Paypal’s Incubator Start Tank Announces Its Second Batch Of Graduated Startups

Online payment company, PayPal, has announced the graduation of the second batch of startups incubated at its Start Tank Incubation Center in Chennai.

The graduated companies are Konotor and PiQube. Both these companies started their incubation at Start Tank in November 2014. At the time of their graduation, PiQube raised $500K in funding from private investment company HR Fund, while Konotor recently got acquired by software firm Freshdesk.

Konotor

Founders: Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar, Deepak Balasubramanyam

Konotor is a product of Demach Software India Private Limited. It enables messaging between businesses and their app users for customers support, promotions, re-engagement and more. The startup provides the businesses the right tools to manage customer conversations as well as the ability to engage, in a contextual and personal way, with their app users.

“This tenure at PayPal has helped us with our growth as a product and a business. We were able to benefit from availing access to great infrastructure to support our business, consult with PayPal architects for technology guidance, and bring more structure to our organization growth and business metrics. We are extremely delighted about the fact that Konotor has recently been acquired by Freshdesk Inc, a leading cloud-based customer support software company,” said Srikrishnan Ganesan, co-founder of Konotor.

PiQube

Founder: Jayadev Mahalingam

PiQube is a hiring intelligence platform that uses data science and human judgment in the right proportion to help companies hire smarter, swifter, and simpler. The machine learning platform aggregates companies and recruitment agencies. PiQube raised $500K from the HR Fund during its incubation at Start Tank.

“Since our incubation at Start Tank in 2014, PiQube has grown leaps and bounds. In terms of manpower, the company has expanded from a 5 member team to a 25 member team in a span of 15 months. On the business front, we have grown from zero customers to 75 customers with a 20-fold growth in revenue,” said Jayadev, Chief Problem Creator at PiQube.

PayPal’s Start Tank incubates early-age startups with the aim of enabling them to help revolutionise and drive innovation in the industry. The startups receive mentorship and infrastructure support from PayPal as well as access to an extensive network of leaders from the industry, including The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Chennai, a not-for-profit organization committed to the cause of entrepreneurship.

“This graduation is another major step in our commitment to the development of a strong technology ecosystem in India. As one of the world’s largest startups, it is rewarding to see the startups incubated at Start Tank benefit from our mentorship and expand their teams and businesses during their incubation period. PiQube and Konotor have done extremely well over the past year, and we wish the two companies the very best in their entrepreneurial endeavours.” said Guru Bhat, General Manager, Chennai Technology Center, PayPal.

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