The global healthcare market is expected to touch $2 Tn in 2018, as per predictions by consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. Despite its unprecedented growth in the recent times, the healthcare sector is still largely dependent on outdated, inefficient methods of data collection and processing. Fighting these problems in the US is a three-year-old Indian startup: Innovaccer.

Striving to bring efficiency to the overall healthcare system, Innovaccer is a big data SaaS startup founded by Abhinav Shashank, Kanav Hasija and Sandeep Gupta in 2014. The Silicon Valley and Noida-based company is focussed on helping healthcare organisations accelerate innovation by making powerful decisions based on key insights and data-driven predictions.

Its flagship product, Healthcare Data Platform, has been used by more than 10,000 healthcare providers, affecting the lives of over 10 Mn patients in the US, as of February 2018. The 500 Startups-incubated company, having clocked 400% YoY revenue growth within four years of its launch, is now leveraging the $9 Bn healthcare analytics market to evolve into a $100 Mn company.

During an engaging interaction with Inc42, co-founder and COO Sandeep Gupta shared some valuable insights into the startup’s initial journey and its plans to reach breakeven by 2019-end.

The Growing Necessity Of Structured Data Analysis And The Birth Of Innovaccer

Innovaccer was founded by three friends. While Abhinav and Kanav were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur, Sandeep and Abhinav met while working at diversified industrial manufacturing company Ingersoll Rand. It was during that time that Abhinav and Kanav got an opportunity to work on a data analytics project conducted by Wharton and Harvard University.

The project: a basic research of how large amounts of data (what we call big data) can be compressed and studied and the insights that can be derived from the same. The idea was simple: to leverage big data and machine learning to derive particular insights in different areas of interest and research and give the output in product form.

As per Shashank, “Because it was an important project and big data was relatively new, the project received a tonne of visibility. We were on NBC, MSNBC and a bunch of other networks.” Soon, universities like Stanford, MIT and Harvard started taking interests in the duo’s big data research findings.

That was what got the ball rolling initially. “They decided to take their idea a notch up. I was brought onboard, and eventually in 2014, Innovaccer began its operations from a small basement which couldn’t accommodate more than ten people,” said Sandeep.

While the trio realised that data across all industries was growing and it would soon assume a central role in developing smart strategies, they also came upon one big problem. This data was distributed across multiple large silos and had to be combined, crunched and analysed, in real-time, efficiently to deliver an in-depth understanding of the looming problems impeding innovation. And that’s exactly what Innovaccer’s Big data platform enables today.

Healthcare Data Platform: A Comprehensive Big Data Repository

Data is ubiquitous. Today, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are consumed every day in the form of emails, videos, images, tweets and content, among others. Despite its growing necessity, data, especially in the healthcare sector, has remained largely unstructured.

Furthermore, data, once culled, is impossible to manually analyse for reasons pertaining to error, time, bandwidth and efficiency. This is where Innovaccer’s innovative solution Healthcare Data Platform makes a mark. A Hadoop-based Big Data repository that can run state-of-the-art analytics, it, essentially, collects raw data scattered everywhere, integrates it, normalises it and parses it through its algorithms to provide trends and predictions in a structured, consumable and ready-to-use manner.

The initial response, according to Sandeep, was so phenomenal that at the end of the first year, the top 18 research institutions among the top 65 in the US had reached out to Innovaccer and given the team various projects to work on – in fields as varied as retail, finance, real estate, healthcare and entertainment.

However, the founders soon realised that, in order to create a billion-dollar organisation, they will have to operate in an area that is small enough to drive focus, yet large enough to create an impact. That’s when the data analytics startup decided to focus solely on the healthcare market.

Currently, Innovaccer’s core product is used by healthcare institutions to deliver efficient care in a cost-effective manner and ensure high patient satisfaction.

Leveraging SaaS And Big Data To Bring Efficiency To The Healthcare System

The US has extensive electronic medical records of patients, unlike India which is still lagging far behind in terms of historic data. This made Innovaccer’s initial tasks significantly simpler. However, as explained by Sandeep, most of the healthcare settings in the developed world are using multiple variants of data repositories from different vendors which makes it tough to create an integrated data infrastructure.

This significantly reduces the operational efficiency and patient-interaction time as physicians have to constantly navigate through the complex workflows. With the help of its integrated platform, Innovaccer has created a comprehensive database that includes information such as patients’ clinical data, hospital operation processes and insurance claims.

How does Innovaccer help?

• Helps recognise high-risk patients that need attention and offer actionable insights at early stage.
• Provides data-backed intervention insights to healthcare providers that can lead to better care outcomes and bring down the cost of healthcare.
• Additionally, in the health insurance segment, claims are one important area that could benefit greatly from data analytics. Coupled with the fact that healthcare in the US is hellishly expensive, often running into thousands of dollars if you’re not insured, the sector poses an enormous opportunity for startups like Innovaccer.

As stated by the founding trio, Innovaccer’s focus is on harnessing the power of big data to improve the outcomes of disease metrics and patient prevention through large sample sizes of population. Furthermore, it tries to improve and predicate doctor efficiencies in order to ensure optimum patient care within a given hospital, or network of hospitals.

“As you know heart attacks go undiagnosed in the first thirty minutes of a patient showing symptoms and getting the medicine right in those first few minutes is crucial to saving the patient’s quality of life. Also, heart attacks among other ailments, cost about $500K to be treated. We want to look for ways to bring this cost down,” averred Abhinav.

On how the company is leveraging SaaS, co-founder and COO Sandeep Gupta added, “Our innovations include building code-free, visual data ETL smart pipelines that enable high quality and reusability. This data is hosted on a big data infrastructure that enables real-time insights for physicians and care management teams. All this is enabled in a SaaS infrastructure that ensures that all our learnings are made available to all our customers in real time.”

$36 Mn Funding, 10,000+ Providers, 10 Mn Patients

Growing by leaps and bounds, Innovaccer’s formidable presence in the US market has enabled it to raise over $36 Mn in funding across multiple rounds from a clutch of investors, including Westbridge Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, among others.

Originally started with a capital of $30,830.65 (INR 20 Lakh), the SaaS firm picked up its first institutional funding led by people like Rajan Anandan, Beenos Group CEO Teru Sato, among others. Later, in August 2016, it secured $15.6 Mn Series A led by Westbridge Capital Partners, with participation by other angel investors.

With a workforce of around 250 people, Innovaccer currently has a prominent presence in a number of regions in the US, including San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Florida, New York and Chicago.

Overall, it streamlines data integration and care delivery for over 500 practice locations. The big data analytics company boasts more than 25 healthcare-focussed registered accounts, with over 10,000 providers leveraging its solutions at various institutions, government organisations, and several corporate enterprises. Sharing more insights into the startup’s remarkable growth, Sandeep said, “With over 10 Mn patients, we have saved $155 Mn and targeting a billion dollars of savings in the year 2018.”

How Innovaccer Overcame Challenges To Clock 400% YoY Revenue Growth

Despite the initial success, the founding trio of Innovaccer had to overcome several challenges while starting out. The first and foremost challenge, according to Sandeep, was to find the right product-market fit, validate their hypothesis and find an enterprise customer who would pay for their product.

From catering to diverse sectors like finance, retail and entertainment, the founders decided to narrow down their focus to healthcare. The turning point for the startup came when an unnamed institution (top-tier) approached Innovaccer to create insights based on historic, clinical data of patients to identify trends that could lead to proactive prevention of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart attacks, blood pressure etc.

The shift in its focus, Gupta recalls, was quite a hardship in itself as they had to let go around 60% of their revenue in 2016. However, soon enough, the company started gaining momentum.

Among its current hurdles is the problem of scaling up, while also maintaining the growth rate and the underlying culture. These, according to the team, are essential for any SaaS company to reach $100 Mn in revenue.

Innovaccer is currently in the process of undergoing this transformation, with a focus on bolstering product, delivery and customer success. Ultimately, the big data SaaS startup aims to transfigure into a $100 Mn organisation by 2020 and also looking forward to breaking even by 2019-end.

Sandeep attributed the growth in its revenue to the company’s undeterred focus on providing a single, yet robust, product to a single problem set. He explained, “By leaving 60% of our revenue on the table, we allowed ourselves to go much deeper, hire subject matter experts, speak the customers’ language, and validate product-market fit (PMF) rapidly.”

Also, as per the company’s COO, it is imperative to charge customers for proofs-of-concept (PoCs), even if it is a small amount. “Unless they put money on the table, customers will not be as serious as you are, which significantly reduces your chances of having a successful PoC. We make sure that we are consistent with the need of the customer.”

On the subject of competition, Sandeep replied that the dynamics of the US healthcare market is quite different from that in India. Due to its transitional nature, the market there has either a major incumbent or a new-age vendor in the form of competition.

What sets Innovaccer apart, as per Gupta, is that it was the first to deliver plug-and-play connectivity with pre-built connectors. This, in turn, makes sure that the data analytics company’s customers have access to real-time, state-of-the-art analytics, which in turn puts Innovaccer ahead of its competition.

Editor’s Note

According to an IBEF report, the overall Indian healthcare market is estimated at $100 Bn. It is expected to touch $280 Bn by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 22.9%. Inc42 Funding Report 2017 states that healthtech startups in India cumulatively raised more than $338 Mn across 111 deals in 2017.

The digitisation wave has helped greatly in increasing the pace of innovation in the healthcare space. 2017, for instance, saw an extensive use of artificial intelligence and machine learning by healthtech startups for accurate screen testing of diseases like diabetes, breast cancer, TB, etc. Additionally, as we move towards prioritising quality of care over plain numbers, predictive data analytics in healthcare has become all the more important.

Data-driven healthcare in India may still be quite nascent, but it’s definitely catching up. Both the Indian government and private institutions have already started moving towards Information Management Systems (IMS). Furthermore, healthcare was one of the key focus areas in this year’s budget, with the government increasing healthcare spending by 11% to $8.2 Bn in order to bridge critical health infrastructure gaps.

With the introduction of technology and a right infrastructure in place, the Indian healthcare market too can tap the potential of data. Big data analytics will find takers in this space as well, and new innovations will completely reshape the landscape. Data synchronisation will not only make the processes fast, but it could also be instrumental in providing quality care. Linking social determinants with care processes in India can have a drastic impact on many pockets with below par health standards.

For Innovaccer, the market poses an enormous opportunity. As it inches closer to gaining a stronghold in the US healthcare segment, the big data startup needs to expand its horizons by tapping other emerging markets across the globe. However, given that the healthcare analytics sector is still largely fragmented and unorganised, whether Innovaccer will be successful in becoming a $100 Mn company will be interesting to watch.

Update 1: November 28, 6:49 pm

Some figures in the article have been removed at the request of the startup’s founders.

The post Banking On 10 Mn Patients, $36 Mn-Funded Big Data Analytics Startup Innovaccer Is Aiming To Break Even By 2019 appeared first on Inc42 Media.

“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?,” Pink Floyd famously sang in ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ Part II (1979). Since the dawn of time, there has been much exhilaration surrounding the consumption of meat. No wonder, India is currently the second largest processed meat and poultry market, growing at a CAGR of 22%, according to the global market intelligence agency Mintel.

Nevertheless, meat – especially the experience of buying it – remains a stigmatised topic in India, hidden in black plastic bags and procured quite hastily from unhygienic slaughterhouses that are clustered in some of the dirtiest and most crowded places of the city. Backed by technology and innovation, one startup, Licious, is striving to bring meat to the limelight by uncovering the shroud that currently surrounds it.

Headquartered in Bengaluru, Licious is an online gourmet meat startup that, unlike other ecommerce platforms in the space, is actually based on an end-to-end model that starts right from procuring the fresh produce to processing, storage and delivery. In an industry largely dominated by the frozen meat market, this Mayfield Capital-backed gourmet meat startup endeavours to satisfy customers with fresh, locally-sourced meat and seafood that has been processed using globally-accepted scientific techniques.

Before we delve into its exciting two and a half year journey, here are some key stats that perfectly highlight just how far Licious has come since its inception in 2015:

• Boasts more than 300K customers across the county.
• Handles over 5,500 orders every day.
• Has forged partnerships with over 180 vendor partners, including individual farms.
• Has set up a chain of processing plants and more than 27 delivery centres.
• Present in five cities – Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, Noida and Gurugram – with a workforce of around 600 people.
• Has attained operational break even in Bengaluru, aims to become profitable within the next three to four months.
• Has raised $14 Mn+ in funding from a clutch of investors such as Mayfield Capital, 3one4 Capital and Sistema, among others.

Meat Lovers To First Time Entrepreneurs: How Licious Was Conceived

Owned and operated by Delightful Gourmet Pvt. Ltd, Licious was founded in July 2015 and officially launched in October of the same year – by Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta, former corporate executives and self-proclaimed foodies. During his initial conversations with Vivek in early 2015, he talked passionately about the inherent problem pertaining to the shopping experience of meat, the duo recalls.

He explains, “Although my initial hypothesis was very limited, I found that the experience of buying meat in India is very unappetising. Together with Vivek, I wanted to embark on the journey of solving this problem.”

Having come from middle-class families with no prior entrepreneurial experience, this was a major step for both of them. However, quite coincidentally, each came with a specific set of skills that made the process of starting up much easier. A Kashmiri Pandit from Jammu, Abhay, a former Futurisk Insurance Broking employee, has a biotechnology degree and is also an Indian Institute of Insurance alumnus.

A qualified chartered accountant, Gupta, on the other hand, joined VC firm Helion Ventures as a Finance Controller in 2006, where he architected a number of consumer deals across ecommerce, FMCG and other sectors, including iD Fresh Food, BigBasket, among others.

