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As the curtain closes on another exciting year, we at Inc42, like always, pause for a while to look back, contemplate, analyse, predict and come up with our series of year-end stories that would perfectly sum up the past year and offer near-perfect predictions for the next year (our predictive algorithm is top-notch). This article is a part of this endeavour.
The late American best-selling author, physician, producer, director and screenwriter, Michael Crichton, once famously said, “They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything.” “They” were absolutely right; it’s all a matter of keeping track of things and that’s why our predictions are spot on.
Last year, we made a series of predictions about the top startups and apps to watch out for in 2015. We don’t just predict and leave it at that; we put our predictions to test and understand if these startups and apps really kicked ass or fell flat on their asses. This article is a progress report of the enterprise startups that we claimed would fare really well in 2015 – let’s see how they performed in the past one year.
Silverpush
SilverPush is a target advertising startup which uses its mobile app product and helps business owners who experience from post-download dormancy & abandoned transactions. They aggregate and analyse multiple sources of data, such as app usage, location, social graph and search history and identify the most lucrative opportunities to deliver targeted advertisements. They claim to hear “ultrasonic inaudible voices” which helps them recognize the user and provide a specific advertisement.
Industry: Ad Targeting Software
City: Mountain View, CA
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: In 2014, it raised $100k from GSF Accelerator and 500 Startups; and $1.5 Mn from IDG Ventures and Unilazer Ventures. This year, it raised additional $1.25 Mn from M&S Partners Pte Ltd in Pre Series A round.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: In 2014, the revenue was about $1.05 Mn (INR 7 Cr.) & in 2015 the revenue has gone up to about $3.7 Mn (INR 25 Cr.)
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: The number of clients have doubled.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 20 team members in 2014 to 50 in 2015
Founders: Hitesh Chawla, Alex Modon, Mudit Seth
Founded In: 2012
Frrole
Frrole is a big data startup which specialises in social-data analytics and provides data APIs and custom dashboards to brands, internet products and media companies. Starting with Twitter data 2 years back, it has added Facebook and Instagram analysis in its arsenal this year. Analysing these social conversations contextually, it is able to generate deep real-time insights about topics, categories and the people behind conversations, including their demographics, interest graphs, personality, segmentation and social activity analysis.
The company has acquired customers in US, Singapore and Australia this year, signed a partnership with Facebook & launched its audience intelligence product – all in 2015
Industry: Social Media, Big Data
City: Bangalore
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: $245K in Angel Round in April 2014 from Sharad Sharma, Rajan Anandan and Manav Garg. Currently, the company is in the process of talking to investors for its next round.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: Its annualised revenue run rate has increased from $260k last year to close to half a million USD this year; almost 100% growth. The company has been growing at 52% Q-on-Q CAGR since the last two years.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: By the end of 2014, it had 24 clients, and by the end of 2015, it would have worked with 44 clients – a little less than 100% growth in terms of no. of clients.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 6 team members in 2014 to 10 full-time members in 2015, plus a few freelancers, interns and contract workers.
Founders: Abhishek Vaid, Amarpreet Kalkat, Nishith Sharma
Founded In: 2012
Voxapp
VoxApp platform enables brands and research companies to undertake consumer feedback for market research on brand awareness, ad recall, etc on the mobile phone. It charges a fee from research companies for completed research samples. Voxapp aims to resolve key problems such as inaccuracy in human collection of responses, turnaround time for nationwide data collection and enhancing access to the affluent audiences which can only found in offices and are out of bounds of field surveyor.
Voxapp was shutdown in the early part of this year and the entire team is working on a new venture called Loanzen.
Industry: Big Data Analytics
City: New Delhi
Funding: Blume Ventures and Palaash Ventures, and angel investors including Sachin Bhatia, co-founder at MakeMyTrip; Sidharth Rao, CEO and co-founder at Webchutney among others.
