Spread Across Categories Such As EdTech, AgriTech, EnterpriseTech These Rajasthan Startups Are Making The City Proud
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Once called the ‘Land of kings’, and known majorly as a tourist destination, India’s largest state Rajasthan is now posing as a top contender in DIPP’s state ranking challenge. Being home to over 750 startups, multiple accelerator as well as incubator groups, the state government is leaving no stone unturned to pave way for a robust startup infrastructure to nurture innovation and foster the spirit of entrepreneurship in the state.
While an attempt has been made to set the right direction for the startup ecosystem stakeholders with the startup as well as IT/ITES policies, considerable efforts have been taken to strengthen the entrepreneurship roots right from the ground up in the state.
For instance, in the month of January, the state information technology and communications department in Rajasthan announced its plans to help promote startups by college students with an aim to support 500 of the top student developers to create startups.
iStart, Rajasthan Digifest, Startup hackathons, Rajasthan IT Day: the list of initiatives tagged under the Rajasthan state government is increasing continuously. This is further attracting the investors as well as the startups to set up their base in Rajasthan’s Tier II cities like Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota and more.
Home to growth and late-stage startups like GirnarSoft, Gemporia, CultureAlley, Finova Capital and more, the land of kings has had its way of leading development by examples. Therefore, Inc42 brings to you an exhaustive compilation of early-stage startups from Rajasthan, pulling in innovative concepts with the potential to rise and shine on the global front.
Here Are The 26 Early Stage Rajasthan-Based Startups To Look For In 2018
Founded in 2014 by Vivek Pathak, Sharad Bansal, OP Godara and Kapil Arya, SRJNA is a hybrid education model using real and virtual teaching aids to impart 5D classroom experiential learning and smart online assessment platform with deep analytics for K-10 students, teachers, and parents.
The startup helps schools to set up and manage innovation labs and tinkering labs. It is working to foster curiosity and invention among kids through a “learning by doing” approach.
Srjna, a brand of Elation Edtech Pvt Ltd, initiated by four alumni of IITs and XLRI is now a team of 15 enthusiasts who want to make a disruptive change in school education.
It has developed over 200+ innovative, economically feasible and portable subject learning physical models for schools that are worried about the low quality of learning outcomes through conventional teaching methods.
The Jaipur-based startup began with an aim to enable people to shed the shackles of mainstream tourism and experience travel through culture and tradition.
ToRoots provides a supporting ecosystem to co-create experiential travel products. The objective is to help travellers easily discover and book unique verified travel experiences created by authenticated escape artists. Their specialties are: experiential travel, adventure travel, rural travel, nature & wildlife travel, eco and agri travel, and spiritual and religion travel
Founded by Naveen Meena and Mohit Sharmain 2015, it provides experiences of diverse nature such as camping on an small island, deserts, nomadic life and walking through the snow or cycling along the hilly regions of Kerala, Rajasthan or the Himalayas.
Myly is a cloud-based mobile app that enables communication and financial transaction between schools and parents while offering a learning platform for students. The communication includes messages, attendance, homework, and images. The app has partnered with mobile wallet Paytm to enable regular fees and activity fees payment.
The app which was created by Gaurav Mundra and Madhup Bansal in 2014 acts as a digital diary, with rich communication features and facility to share images and videos. It enables a two-way communication between students or parents and educators.
The app is also useful to universities, coaching centres, tuition and hobby classes. The app went operational in March 2015. It claims to have 120 schools on its platform with 30,000 students.
ScooNews is a media platform for the education sector. The platform helps the stakeholders in the education sector to remain updated with the latest updates. Headquartered in Jaipur, it was founded by Ravi Santlani and specialises in education news, K-12 education news, school news, and edtech.
ScooNews is present across mediums and formats – print, online, online TV (currently on YouTube.) The independent online TV channel launch is planned for July 2018. It also conducts events – all focused on the education sector.
In an interaction with Inc42, Ravi further claimed that ScooNews is currently running with a monthly print run of 50K copies with a reader base of over half a million. The team further aims to enhance its content curation and creation capabilities and help educators stay on top of the game with best practices across the globe.