Armed with a keen eye for scalable and executable ideas, which is often typical of an experienced investor/VC, Vivek soon realised that the issue in the Indian meat industry was not insufficient availability, but lack of trust. As a result, they started focussing on building a consumer brand, rather than just an online marketplace.

It was around the time that the duo started engaging with Adithya Kote, who was then the Creative Head at Cafe Coffee Day Group. After going through more than 300 name ideas, they finally zeroed in on Licious, which is actually taken from the word “delicious”. On why they ended up with that particular name, Abhay said, “We wanted to name our company something that appeals to people’s emotions. Our intention was to be a complete meat brand.”

How Licious Is Striving To Streamline Meat Sourcing And Processing

As Gupta proudly answers, “There is ordinary meat and then there is Licious meat.” Meat, according to him, is a highly commodified item. Although the founders admit they have not created any new product with Licious, their aim was to create a brand around this category.

In the food space, India has seen atta getting branded, butter getting branded and milk getting branded. Today consumers don’t buy groceries. Instead, they buy brands,” averred Vivek. While this might be true for other categories, meat as a vertical has been completely left out. Although meat is well loved by most Indians, Abhay points out that our hypocrisy is evident in the fact that we hide meat in a black thaili (packet), which incidentally was what inspired Licious’ white packaging.

Back in 2014-15, Vivek recalls, there was limited visibility of the problems and gaps that exist even now in the meat market. To create their initial value proposition, Hanjura and Gupta had to first interact with a lot of different people from both consumer and vendor sides. Following were some of the problems that the duo uncovered during their initial interactions:

• Lack of food safety and hygiene, which made the experience of buying meat extremely harrowing.
• The absence of widespread of awareness, be it in the way farmers were raising the livestock, the way they were fed or the way the meat itself was processed. Interestingly, up until now, there was no such thing as the processing of the meat.
• The sector, even today, is largely dominated by local integrators who are selling up to 90% of the available meat live to butcher markets. While consumers have been programmed to think of fresh cuts as the best form of meat, what is often overlooked is the science that controls the quality and “freshness” of the product.

Licious was, therefore, built with the vision to offer an alternative that can be consumed safely by even pregnant women. He adds, “Ours is a bundled proposition. Because we have built the country’s first meat brand, there is a lot of responsibility on us to ensure that we have a differentiated product. And to create a differentiated product, we have to be present end-to-end.”

To solve the issue of hygiene and food safety, the gourmet meat startup relies on globally-accepted meat processing techniques. The process, according to Vivek, usually involves cold-chain, ageing neutralisation of pH balance and natural tenderisation, before the meat can go for butchering.

Inside Licious’ Futuristic Processing Plant

In order to bring efficiency to the processing of meat, the team at Licious had to first define their standards, in terms of the livestock being free from antibiotics, steroids, etc. To that end, the company has set up testing labs – including one in Gurugram, where “meat scientists” check the quality of the meat procured, ensuring that it is devoid of any of these substances.

Apart from that, it has also set up its own cold-powered processing plants in Bengaluru as well as Delhi-NCR. These plants, according to the founding duo, are run by qualified food technologists and microbiologists. And the actual processing depends on the type as well as the cut of meat, which can range from curry cut to keema.

What sets Licious apart from other meat retailers or e-tailers is that it leverages technology to keep track of every step of the process. With the help of algorithms, therefore, it keeps records of everything digitally for further monitoring.

In the highly fragmented and unorganised meat segment, Licious, backed with technology, is striving to bring efficiency to the sourcing and processing of produce. For instance, the last-mile engagement with the customer happens with the help of technology. Because the company interacts with the customers directly via the website or the app, the last-mile inventory management becomes more streamlined.

This, essentially, eliminates the need to stock the products like retail shops, which in turn reduces its lifespan. Another angle of technology use and innovation is tracing the whole inventory, from the time it is sourced from the suppliers till the time it reaches the customer.

When the lamb is hung in the cold room, for instance, care needs to be taken to ensure that the meat is not frozen suddenly. To that end, the company relies on a technology that maintains the conditions inside the cold room, including the temperature, humidity, fan speed etc. In fact, the tracking of the entire value cold chain is done through technology. Furthermore, on the logistics side, when the product leaves the plant to be delivered to the customer, a specific set of algorithm helps track the temperature at which the meat is stored inside the vehicle.

Similarly, on the delivery side, the tech team at Licious has developed containers that come equipped with temperature sensors. Along the same line, the company has built a biodegradable bag that can maintain the temperature between 0°C and 4°C for around three to four hours. It currently in the process of adding these trackers to the delivery bags used by the delivery agents.

Additionally, they have created a technological system that helps predict consumer behaviour ahead of time. Based on the behavioural patterns that are collected over time, the gourmet meat startup has built several algorithms around that are working to solve the problem of stocking branded, chilled meat round the clock.

Product Breakdown

In the fresh meat category, some of the popular products that Licious specialises in include chicken breast, chicken drumsticks, goat keema, lamb chops, among others. Apart from red meat and poultry, the gourmet meat company also offers a range of fish and seafood products such as basa fillet, mackerel, sardine, prawns, etc. Some of the exotic meat varieties that Licious offers on its platform include turkey, blue crab, quail and Atlantic salmon.

In addition to raw meat, it sells a variety of pre-marinated meat that is created with in-house recipes. Within the ready-to-eat range, the gourmet meat startup offers soups, pickles and spreads like tuna spread, butter chicken spread, etc. With a shelf life of 30 days, these products have no added preservatives, claims Abhay.

The gourmet meat startup is currently in the process of expanding its product category in this vertical. Another value-added category the Licious caters to is cold-cut meat, which together with pre-marinated meat and ready-to-eat items accounts for close to 20% of its total sales.

The meat, Licious provides, comes from cage-free farming. To offer an end-to-end solution, the company started working with farmers to procure the team. On the seafood side, they employed people on the coast. Additionally, the founders also onboarded other partners to have a right cold chain infrastructure in place.

Over the last two years, Licious has also forged contractual arrangements with a number of large institutional meat vendors and integrators on the poultry side, who are trained in managing livestock and meat handling techniques. In total, the startup has on-boarded around 180 vendor partners, who, in turn, work with individual farmers.

This, the founders claim, allows them to deliver the products within 120 minutes of ordering, either through the website or the Licious app. They are sold across BigBasket, Grofers, Amazon, Daily Ninja as well.

Over the years, the gourmet meat company has also trained farmers and farm owners on the best practices of rearing and feeding livestock. To further ensure the quality, each of the products is sourced locally from the place of their origin.

In case of fish, hilsa, for instance, is sourced from the Brahmaputra Basin or Bangladesh. Similarly, seafood is sourced from the east as well as the west coasts of India. Licious currently has vendor distribution networks across both coasts. Everything is sourced from the point of origin, meaning all the meat is fresh, not frozen, with two-day shelf life.

At present, the fresh meat range forms the company’s core business, contributing the highest number of sales. Of this, around 40% to 45% of all orders are poultry, while red meat – which essentially refers to goat, lamb and sheep – accounts for another 20%. As stated by Gupta, fish and seafood contribute nearly 30% of Licious’ total orders.

Why Competitive Pricing Is Not The Most Important Thing

When it comes to poultry, the quality of meat depends greatly on the breed of the bird as well as the feed given to it. So, the way the bird is brought up determines, to a large extent, the quality as well as the price of its meat. Because the price is dynamic, depending on the demand and the supply in the market, it tends to create a lot of pressure on the back-end ecosystem to keep pricing low.

The founders elaborate further, “On the price side, you can’t fight a large integrator that is producing thousands and thousands of tonnes of meat every day. So, the way many players keep the price in check is through cross-breeding. The birds are often brought up in small coops and pumped with growth promoters, antibiotics or hormones. You get unprofessional child labour to manage it. Plus, there is no quality check, no proper slaughtering process.”

Licious, therefore, initially focussed on adhering to the correct food safety standards and offering high-quality, cage-free meat. With scale, they have managed to bring the costs of products down significantly. Overall, between a guy who buys his meat from local suppliers and slaughterhouses and someone who gets all his meat from Licious, the overall dent in the pocket per month is not more than $4.6 (INR 300), claims Vivek.

With a lean team and an efficient process in place, the gourmet meat company has managed to bring down its own expenses, thereby enhancing its revenue and profits even further. Gupta adds to that, stating, “Because I come from a finance background, every cost is tracked efficiently. We don’t splurge as a company. Even after VC funding, we have been very conservative in terms of our spendings.”

As a result of these cost-saving measures, Licious managed to hit breakeven in Bengaluru and has actually become profitable at the operational level. Its annual turnover has increased by several-fold to $2.3 Mn (INR 15 Cr) as of August 2017. It now aims to break even within the next three to four months.

Relying On Word Of Mouth To Create A Sustainable Business

Over the last two and a half years, since its inception, Licious has successfully achieved an upward growth trajectory that hasn’t yet slowed down. It originally raised a Seed investment of about $1 Mn (INR 6.4 Cr) in 2015 from angel investors such as Mohandas Pai, Kanwaljeet Singh and Kaushal Agarwal.

Within seven months from that, the company announced a $3 Mn (INR 20 Cr) Series A fundraise from Mayfield Capital and 3one4 Capital.

Later, in May 2017, Licious secured its Series B funding of $10 Mn from Mayfield Capital, 3one4 Capital, Sistema Asia Fund and others. The funding was largely used to set up cold chain-powered processing units as well as delivery centres in Bengaluru. Some portion of the logistics between these centres was also outsourced. However, the last-mile logistics from the processing centres to the customer’s house is currently done by an in-house team of delivery boys, adds Gupta.

The company claims that the number of orders grew from 1,000 in July 2015 to 5,500 daily orders currently, with an average ticket size of $8.4 (INR 550). From clocking business $461.1K (INR 3 Cr) in the first year, Licious managed to hit the $384.2K (INR 2.5 Cr) in a single month last August. 

Attributing the growth to its increasing repeat customer base, Vivek adds, “More than 70% of our business has come through word-of-mouth. Around 90% of our monthly revenue today comes from repeat business.”

To achieve that feat, the gourmet meat startup adopted a very comprehensive marketing strategy, starting from radio sessions, tasting sessions, referral campaigns to chef tables, sampling, interactions with food bloggers, apartment events. Apart from that, it also conducted campaigns to increase customer awareness about the quality of meat, different types of cuts, etc.

Adding to this, Gupta said that that the meats/orders are vacuum-packed with the face of an actual customer on the packaging. When asked why they chose to put their customers’ faces on the packaging, Abhay quips that the aim is to create an approachable brand that interacts and engages with customers closely. What has helped Licious become a more self-sustaining business, over the years, is the fact it is based on a model that is very viable, believes the founding duo.

Since it does not depend on the volume of new customers and thrives on repeat business, the company, unlike ecommerce players or retailers, has managed to cut down costs substantially, while also increasing its revenues by leaps and bounds.

Five Cities, Two Processing Plants, 27 Delivery Centres

Today, all products sold to Bengaluru-based customers are processed at a 20,000 sq ft processing plant located. Boasting a capacity to process 10 tonnes of meat per day, the facility works in tandem with 11 delivery centres spread across the city.

In February, just over a year after its launch, Licious expanded to another city: Hyderabad. Most recently, in October last year, the gourmet meat startup branched out to Delhi-NCR, armed with a state-of-the-art processing unit in Gurugram and 12 delivery centres.

According to Abhay, setting up the infrastructure in Delhi was slightly more challenging than in Bengaluru because the market is a bit more fragmented in NCR. However, despite initial hardships, Licious currently has around 10 delivery centres across Delhi, Noida and Gurugram.

With a workforce of 600 people, the startup now has a network of 27 delivery centres in the five cities. True to its city-by-city approach, it is currently preparing to go live in Mumbai and Pune by 2019.

Initial Challenges, Future Plans

No entrepreneurial journey is devoid of challenges and obstacles and it wasn’t any different for Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta. According to them, the biggest challenge they faced initially was getting the team right. The first six months, the duo recalls, was spent getting the right team and the product. Similarly, on the vendor side, the major hurdle was procuring the produce at low costs.

Having overcome these obstacles, however, the gourmet meat company has managed to grow tremendously, which is evident from the expansion of its scale. When Licious was started in Bengaluru in October 2015, Vivel recounts that, for the entire month, they bought a total of 1 ton of meat. Today, nearly 150 tons of meat processed per month in the four cities.

Coming to its future plans, the duo revealed, “We have enough money in the bank to expand to Mumbai and Pune. But, sometime this year, we will do another fundraise. It will probably be the last fundraise in our journey as a startup because we hope to turn profitable by then.”

Apart from expanding its geographical presence, new product categories, recipes and catalogues are also in the works particularly in the ready-to-eat vertical. For that, it is now looking to partner with retailers and other brick-and-mortar vendors to increase the reach of the range among customers.

Editor’s Note

In the burgeoning online meat delivery space, Licious competes with a number of players such as Zappfresh, EasyMeat, Brown Apron and MeatRoot, among others. In August 2016, Pune-based raw meat etailer EasyMeat had acquired Nonveggies in an undisclosed all-cash deal.

More recently, in March 2018, Gurugram-based Zappfresh raised around $3 Mn (INR 20 Cr) in funding led by Amit Burman, Vice Chairman of Dabur India. The round of funding also saw the participation of SIDBI Venture Capital.