Founders: Ritesh Kadmawala, Madhu Sudhan
Founded In: 2013
Tookitaki
Tookitaki aims to build the world’s largest audience predicting engine which helps marketer understand their audience behaviour at any moment. They have a three step technology which is build on the motive to deliver the same in real time. These are namely, Listen which queries unstructured data across web to identify viral and engaging information, Understand which uses semantic mapping to provide inferences about audience’s engagement, Recommend which provides actionable audience insight based on identified content.
The company now has two lines of business – Facebook Content Management Platform and Decision Support Platform. In September this year, Facebook appointed TookiTaki as its first Indian marketing partner. Earlier this month, the company was shortlisted to be a part of Aditya Birla Group’s 20-day incubation program,
Industry: Social Media Advertising
City: Kolkata
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: $25K in Seed Round from Ravi Trivedi, Miten Sampat and Anand Ladsariya. $200K in Seed Round from Nihal Mehta, Rahul Garg and more. $200K in Seed Round from Blume Ventures India Internet Group, Harvard Angels and Centre for Innovation Incubation Entrepreneurship (CIIE) Ahmedabad in August 2013. $1 Mn in Seed Round from Blume Ventures, Rebright Ventures and Jungle Ventures in January 2015.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: 200% increase.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: 100% growth.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 10 team members in 2014 to 24 members in 2015, with offices in India and Singapore.
Founders: Abhishek Chatterjee, Jeeta Bandopadhyay
Founded In: 2012
HackerEarth
The hunt for talent has taken a turn to India. It’s no longer about Silicon Valley, India has multinationals and a booming startup ecosystem which require engineers(read: programmers). HackerEarth is looking to make the process of fathoming a person’s talent easier by programming challenges. They either design ‘challenges’ on their own based on skills like front-end development or hire someone to design them. The whole process is to create a profile, enter into a challenge, get an offer and get hired. It filters out best from the rest.
In January this year, the company launched HackerEarth Sprint, a tool that allows organisers conduct hackathons easily by minimizing the effort and time required. Aadhar Hackathon conducted by HackerEarth, in association with NASSCOM, on January 10 -11, 2015 became the first event to be hosted on this platform.
Industry: Software
City: Bangalore
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Till date, the company has raised $620K in funding – $500k from Angelprime and GSF SuperAngels in a seed round and $120K in an accelerator round. Both the rounds were raised in 2014.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: The company’s revenue has grown 10 times.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: From 20 large enterprise customers in 2014, the company has acquired over 100 customers in 2015. “The total number of recruiters signed up on HackerEarth have gone from 1000 to more than 2500,” said Sachin.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 25 team members in 2014 to 70 in 2015
Founders: Sachin Gupta, Vivek Prakash
Founded In: 2012
Zapstitch/PipeMonk
Zapstitch is a “Cloud Data Integration” platform that seamlessly integrates data between various cloud apps like shopify, Quickbooks etc. It does away with the need of manual accounting thus avoiding chances of any human error which in turn provides greater efficiency. It automates the entire copy-paste manual data transfer process for SMEs and enterprises. It acts mediator between various SaaS applications and a company can connect this to multiple apps, define the data that it wants to sync and schedule the same. Zapstitch gets this data from the source apps and then automates it from one SaaS app to another.
It has been rebranded to PipeMonk
Industry: Web Tools and Apps
City: Bangalore
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: $100K in Seed Round and an undisclosed amount in Venture Round from Anupam Mittal and others. This year in May, the company raised $2 Mn in a Pre Series A round led by Helion Venture Partners.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: The company has over 400 clients, majority of whom are based in the US and Canada.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: It currently has a team of 31 people, including the co-founders.
Founders: Satya Padmanabham, Ravi Madabhushi
Founded In: December 2013
ShieldSquare
ShieldSquare is a SaaS-based solution that uses a combination of behaviour pattern analysis, device and network profiling to detect and protect online businesses against web scraping and malware attacks by competitors and unauthorised third parties, thereby increasing revenues, improving site performance and enhancing customer experience. The product analyses millions of traffic requests daily and uses Big Data analytics to identify and help block suspicious, unwanted and abusive behaviour.
