivery.

So far, the edtech startup claims to have completed over 20K classes catering to more than 1 Lakh students. During the lockdown, Qn1 has also noted an 8x growth in the number of students.

Streamsource

Targetting the unsecured subprime personal loans market in the US, Kanpur-based Mayank Tewari and Prerit Srivastava founded Streamsource in January 2019. The startup is running a blockchain marketplace Skeps that lets lenders buy and sell consumer leads in a secure way.

Skeps allows lending customers to avail services from multiple loan providers, meaning a borrower may apply for a loan from a single lender but end up receiving approvals from several vendors. Both lenders and buyers can access the services without giving up data privacy.

Previously, Tewari had founded a reverse logistics startup Agilo Logistics, which shut down in 2016. He has also worked in Uber and Paytm. Srivastava had founded Chennai-based Qarth Technologies that was acquired by Ola in 2016.

Since its launch, Streamsource has disbursed loans worth $18 Mn to 1.8K customers. The approval rate on the platform is 86%. The company is currently working with mid-sized lenders in the US, and plans to expand into the UK, Australia, and other first-world economies like Europe and Singapore.

SuperGaming

Global tech giants Amazon and Facebook have started expanding their presence in the gaming segment with live streaming services or new games. While the segment is largely focusing on hardcore gamers, Indian casual gamers don’t have a counterpart yet.

SuperGaming is a startup that is focusing on the casual gaming segment with its suite of 100+ casual games and more than 150 Mn installs. The startup is founded by Roby John, Navneet Waraich and Sanket Nadhani. John had previously founded Y Combinator-backed educational gaming company June Gaming, where Waraich was working as a CTO. Meanwhile, Nadhani has previously worked in Wingify and FusionCharts.

The Covid-19 outbreak has given rise to a new generation of gamers across the world. In the US, there has been a 75% surge in the number of users playing online games during peak hours. In India, social gaming platform Winzo noted a 30% hike in traffic coming from Tier I cities in a week last month. Otherwise, other players in the segment include Nazara, Paytm First Games, Zapak, Junglee Games, MPL, and others. Statista’s report from September last year projects the number of mobile gamers in India to reach 370 Mn by 2022.

Tango Eye

Smart surveillance cameras are all the rage in security these days as machine learning and AI algorithms help authorities and businesses stop misdemeanours, thefts and other unwanted activities. But beyond that some companies are helping businesses get higher revenue and conversions through surveillance footage. Founded by Surender Gounder, Tango Eye is an AI-powered software company that allows business customers to get insights from surveillance videos. Its solutions can be integrated into a range of services from understanding the customers’ consumption patterns in retail stores to law enforcement activities.

The company is working with over 10 retail chains including Nykaa and L’Occitane across cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai. With the Covid-19 pandemic, the company has also upgraded its platform’s capabilities to include features that can easily detect if social distancing norms are being violated in stores, markets and other services. Tango Eye’s software also alerts the local authority about breaches. The company is looking to deploy 1 Lakh such solutions free of charge over the next three months.

Tango Eye claims to be on its way to generate INR 10 Cr in revenue by the end of the year. It is currently serving 300 stores, which can be scaled to 10K stores with social distancing becoming mandatory in the post Covid-19 world.

Tathya Earth

Allowing business customers to explore the real-world using the power of data, Tathya Earth arrived on the scene last year with its real-time factual insights on economic indicators, like production of key metal commodities, from alternate datasets like satellite images, web data and more. Founded by Nikit Shrungarpawar, the company relies on machine learning and remote sensing techniques to drive such solutions.

Tathya Earth’s solutions include steel index for performance across the steel industry, metal index for production trends, auto manufacturing index for trends in different automotive sub-sectors, and a commodity price index to track price and movement of goods across ports. The data can be used by the government for policymaking, financial institutes for hedging, trading and risk management.

Upshotly

With home becoming the new workplace, the need to streamline the day and optimise the tasks is bigger than ever. Chennai-based Upshotly claims its employee performance management software can enable teams to build a high-performance culture even in a remote working environment. It does so by tracking the objectives and key results (OKR) framework, continuous feedback and recognition, periodic check-ins and one-on-one meetings through its performance management software.

Upshotly claims that its OKR-based approach helps startups and organisations build a work culture around problem solving and outcomes, leading to increased employee performance and engagement. The startup offers a single-window dashboard to manage all employee engagement and performance metrics.

Upshotly’s software is said to help companies tap into the potential of each employee. The company has a starter pack for $29 per month for an year for management of 15 employees, Growth pack for $4.5 per user per month for an year for management of 16 employees, and enterprise pack for $7.5 per user per month for an year for large employee base.

WizCounsel

India’s MSME sector is not only lacking the right technology support in many ways, but also needs to ensure a high degree of compliance to earn government incentives. This requires businesses to spend heavily on availing services for legal and regulatory purposes. Ranu Gupta and Royce Raju Beena founded WizCounsel back in 2018 to allow MSMEs to book white-collar services like lawyers, taxation support, accounting and compliance services online. The platform has been tailored to the requirements of more than 1,000 MSMEs and independent business owners who have been impacted during the lockdown.

Just like an ecommerce marketplace, the users can leverage the services from a variety of providers. The company claims to be 6x more affordable, 10x faster than other services providers with 100% assurance. To make the services more affordable for its customers, WizCounsel also allows payments in installments. Besides this, it also offers a Pay Later option for certain services.  WizCounsel is looking to build a community, a resource center, and a free consultation model for small businesses to help them with various services.

So far, the company has served more than 1100 unique customers, including MSMEs and consumers till date. It has also expanded its services across seven categories with more than 100 service products and more than 400 services. The company claims to have over 1K verified subject matter experts among its 3000 experts on the platform.

WonDRx

There is no doubt that telemedicine is emerging as the most important aspect in the healthcare domain. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has emphasised that telemedicine and teleconsultation are on the same path of success as digital payments with growing numbers and integration, however, there is still scope for innovation.

Founded by Pankaj Sindhu and Pankaj Agrawal, WonDRx is a healthtech platform that allows doctors to write digital prescriptions and check up on patients through interactive content. The immersive prescriptions are also embedded with audio and video to inform the patients about important dosage and other critical verbal instructions.

Currently the startup is offering three integrated apps — SMART Rx Paper, a digitised prescription platform, a healthcare provider app to allow doctors to create digital clinics without investing heavily on creating their own digital platform, and patient-facing app for teleconsultation, find nearby healthcare providers and diagnostic clinics. Looking at the traction gained in the immediate aftermath of Covid-19, the company is looking to launch new features in May.