The pandemic has impacted the growth of most businesses but media consumption is peaking in many markets
Inc42 has curated a list of 30 early-stage startups that have shown the most promise in the past few months
The selected startups were founded in the last two year and have not raised more than $6 Mn in the last six months
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March has turned out to be a disaster for the Indian economy after the deadly coronavirus pandemic began spreading across the state. Even the Indian startup industry is not immune to the repercussions of the pandemic and the lockdown enforced by the government.
With work and business going remote and even basic management processes involving digital tools, it’s also an interesting time for SaaS and other productivity-focused tools as well as collaboration platforms.
There is no doubt that this pandemic is going to irreversibly alter consumer behaviour, whether it is in terms of shopping, content consumption, food, payments or communication. But for now, essential services like ecommerce, supply chain, and healthcare have definitely gone through the roof in terms of adoption.
In fact, remote meeting tools, social gaming apps, online learning, and health and fitness startups have earned plenty of attention from the investor community through March 2020.
30 Startups To Watch: March 2020
The list below includes startups across sectors and geographies, who have been in the Indian startup community since the last two years. This month, we have two interesting entries from the cryptocurrency and spacetech domain.
Editor’s Note: The below list is not meant to be a ranking of any kind. We have listed the startups in alphabetical order.
Agnikul
Pushing forth the agenda to make space accessible to everyone, spacetech startup Agnikul is working on means solutions that will allow satellites to be launched anywhere, anytime and affordably. The company is developing a satellite launch vehicle, or rockets in layman terms, that put small satellites in space on-demand.
Agnikul was founded by Srinath Ravichandran and Moin SPM. Cofounder and CEO Ravichandran highlighted that despite satellites getting smaller in terms of dimensions and size, the carrier rockets continue to be as large as they were. This has opened up the market for ridesharing for satellites, which is not always optimal.
The duo saw this as an opportunity to build small and dedicated rockets to eliminate the need for any rideshare. So far, the concept has been recognised by DARPA Launch Challenge, Airbus Bizlab Accelerator Programme and Kerala Startup Mission’s Space focused initiatives.
The company works out of the National Center for Combustion R&D at IIT Madras that allows them to test and develop solutions under the right guidance.
Airmeet
The global coronavirus pandemic has definitely changed the way people communicate. All of a sudden, digital is the only way out. Whether its national or international events, educational institutes or your day-to-day business meetings. This has definitely kicked off new social sections that promote remote converversations.
One such platform gaining transaction at the moment is Airmeet, which is an online meeting platform that hosts multiple events formats — networking, workshops, company events, meetups, webinar and conference. The platform was developed in 2019 by Lalit Mangal, Vinjay Kumar Jasti and Manoj Kumar Singh. Lalit Mangal had previously founded CommonFloor.com, while both Jasti and Singh served as top executive in the company, which was acquired by Quikr in 2016.
In order to meet the expectations of businesses in the remote-working world, the Airmeet team itself heavily relies on its online meeting platform to carry on its day-to-day businesses and tests it thoroughly. The company highlighted that it has a fully remote team and uses its product to the fullest.
Bione
The limitations of the Indian healthcare system have been exposed by the pandemic situation. There aren’t enough beds, ventilators, protective gear, doctors and other essential services to deal with this situation. Even the Indian government has taken the development of the Indian healthcare infrastructure to be of the first priority and allocated INR 15K Cr for the same.
But beyond this it has encouraged Indian healthtech startups to innovate and find solutions for the big problems. Bione, founded by Dr Surendra Chikara, is a patient-focussed platform for genetic and microbiome testing, which will become a major factor in future diseases.
The platform uses AI for predictive analytics of dietary and lifestyle recommendations to strengthen the individual’s microbiome and immunity. Bione has also come up with new parameters for its Longevity Plus kit that predicts the susceptibility of a person to the coronavirus family, along with HIV, Hepatitis C and other pathogens. Bione’s predictions are based on the individual’s genetic makeup or the pattern of living.
BOLO App
Google might have to answer all your questions, but only as long as you speak the language it supports. Try finding answers in any of the many Indian local languages and one might be left surfing in circles. Bringing its solution to vernacular language internet users in India, Nishant Chandra and Siddharth Maheshwari launched Bolo App back in 2018.