While some of these players have stayed on the ecommerce side, Licious stands out as the startup that is aggressively leveraging technology to create an approachable, consumer-centric brand. Having already acquired a strong position in this space, it remains to be seen if this Bengaluru-headquartered gourmet meat company will ultimately be able to bring order and efficiency to the overall unorganised meat market in India.

The post Armed With Over 300K Customers, Here’s How Licious Is Gobbling Up The Indian Gourmet Meat Market appeared first on Inc42 Media.

On a frigid winter evening in Delhi, three friends took the corner table of the Indian Coffee House (in Connaught Place) with their hot cups of coffee and half-filled notebooks placed in their midst. They had gathered that evening to discuss an ‘idea’. An idea that they all believed in, an idea that they all wanted to pursue but didn’t have enough courage to pursue alone. They had to pluck the courage from each other and that’s what they were meeting for.

As the evening progressed, the fervour of the discussion became more lucid and as their convictions took a firm shape, each took to scribbling the points of the discussion in their half-filled-half-empty notebooks. By the time they were done with their discussion, it was apparent that this ‘idea’ had to see the light of the day.

Two weeks later, Inc42 was born.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

We took the first step, four years ago. Since then, we’ve fumbled, screwed up and even reached a point where we didn’t know what lied ahead. But all three of us (the co-founders of Inc42) had an immovable conviction in our ‘idea’ and it not only helped us move forward to realise our ambitions but also helped us in building India’s leading media and information platform working to empower and grow the Indian startup ecosystem.

The things we write and the stories we pursue, reach every corner of the Indian subcontinent and is read, followed and appreciated by the who’s who of the startup ecosystem. However, the stories which thrill us, in particular, are the ones coming from the startup founders themselves.

There have been umpteen instances when startup founders attended our events and found investors who ended up investing in their startups. There have also been instances when a startup got featured on Inc42, which led to even more exciting developments for the startup from forging strategic partnerships with corporates to getting acquisition offers. Crazy right? But these inside stories are the reason why our startup journey is a lot more satisfying.

And all this because we had an unwavering conviction in our idea.

From the time of Inc42’s inception, the Indian startup ecosystem has gone through massive changes. While only about 5 startups were getting funded every week in 2014, the number has now grown to 15-20 startups in 2018. In terms of startups being founded in India – the numbers have grown from about 3,000 in 2014 to over 20,000 in 2017.

With a lean team of 20 people (yeah, you read that right), serving an ecosystem which is thousands of times larger than us, is a gruelling job. There hasn’t been a single day in this journey when we were not approached by startups to write about them. In fact, you’ll be shocked to know that over 10,000 startups have applied to be featured on Inc42. From our startup form to social media handles and even our offline events, startups often try every means to get featured on the Inc42 platform.

And we know we have disappointed many by not covering them.

We, however, feel privileged that startups look up to us as a part of the milestones they achieve and we genuinely feel privileged when such requests knock at our doors.

Most often, startups are driven by their own unique propositions to showcase their specific products, needs and market presence. But in presenting their story from our perspective, their expectations or goals aren’t met sometimes. Thus, we decided to bring something to the table that will solve this problem for startups wherein they can leverage the unique editorial capabilities of Inc42 team to present their story, the way they want.

Announcing – Startup Booster Packages

Startup Booster Package is a unique product by Inc42 where instead of offering old-school vanilla advertising, we’re offering our editorial capabilities, extensive reach and brand credibility to help startups achieve their goals in a smarter and impactful way.

From reaching your target customers to employer branding, from building brand credibility to thought leadership, from raising investments to getting acquired, Inc42’s Startup Booster Packages are designed to amplify exactly that!

Startup Booster Packages are a strategic mix of

• Native Stories that delivers the intended message in an engaging way.
• Persuasive Videos in the style and the flair that brings out your X factor.
• Email & Social campaigns designed to maximise the impact and reach of your message.

And you have three packages to choose from:

Since the time we launched Startup Booster Packages in beta a month ago, we have received numerous requests from startups to leverage our unique offering and many of them have already benefited from it.

Now it’s your turn to join the spotlight and transform your startup into a brand.

The post Announcing Startup Booster Packages: An Idea. 4 Years. 12,000 Stories. 10,000,000+ Platform Reach! appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Apps and digitisation today are words that need no explaining today. But if we roll back a few years to be in 2010, mobile apps had just started making their appearances in India. At that time, it used to normally take around a year to build an app. This is in complete contrast  to what is happening today as an app update is rolled out practically every 15 days.

It’s this very agility Siddhartha Chandurkar had in mind when he began Shephertz in 2010, providing app builders and enterprises a set of pre-built services for common features so that they can quickly launch their apps.

Says Siddhartha, “To scale an app from a couple of users to a million, on the backend, required considerable work then. Free cloud technology was not readily available at that time. By using our services, app developers need not have to worry about how to scale, how to manage the servers or the traffic even.”

And that’s what ShepHertz does. The ShepHertz Intelligent Digital Hub Platform (IDHP) provides an environment of continual transformation to build omni-channel (mobile, social, gaming, TV, IoT, wearables, Point of Sale and web) apps and increase user acquisition, retention, engagement and conversion through their real-time actionable Big Data analytics solution.

As part of their omni-channel digitisation platform, they also provide social listening tools such as sentiment analytics and machine learning tools such as chatbots. The startup enables large enterprises with digital transformation so that they can be agile to launch new features and campaigns quickly.

For instance, Siddhartha points out that ‘recommendation’ is a service used by most apps. This service is applicable to all apps: from ecommerce, music to insurance. It’s a cross cutting service. ShepHertz provides 800 such APIs spread across platforms i.e., from wearable devices to other platforms.

Focussing On The Enterprise Customers: 60K Customers, 150 Countries

In layman’s terms, ShepHertz provides services to app developers at a price point which is easy for them to adopt. Today, because of the cloud, many such services like ML, AI, which were earlier available to only very large companies, have gotten democratised.

So much so that Siddhartha opines if you are an app developer with a laptop, you can compete with any company. In contrast, in earlier days, building a software required a 15-20 people team with a substantial investment.

However, though the company started with its focus on app developers, now it is focussing on enterprise customers.

Says Siddhartha, “Though we supported app developers of all kinds but the challenge with that market is that almost 80% of that market consists of gaming app developers. If you make 60 games on an average, only one out of them would work.”

“For us, to build a company with a possible $100 Mn revenue streaming in the future, it did not make sense to focus solely on an unpredictable customer set. Because we could not tie them up at a recurring level given the unpredictability of their success,” he further added.

Coupled with this was the fact, that today enterprises are changing themselves with the evolution of the startups. Today, every company in India (large or small scale), are at some level of digitisation and they want to move ahead.

Thus, ShepHertz  started focussing on selling digitisation to large enterprises. Traditionally, such enterprises used to buy software from large IT companies and the whole setting up process would stretch to a year. They were dependent on them for all sorts of development.

“Today, one quarter is a lifetime! You can’t spend that much time on development as the market is changing continuously. So, we put enterprises on a continuous transformation path so that in 15-20 days they can launch new services,” says Siddhartha.

The platform thus enables enterprises to launch use cases and campaigns in days instead of months without having any type of dependency on the development team or external development agencies. Not only this, the startup helps them realise the digitisation roadmap by putting them on a continual transformation path.

Consequently, ShepHertz serves 60K customers in 150 countries, processing close to 100 Bn+ API calls through its platform. In India, it counts enterprises like Kotak Securities, Spencer’s, Edelweiss, L&T Realty among its many customers in the retail, banking, insurance and other fields.

The Gurugram and Palo Alto-based SaaS startup is focussing on Asia, Hong Kong and Middle East at the moment.

As far as monetisation is concerned, it follows both the SaaS model as well as a hybrid managed solution for clients in segments such as insurance: where one can’t have data co-located with another company on account of compliance. For such clients, it offers a private managed service on the cloud.

While Siddhartha did not disclose the amount of revenues, he did mentioned that the adoption rate in the past five years has been raised by 8000%.

The SaaS startup had raised seed capital in 2012 and then raised a Pre-Series A round of $1.5 Mn, led by Kae Capital, with participation from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures, along with independent funds, Sashi Reddi Investment Capital Fund, GrowX Ventures, LetsVenture and India Quotient. It was also one of the 15 global startups (out of +500) selected for Microsoft Accelerator’s First Global Startup Roadshow in 2016.

Navigating The Challenge Of Becoming A Global SaaS Player

Given that ShepHertz has a significant global presence, Siddhartha is well versed with the challenges involved in becoming a global player. While today, the ready availability of VC funding has changed the scenario for SaaS startups in India, but it was not the case eight years ago. Given that one has to fight competitors in a mature market, reach one’s customers effectively becomes a challenge.

To this end, Shephertz employed content marketing, social media heavily. Siddhartha opines, “One has to find new ways to acquire customers and operate under constraint. We learnt to operate at a low cost. We converted our blog into Spanish and Japanese. Thus, automatically, Spanish traffic started coming in, as it is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. When we converted it into Japanese, a lot of Japanese gaming customers started coming in.”

Additionally, the startup also banks on its differentiating features against competitors such as Apptimize and other global PaaS (Platform as a service) players like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Services in the digitisation space. Siddhartha believes that because the product is API-driven, it quickly enables enterprises in a very short term. Agility with reliability is another factor with which it aims to set itself apart.

“By virtue of knowledge from so many customers over time, we have so many APIs and so many services in our portfolio. If you want a bot or a recommendation engine or a virality solution or core storage services: anything an enterprise or app developer needs to build their app is available with us,” he adds.

The SaaS startup’s future plan is to focus on the mobility side to have a omni channel solution for its customers. Secondly, it wants to solve the data problem of enterprises through its digital hub. The third focus will be on AI/ML as they will fundamentally change the game for companies who adopt them earlier.

Editor’s Note

The scope of the industry is mind boggling as the total digitisation revenue is growing in billions. If companies like Amazon has taken over retail in the US and forcing companies to digitise and stay relevant, consumers themselves are also driving the digitisation wave as they opt for ecommerce and greater dependence on the Internet and mobile apps.

A report titled ‘Internet in India 2017’ expects the number of Internet users in India to reach 500 Mn by June 2018. Recently, a Google-BCG report suggested that digital spending by consumers is expected to grow nearly 2.5 times to $100 Bn by 2020.

Interestingly, this year as per the App Annie 2017 Retrospective Report, India overtook the US to take the second spot in terms of the number of app downloads in 2017. Meanwhile, globally there’s been a 60% growth in the number of app downloads with downloads exceeding 175 Bn. Consumer spending has more than doubled from 2015 and exceeded $86 Bn.

In this respect, the scope for SaaS startups like ShepHertz remains immense as the world moves towards digitisation. However with so many players in the SaaS space and a fragmented user base, how far behind can the startup leave its competitors remains to be seen.

The post How SaaS Startup ShepHertz Is Helping Enterprises In 150 Countries Onboard The Digitisation Bandwagon appeared first on Inc42 Media.

“Behind every successful woman is a basket of dirty laundry,” Sally Forth quips in Greg Howard’s famous daily comic strip by the same name. The statement, Arunabh Sinha will agree, resonates with wisdom that is surprisingly universal. In fact, it was essentially what inspired Sinha’s first entrepreneurial venture: UClean, a tech-enabled startup that specialises in laundry and home cleaning.

With over 40,000 monthly customers and nearly 1,500 orders per day, Faridabad-based UClean claims to be India’s first organised chain of laundry and home cleaning stores, focused on fostering the DIY (Do It Yourself) culture. The startup offers its customers an option to wash their clothes at their nearest UClean outlet, according to their convenience.

It also offers pick-and-drop services for dry cleaning, laundry, and iron services, among other services. Based on the franchise model, UClean has till date raised more than $1.5 Mn funding across two rounds. Present in around 16 cities across India, the integrated laundry startup recently announced its $615K fundraise from US-based angel investor Anubhav Chopra.

As for Arunabh, he is an IIT Bombay graduate with a good amount of experience in the franchising and startup space. He has been instrumental in the India entry of several international brands including American food chains Carl’s Jr. and Fatburger, French luxury brand Longchamps and retail brands like Poney, Jymka, and Bricks 4 Kidz. In his last professional stint, prior to starting his own venture, Sinha headed the North India operations for Treebo Hotels.

During a recent interaction with Inc42, founder and CEO Arunabh Sinha shared some of the highs and lows of UClean’s journey, from the initial fund crunch to hitting profitability at the operational level in just over one year after its inception.

Turning A Mundane Household Chore Into A Lucrative Business

UClean, like many other businesses that have stood the test of time, was founded on an idea taken directly from the pages of real life. Sinha explained, “One fine day I saw my wife lose her cool with our house help over laundry. There was a lot of pent-up emotions which she vented that day when she couldn’t stand the daily haggling over laundry.:

This was, what we call colloquially, a light-bulb moment for Arunabh. Having discovered the huge untapped market opportunity quite accidentally, he immediately set out to look for a viable solution that could turn the mundane chore of doing laundry into a lucrative and sustainable business.

As he recalls, “Thereafter, I spent a lot of my time researching laundry and laundromat concepts globally and was particularly impressed by the growth of laundromats in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines in particular.”

The more he studied, the more he realised just how laundry has flourished across the world as a brick-and-mortar concept. Being a calculated risk taker, after extensive research and analysis, Arunabh took the plunge, building a laundry business based on the “offline first, online second” model.

Thus was born UClean. The tech-enabled integrated laundry services provider was incubated in October 2016 by initial Seed investment from franchising and licensing solutions company Franchise India.