Freshokartz Agri Products is aimed at becoming a one-stop-shop for all the fruits and vegetable needs to run food businesses. Based out of Jaipur, it works on basis of the on-demand procurement model to provide the farm fresh fruits and vegetables directly procured from farms.
The startup which was founded in 2016 by Nagendra Yadav and Rajendra Lora operates in Jaipur, Rajasthan. It brings fresh farm produces directly from the farms and does the sorting, grading and packing as per customers order but orders need to be placed at least one day ahead. It only delivers to hotels, restaurants, cafe, retailers and other commercial kitchens.
The Jaipur-based startup is aimed at becoming a one-stop solution for pet lovers.
Founded in 2016 by Ashish Chhanwal and Ankita Singh, it features animals for selection according to the breeds for families looking for pets. The website also listed a variety of services for the pets such as pet hostel, pet walkers, pet health, etc.
It also aids the pet owners to learn about food and nourishment for their pets along with spreading an awareness about their pets’ health via veterinary services, etc.
Brickcart is a Jaipur-based startup that provides a digital medium for homeowners to design, build and decorate their dream homes. It is an online platform to meet every need related to home construction or renovation.
Interestingly, the website reflects live quotes of a wide range of building materials along with the total available stock. Brickcart claims to be the largest marketplace for all home construction and home renovation related needs.
They provide services for “bulk deals” and ‘turnkey solutions’, which includes design, labour services and materials.
The startup, founded in 2016 by Atal Khandelwal, Sumit Sonkia, Vivek Dhanopia, and Brijesh Sharma, also offers building materials listed on their website from the top brands. Some of the construction categories they work in are: building material, kitchen, plumbing, bath and faucet, wood and plywood, sanitary, walls and flooring etc.
ETACUDER is a Udaipur-based startup which has launched an AI-powered digital tool called munshiG to meet every type of accounting needs of small vendors.
The startup was founded by Nishant and Prateek in 2017 and its software provides a 360-degree accounting solution to retailers such that billing, accounting, book keeping and filing taxes, mitigating the need to go to an accountant.
The three main services catered by munshiG include invoicer for businesses, POS for vendors and ERP for startups.
The app is also helpful to generate bills on the voice input for kirana vendors, make records of purchases of customers. The interesting part of the app is that ‘Purchase Bills’ can be transferred to customers through an e-mode via SMS, email, etc. on the spot, with which customers can track the records of their purchases bill. Vendors can select payment mode during purchases and can see daily, weekly, monthly and even an all-time insights of overall usage pattern of payment mode.
The Green Bharat is a social project, focussing on of environment and employment. In this project, anyone can plant as many as tree(s) and can also track location and growth of the Tree at his/her home.
The prime objective of the project is to enable the people to plant trees, who don’t own land and don’t have sufficient time for the plantation. The plantation can be done as many times as they want by ordering plants online through Green Bharat App even they can track the plantation process as well.
To the farmers who own land, the Green Bharat will provide free plants and offer some money for the plantation till the plant become fully grown. Of course, the farmer will have complete ownership of the plants and its products (fruits, etc.).
The startup is based out of Jaipur.
Jodhpur-based Cattle Mettle was founded by Nikhil Bohra as a social venture with a mission to increase the current productivity of India cattle. It is operated by the startup Krimanshi Technologies Private Limited which was launched on June 2015.
Currently, farmers rely on intermittent supply of green and dry fodder, and food grains which do not fulfill the nutritional requirements of cattle. Also, the concentrate cattle feed available in the market is expensive for these small farmers.
The startup aims to provide a solution to address these challenges by incorporating locally available resources into the food chain of cattle which are not being used at present. Interestingly, the startup utilises farm waste, mandi waste, forest waste, etc. and based on the nature of the waste, develops cattle feeds.
The startup is yet to launch and is currently engaged in the groundwork. As part of its pilot programme, it has already tied up with organisations such as Ambuja foundations, who have reached over 2000 farmers with their farm-based products. In 2017, it had received a funding of $261K (INR 1.7 Cr) from Startup Oasis.
As shared by Nikhil with Inc42, Cattle Mettle is currently working with a team of four full time and 10 part time employees and with its cattle feed, there has been seen a 20-25% increase in milk production, and milk fat. There are also plans to scale the operations to Jaipur.