Bolo App is a knowledge-sharing community platform that allows users to ask and answer questions in local Indian languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The answers are usually in the form of short videos of less than 1 minute each. Besides this, Bolo App also allows users to connect with experts over a video call to get a personalised solution to their problems.
Chutney
The quarantine advisory and 21-day lockdown has put enormous stress on the supply of daily essentials. Online orders are getting delayed, stores are running out of food items and worse of all procurement costs are getting much higher.
Chutney, founded by Jhansi Elango and Vivek Nautiyal, has been solving this problem through 30 local partner neighbourhood stores in Coimbatore. The company allows consumers to buy fruits and vegetables at wholesale prices from their neighbourhood stores. Consumers can place orders through WhatsApp and collect it the next day.
Chutney highlighted that its customers end up saving up to 40% on each order, while its network of Kirana stores end up earning an additional INR 7K to 10K monthly. This is one of the reasons that has allowed Chutney to have a first-month retention rate of 80%.
Cognicept Systems
Nobody is perfect, not even robots — this is exactly what Cognicept Systems has been preaching ever since its launch in 2018. The company, in very simple terms, is no less than a doctor for robots that provides human interventions when any automation fails. The company uses its proprietary intervention system to remotely troubleshoot any robot related issue.
Founded by Alok Pathak, Michael Sayre and Ruchit Rami, Cognicept Systems offers three packages for its customers — Trial Pack for 5 repairs in three months (free), Scaling Package for 100 repairs ($60 for additional robots), and enterprise pack for more than 100 repairs ($60 for additional robots).
Crio.Do
There is no better time to acquire new skills and polish the old ones than this one with most people finding they have plenty of extra time at hand. And for engineers, updating their software development skills is an essential process, Crio.Do is looking to help learners upgrade or update their build software development skills by studying projects from the bigger organisations.
Binny Bansal-backed Crio.Do is founded by Rathinamurthy R and Sridher Jeyachandran, who have worked in Flipkart and Google, respectively.
Crio claims to provide a personalised and adaptive learning experience for developers and enables tech organisations to nurture talent. This also helps learners grasp concepts and standards from “work-like” micro-experiences curated based on real-world problems, solution landscapes and work environments. The company’s clientele includes Visa, Capillary, Go-MMT, Reliance Jio, Rakuten and Flipkart.
DROR
Did you know that India was named as the most dangerous country for women to live in? The crime and the violence against women is not something that is hidden, whether its rural or urban regions the gravity of these offences has been getting more serious day by day. Next in line to be subjected to gruesome violence are children and the elderly.
In order to ensure the safety of our loved ones, Dhiraj Nauhbar came up with a one-stop solution called DROR. With a single click, the app sends out a notification and location details of the attack or emergency to the nearby users of the app. The technology-driven platform acts like a community-building platform also sends a similar emergency notification to the nearest police station. Besides this, the app also offers a live tracking option, which alerts friends and families when they deviate from their route.
Recently, DROR has enhanced its capabilities to include a special social distance feature to remain safe during the coronavirus pandemic. The feature allows the users of the app to maintain their daily social distancing score and alerts them whenever they come in contact with a Covid-19 patient.
FamPay
Recent IIT Roorkee graduates Kush Taneja and Sambhav Jain had the same thought. The duo, “disappointed” with the Indian education system’s neglect of the fundamentals of personal financing, has come up with an innovative solution to integrate it in teenagers day to day life. FamPay offers debit card services for Indian teenagers to make both online and offline payments, which also includes UPI transactions without having to set a bank account.
Parents can top up the FamPay account of their children and let them spend the way they want, but under supervision. The company believes that its services allow parents to teach their children important financial lessons and have control over what they’re spending on.
Farm Theory
Pushing for “it’s what on the inside that matters”, Farm Theory has been ensuring that this perfectly healthy farm produce does not go into the trash can. The company sources these “ugly” and “imperfect” fruits and vegetables directly from farmers and sells it to restaurants, who usually want to save costs in procurement as long as the quality is not compromised.