In November of the same year, US-headquartered Alliance Laundry Systems also backed the venture, becoming its exclusive equipment and technology partner in the process. Within a few months, the company also onboarded actors Soha Ali and Kunal Khemu as its strategic partners, in a bid to further expand its reach. It was around the same time that the first two UClean stores were launched in Vasant Kunj, Delhi and Sushant Lok, Gurugram.

UClean Products And Services: An Overview

Currently, UClean’s key services include ‘Wash and Iron’ and ‘Wash, Fold and Dry Cleaning’, among others. Although the startup is age- and income group-agnostic, its primary target audience is nuclear and DINK (Double Income No Kids) families.

As stated by Arunabh, these are ‘live at-store’ services where the entire processing happens at the store itself. With technology at the heart of the brand, UClean also enables time-crunched customers to avail ‘pick-n-drop’ service from the comforts of their home or office.

Recently, in February 2018, the laundry startup forayed into the home cleaning segment with its new subsidiary Mint Clean, currently available in Delhi NCR. Under the ‘on-site’ category, it offers services like carpet cleaning and upholstery cleaning where the startup’s team travels to the customer’s premise and executes the service directly at the customer’s home.

Essentially, Mint Clean operates as an on-demand direct-to-home cleaning company, which offers door to door cleaning solutions through a “man and van” model. The brand was officially launched in January this year and has already commenced pilot operations in Delhi-NCR.

Like UClean, we would be building Mint Clean through the franchise route and would be targeting 100 franchises of Mint Clean by 2020. As part of the move, Mint Clean is currently working to create a tech platform for the business, which predominantly is B2B2B and B2B2C in nature.

Another service that the company recently launched was UClean Select, which is a premium dry cleaning offering for clothes and bags. The laundry startup announced the launch of its first UClean Select store in Delhi.

During the launch, the integrated laundry services provider also unveiled its upgraded Android and iOS apps, which are designed for the convenience of last minute bookings and quick doorstep services. As stated by Sinha, the company is aiming to set up around 50 franchises of UClean Select by 2020.

How UClean Is Disrupting The Laundry Market With Technology

As per reports, the Indian laundry industry is estimated at $34 Bn (INR 2.2 Lakh Cr), of which the unorganised market (dhobis, maidservants, and mom-and-pop stores) is valued at $771 Mn (INR 5,000 Cr).

The sector is fragmented with 767K establishments, 98% of which are micro-sized laundries with fewer than 10 workers. The organised segment comprises a mere 2-3% of the entire laundry market in India.

UClean, according to Arunabh, is built on the vision to bolster this industry collectively in collaboration with the local operators. The startup is primarily leveraging technology to offer the convenience of pick-up and drop-off to the customers from the comfort of their homes, through the click of a few buttons.

Technology also enables it to keep the entire process transparent, where the customer has full visibility into the whereabouts of his/her garments at any point in time through automatically generated SMSes.

All stores are controlled centrally and also equipped with supply chain support through a central proprietary software called CleanOps. This software, as per the company’s engineering team, helps the franchise owner to keep a tab on all active bookings as well as the status of the inventory. This, in turn, allows them to plan the orders well in advance, averred Sinha.

On how the startup is utilising technology to bring efficiency to the fragmented laundry sector, Arunabh added, “The idea has always been to build UClean as a hyperlocal neighbourhood concept, powered in the front end by technology. We will continue to work on streamlining the overall supply chain even further and are working on developing technology-based modules for the same.”

From Touching 1500 Daily Orders To Hitting Operational Profitability

Backed with innovation and a vision to modernise the still-antiquated laundry market in India, UClean, in just over one year, has managed to expand its presence across 16 cities. Today, it services around 40,000 customers every month on a pan India basis and claims to have a high percentage of repeat subscribers.

Clocking over 1,500 orders daily, the startup processes nearly 100K kilograms of clothes per month currently. As shared by Sinha, at present, every UClean store is fully equipped to process clothes in-house.

Furthermore, each of these outlets has in-house laundromats and a full-fledged vacuum table-based steam iron setup, which enables the company to swiftly deliver processed and packaged clothes back to the customers.

Through its many products and services, UClean is also striving to empower local entrepreneurs and small businesses operating in the laundry space. According to Arunabh, the entrepreneurs are trained, equipped and handheld during the process of building and operating their own UClean franchise store.

With a workforce of more than 60 people across offices in Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Bengaluru, apart from its headquarters in Faridabad, UClean has raised over $1.5 Mn (INR 10 Cr) in funding till date across two rounds.

Highlighting the impressive growth that the company has charted in the last 12 months or so, its founder Arunabh Sinha said, “UClean is striving to not just be a brand but an overall segment creator. In a segment that remains technologically challenged, despite its enormous potential, we have already become operationally profitable with decent cash flows.”

The growth, as attributed by Sinha, has been largely due to the strong partner network UClean has.

On Overcoming Fund Shortages And Crippling Stereotypes

“When we started in the first place, we had limited funds at our disposal. Starting a store of our own would have meant deploying all the funds in this single store, which would have limited the scope for quick expansion,” replied Sinha when asked about the initial pain points in UClean’s journey.

To overcome this challenge, the team took a conscious call to use the funds to go all out in the market to look for franchises who would work on the FICO (Franchise Invested Company Operated) format and quickly help set up ‘proof of concept’ stores in the market. However, as Arunabh recalls, it was easier said than done.

Since the startup did not have any stores that were operational at the time and its founder and CEO did not have an existing laundry background, it was a major hurdle to convince investors to jump onboard. For close to two months, Arunabh and his associates met around 30 investors but could not get a breakthrough.

Things, however, took a turn for the better when Franchise India pumped nearly $1 Mn in UClean as part of its initial fundraise. On the company’s future plans, Sinha clarified, “As a brand, the target is to become the one-stop-shop for all cleaning requirements inside a household. Whether it is dirty clothes, dirty carpet, dirty upholstery, dirty homes or dirty car, we want to cater to all of them.”

Competing For A Share Of The Fast Growing Laundry Market

According to estimates, there are nearly 100 startups in the laundry market in India, including Laundryprime, UrbanDhobi, Super Dhobi, Wassup, LaundryAnna, Laundrokart and Washbuddy.

Then there are those in-home services sector offering laundry services such as Zimmber, Amazon-backed HouseJoy, Urbanclap, among others. Another player in the space, PickMyLaundry, announced the acquisition of subscription-based laundry services provider OneClickWash in an all-cash deal last March.

Despite the burgeoning competition, Arunabh claims that there are quite a few counts on which UClean stands out. Operating a chain of laundromats that provides ‘live cleaning services’, the startup ensures greater transparency by allowing customers to see the entire process at any point in time.

Elaborating further, Sinha stated, “This is very unlike the local mom-and-pop operators where you have zero visibility into the overall process once the clothes leave your place. You have no visibility about where the clothes are getting washed (ghats or washroom or river), the kind of water that is being used, the kind of chemicals that are being used or even the way the clothes are handled. This has resulted in a huge sense of distrust, which is what UClean wants to eliminate.”

Editor’s Note

A report by FMI, titled “Laundry Care Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment”, estimates that the global laundry sector will witness a sizeable revenue growth from about $75.5 Bn in 2017 to nearly $127 Bn by 2027 end, resulting in a CAGR of 5.3% during the forecast period.

This means that it would take only 1% of this market for a company to become a billion-dollar enterprise! Now wonder, startups are moving in fast to conquer the category, which in India remains largely unorganised.

In India, laundry has always been a necessity and a time-consuming chore. As estimated by Arunabh, by end of 2020, more than 3 Mn Indian households will need outsourced laundry and cleaning services due to time crunch and rising disposable income.

This represents a huge opportunity for startups, regardless of whether they offer on-demand laundry services with vendor association, or with a functional plant, or through a hub and spoke model, or by aggregating laundromats.

Having already turned profitable at the operational level, UClean is undoubtedly in a strong position to emerge as one of the champions of the organised laundry market in the country. With an assortment of products and services, whether it manages to turn dirty laundry into a sustainable business will be interesting to watch.

The post Turning Dirty Laundry Into A Profitable Business: UClean On A Path To Disrupt The $34 Bn Unorganised Market appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Food today is laden with chemical fertilisers that cause some major health risks such as cancer. Fertilisers such as ammonium nitrate, cadmium, potassium chloride, organophosphate (OP), pyrethroids, etc. are used to protect vegetables against pest and premature decay. Despite the apparent impact on health, the irony is that India is now the second largest manufacturer of pesticides in Asia after China and ranks twelfth globally.

“It was the importance of clean and healthy food dawned upon us. Bringing farming to the urban Indian homes, and making people aware of what they eat is the mission behind setting up Pindfresh,” says Somveer Anand, founder of agritech startup Pindfresh.

For Somveer and his wife Sohila Anand, the idea to launch Pindfresh was very much based on a personal experience that he had after one of his close relative fell ill due to the consumption of chemical-loaded food.

During their India visit the husband-wife duo had an hands-on experience on the extreme dearth of hygienic, nutritious food in India and this is where, they also felt, there was a dire need to provide people with the ability to grow vegetables locally. That’s precisely where the Pindfresh’s journey began 2016, when they were also joined in by Jaspal Singh Anand.

The agritech startup Pindfresh is turning small plots or spaces between buildings or in buildings into usable farm space. From rooftop gardens, to floors specifically designed to incorporate farming, to other spaces within high-rises filled with racks of perfectly lined leaf vegetables, it is striving to bring about a farming revolution in urban India.

Apart from selling in-house home systems (hydroponic and others) and fresh produce (lettuce, rocket, basil and mushrooms), it also runs programmes to train people (in schools and societies).

By using hydroponics, cocopeat gardening and other soilless techniques, Pindfresh is attempting to educate urban dwellers to use a technology which takes less space, demands lesser water and is completely free from pathogens and biological contaminants.

Organic Farming: Ushering In Organic Food Revolution  

The concept of urban farming is a trend that is catching up fast globally. For instance, Tokyo-based Kono Designs started an urban farm by the name of Pasona in a nine-storey building in 2010, and this gave the employees a chance to grow and harvest their own food at work. Apart from Pasona, major companies in Japan like Mitsubishi are also leading the way to set up urban farms at their offices. Japan has become a front runner in urban farming, which is in turn helping the country cut food import costs.

India too needs to plant the idea of urban farming. Why? Here is the reason.

The urban population in India, which stands at 377 Mn, is expected to reach 600 Mn by 2031, according to a new UN-backed report. The increasing nutritional requirements of this fast-growing urban population will pose a huge challenge in the coming years.

Due to the ever-increasing urban population and decreasing rural population that used to tend to frame as a traditional occupation, India imported $906.3 Mn (INR 5,897 Cr) worth of fruit and vegetables in 2016-17, while the figure in 2014-15 was $832 Mn (INR 5,414 Cr).

As a result, Indian consumers are becoming victims of processed food as there is a wide gap in the supply and demand chain.

To address this problem, there is a subtle movement that is taking place in India over urban farming, spearheaded by millennials. Of these, integrating farming ideas into the urban space is also Pindfresh.

As far as India is concerned, a survey on the Status of Organic Farming in India was conducted by scientists from different universities including the Indian Institute of Soil Science to ascertain the real benefits and feasibility of organic farming in terms of the production potential, economics and soil health, in comparison to the conventional farms in India. The study revealed that organic farming, in spite of the reduction in crop productivity by 9.2%, resulted in an increase of 22% in the farmers’ net profit compared to conventional farming.

This trend got further escalated with the coming of urban farming and today, agritech startups are not only helping farmers to assess the soil and weather conditions or crop production but are also coming up with unique ideas to optimise the limited space in urban India to grow vegetation in offices and other commercial complexes.

And the best part is that the idea of organic farming is not limited to just offices; balconies, roofs, terraces, drawing rooms and kitchens in urban homes but could be seen as a future of vegetation in urban India and Pindfresh is determined to make it a reality with its advanced organic farming techniques.

Pindfresh And Their Concrete Vegetable Farms

Pindfresh’s journey began with an initial capital of $7.68K (INR 5 Lakh). When the agritech startup was taking shape, the trio did a lot of research to learn about hydroponics and then tailor make it to suit the Indian conditions (or rather, that of any developing nation).

“For example, we try and promote hydroponics where the space requirements are important. For places we have no space constraint, we try and promote coco peat gardening in grow bags and feed them using hydroponic nutrients. Not being wedded to a particular technology allows us the freedom to experiment and recommend the most appropriate ways of growing our food,” says Somveer.

But this agritech technology or perhaps trend is soon catching up across India today.

Here is a look at how hydroponics and soilless farming is evolving in India.

According to a research pursued by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, the area under hydroponics began to expand significantly in Europe and Asia during the 1950s and 1960s, and large hydroponic systems were developed in the deserts of California, Arizona, Abu Dhabi and Iran (1970).

The research elaborates that hydroponics did not reach India until 1946. By 2008, localised experiments were adopted to grow exotic crops like strawberry, green garlic and tomatoes.

Today, ‘Landmark Agrotech’ project is the second biggest hydroponics project in Gujarat and is currently under implementation. Likewise, for Pindfresh, all the growing is done at their prototype growing facility in Nayagaon, Punjab.

Startup Pindfresh Making Systems To Flourish ‘Mini Pinds’

The startup is attempting to make cities holistic in their requirements of food and vegetation. To that end, it is working towards creating systems by which people will actually eat the local and fresh produce – just as if the food is coming directly from the Pind.

Essentially, they offer three services: creating and selling systems for home and commercial use; producing food using Pindfresh systems and selling it and holding workshops.