Industry: Information Security
City: Bangalore
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: $350K in Angel Funding from Samir Sood, Pallav Nadhani and more in October 2014. It also raised funding from StartupXseed Ventures in August 2015.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: The company’s revenue has grown 20 times.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: The client numbers have grown 10 times.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: Team has tripled in size
Founders: Rakesh Thatha, Vasanth Kumar, Pravan Thatha, Jyoti Kakatkar, Srikanth Konijeti – the management team remains the same.
Founded In: 2013
LimeTray
People no longer like to wait for their reservations by standing in queues or making a reservation on phone as it can take upto minutes whereas online reservation provides you the same within seconds. LimeTray is such a startup which helps restaurants market, engage and sell to more customer online. The startups recognizes that restaurants shut down due to lack of reach to enough customers. It provides services like online reservations, content aggregation, business listing and social media marketing without having to do a single line of code.
Industry: Business Development, Internet Marketing and Local Business
City: New Delhi
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Series A round on 1 October 2014 by Matrix partners India. No new rounds this year.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: The company has acquired over 1500 merchants across India & Middle East as paying customers.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: The company has a team of over 60 employees.
Founders: Piyush Jain, Akhilesh Bali
Founded In: 2013
Piquor/RepUp
Piquor Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has a flagship product “Piquor Booth” which is a touch screen kiosk that enables clicking high quality digital pictures and sending them instantly through email. It bridges the gap between outdoor media and online marketing such that a company’s “key message” is interactively delivered & spreads virally and effortlessly through social networks. Piquor has tied up with brands in Gurgaon and Bangalore and the booths have registered more 2,00,000 unique interactions. More than 80,000 people have shared the photos on Facebook.
The company has been rebranded to RepUp.
Industry: Marketing and Advertising
City: Gurgaon
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: $50,000 seed funding each in January 2013 and October 2014. Raised an undisclosed amount in a Pre Series A round from Indian Angel Network in November 2015.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: Its revenue has been growing at a rate of 50% every quarter.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: The company added over 100+ hotels in India and Europe in last 6 months – including Sheraton, ITC, Deltin Casino, Galaxy.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: It has a team of 24 people across Mumbai, Gurgaon and Bangalore.
Founders: Pranjal Prashar, Vineet Chauhan and Arpit Gupta. According to Pranjal, more people from NIFT and IIT Delhi have joined the management team.
Founded In: 2011
GreedyGame
Free and addictive games are a boon and ads disrupting the same are a bane. GreedyGame aims at enabling branding on mobile games grab highest engagement time of the consumers and also enables advertisers looking to tap this potential. They deliver dynamic and native ads which vary on the basis of location and time the game is played. It helps brands get a channel to reach out to potential audience on mobile devices through the most engaging medium and gamers enjoy the games without any interference in game play.
The company was selected for the Google for Entrepreneurs’ Blackbox Connect program in September 2014.
Industry: Mobile Advertising
City: New Delhi
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Funded by TLabs. It also raised an angel round in September 2015.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: Last year, the company was in product development stage. “We have been in the revenue stage for the past 5 months, the revenues are currently growing 50% MoM,” said Arpit.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: “We are working with brands like Pepsi, Gatorade, Fastrack, Vespa, Quikr, Flipkart, Ola etc as advertisers, and top game developers in india including Nazara, Octro, Reliance and Playizzon,” said Arpit.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 3 team members in 2014 to 12 members in 2015.
Founders: Arpit Jain, Arink Verma
Founded In: 2013
Wizrocket/CleverTap 
WizRocket is a startup which provides with user behavior analysis and is a targeting tool that helps every size of web businesses interact with their users across offline and online mediums. It can reach out to customers via web messaging, push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS or Email. They let websites discover the who, what and why on their own websites and mobile apps and then apply behavior targeting to improve retention, engagement and conversion rates.
Wizrocket has been rebranded to CleverTap.