Founded in 2017 by Prashant Pandey and Gaurav Sanghai, Bodhi AI is an edtech startup based out of Jaipur. It offers an AI-based test creation engine which instantly and automatically creates tests that are personalised and customised for each student based on their performance and learning abilities.
The startup also creates strategies best suited to learning pattern of each and every student. It is currently serving coaching institutes which help students prepare for government job examinations including SSC, Railways, IAS as well as Army examinations. It also helps colleges and institutions to run student programs for aptitude examinations in order to prepare them for campus placements.
As shared by Prashant with Inc42, Bodhi AI currently has the partnership with 10 leading educational institutes of Rajasthan wherein five of them come from the Army background. Also, there are 16K students registered on the platform.
Urban Kisan was established in 2015 by Ankit Rawat and Keshav Modi as a full-scale hydroponic farm at Jaipur. The word, ‘hydroponic’, comes from Latin and means working water. Simply put, it is the art of growing plants without soil.
As implied, the startup is thus working to find ways to making organic farming more effective. It claims to utilise new age techniques to grow the crops at a 30% faster rate and with 80% less water. And the most interesting part is, the crops donot require soil to grow.
The farms are enabled by latest soil-less vertical farming technology of hydroponics developed by NASA as research to grow food naturally in outer space.
Majorly, the startup is serving the needs of the top hotels, multi-cuisine restaurants and retail outlets. It is only by 2016, the team took their first order from Dubai and Malaysia, for the supply of strawberry, herbs and microgreens.
Jodhpur-based Kooky is an inspiration for Tier II startups who aim to make big and scale globally. Maker of digital products, the Kooky team specialises in premium UX/UI design, mobile app, games development, website design & development, animation & art, video production and digital marketing.
Till 2013, Kooky founders Ravindra Prajapati and Gulshan Solanki were working solely on games development. With time, they got a big client and collaborated with them for games. By 2014-15, they formed a private limited company and expanded to international market.
Prior working experience in a startup gave them the idea to help other people in their MVPs by putting their personal interest to make a successful and outstanding products. Now, Kooky team has more than five partners across the world and yet counting the success.
Apart from India, the company has the presence in Australia, Nigeria, the USA and the UK.
Based out of Pink City Jaipur, the startup endeavours to inculcate cycling as a habit. Founded by Pooja Vijay, just seven months back, Pink Paddles found its inspiration from traditional India.
The earlier generations in India found cycle as the medium for day to day commute. With rapid civilisation, we have now switched to faster mode of commutes. However, while saving time, we have paved the way for several health disorders as well as pollution.
Pink Paddles thus aims to play its part by serving a threefold purpose of reducing environmental pollution, motivating people for a healthy living and at the same time earning its revenues out from the venture.
The startup provides cycles to morning and evening walkers of their choice at very nominal charges at the major gardens and parks of the city. The team of four claims to have a huge fleet of top international brands cycles available on first come first serve rule. It also provides “The Tandem cycles”, with two seats and four pedals.
As Pooja shared with Inc42, she has already reached break even in a short span of time and is now looking to expand Pink Paddles outside Jaipur. She also claims to have motivated 6000+ people so far to cycle and on an average 50 people cycle daily with Pink Paddles’ fleet of high-end international cycles.
Working with the motto of “Friend-ism is the new Tourism!!!”, India OuttaBox is aiming to bring customisation to the Indian travel industry particularly for the foreign tourists. The startup was founded in 2016 by Vinny K Williams, who aims to provide an umbrella of services to the foreign visitors including tourism, business, education or medical reasons.
From customising the travel itinerary to making available comfortable stays with Indian families, the startup is doing everything digitally, thus making it easier for the travellers to make the most out their India trip.
At the same time, it is also partnering with different service providers be it hotels, ticket booking, mobile sim providers and call them as ‘Travel Dost’ on Indian Outtabox platform. It has also partnered with AVIS, which is a global car rental service provider and has a fleet of more than 450K cars.
Parallel Campus is a cloud campus automation platform, where the team is on mission to improve communication between all entity of educational ecosystem to reduce pressure, improve classroom attention, discipline and simplify and automate all aspects of operations for Campus.