The startup is grossing over a monetisation strategy that involves making the vegetable saplings available for procurement by offices and houses. They have two types of customers: one who buys the plants to grow the vegetables themselves and those who only buy the vegetables. Pindfresh is also selling to wholesale markets.

“Traditionally, cities have sourced all their food and supplies from the surrounding villages. The reason why we call ourselves Pindfresh is because we want to move the production of food from the villages to the cities. We want to create mini pinds (villages) in the centre of the towns and in every household!” Somveer enumerates.

The startup is planning to develop an app which can advise customers on the right way and time to water the plants, add nutrients, check the pH of the water, etc.

The Road To Augur In An Organic Revolution Via Agritech

In the two years of growing leafy vegetables and building the organic ‘farm to fork’ concept for the urban landscape, agritech startup Pindfresh has seen quite a number of challenges.

“The major challenge we had initially was a complete lack of an agri startup ecosystem in Chandigarh (which was surprising, considering its the gateway to Punjab, the ‘Bread Basket of India’. The other problems that we faced included sourcing specialised materials and equipment (that we needed to make our hydroponic equipment with) and customer education but made us realise that a HUGE opportunity existed here,” highlights Somveer.

Despite the challenges, the agritech startup has been well on the path of exploring the opportunity as their traction shows.

• It has a top line of about $6.14K (INR 4 Lakh) a month (growing at 20% M-o-M).
• Sold more than a 1,000 units over the last 12 months
• Chandigarh and Delhi are its two major traction areas

As urban farming is fairly a new idea in India, Pindfresh is shaping itself to become a robust sustainable agritech startup to lead the industry amidst many people who deal with home-grown balcony systems and hydroponics. Organisations like City Farming, Earthoholics, Fresh & Local, Urban Leaves, etc. are its likely competitors.

According to Somveer, “This industry has a lot of scope of becoming a rage. The main reason behind it is that it is aimed at our well-being, and health, which are the burning topics of discourse these days.”

He adds, “It is well suited to the modern day lifestyle, where we are living in smaller spaces, with even lesser time to devote. Hydroponic and soilless systems are easier to maintain, requiring on an average of 30 mins a week – produce wonderful and nutritional food and flowers, are modular and DIY in nature and most importantly will not break the bank once you start!”

The agritech startup is aiming to introduce consistent innovations to grow and aid to the development of urban farms in India.

On the latest innovation the company is working on, Somveer mentions, “We’re always thinking about how we can use hydroponics to solve other real-world problems. So, we ‘invented’ the Niño. The Niño is a unique vertical system (the first of its kind in India) and apart from being easy on the pocket, is very low on maintenance as well! This system can hold up to 36 air cleaning plants, looks beautiful in being placed in a corner and it not only removes formaldehyde, acetone, NOx’s and COx’s, etc. from the room, it also releases fresh oxygen for us to breathe and work in a healthy environment.”

As for the way ahead, Somveer avers that they are currently toying with the idea of raising a little bit of money for the R&D and for inventory, but prefers an investor who understands the space. The startup says it will need about $307,600 (INR 2 Cr) to roll out its rooftop system for growing plants (and that doubles as a nursery for their farmers).

The founders plan to use the funds for the development of sensors and IoT systems that can predict how much food will be required at what time, what the growing conditions are going to be in the future and how much of the produce must be consumed to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

The Green Of The Future

In countries like Israel and the US, hydroponic produce is already part of the market, which is yet to happen in India. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon is perhaps one of the earliest examples of hydroponics.

Urban farming, especially in the case of India, can play a significant role in urban environmental management as it can combat urban heat island effects and enhance the quality of air, besides offering organic, fertiliser-free produce. The Food and Agricultural Organization has long since recognised urban agriculture as a key element in food security strategies.

However, a formal recognition of urban agriculture and its integration into the urban planning process are necessary for it to be successful. In India, urban agriculture is being carried out in many cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai under the leadership of the government, private agencies or even individuals. Considering the wave of organic revolution that it can ignite, startups like Pindfresh may go a long way in equipping India to meet its future food demands.

The post AgriTech Startup Pindfresh Is On A Mission To Bring Urban Farming Revolution In India appeared first on Inc42 Media.

With more than 864 universities, 40,026 colleges and 11,669 standalone institutions, India is expected to have “the largest population of college-going students” i.e. approximately 119 Mn by 2025, according to All India Survey on Higher Education (2016-17) by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Higher Education.

The same report highlights that in 2016-17, the total college student enrolment in the country rose to 35.7 Mn from 30.2 Mn students in 2012-13.

Despite the rising enrolments, there is no proportionate growth in the employment prospects for these 35.7 Mn students once they complete their education. This was highlighted in the India Skills Report 2018, which revealed that the percentage of employable resources between the 18-25 years of age stood at 46% and 26% between the age group of 26-29.

Even though the hiring scenario for 2018 looks “positive”, hiring and employability has continued to be a major cause of worry for corporates, students as well as colleges. This is the problem where Kajal Malik, an MBA from Faculty of Management Studies saw an opportunity to bank upon.

One Problem, Three Communities: Problem Being Addressed By Reculta

During the placement drive of MBA students in the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi, Kajal Malik and Vidyarthi Baddireddy worked for the placement committee and witnessed a “woefully outdated and manually intensive” process of campus placements. The duo took the matter in their own hands and introduced a technology intervention in the process, which led to better ‘Day Zero’ offers and median CTC.

To address this gap, Kajal Malik and Vidyarthi Baddireddy founded Reculta, an HRTech startup in January 2017. The startup is making use of automation and data analytics to simplify placement processes for the principal stakeholders in the said communities i.e. students, corporates and colleges. The team had later on-boarded Rajnish Kohli as CTO, Utsav Bhattacharjee as co-founder and Sanjeev Malladi for product management along with developers for their product.

The New Delhi-based Hrtech services startup aims to manage the workflow and activities of campus placements more effectively through automation, data analytics and cloud technology while generating actionable insights for more effective hiring and placement preparation.

Reculta founders initially started with a small working capital of $30.7K- $38.4K (INR 20-25 Lakh). And are now in the final stages of closing a seed funding round worth $61.4K (INR 40 Lakhs) from CIIE, Ahmedabad.

The startup was also the winner at the first edition of the eBay Startup Cup (India edition) in September 2017 and was awarded a grant of $10K. Earlier, it received an incubation support from Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) of IIM Ahmedabad through their EIR programme, which included financial and mentorship support. Reculta also participated in the ITS (Ideas That Scale) Accelerator programme run by Ajeet Khurana and Pranav Khanna.

What Does Reculta Solve?

In the Indian recruitment space, colleges and universities are the first option for recruiters to hire fresh talents for their companies. However, the cost of recruitment has been continuously rising,  the fact that one in four graduates leave their job within two years.

On the same spectrum, students have been mostly blindsided during placement drives with no backend information. Students are found majorly dependent on the company information shared by recruitment coordinators and company representatives. Some of the major issues for the job seeking students continue to be the lack of information and data about the company, job profile, work culture, growth opportunities, etc.

While most of the colleges have been putting out “100% placement” claims, the reality has been very different. Towards achieving the same end, the placement season in the colleges  have a huge responsibility over the students who are counting on major companies to choose their students. The files have been ever increasing for the corporates, colleges and students.

Talking to Inc42, Bhattacharjee briefly explained that the product-based company enables stakeholders of recruitment to “achieve their objectives more quickly, more efficiently and with reduced costs through the use of our products”.

He added that Reculta works well for companies looking to hire either in large or in small numbers. Furthermore, startups can benefit with its speed and scale in hiring at affordable rates.

Monetisation Model, Current Traction And Challenges To Overcome

Reculta offers yearly subscription-based services and also charges on the basis of feature set requirement and number of students on-boarded or hired. The average ticket size for a client is $3,077- $4,616 (INR 2-3 Lakh).

Despite being functional and monetising only for the last nine months, the company aims to reach break even and become profitable in the next three months and clock in $9,230- $10,769 (INR 6-7 Lakhs) as monthly revenues.

As the company enters its first quarter of FY 2018, the company claims to have registered 100% growth rate in Q3 to Q4 of 2017.

With 13 paying clients, including IIM Ahmedabad, FMS Delhi, IIFT, NMIMS, IMT, XIMB among others; the startup is currently in the process of onboarding law and design colleges like Symbiosis Law School and School of Planning and Architecture, while eyeing engineering colleges, which it aims to achieve in the next six months.

Bhattacharjee shared, “Our recruiter product has got very strong positive feedback from the companies (recruiters). Several of them have indicated that they want to partner with us for pilots for the upcoming placement season. These prospective client partners represent some of the biggest names in the Indian campus recruitment space.”

Some of the major challenges Reculta has been dealing with includes long sales cycle, seasonal business and competition from CRM solution providers like Zoho, Salesforce and Talisma.

To address these, Reculta is working to expand its sales funnel to ease its cash flows and at the same time, bring in more credibility and shorten its sales cycle.

The startup is also planning to add more B2C features to generate around the year revenues. Also, “we are developing a diverse portfolio of campuses with varying calendars to offset seasonality,” Bhattacharjee shared.

Another major concern for the team is competitions from CRMs and therefore, they want to “differentiate ourselves by keeping a razor sharp focus on our target segment, i.e. stakeholders involved in campus placements which means we choose to fulfil a particular need of our customers”.

Reculta: Now Focusing On Growing Niche Areas In The Broad HRTech Space With Data Analytics

Bhattacharjee shared that the startup plans to expand its college platform to thrice the clients at present, while getting at least 15-20 recruiters on board before the next placement season kicks in.

The startup is also eyeing foreign markets such as Singapore and the UK, however, the hurdles such as tighter VISA rules and increasing salaries in the Indian job market has sparked concerns around the return on investment in an international college education.

With a learned insight from foreign universities, he shared that campus placements are a fairly alien concept in most countries. Therefore, it presents itself as a huge untapped market with limitless potential which the startup wants to leverage.

Bhattacharjee said, “Our favourite comment at the end of our presentations is ‘You guys seem to have thought of everything’. Every person who sits through our presentation recognises that we want to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve through product upgrades and cutting edge features at regular intervals.”

The company plans to introduce machine learning algorithms in the near future so that the users will be able to harness the power of ML and AI for more effective decision making using Reculta.

For example, for companies Reculta will be able to predict attrition and recommend changes in evaluation matrices to achieve optimal hiring outcomes. For students, Reculta fills in the huge gap in our education system which should have been occupied by career counsellors.

Bhattacharjee believes that “these are not wishful dreams, but matter-of-facts in the near future”.

Deep Inside The Competitive Landscape Of Indian HRTech Industry

The Indian HR industry is estimated to be $6.29 Bn (INR 40,000 Cr). In the year 2017 alone, it was estimated that $2 Bn was invested in the HR technology companies globally. As per an India Skills Report, the average increase in hiring intent is about 7%-10%, compared to last year.

In the last few years, however, the industry has worn off its age-old shackles of manual processes and have resorted to the effective utilisation of technology in order to streamline the series of processes required in selecting and training the new employees.

Post the revolution brought in by job search sites such as Naukri.com, a brigade of startups catering to the needs of the HR industry has evolved. This includes names such as Belong, JobSpire, Skillate, PeopleStrong, Freshteam, Bash amongst others, who have been taking the charge in the HRTech industry.

For instance, Skillate boast of its client base, which includes MNC’s like L&T and Expedia and startups like BigBasket, HomeLane among others. It is also working with few large enterprises in BFSI, FMCG and manufacturing sectors. While another player, Edge Networks works with customers like Wipro, HCL, Virtusa and several others.

However, Reculta believes that its competition is usually from local IT vendors providing stopgap solutions to its potential clients, without any data analytics or machine learning capabilities. At the same time, the founders also believe that their product is strong enough to gain the required product-market fit and build an edge over its competitors.

The other players in the segment have been raising funds to develop their technologies and expand their services. As per Inc42 DataLabs Tech Startup Funding report 2017, 70 HRTech startups raised around $100 Mn in the period of 2014-2017.

In this space, the startups have been trying to address the issues mostly of the stakeholders by providing them access to AI and ML technologies, but with Reculta focus first comes on the basics i.e. organising the recruitment processes. As the startup continues to focus on its niches of stakeholders, the startup looks promising, however, how it escalates its growth will be largely depended on the potential in the industry and with the investors.

The post HRTech Startup Reculta Wants Easy Recruitment Processes, But How? appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Online pharmacy startup Medlife co-founder, Tushar Kumar opines, “Over a period of time, I realised that the healthcare system in India is extremely chaotic. People don’t know where to go to locate the right specialist, find all of their prescribed medicines or even find a good laboratory for their tests. Sometimes, they have to travel to different places to avail these services. I believe that if a person is ill and is already anxious with the disease itself, there should be no need for them to stress any further in getting treatment.”

For Tushar, the reason to create Medlife where people could gain access to multiple healthcare services came from a personal experience where he had to walk up to 40 miles from his home to purchase medicines for his parents.

After realising the potential of technology intervention in the healthcare domain and the experience he gained while living abroad, Tushar who comes from a family of pharma entrepreneurs and was briefly involved in the family-run Alkem Laboratories, teamed up with Prashant Singh to launch Medlife in November 2014. The startup embarked on the journey with an initial investment of $15 Mn, later received a funding of $30 Mn from family capital and promoters.

The idea was simple: meeting the inadequacies in the healthcare delivery system through technological interventions. The epharmacy startup aims at providing a platform which would enable a consumer to gain access to healthcare services at all levels, starting from having all their clinic visits and prescriptions recorded and stored to buy medicines online and getting them delivered to their doorstep to e-consultation with doctors and scheduling diagnostic tests, thereby making it a one-stop platform for healthcare needs.