Farm Theory sells these vegetables at a discount of 30%, which can be used to make sauces and purees. Meanwhile, Farm Theory also provides regular fresh produce for salad dressing and presentations. The company delivers over 2,500 Kg of produce every day to over 70 kitchens, and has been recording a growth rate of 60% on a week-on-week basis.
Fintso
One can afford no mistakes when it comes to making an investment. Working on the same concept George Mitra and Rajan Pathak decided to come up with Fintso to allow investors to directly connect with financial advisors.
Fintso is a B2B2C wealth management platform that provides a digital platform to independent financial advisors to reach out to a wider range of customers. Basically, the platform is helping such advisors, who usually rely on offline medium, to take an omnichannel approach to selling financial solutions.
As per Deloitte India report, 21 paise out of every rupee invested in mutual funds will likely be through online portals by the end of 2020. However, the coronavirus pandemic is going to have an effect on the digital wealth management segment as well for the time being, but it might be able to regain its pace faster.
GoZero Mobility
Ankit Kumar and Gaurav Tiwari founded active mobility solutions GoZero Mobility in 2018 to help people transition to a more sustainable and healthy commuting lifestyle. GoZero Mobility started its journey as electric bikes manufacturers back in 2018 from Birmingham (UK) through its first research and development centre.
The company took an year to come up with multiple prototypes. After several sessions of testing and feedback, GoZero Mobility finally launched its electric bicycle in Delhi in 2019. The company managed to sell to around 1100 customers between May 2019 to February 2020. Besides this, the company highlights that it’s bikes are largely made in India, with vendors in Pune and Ludhiana. Besides this, it also sources certain products from Spain, UK and Taiwan.
The company is currently selling in India, Africa and Southeast Asia. Talking about India specifically, GoZero Mobility currently has over 21 distributors, but the company plans to use its recently raísed capital to get over 100 distributors on board.
HelpNow
The lack of quick response ambulance services in India is no secret. The delay in getting emergency medical assistance can be the difference between life and death. As they jokingly say — In India, pizza is delivered faster than an ambulance.
But IIT Bombay alumni Shikhar Agarwal, Venkatesh Amrutwar and Aditya Makkar-founded ambulance aggregation platform HelpNow to change this status quo. The startup, which calls itself the OYO for ambulance services, aggregates car and cabs from local vendors and makes its own standard additions — GPS, medicines, medical training etc. The company ensures that its ambulances are fully equipped with all required services. HelpNow offers efficient emergency care services 24×7 by reducing the arrival time for ambulances from 50 minutes to 10 minutes.
With the ongoing coronavirus scare, the company has also been working on optimising its services to meet the surge in demand. HelpNow has been converting Uber cabs into emergency first responder vehicles. These cabs are equipped with a patent-pending “Mini-ambulance” kit, which includes most of the services installed in the Basic Life Support ambulance. HelpNow is currently operational in Mumbai and has been noting a 70% MoM growth in its paid services since its launch in August.
Hempstreet Medicare
Several countries have accepted the medical benefits of cannabis and India’s relationship with the plant dates back to 2000 BC, when it was described as one of the five sacred plants in the Vedas. Despite this, there are very few startups or companies looking to explore in this domain. Hempstreet is a cannabis-based ayurvedic medicines maker that aims to serve patients with varied ailments.
The company highlighted that cannabis Sativa plant — which produces marijuana — contains more than 100 different chemicals called cannabinoids. These can be used to treat several diseases and conditions, including chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety, menstrual cramps, sexual disorder and mental health issues, among other things.
In order to prevent the misuses of cannabis-based medicine, the company has integrated a blockchain technology-powered “seed to scale” tracking system. This allows Hempstreet to keep a check on the supply chain process, besides this, it also ensures that all medicines are sold with doctor’s prescription.
ImStrong
With most of us locked up in our homes, all of a sudden there is a spike in underqualified “fitness gurus” on Instagram. Focusing on yourself and your body is the best way to spend time when cooped up at home — as long as you leave it to professionals! ImStrong is an online fitness platform that allows customers to connect with qualified fitness and yoga trainers for both live and pre-recorded sessions.
ImStrong offers two-way interactive live classes, so you don’t have to workout alone even when stuck in quarantine. Bringing real-life workout experience to your phone screen, ImStrong ensures that there is someone keeping a check on the users always.
