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Start Tel Aviv, a global competition held by The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Tel Aviv Global that brings together technology startups from 21 different countries, has announced personal tour guide app, AudioCompass as the winner of its third edition.
The startup will get to participate in a five-day “Start Tel Aviv” event and be part of its DLD Festival.
The festival will feature hundreds of startups, VC’s, angel investors and leading multinationals. Thousands of interactions are expected to take place in order to create opportunities for up and coming startups and entrepreneurs from around the world in the field of technology.
The event Start Tel Aviv is run by the Embassy of Israel in partnership with TiE Delhi-NCR.
The other 5 final startups who presented at Delhi included XLPAT TT Consultants Pvt Ltd, Linksmart Technologies, Vidgyor Media Technologies, AudioCompass and loTfy. The jury of the event included Rahul Khanna, managing partner of Trifecta Capital Partners, Rajesh Razdan founder & director of mCarbon Tech Innovation Pvt Ltd, Dev Khare, venture investor in India at Lightspeed Ventures and former entrepreneur and Praveen Tyagi, founder director at Evelyn Learning Systems.
AudioCompass, started in 2011 by Gautam Shewakramani and Pariket Doshi, helps to explore places to travel by turning the phone into a personal guide. Its app is available on both iOS and Android platforms.
Today, it is very difficult to know about a place you visit without getting costly guides or asking a friend to explain things. AudioCompass aims to solve that problem, the startup turns smartphones into virtual tour guides (like having a local friend) for travellers.
To use the services, users can download its app and then pay a certain amount to know more about the place he / she is visiting. The plus point of this app is that, it offers first 30 seconds of the tour cost-free and if a user likes it, then there is an option to buy the rest of the tour guide.
“The content has been created with a lot of care and is experiential, and historically accurate. We have sifted through a great deal of research and automated our processes to come up with the content,” says Shewakramani.
Back in 2012, the startup used to rent physical devices to visitor while their visit to heritage sites. “What we have realized is that we needed to do something that was more capital efficient and did not rely on physical presence,” added Shewakramani.
Shewakramani (only Founder back then) wanted to kick-start his startup, so he managed to invest about $151K (INR 1 Cr.) through friends and family. Later he was joined by Pariket Doshi as his co-founder. By 2013, the company managed to raise a seed amount funding of about $450K from Blume Ventures and Urrshila Kerkar of Cox & Kings among others.
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