Industry: Consumer Behaviour and Business Analytics
City: Palo Alto, CA
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: In August this year, the company raised $8 Mn in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners. Last year it had raised a Series Seed round from Accel Partners for $1.6 Mn – total funding so far $9.6 Mn.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: “We’re still pre-revenue. We’ve published our pricing plans publicly. We’ll start billing customers from Q1 2016 onwards,” said Anand.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: The company has over 1500 customers worldwide. “Some of our notable customers include – BookMyShow, Zoomcar, Ixigo, Faasos, Voonik, Zee Tv, DealsPlus, Club Mahindra etc. We currently see a 50:50 split of customers between India and the US. Today, we send 80+ Mn notifications out daily,” according to Anand.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: The company has a team strength of 30 people spread across Sunnyvale (HQ), Los Angeles, New York and Mumbai. It recently hired Paul Brody – cofounder of Sococo, an online workplace designed for distributed teams – as its chief product officer.
Founders: Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas, Suresh Kondamudi – the management team is intact
Founded In: 2013
Kartrocket
Ecommerce has turned taller than Burj Khalifa, metaphorically. After giving cutthroat competition to brick & mortar shops, these offline sellers have found a boon. SMEs can now open their own ecommerce website and to do so Kartrocket works for them. It is a provider of DIY ecommerce platform. Kartrocket provides storefront designs, domestic as well as international payment options integrated with logistics. It helps these SMEs sell across mobile and web devices. The platform is already integrated with eBay, Amazon and Snapdeal to allow multi-channel sales.
Industry: SaaS
City: New Delhi
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Angel funding on 23 July 2013 from 5ideas and 500 Startups, $2 Mn in Series A Round on 21 October 2014 from Nirvana Venture Advisors, 500 Startups and others. No news rounds this year.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: The revenue is grown six times.
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: The number of clients has doubled.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 50 team members in 2014 to 130 members in 2015.
Founders: Sahil Goel, Gautam Kapoor – the management is intact.
Founded In: 2012
Nowfloats
NowFloats is a startups which helps Small and Medium Businesses to ‘float’ online i.e help those business in providing an online existence. The most common and familiar method of SMS is used to update the website and same can be delivered to customers of the business. Also, its algorithm ensures highest discoverability through intelligent Search Engine Optimization(SEO).
The startup recognizes the need of providing Indian Businesses some sort of online identity and thus makes it easier for them to do so with the easiest way.They claim that SMEs can create a website in 13 minutes with just four text messages.
This year, the company launched a new initiative called Digital Desh Drive as a part of its mission to get every local business online by 2020.
Industry: Location Based Services
City: Hyderabad
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Undisclosed Amount in seed round of funding in August 2013 from Mumbai Angels, Blume Ventures and Hyderabad Angels. In February this year, it raised Series A funding from Omidyar Network and existing investors.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: Revenue Growth has been 6X
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: Dec 2014 From 32,000 in Dec 2014 to 190,000 in Dec 2015 – registering a growth of 494%
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 74 team members in 2014 to 204 in 2015
Founders: Jasminder Singh Gulati, Nitin Jain, Ronak Kumar, Neeraj Sabharwal
Founded In: 2012
Altizon
No matter how skilled humans get, they can still be erroneous. To get ahead of this Altizon systems has developed a family of sensor data appliances and SDKs that drive data from sensors in Industrial Equipment to their flagship Datonis platform. The platform provides a device cloud and performs large-scale data ingestion. The company claims that their platform can handle a billion events a day from a million devices. It can be used for Industrial, Health, Consumer Electronics and Retail pruposes.
Industry: Software
City: Pune
Current Stage: Operational
Funding: Undisclosed amount in Institutional Seed Funding from Hive, Infuse and Persistent on 17 September 2014.
Increase in Revenue in the past one year: Revenue has grown by 250%
Growth in terms of clients acquired since 2014: Over 100 enterprise users adopted its flagship platform product Datonis.
Current team strength vs. last year’s: From 8 team members in 2014 to 15 in 2015
Founders: Vinay Nathan, Ranjit Nair, Yogesh Kulkarni – the management is intact.
Founded In: 2013
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