The company has over 25K customers on its platform and interestingly, the customer acquisition cost is zero. In the last two weeks, the company has managed to grow its revenue by 10x. Meanwhile, even Gurugram-based fitness startup Curefit has taken a sprint to launch an online workout session for its registered users.
Insurance Samadhan
With the coronavirus pandemic taking over the world, several industry experts are estimating a boom in the insurance industry. And with any boom, there are bound to be more than a few complaints from customers.
Bringing over 45 years of experience in the insurance segment and 25 years of experience in the legal space to the table, Deepak Bhuvneshwari Uniyal, Shilpa Arora, Shailesh Kumar, and Sanjay Aggarwal came together to handle all your insurance-related complaints through Insurance Samadhan.
Insurance Samadhan is a B2B startup that operates in several verticals — retail, hospital, micro-finance, corporate and cases through insurance advisors. So far, the company has handled over 12K B2B cases, catering to 10K customers.
InVideo
During his experience of running short-video production platform Visify Books in 2012, Sanket Shah realised one thing — creating videos is a tedious task. Shah, along with Harsh Vakharia and Pankit Chheda, decided to come up with a platform, InVideo, that will make the process of video making even simpler.
In less than a year of its launch, InVideo has already managed to have over 120K users registered on its platform from more than 150 countries. The company’s clientele includes CNBC, Reuters, ATT, Sony Music and many more.
InVideo was also named as the top video creation platform by the G2 Crowd in 2019, against professional platforms such as Adobe and Apple video editor. The company also recently announced its AI-powered video editing platform that comes with an autocorrect feature and suggests improvements in real-time to make the video-making process much more simpler.
Karbon Cards
All entrepreneurs can understand how difficult it is to get a corporate card from banks, especially at an early stage. The money is a short plus, there are so many compliance to follow — fixed deposits, guarantees and all sorts of documents. It’s not really an easy cost for most of the early-stage startups to pay. Now, with the coronavirus pandemic slowing down the business growth, the cost will be much harder to pay now.
But Pei-fu Hsieh and Amit Jangir-founded Karbon Card have a special offering for Indian startups. The company offers corporate cards to the startup that has had at least INR 25 Lakh in funding. These cards are bundled up with several essential tools and packages that come in handy to scale the business. Besides this, Karbon Cards also offers rewards of up to $50K for startups.
Karbon Cards also offers an expense management tool that helps entrepreneurs understand and analyse the company’s expenses and make the necessary cuts. For now, almost 200 Indian startups have been using Karbon Cards including Cred, MoEngage, Jumbotail, MyGate, Jupiter, and several others.
Leap Finance
India is second to China in terms of student enrollment in overseas colleges and universities. But with high capital requirements and uncertainty of finding a suitable job, even student loans are not an easy solution. In addition, there aren’t many lenders that focus on personal finance but not on the education category.
Vaibhav Singh and Arnav Kumar founded lending startup Leap Finance to carve a niche in this category. Singh has had over 12 years of experience at banks and several fintech companies, whereas Kumar has worked with Deutsche Bank, SAIF Partners and also founded GoZoomo.
Leap Finance offers low-interest-rate loans to students, who are planning to study abroad. It relies on proprietary underwriting technology to offer direct unsecured loans to students, who usually do not have any credit history. It disburses loans in USD so that students do not have to pay the exchange rate in INR.
“Borrowing in Indian currency is more expensive than the foreign currency. You don’t only get the benefit of FX but you also get a substantially cheaper loan,” cofounder Singh told Inc42.
These loans cover full tuition cost, stay and incidental costs as well. The company also provides student insurance, if the tuition fee does not offer that. The company has partnered with over 150 colleges in the US for nearly 1000 STEM courses.
Lokal
With home-stuck consumers making a great captive audience, digital media and entertainment startups have been seeing good growth. Especially among the local and regional news media platforms as people seek information about the state of affairs in their immediate vicinity.
Y Combinator-backed fledgeling hyperlocal news platform Lokal has been working hard to spread local news through citizen journalists. During this period, the company has noted a 20% additional growth, all because of the drop in the newspaper circulation.