After being operational for almost four years, the startup is now processing over 8,000 deliveries a day (including private-label products) that amount to $4.6 Mn (INR 30 Cr) a month and expects 15-20% business growth month-on-month. The company further plans to close the current financial year with a revenue of $64.7 Mn (INR 425 Cr) and is targeting $138 Mn (INR 900 Cr) by the end of 2018-19.

Medlife: The What, The Why And The How

Medlife started out in the e-pharmacy space following an inventory-led model and helping doctors digitally manage and store patient records. However, it gradually diversified to online doctor consultations, wellness products and laboratory services.
The startup now has a single consumer-facing mobile app to access its main services: it offers doctors the ability to create and store patient records online through the app.

However, with time, it diversified to provide:

• Online doctor consultations
• Wellness products
• Laboratory services

Today, Medlife has a customer base of over 500K in India. The rapidly changing consumer behaviour towards Internet services in India is contributing to the boost that healthtech startups in the healthcare system and especially e-pharmacy based startups like Medlife are experiencing.

Why? Read this.

The global e-pharmacy market, led by North America and Europe, was approximately $29.3 Bn in 2014 and has been estimated to grow at a CAGR of 17.7% to reach a valuation of $128 Bn by 2023. This is a treasure trove that healthtech startups in India can capitalise on.

Secondly, according to a report published by FICCI, e-pharmacy platforms are expected to account for 5-15% of the total pharma sales in India, which would be largely achieved by enhancing adherence and access to the medicines for a large section of the underserved population. Moreover, the report also states that the healthcare industry in India is at an inflection point right now and is poised to grow up to $280 Bn by 2020, which is 10 times the growth since 2005.

In cognizance of the growth prospects and the challenges that mar the healthcare industry in India, what Medlife is doing is to maintain affordability, spread awareness and make health services accessible.

Recently, the startup also launched its generic drugs in keeping with the Government of India’s efforts to encourage the use of affordable generic drugs, instead of expensive brand-named alternatives.

What gives Medlife the edge for this money-run? It’s range of deliveries.

While Medlife is essentially an online pharmacy delivering healthcare solution such as medicines delivery and diagnostic services, it also provides a complete health package by integrating various other aspects of healthcare onto its platform thereby providing an entire healthcare ecosystem to the customer for timely diagnosis and effective treatment.

The app is easy to use and customers don’t have to go outside the platform for medical assistance unlike various other products available in the market. At the moment, Medlife has over 1,200 doctor clinics on the platform working for the ecommerce healthcare business in the health sector.

Tusher elaborates, “As we wanted to build a cash generating platform first, we forayed into the e-pharmacy space to get the ball rolling. The e-pharmacy brings in most of our revenues right now. We own our inventory and then sell the same to the customers who order from our e-pharmacy. Presently, we have our registered pharmacies in 20+ cities. In addition, we also generate revenue through sample collections in the diagnostics space.”

Along with Medlife, other e-pharmacy startups are also reaching out to the exponential growth. India has around hundreds of e-pharm startups in India which include the likes of 1mg, PharmEasy, Myra, Practo, etc.

With regards to the Indian healthtech market, NASSCOM has some interesting findings:

• The opportunity: The Indian healthcare IT market is worth $1 Bn (2014) and is pegged to grow at 1.5X by 2020. Healthcare software market comprises of only 9% of the total healthcare IT market in the country.
• Startup Hub: Over 60% of healthtech-focussed startups incorporated since 2010.
• Key Segments: Mobile apps, healthcare platforms and wellness analytics have gained maximum interests from the investors.

And in terms of funding, as per Inc42 DataLabs, the healthtech sector had witnessed over 111 deals in 2017, making it the second most funded segment of 2017. Not just in terms of the number of deals, healthtech startups raised over $333 Mn in funding in 2017, which is three times the amount they raised in 2016.

In light of the growth curve in the sector, not only is there a huge competition among epharmacy startups, but also virtual pharmacies are posing a grave threat to the non-virtual ones.

Online pharmacies are not only catering to a larger customer base due to the technology leverage that provides easier access to the services but they are also rolling out discounts and coupons to attract and broaden the customer base.

Online Pharmacy Trampling Challenges

Just like any other tech startup, Medlife initially faced the problem of encouraging customers to adopt its platform. “The customers were skeptical and weren’t very forthcoming. But over time, because of our services and commitment, clients started trusting the company and the brand. Now we have customers of 60 or 80 years of age, who have come to love Medlife.”

Another challenge was to win the first few customers, especially doctors, since there was skepticism about the security of patient data and using technical devices in general.

The company had also faced challenges with setting up the delivery of medicines within the legal framework but ultimately achieved compliance with all laws and regulations.

“Additionally we saw that a certain segment of the target audience was not comfortable placing orders online. To solve this, we launched call-to-order for them to simplify their experience with us,” Tushar speaks retrospectively.

But government initiatives are also attempting to mitigate the prevailing challenges.

Last year, due to the boom in e-pharmacy, the government issued a draft of the Drugs (Sale and Distribution) Rules 2017, aiming at removing ambiguity on regulations to facilitate sales of drugs online.

According to the draft rules, which came out in March this year, no one can operate an e-pharmacy without registering with the Central Licensing Authority and the supply of drugs by an e-pharmacy will be regulated.

Walking The Last Mile

Going forward, Medlife has plans to launch about 30 generic drugs and 40 OTC products by the next financial year. With a planned internal investment of $30 Mn to scale up operations, the company expects to earn a revenue of $138 Mn-$153 Mn (INR 900 Cr-1,000 Cr) by the financial year 2019.

Medlife will manufacture generic products through Alkem Laboratories and Tulip Lab, and aims to open its first store in Mumbai. Eventually, the firm will either eye wholesale drug suppliers in the south or target cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, New Delhi and Kolkata.

“We will also be launching our first ever diagnostic lab in Bengaluru to reach out to the masses in Tier I/II cities in India, with the direct and clear-cut approach of providing easily accessible high-quality diagnostics services at affordable prices,” Tushar confirms.

Editor’s Note

The growth demonstrated by Medlife and such online pharmacy startups is a clear testimony to India’s indulgence in digitised services.

Accenture analysis revealed that digitisation will be fueling almost one-third of the growth and an estimated 40% of the profitability in the pharmaceutical market by 2020. For businesses that are partially digitised, their models can drive improved profitability by as much as 27%.

The Indian pharmaceutical industry is at an interesting juncture today. Digitising pharmacy and other healthcare services is boosting the healthcare industry due to the wider reach of technology in different geographical locations in India.

Companies have started exploring and deploying cloud-based platforms, mobile applications and advanced data analytics tools to build leaner and more digitised healthcare organisations. It can be said with conviction that this market is set to grow further as India’s online presence increases. With over 460 Mn Internet users, India is the second largest online market, ranked only behind China. By 2021, there will be about 635.8 Mn Internet users in India.

With such a promising future for digitised healthcare in India and across the world, online pharmacy startups like Medlife will try to capitalise on the opportunities that the digitised industry holds. Considering the encouragement that e-pharmacy is receiving, startups will have a lot to gain from this wave.

The post How Online Pharmacy Medlife Is Making Healthcare Accessible For 5 Lakh+ Users Across 40 Cities appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Internet of Things (connected devices) are the future and are touching every aspect of our lives, be it healthcare, transport or the smart home systems. These devices, which are connected to the Internet, function by gathering data (understanding your needs and behavior) and talking with each other.

But according to a report by Cisco, IoT device hacks have become a dangerous reality. Due to the sensitive nature of data collected, many see blockchain technology as the logical option to help with security.

Indian blockchain services startup, KrypC is also counting on this sentiment as its latest initiative is to help intelligent machines talk securely with each other using the blockchain platform.

The startup is in the process of developing a blockchain protocol for IoT devices. Which means that in the future when a drone comes to deliver your package, this solution could possibly make it hard for someone to hack it and steal the goodies for themselves.

Speaking to Inc42, KrypC’s founder and CEO Ravi Jagannathan states that one of the most important trends going forward is going to be the security of IoT devices and hence, blockchain technology presents itself as a right solution.

“Our primary goal has been doing the research and making it a reality and we think about how this technology can be brought to normal adoption,” Ravi says.

Ravi: “The company is through with the internal research (on IoT solution) and is expecting to release the beta version by end of this year.”

The Company: KrypC

KrypC aims at attracting enterprises which are looking to adopt blockchain technology in their processes to help them increase their efficiency and transparency.

In short: it seeks to provide custom-built blockchain solutions for business specific needs with “zero” coding effort. With its presence in the US, Netherlands, and India, the company is looking to establish more offices around the world.

The company says most of its clients are international and being part of the Microsoft accelerator program (inducted earlier this year) has helped in opening doors of opportunities for them. KrypC is currently working with about 20 clients directly or indirectly, some of them being Fortune 500 companies and in India, it’s working with the likes of Bajaj Allianz for whom it has helped ease disbursement of travel insurance claims related to flight delays for the passengers without any paperwork through automation using smart contracts.  

One of its other clients is Dubai-based startup TradeAssets, a blockchain powered e-marketplace to help banks optimise trade finance risk. Banks on a regular basis engage in the financing of trade and when they do, they create assets which are then traded between the banks to mitigate risk and increase revenue. According to Ravi, the blockchain will enable all the participants in the ecosystem to exchange information and assets with the others selectively and securely. The solution has been implemented in a production-ready environment and running live for banks.

The Sell: KrypCore

Its main offering, KrypCore, which is based on the hyperledger platform has been developed to enable enterprises to quickly and easily develop blockchain applications.  The platform not only acts as a translator between a business user and the blockchain, but also helps manage the overall blockchain network.

Ravi says that although there are companies that offer the comfort of multiple platforms, what makes KrypC unique is the bandwidth of services it offers ranging from ideation, PoC to production.

While KrypCore is primarily based on Hyperledger protocol, the company also offers clients the option to develop customised solutions and platforms using multiple blockchain protocols like Ethereum and Multichain and has several solutions (live applications to pilots to PoCs) running on its platform.

The Business

KrypC makes money through a combination of subscription, licensing fees and service charges.The team has developed more than 40 use cases in the area of supply chain, healthcare, law, travel, insurance, banking, financial service and many more since its inception.

Ravi says the last six months have been good with the company already having signed five projects but he does not disclose how much revenue the company, which works across sectors, has made as the timing of the chat comes close to the fundraising efforts. The Delaware, US-based startup does the bulk of its operations and R&D from Bengaluru.

As per him, there is a perceptible increase in interest levels in India around the technology but the challenge will be to divert these energies towards foundational technology requirements and identifying the right use cases.

AKA – not adopting blockchain just for the heck of it.

In a report titled, “Blockchain technology in India” released last year by Deloitte in association with The Associated Chambers of Commerce of India (ASSOCHAM), one of the primary reasons listed as a hurdle in the adoption of this technology was lack of awareness and integration issues.

Solution 5 : 50 : 500

KrypC’s “5 : 50 : 500” adoption methodology gives enterprises a sufficient time before applying it in right-fit areas to maximise their benefits while keeping risks to a minimum. Because the technology is at a nascent stage, the company puts effort into conducting workshops for the client wherein a good amount of understanding regarding blockchain is explained to the client. The company aims to provide solutions across verticals and Ravi says sectors such as supply chain, energy, healthcare and retail companies are thinking about this technology.

Catching The Worm

The day is still early but the buzz around blockchain technology seems to only increase. Deloitte has said that blockchain today may be compared to what the Internet was in the early 1990s. But as they say, the early bird catches the worm and KrypC is one among many birds waiting to swoop down.

KrypC which began its journey in 2016 with some funding raised from the family, friends and four investors from Amsterdam in 2017, is now aiming to raise $5 Mn in Series A funding in the next two to three months.

It comes as no surprise that it does not feel the need for an ICO that many blockchain startups go for. “We don’t need an ICO… definitely not. We want to play to our strengths, we have angel investors, our technology is appreciated by the investors, we have real assets and have experienced staff…we are not a white paper company,” Ravi said.

One of the other blockchain startups in India that offer similar enterprise solutions is Sofocle Designs (built on Hyperledger). It provides blockchain powered enterprise solutions for Smart Contracts, Supply chain, Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, and Manufacturing. Cateina Technologies is another startup that provides blockchain solutions for business process automation. The product helps suppliers avail loan against approved invoices by the manufacturer with no paperwork needed. (For more interesting startups click here).

In India, Blockchain adoption has seen a lot of traction over the recent years especially by enterprises and financial institutions and its use cases are not sector specific and hence you may want to familiarise yourself with the word “sector agnostic” as we may see more and more blockchain startups call themselves that. This approach provides companies to have a flexible and scalable product, especially at a time when the technology is in its infant stages; it’s a bit of no-brainer.

But for a change, we are not talking about blockchain and Bitcoins in the same breath. It is very likely that we will see more progress on the adoption of blockchain based enterprise solutions before we know what the fate of the cryptocurrency is but it’s clear now that the technology that was specifically built for the virtual currency has outgrown its parent. Expect to see more activity in this space.

The post Blockchain Startup KrypC Eyes To Secure IoT Devices appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Data is the new gold. As PayPal co-founder Max Levchin says, “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.” But to make such analysis, we first need the raw data, which can be stored for a required time period and can be structured in an informative manner, ready to deliver any sorts of insights.

Globally, we have consumer data companies like Neilson, Gartner, IMRB, Grail, etc. amongst others who excel in providing aggregated bundles of demographic information across different geographies as well as over web. For instance, to answer questions such as how many females aged between 18-35 watch a particular TV serial or a web series in the US, a company can always find a resort here.