Parallel Campus, thus, provides a single centralised platform for managing a campus and give a single point of contact for all-teachers, students as well as parents.
At the same time, the startup also offers enterprise SaaS services, to manage day to day campus processes including inventory management, payroll processing, digital library and more.
At present, Parallel campus claims to have over 80K students and a strong, global network of channel partnerships with customers in more than 50 countries. Also, the platform currently supports over 12 languages.
Inspired by Indonesia’s GoJek, Bykup, a bike pooling startup, went live in August 2016 with a simple motto of connecting a biker and a rider on prescribed city commute routes.
The Jaipur-based company managed to raise $200K in angel funding in two tranches of $100K in January and October 2016 respectively. It is currently operational in Jaipur, Hyderabad as well as Pune.
With India being the second biggest two-wheeler market in the world, targeting Tier II and Tier III markets particularly, the founders, Shashank Kansal and Ruchir Gupta, are aiming to leverage the existing on-road fleet of two-wheelers and 530 Mn smartphone users (to reach by end of 2018) in India.
The team is insistent on pushing the service for the bikers as a source for second income is targeting the emerging 18-30-year-old population from non-urban India. They are also eyeing the global economy with a Master List of 100 cities in Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe.
Jaipur-based crowdfunding platform, Dream Wallets, owned by SeedLogix India Pvt Ltd, was founded in July 2015 by Nikhil Agrawal and Manish Harodia.
It is a reward-based online crowdfunding platform and showcases initiatives on diverse interests relating to short films, documentaries, arts and crafts, social causes, photography, environment, film and video, technology, food, etc.
Dream Wallets provides direct linkages with donors such as corporates, NRIs and individuals.The company claims to have over a thousand registered users who regularly endorse and support the projects listed on its platform.
In May 2016, the startup secured an undisclosed amount of funding in a Seed round led by Rakesh Gupta and Aditya Aggarwal. Siddharth Banerjee, Vikas Ranjan, Anshul Jindal, Sunil Koul, and Sanjeev Agrawal also participated in this round.
Jaipur-based Xatalog Technologies, founded in 2016 by Aditya Kedia and Deepak Sharma is envisioned towards simplifying the online catalog creation and management. With millennial customers ruling the digital businesses all over the world, the need has also risen to maintain online catalogues to give user a better purview of the available products and the services.
Xatalog’s technology enables design-centric businesses to create and sends personalised B2B sales catalogues in one minute, thus eliminating the need for less productive catalogue sharing tools like PPT, Excel, PDF, etc. The data is stored over Amazon cloud, and the services are available in the price range of $290 – $1490.
The startup primarily targets manufacturers and wholesalers of jewellery, apparel, footwear, handicrafts and pharmaceuticals industries among others.
Jodhpur-based Qriyo Infolabs is a startup that aims to provide avenues for a fitter and active lifestyle.
Founded in 2015 by Mudit Jain and Rishabh Jain, Qriyo offers plethora of courses at home from wide domains including academics, co-curricular, extracurricular and fitness with philosophy. These semi-customisable courses offer quick, focused learnings with qualified, trained instructors and powerful curriculum.
With a vision of creating a “new breed of offline freelancers”, Qriyo also aims to provide employment opportunities to skilled individuals in their respective domains, encouraging skill development on a large scale.
The startup also raised $160K in its Seed round of funding from early-stage venture capital firm, Idein Ventures.
Rays Culinary Delights Pvt. Limited operates an online marketplace for yogic products and services. Sattviko also runs a quick service restaurant in Gurugram and Jaipur, and its a platform that sells various yoga products ranging from fresh food, daily groceries, yoga classes, yoga stays, ayurvedic medicines, and others.
Rays Culinary Delights Pvt. Limited was incorporated in 2013 and it started online delivery of packaged foods in February 2015. The startup was founded by three IIT-Roorkee graduates Gupta, Ankush Sharma and Rahul Gupta.
In November of 2017, Sattviko had raised its first angel investment in a Pre Series A funding round. Prior to that, it had also acqui-hired snacks company Indori Chotore based out of Mumbai and Pune.
Blackboard Radio is an AI- powered, gamified mobile app for learning the English language, targeted towards children below the age of 10 years.