Besides this, the company has also been working closely with local authorities to spread more information regarding local development and circulated. Lokal claims to be the “only channel” for local information dissemination in certain districts. The company is currently operational in close to 34 districts across three South Indian states — Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu.
Meddo
Foodpanda cofounder Saurabh Kochhar and Cygnus super-speciality hospital chain cofounder Dr Naveen Nishchal entered the healthtech startup domain back in 2018 with their latest offering — Meddo. Meddo is a digital platform that provides both online and offline healthcare services, which includes doctor appointments, diagnostics tests and many more.
Meddo enables services through partnerships with standalone doctor-led establishments and accredited testing labs. So far, the company has on-boarded over 400 doctors and 200 clinics in Delhi NCR, along with 250 trained clinical staff for providing in-clinic and home-based test sample collections. Meddo claims to have served more than 150K customers so far.
Despite its shortcomings, the healthcare industry of India is said to be one of the fastest-growing sectors in terms of rising income, health awareness, and access to insurance. Besides this, the increase in lifestyle and stress-related diseases have also been giving the healthtech sector a boost. As per an IBEF report, the Indian healthcare market is estimated to be valued at $372 Bn by 2022.
Myelin Foundry
Video streaming services are slowly and gradually replacing cable TV and networks. The amount of quality content and flexibility that consumers experience with over-to-top (OTT) platforms is unmatched by the traditional media heavyweights. But what if there was a company trying to further enhance the already near-perfect experience the OTT platforms have to offer?
Founded by Dr. Gopichand Katragadda, Ganesh Suryanarayanan, and Aditi Olemann, Myelin Foundy builds artificial intelligence algorithms on video, voice, and sensor data for edge devices. Myelin’s deep learning frameworks are said to have applications in various sectors including media & entertainment, health & wellness, and national security.
Myelin highlighted that video streaming faces several technical challenges such as buffering issues, bandwidth issues and several other issues arising out of the limited control over the quality of experience. It also claims to be working on solutions that could reduce the time and cost to market for video and gaming content creators. Further, in the field of health and wellness, the deeptech startup claims to help quantify the state of wellness, in addition to leveraging AI and advanced sensors for measuring inflammation. Moreover, it is expected to solve the problem of limited data availability for AI model training, and utilising sparse data AI techniques.
Nuo
Nuo, backed by Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau and Citrus Pay cofounder Jitendra Kumar, is one such startup that allows lending and borrowing of cryptocurrency. Founded by Ratnesh Ray, Siddharth Verma and Varun Deshpande, Nuo has given out loans with $27.77 Mn. The company allows users to lens and borrow using various digital assets as Bitcoin, Ethereum, DAI, LINK and more,
The company is a decentralised finance application for borrowing and lending. Besides credit, Nuo also allows users to margin-trade with over 30 trading pairs across four markets.
ODA Class
With the Indian government announcing a complete lockdown till April 15, the Indian edtech market has got a massive boost. ODA Class is working to fill the school gap for students in class VI-XII, along with the ones studying for competitive exams like JEE, and NEET.
Founded by Shushant Srivastav, ODA Classes connects students with teachers and allows them to enter live classes even with the low-speed internet connections. The company follows a dual teacher approach, where a professor provides online educational sessions to students and another assistant professor connects with the student to clarify any doubts. These assistant professors clear doubts through online chats and also guide the students further.
ODA Class has registered over 1 Mn users within 50 days of its launch in November 2019 and aims to add more than 10 Mn users by the end of 2020.
QTalk
QTalk plans to make normal telephonic calls much more engaging and entertaining. For this, the company would allow its users to play games like Ludo, Hangman, Scrabble, Tic Tac Toe, Crossword, Guess the Celebrity and others to pass their times at home.
Meanwhile, the company has also developed a solution to reduce disruption on such calls. The company believes that with the current quarantine and lockdown situation, people have started getting more aware about the existence of such platforms, evident with the sudden popularity of the Epic Games-owned Houseparty app.
Rage Coffee
Brewing a more power-packed version of everyone’s favourite caffeinated beverage, Rage Coffee claims to produce coffee with only natural ingredients and without any chemicals.