But what about the rising class of millennials who are always on the go and the primary mode to target them is the ‘Smartphone’. Talk about India and you have 300 Mn+ smartphone users, predicted to reach 530 Mn by 2018, residing in 29 states, consuming 22+ official languages, and the vast diversity in religions, education as well as work practices.

To take on this arduous task, US-based MobileWalla has come forward. It recently launched its business operations in India, setting up its headquarters in Kolkata.

As the serial entrepreneur and founder Anindya Datta averred in a recent interaction with Inc42, “We don’t do what Neilson or Comscore might be doing. If you need to reach women aged between 18-35 in India, we will give you an audience segment, say of 6.5 Mn devices which belong to this particular age group. You can take it and then with the help of companies like Inmobi, can push data as per the need of your campaign.”

So Who Is MobileWalla? Take A Look!

• Founded In: 2010
• Branded As: A next-generation consumer data company
• Technologies Employed: Big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Aim: To be the most granular consumer intelligence platform in the world for B2C companies
• To Reach For: Getting demographic, behavioral and systems-usage information
• Sectors: Telecommunications, retail, FMCG, financial services and market research verticals.
• Products:  Segments and Data as a Service (DaaS),
• Highlights: Claims  to have encompassed information about 1.3 Bn consumers in 31 different countries
• Key Investor(s): Indian Angel Network

So let’s dive in!

The Conceptualisation Of MobileWalla

Anindya, although operating out of the US for quite many years, is still an Indian by heart, and this is reflected in the way he has named his startups so far. His previous startup was named Chutney, which was backed by Vinod Khosla and later sold to Cisco in 2005. The same goes for MobileWalla, which he had earlier nearly named as Appwalla.

“But the domain name was already taken, so we had to settle for MobileWalla.com,” he reminisced.

Anindya further revealed that post selling Chutney, he spent almost four years with his six-year-old daughter and interestingly, she is the one who landed him with the concept behind MobileWalla. “My daughter was quite obsessive about one particular game on her iPod. This was the time when apps were starting to take off, and there were around 800 apps on the iTunes store. This made me dig deeper and I found that native search for the app store was quite bad.”

With this realisation, Anindya first built an app discovery and search engine, which helped users search for apps on the basis of Semantic Search. The origin of Mobilewalla was Anindya’s quest to build a third party search engine for apps, but Mobilewalla was not a proper business at the time. Although they were becoming popular, the financial resources were depleting fast and there was no monetisation model in sight.

“So I realised that as we were doing a lot of semantic search, and it’s 2010, people are now accepting apps. So, I thought why can’t we make something which can help a company reach its audience on mobile better based on how he or she is using the apps on his smartphone.”

MobileWalla, as it is today, took shape in 2010. In its early days the company was backed by IAN and is now growing at a fast pace. It’s now monetising through its subscription-based DaaS services as well as its audience targeting and segmentation service.

It now claims:

• Team Size: 50 (global), 20 (India)
• Revenue: $10 Mn Annual run rate, Grown 80% Q-o-Q for the past 8 quarters
• No. of Customers: 85

The Tech Behind MobileWalla

As Anindya explains, “One major source of our data is ‘ad requests’. When you open an app or a website, you are served with ads for the entire duration you are consuming the content. The instance an app is opened, it starts sending out ad requests on a constant basis. These ad requests are structured and transmit information about the device id and the location. This is the key part of the data that we gather.”

“As the data does not include any privacy-related information and is majorly treated as third-party data, data privacy compliances have not been a hurdle,” he added.

For instance, if a consumer is at Big Bazaar and happens to check the cricket score on ESPNcricinfo, that app will continue sending ad requests embedding his or her location. Tracking it will let MobileWalla know where the consumer is. A further demographic analysis is done on the basis of the user’s engagement on her smartphone.

To explain further, he cited a US-based client’s case study. Consider that a company needs to sell diapers and reach a potential consumer base to target. So, here’s the analysis that runs on the back end:

•  We identify the audience segment which has the maximum potential to become a targeted consumer base for the company. In this case, they are ‘mothers’.
•  Where can we reach out to this audience segment? In the US, most parents drop off their kids at their schools. So, there is a high chance that we can reach out to mothers at elementary schools. So, let’s say, there are 780K elementary schools in our data, whose location can be easily fetched.
•  We will then start tracking the ad requests we receive from these elementary schools and over a period of time, we can analyse and segment this data.
• This will enable us to find the devices owned by the mothers of these young children.

With this data, the company can then send targeted notifications through its marketing campaign, leading to better results.

Challenges On The Tech Execution And Data Analysis Front

The first and foremost challenge is the data storage. As claimed by Anindya, every day they receive about 25 Bn ad requests. Here is how the storage-cost analysis is done.

25 Bn ad requests per day –> Each ad request is 4 KB in size –> Totals to 100 Terabyte worth of raw data everyday –> Need to store data over a period of time, say two years, totals to 1.5 Hexabyte

“Amazon Web Services today has the storage capacity of 15 Hexabytes. If we store this data there, it will consume 10% of their storage and our data storage bill will alone shoot up to $5 Bn. This is not economically viable,” shared Anindya.

The team has thus built its own data compression technology based on data semantics where the data can be compressed down to 1,000th of its size. “This reduces the storage by 90%, and consequently our data storage costs,” he added.

Further, the data analysis is based on statistical and probabilistic measures. So, how does MobileWalla keep the percentage of error down?

Usually, consumer data companies do two kinds of analysis – deterministic and probabilistic. So for instance, if a retail company asks for its competitor’s consumer data, this is deterministic analysis and can be completed within a time frame of a week to 14 days. However, if  the team need to find data for campaigns like ‘Mother’s of elementary school children’, it goes for probabilistic analysis, which takes a much larger time frame to complete.”

Further in statistics, while taking the inference, one makes two kinds of errors, Type 1 and Type 2 i.e. False negative and False positive, respectively. False positives are “when I am telling you something is true but is not”, and false negative is “when I am not giving you something which was true”. Simply put, a type I error is to falsely infer the existence of something that is not there, while a type II error is to falsely infer the absence of something that is. “So we are very careful that we do Type 2 errors and not Type 1,” he added.

Anindya’s Bet On India

India, with its diversity, offers a very large consumer market and hence a large number of B2C enterprises. As Anindya explains, “Imagine rivals like Flipkart-Amazon, Ola-Uber, Zomato-Swiggy, or even offline hotel chains like ITC-Hyatt. Amidst this cut-throat competition, the company with better data will certainly be in a position to gain an edge over its competitors. Take the case of someone like Paytm seeking the adoption of its digital payments platform among every small e-shop. That would require granular data and this is where MobileWalla steps in.”

He further added that the diversity in the data consumption patterns further made it technically difficult for the companies to collect and segment the data and get the solutions at a granular level. “But being a pure play technology company, MobileWalla is focussed on solving such hard tech problems,” added Aditya.

What about the challenges? Anindya believes that one major challenge MobileWalla may face in Indian adoption is the price-sensitive nature of the market. Also, the lack of talent specialised in the Data as a Service space.

The Increasing Importance Of ‘Data’ In The Indian Economy

According to a few industry experts, Big data analytics sector in India is expected to witness an eight-fold jump and reach $16 Bn by 2025 from the current $2 Bn. The Indian marketing analytics industry’s present annual revenue is pegged at around $2.03 Bn and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 23.8% till 2020.

With the Indian government showing an inclination towards the promotion of new age technologies, there has emerged a brigade of startups using data as a key to solving problems for the enterprises and marketers. Fractal Analytics, TEG Analytics, WNS, Datalicious and Bridgei2i are some of the names leading the charts amongst others.

MobileWalla, with its audience segmentation and targeting as well as DaaS services, is aiming to provide one holistic set of services to its clients under one roof. The company is now looking to scale and is looking to invest more in its research and technical capabilities.

The post How MobileWalla Is Using Granular Data To Make Enterprises Reach 300 Mn Indian Smartphone Users appeared first on Inc42 Media.

A lot of you are familiar with WhatsApp groups for family, friends and in recent years, office. Who knew social platforms would one day also be professional platforms. But if you use WhatsApp for official communications then you most probably use it as a supplement to your communication needs and use other communication tools too, the most dominant among which would be email and many of you would be dreadfully familiar with those long chains.

But all that changed in 2013 when a US-based company, Slack was launched, which took the concept of sharing messages with your teams and made it more fulfilling and holistic by centralising the communication and integrating apps in a way, redefined how you look at internal communications.

The enterprise collaboration market is touted to touch $49.51 Bn by 2021 and although Slack is by far the most dominant player in a segment that it helped create, there is another Indian player that wants to offer you an alternative among other international players in this segment,.

Flock, a company started by serial entrepreneur and billionaire Bhavin Turakhia, is a real-time communication and collaboration app that began life in 2014 and is aiming to be the most cost-efficient product in the expensive enterprise communication segment while aiming to offer you more features for your bucks. Four years since launch, over 30,000 companies use its services, some of which include corporate honchos like Tim Hortons, Victorinox, ITC Hotels and Tata AIA life insurance.

Inc42 recently caught up with Turakhia, who is also the Flock CEO, and his team, just a few months after the company launched its paid subscription plan, a move that is dreaded by companies over the fear of losing users who are all too familiar with the free features.

The company is however optimistic, Turakhia says that Flock, whose product development happens in India, has 135,000 weekly active users. Since the launch of its premium subscription features in January this year, Flock has witnessed a month-on-month growth of 200% in licences sold and more than 40% of the teams tended to buy Flock subscriptions within two days of using the product, he claimed.

The largest market for the company is the US followed by India and the UK.

Folks at Flock have valid reasons to be optimistic as it was recently voted by PC Mag as one of the best alternatives to Slack.

The post Flock Aims To Give Slack A Run For Its Money appeared first on Inc42 Media.

“The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people,” said US-based author and journalist Jon Ronson. Few will disagree with this. However, Gen C has been so busy, scrolling through hundreds of profiles on Facebook, texting on Messenger, and liking pictures on Instagram, that it has forgotten the power of the voice.

Yes. We are talking about the sound that is produced in a person’s larynx and uttered through the mouth, as speech or a song. Our voices have now become limited to sending audio messages and making voice calls on Whatsapp or calling out to Siri and Google Assistant on our smart devices.

So what else have we lost? Effective communication. Social media has become an inseparable part of our daily lives and an important medium of communication. Yes, we are communicating, but are we communicating effectively?

Effective communication isn’t just about passing information back and forth; it’s about understanding the intentions and emotions behind that information. TheVOIZapp, a San Francisco-based startup, with one of its founders based in Bengaluru, aims to bring the voice back to the people, in a bid to boost effective communication via social media.

“The current suite of social media or networking apps does a lot of things. However, we feel that the true emotions behind messaging, expression of ideas and thoughts are still not captured enough by them,” says one of the co-founders of theVOIZapp, Babatunde Olaniran (Babs), who along with Sidharth Vijayan struck upon the idea for their company during their MBA days in 2016.

Sidharth adds, “Current platforms traditionally support text, photos, and videos. Text lacks the depth of emotion and photos and videos have an inherent need for composition and perfection, which can be both time-consuming and frustrating to get done well.” So, they decided to build an audio-based social networking platform where content creation becomes extremely easy and users still have access to photos (and video coming soon). One where photos (and videos soon) combined in a unique way with audio to enrich user interactions. The aim is to make it extremely easy to share ideas with the world.

The founders’ vision of embedding the missing emotional layer in social media has certainly paid off. Since the official launch of theVOIZapp in February 2018, the app has gained a following of approximately 7000 users.

As we dive deeper into theVOIZapp’s concept, the founders’ journey and their plans for the future, let’s take a closer look at the metrics of this social media app, which is growing by leaps and bounds by leveraging the most innate part of the human expression — the voice.

Stage 1: The Inception

Sidharth reminisces, “Our journey started back in September 2016 when we met while pursuing our MBA in San Francisco, California.” Like most management graduates, the duo kept discussing business ideas. During one such discussion, Sidharth pitched to Babs a version of the app where people could start a story with a simple 10-15 second audio track and let others just jump in and continue building the story in their own flavour.

“It somehow sparked a light in Babs and he said, ‘Sid, let’s do it!’ and the rest as we say, is history,” chuckled Sidharth.

From then on, the duo worked on the MVP (minimum viable product) for the app and launched it on November 17, 2017. The MVP gained some traction, after which they then went on to relaunch the app in its current version on February 14 this year. They were also chosen by StartupGrind 2018 as part of a group of 30 startups to demonstrate their app and concept at the event.

theVOIZapp allows users to share photos with an audio story attached to it. They can share content either publicly or privately with family members, friends, and others, thereby facilitating effective communication and socialising.

“I think it had something to do with the fact that we were in an environment where online discussions were open and active, but not very interactive. It seemed like a good problem to solve and a solution that would enable people to create interesting conversation threads and creative stories,” Babs added.

Stage 2: Leveraging Voice To Get A Lead Over Social Media Giants

It is a scientifically proven fact that effective communication is brought about by engaging as many of the sensory organs as possible. TheVOIZapp isn’t the first app to realize this and try cashing in on it. World over, organizations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Whatsapp are already working on capitalising a wide user base with innovative voice features embedded in their respective apps and devices. TheVOIZapp also has direct competitors such as HearMeOut and Limor app.