The app was created by Vatsal Dusad and Shubham Gupta and engages children by creating an immersive speech-driven environment and thereby reducing need of language trainers, constant parental supervision and cost.
All the activities on the app are speech and diction focussed, with ML in the back end to create a personalised and adaptive engine for the user.
Founded in 2016, it is focussed on B2C sales where students, parents and teachers can listen to podcasts, messages and radio shows from their schools. It is headquartered in Delhi.
The app features a community platform where parents can showcase their child’s creative audio content (poems, stories etc) and share with family and friends. The solution is focused on tier II and tier III cities in India.
Through the product, the app is aiding in collecting speech data from Indian children who speak English. The makers of the app aims to use the data to create machine learning algorithms which will provide feedback on speech characteristics such as pronunciation, fluency, and diction in the near future.
Apnagodam works to efficiently manage agri-based warehousing. The startup was founded by Sanjay Agarwal in 2016 and is headquartered in Jaipur.
Mainly working as a B2B startup, it attempts to find closed factories, old sheds, idle cement godowns which are vacant and no longer in use. The team of Apnagodam then repairs those spaces and convert them into agri warehouses.
These warehouses are used by the farmers and the traders who keep their agri produce over there and they are also able to avail financial facilities pledged by the startup to avoid distress sale of the produce.
These warehouses are listed on the portal, to which the farmer can log in to check the nearest and cheapest warehouse.
The startup is aiding to solve the day-to-day problems faced by the farmers or farm owners in storing their cultivated crops as there aren’t sufficient places to store the produce securely.
Newndra Innovations is a disruptive and frugal innovations-focused startup recognised by DIPP. The startup manufactures exoskeleton belts which are unpowered, lightweight, efficient and affordable to assist manual workers of which JaipurBelt, is a flagship product of the company.
The startup was founded in 2014 by Ganesh Jangir and is headquartered in Jaipur. It develops and markets its products to create better impact for manual workers and society.
Newndra Innovations was amongst the top 10 Promising Startup of the Year (CII, Industrial Innovations Awards 2016). It has also been awarded by India Today’s Trails Blazer Award 2016.
Newndra Innovations is is an awardee of the Indo-US Science and Technology Endowment Fund and the TePP, DSIR Grant. It is collaborating with institutions like Dr P.K. Sethi Rehabilitation Center and MedSpark, USA.
The startup already has over seven national and international patents.
Amogue
Amogue, an application which is a ‘Smart Shopping Assistive Mobile’ platform currently being tested over Android Platform integrates multiple ecommerce portals in the clothing and accessorising sections. It then generates various looks and combinations for a user and gives personalised dressing suggestions.
Founded in 2017 by Gautam Bhatheja in Jaipur, Amogue helps people to dress and shop better. It updates its users with the latest fashion trends in the fashion world.
mLoyal is a pet services aggregator that encompasses the needs and pain points of pet parents (owners) and pet service providers. The startup offers mobile application, website, food, insurance, mobile crematorium and a number of other value-added services.
The founders aim to make mLoyal a one-stop shop for both pet owners as well as service providers right from pet food to medicines and from veterinary doctor to pet salon. While the consumers can access all kinds of pet products and services, service providers can manage their clients on the mLoyal app in an efficient manner, thereby increasing ratio of the returning customers.
The founders Nipun Biyani, Manas Mehra and Arpit Mehra, themselves are pet lovers and are also fans of Roger A. Caras who once said, “Dogs have given us their absolute all. We are the center of their universe. We are the focus of their love and faith and trust. They serve us in return for scraps. Is it without a doubt the best deal man has ever made”?
While Nipun has partnered and managed veterinary clinics in Jaipur with key role in client servicing and promotions, Arpit has great working relations with a lot of vets and shop owners of Jaipur and some other parts of Rajasthan as well.
The startup was launched in September 2017 and is currently planning to scale up on a pan India level. In the next five years, the startup is planning its presence across nine cities in India (sic metros and three-tier II cities) as much as increase the number of its app users by 5,000.
The Department of Information Technology and Communications under the Government of Rajasthan is organising the third edition of the Rajasthan IT Day from March 18-21 at Jaipur. To know more and for participating register here.
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