The company’s coffees are filled with important compounds such as Tea extract L-Theanine, fossil Ginkgo Biloba, L-Glutamine, and Panax Ginseng, among others. Founded by Bharat Sethi, the company sells its coffees through ecommerce platforms such as Amazon and over 400 offline stories.
Besides this, the company also banks on institutional buyers and other players in the food services industry such as hotels, restaurants, cafes. Even though the entire institutional and foodservice industry is at a halt, the FMCG brand will be able to get back on track once the pandemic situation gets better. Rage Coffee is founded by Bharat Sethi, who has also founded other startups like PosterGully and iDecorama. PosterGully was acquired by Sumit Gandhi and Manish Gandhi, promoters of Asian Business Exhibitions and Conferences (ABEC).
Redwing Aerospace Lab
Drones are definitely about to be the next big thing in India, especially after the Indian government has also been looking to make them available for commercial use. Talking solely about the current situation — with social distancing limiting human interactions — drones can very easily help businesses minimise human contact in deliveries.
Anshul Sharma, Rishabh Gupta, and Arunabha Bhattacharya-founded Redwing Aerospace Lab have been working to enable medical delivery through drones since its launch in 2018. The startup aims to make drone delivery easy, cheap and reliable for the Indian market.
The company has received over 15 awards in the USA and Asia-Pacific region for best performance drones. Besides this, Redwing Aerospace Lab has also been facilitated by industry giants such as NASA, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Airbus. It is also one of the startups that is working with the Uttarakhand state government to enable the delivery of drugs, vaccines and blood packets to remote areas.
Strata
Coming from a real estate background, Sudarshan Lodha and Priyanka Rathore noted that several people make really poor choices when it comes to making bets in the real estate space. While HNIs and private equity firms make over 15% returns in property investments, an average investor is stuck with a meagre 4% returns. That’s where they decided to start Strata to help the inexperienced buyers in making better choices.
Strata focuses on the pain point the buyers feel due to lack of experience, liquidity, data and the capital required to invest in prime properties. The company simplifies real estate investments, by allowing investors to invest in properties and plots without spending large sums of money.
Currently, Strata has commercial assets under management (AUM) worth INR 60 Cr and office assets worth INR 18 Cr. It is underway to quadruple the AUM to reach INR 250 Cr by the end of 2020. Besides this, Strata, founded in 2019, has over 2K users on its platform and 200 clients. An IBEF report highlights that the real estate sector in India is expected to reach a market size of $1 Tn by 2030 from $120 Bn in 2017 and contribute 13% of the country’s GDP by 2025.
Unbox Robotics
With ecommerce proving to be a lifeline amid lockdowns and quarantines, there’s a sudden spike in online orders and ecommerce companies have been forced to prioritise faster deliveries of essentials. But with such heavy demand and limited supply, managing the logistics and warehousing is a big pain point.
This is where Unbox Robotics comes into the picture to provide its AI-powered logistics automation system. Founded by Pramod Ghadge and Shahid Memon, Unbox is looking to replace existing warehousing solutions which are inefficient in terms of space utilisation, installation time and the capital involved.
The startup helps ecommerce and logistics players automate and improve their operations on-demand even with limited (50% to 70%) footprint and capital. The company claims that its solutions allow its clients to make deliveries much faster.
Zealthy
Talking about “women’s problems” is considered taboo in most of India, especially as you go deeper into the Tier II and Tier III regions of the country. Digital healthcare solutions are anyway hard to find in such regions, and finding solutions that specifically cater to women is even more difficult. Rishi Malhotra and Akhil Gupta have been working since 2019 to take such healthcare services to women of such regions.
Zealthy is a women-only healthcare platform that allows women to understand healthcare-related issues in regional languages. Share and learn about health issues in their local languages. The digital platform connects users with reliable healthcare providers for specialities such as maternity, infertility, cosmetic interventions, and others, which are very specific to women. Keeping in mind that its target audiences are the women from the grassroots of Tier II and Tier III regions, Zealthy also ensured that the prices are affordable enough.
So far, the company has marked its presence in over 15 cities and has also partnered with several big healthcare providers such as maternity, infertility, cosmetic interventions, etc. at affordable prices.
If you want to get featured or refer a startup which we should review for this list, write to us at editor@inc42.com
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