But what is the need for a social media platform like theVOIZapp in India, where the market is already dominated by Facebook, which has a user base of more than 270 Mn, and WhatsApp, with more than 200 Mn users,? “Yes, it’s true that other apps have voice options, but a more relevant question to ask would be ‘How is the voice option applied to the platform to enhance user experiences when it comes to social media interactions’?” asks Sidharth.

The founders explained that at present, there are apps that enable a user to only make calls or send and receive audio messages. They believe that theVOIZapp offers a unique experience and facilitates far better communication as it combines the elements of photo and voice (video coming soon).

Using TheVOIZapp

TheVOIZapp is available on both iOS and Android. Upon signing in, the app offers the user an interface with three icons at the bottom of the screen, which take them to the three sections into which the platform is divided. Notifications are handled in an innovative manner – tap and hold any one of the three bottom icons to launch contextual notifications for your scroll, rooms and profile.

 1) The icon on the left navigates the user to his or her feed (referred to as the ‘Scroll’).

2) The middle icon navigates users to the room’s screen (where users can access public and private rooms). Public rooms can be created by any user, shared with the world and can be joined by anyone who wants to join interesting audio and photo conversations or discussions. Private rooms are where users can connect with friends, family, and other users of theVOIZapp.

3)  The icon to the right takes the user to their profile page and settings.

Further, effective communication is not the only problem the duo is trying to cater to. Another key problem they are trying to solve is the issue of impersonation.

As Babs explained, “With theVOIZapp, we’ve created a huge barrier for impersonators, as it’s not as easy to mimic someone else’s voice and to pull a prank on someone, unlike with photos and text, especially in a one-to-one conversation. So, privacy and safety that theVOIZapp provides, along with the emotional element, will help users feel safe while connecting with people and improve the overall experience.”

He added that they’ve delved into research to find that people around the world who can’t read or write face a communication barrier. Such people can benefit from a social platform that uses voice. “Our platform breaks down such barriers and lets people express themselves and listen to others in the language they love to converse with their peers and close ones,” added Babs.

Ensuring Data Privacy

With even social media giants like Facebook and Twitter facing the data privacy heat, it is imperative for young startups to be on their guard in this area. “We understand that user privacy is a huge responsibility and believe that privacy begins from the time a user registers on the platform.” As of now, theVOIZapp uses only phone number verification for registration and password retrieval. “This is required to avoid fraudsters from hacking user accounts or registering multiple profiles and interfering with other users’ privacy,” said Sidharth.

The platform has also been designed in a way to continually remind users to keep private information private. “It’s an ongoing process. Our users have control over choosing a private or a public profile. We don’t collect any sensitive information except for the location of the user. The location data is collected so we can find new friends around the user and also serve up relevant content that is being talked about by others in and around their location,” he added.

Stage 3: Monetisation And Achieving A Product-Market Fit

TheVOIZapp is currently looking to establish a base and, like any other social media platform, building an audience is the first priority. If they can do this well, the money will follow, is their mantra.

For now, with the hope of acquiring at least two million active users in the first fiscal year of its operation, the startup has taken financial support from friends and family. It has raised a total of $215,000 (~₹1.4Cr) before launch and is looking to raise a bigger round now. “We are focused on the product and on generating traction, as we think they are the key elements for any startup in the online space. We are learning quickly and that is evident from our growth trajectory,” said Babs.

So, How Does theVOIZapp Plan To Gain Traction? Babs replied, “We are connecting with influencers from our target demographic from different walks of life and industries, especially those who have a sizeable number of followers and have deep engagement with their audience. We believe that when we create value for these influencers, they will get on board and easily attract their audience to the platform to share this value.”

In the near future, the startup is looking to expand in three markets — India, Africa, and the US. It also intends to charge businesses for the value it will be providing them with an interesting take on analytics that makes it very relevant to online businesses. “We look forward to that possibility becoming a reality soon, say in the next two quarters,” said Sidharth.

Not only this, theVOIZapp also has plans to venture into apps for wearables like smart-watches in the near future. The two founders are aiming big and are working to bring a “killer feature” that is targeted at the youth, sometime soon. “We’d like to keep that for a future conversation when it is ready to be launched. I wish we could reveal more about it now, but it would really be a buzzkill,” added Sidharth with a smirk, when probed about this special feature.

Helping People Find Their Voice Again

If there is one thing that gets revolutionised with each passing year, it is the smartphone. The smartphone revolution has taken Drogon -like wings in the last few years. Even though the market grew only about 14% last year, 124 Mn smartphones were shipped across the country. Not only that, the feature phone market registered double-digit growth as well, leading up to 56 Mn phones being shipped in the last quarter of 2017 alone.

This data suggests that the smartphone market isn’t growing in a vacuum and that it’s a collective shift in the way that India connects across its demography and geography. At the intersection of this shift is theVOIZapp .

Recent research by Omidyar Network India suggests that 70% of the minutes a user spends online are spent on social and entertainment apps, 38% of that being spent on Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram. With Whatsapp at 200 Mn users and Facebook aiming for 350 Mn, India is becoming one of the fastest adopters of social media for online communication.

Indian startups are looking to cash in on the potential of connecting people on social. That they are looking in the right direction is evident from the success of local players like ShareChat, which has surpassed expectations with over 8 Mn downloads in India.

Further, telecom players are offering cheap data packs, encouraging the use of social media platforms and sidelining phone calls. Although the effect is hard to quantify, it can be felt in our everyday lives. People are increasingly moving away from phone calls towards texting, losing out on creating personal bonds to a large extent. Apps like theVOIZapp have the power to help millennials find their social media ‘voice’ (the real one) and engage better with friends both in India and across the world.

At the same time, the challenges are piled up in a high stack. The success of the venture depends on how many users join the platform and how many of them stick around and bring their friends and family into the ecosystem. This could be a tricky task as across age groups, conversations are becoming increasingly impersonal and social media profiles are getting more aspirational.

The post TheVOIZapp Is Bringing Voice To Social Media Communication appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Ecommerce in India is like the Midas Touch. It turns everything it touches into gold, and it touches everything. The Indian ecommerce industry, which is poised to touch $73 Bn by 2022, has gone from selling books and music CDs just over 10 years ago to selling apparel, lifestyle products, electronics, food and more. It is now transforming the service sector with the likes of logistics, hyperlocal, and even advertising.

Thanks to the ecommerce boost and given the increase in advertising spend, one of the most fragmented segments in advertising — OOH (outdoor or out-of-home media advertising) — is now growing at a much faster pace. OOH is expected to grow 9.7% in 2018, pulling in revenues worth $556 Mn (INR 3,743 Cr) by the end of December. The total advertising market in India is expected to be worth $1 Tn by 2022.

To make a mark in this niche category, Gayatri Kapur and Nikhil Pawa joined the OOH bandwagon in 2016 with their venture Mudraka. Based out of Delhi, the bootstrapped startup offers outdoor print advertising products, promotional materials, and custom signages to businesses. It counts brands like Google, Zoomcar, Muthoot, 1mg, Apollo Tyres, and Modi Pharma as well as FICCI among its clients. The founders aim to resolve some of the issues such as opaque pricing, and non-standardised products in this so far unorganised industry.

So, What Is Mudraka?

Mudraka, which means “printer” in Sanskrit,  was initially started as a marketplace for outdoor advertising, display and signage products with vendors across India. However, in order to address issues concerning quality control, consistency, service levels, packaging, etc, the founders had to internalise a number of processes. They then shifted from the marketplace model to the inventory model.

Mudraka had started as a platform for SMEs, and now has two very distinct markets that it caters to — the online segment for small businesses and a bulk order segment for large corporates. These products are used by businesses in outdoor campaigns, activations, exhibitions, events, POP/ in-store displays, and others.

With absolutely zero spend on branding, the company has been scaling impressively year-on-year and has clocked in a 7x revenue in FY18 as compared to the previous financial year. With a target revenue of $7.5 Mn (INR 50 Cr), Mudraka aims to grow its partner base besides generating ten times more indirect employment in the next three years.

“Today, we work with an extensive partner network who depend on our value chain. We want to grow this number organically. This extensive partner network is managed by a core team of eight people,” emphasised Gayatri.

Mudraka: Making Its Way The Bootstrapped Way

The founders were particularly keen on doing something digital as they had been observing the ongoing internet revolution in the country, which is changing the way people conduct businesses or consume services, trends which were also fueling huge valuations and funding. However, one thing they were determined about was not to make their way on the heels of VC money.

There were two reasons behind this decision. Firstly, they didn’t want to get quick funding, spend funds recklessly, let the promoters make money, and then get out of the game. The ultimate vision was to build a business that worked for everyone by being self-sustainable and profitable, and one that empowered its partners.

Secondly, the founders deeply cared about building a business that would provide enduring value to the society via sustainable jobs. “Take, for example, the case of the erstwhile second-largest ecommerce company in the country, which was heavily funded and then went kaput. There is no point in building ventures with the objective of being acquired or funded,” said Gayatri.

How Overcoming Challenges Helped Mudraka To Scale In The OOH Sector

 “The Indian market is not at all homogenous in its behaviour, and hence we cannot apply a successful business model from any other part of the world. In my view, India comprises many countries, each with unique requirements and expectations. Since our firm is focused on customer satisfaction, how to keep up to this standard, while customising every order, from design to delivery, given time constraints are some of the challenges we grapple with daily” said Nikhil.

While some of the challenges such as attaining a product-market fit were overcome with extensive research and finding existing loopholes in the industry, others were solved with experimentation and experience.

Overcoming Challenges Along The Way

• Installation Support: With customers fragmented across the country, providing installation support was not feasible. Therefore they Built a product portfolio around portable display items which don’t require installation support, thus saving costs and promoting DIY (Do It Yourself) at once.
• Time to delivery: Since a large percentage of customers are on strict timelines due to an event or a launch, Mudraka has optimised its inventory and processes to ensure the quickest possible delivery.
• Better packaging: With constant improvements in packaging, they’ve been able to ensure their fragile and heavy products reach the customers in perfect condition.

However, despite working around many of these challenges, the Mudraka team still has to contend with problems that are inherent in the industry and tough to overcome.

For instance, the ecommerce industry is still Cash On Delivery (COD) sensitive, while Mudraka demands the price upfront as it offers a customised product. Similarly, returns are also not accepted and new products are delivered only in case of damage during delivery or faulty products being sent.

Competition And The Plans Ahead

Mudraka is not the only company in this domain. Amid existing players such as CircleOne and Mega Biz Merchandise, Mudraka is betting on its ability to collect and analyse data to differentiate itself.

“Data is in our DNA. By employing A/B testing, UX improvements and smarter product selections, we’ve seen our conversion rate increase by three times in the last year. From a profitability perspective, we look at the cost of selling, distribution, customer satisfaction, etc for every product and SKU – and juggle with our portfolio in a manner that makes sense for the business. We also use data to forecast demand and secure supply,’’ Said Gayatri.

Nikhil added, “Transparent, affordable pricing, consistent quality and ease of ordering are the primary advantages over offline players. We also reach areas where there are no local offline players present.”

Further, the Mudraka founders are clear that they don’t want to introduce installation services. “We’ve tested the DIY model, which is very popular outside India, and seen it work for our products. Our most popular products are portable display items such as standees, canopies, backdrop stands, table top displays, LED boards which do not need installation support.”

They also intend to continue working in a bootstrapped manner. ‘’We want to stretch this business model to see how much we can scale it without any investments, to see its organic growth. We could look at future partnerships or investments that are strategic in nature. However, our main focus now is not to seek investments, but to build a sustainable business that is predicated on a great customer experience,” added Gayatri.

Going ahead, Mudraka is also looking to focus on increasing its product range, adding tech-enabled digital OOH solutions, reaching a larger customer base through various marketing channels and building support for local languages.

In Conclusion

With growing competition between products and services in both the offline and online space, effective and efficient advertising seems to be the need of the hour. This need has resulted in new and innovative changes in OOH advertising media across the world.

Travel to countries like Russia and Singapore, and what strikes you is the ubiquity of outdoor digital advertising, and the lack of physical display units of the kind we find all over India.

Given how India has leapfrogged into the digital arena in the last couple of years, this change in advertising will inevitably reach India as well, with players such as Mudraka in the race. And when this change happens, if such companies are able to capture even a small percentage of the market, we are talking tens of crores.

The post How Bootstrapped Startup Mudraka Is Making A Dent In The $556 Mn Indian OOH Market appeared first on Inc42 Media.

India is a country with 1.3 Bn population. Recently, Union Minister for Road Transport Nitin Gadkari has sought the support of corporates to fulfil India’s commitment to reduce fatal road accidents by 50% by the end of 2020 as the country is a signatory to the UN Decade of Action. However, India recorded 1,46,377 deaths in road accidents in 2017 alone.

According to the World Health Organisation: speeding, driving while intoxicated or under the influence of psychoactive substances, non-compliance or absence of safety provisions, use of mobile phones, dangerous road infrastructure and failure to comply with the Highway Traffic Act have been some of the factors which lead to road accidents.

However, these suggestions are on the issues which can be controlled or avoided by the drivers themselves with due diligence. But, at the time when cell phones are the essential survival kit, the safety and attention on the road have been widely avoided.

What if, as soon as an accident is about to happen, the driver is prompted to take control the vehicle or the car gets stopped to avoid collision?

This might appear unimaginable to you, but for young engineering graduates: Arbaz Reza, Vrunda Nimje and Aditya Unde this is a problem they want to solve with their venture Accelo. The trio has already put on stage their first Internet of Things product – M.A.M.A Drive (Module for Accident Management and Assistance) in the accident prevention space. The startup has envisioned to disrupt the automobile sector with its driver assistive savvy technology.

Arbaz shared, “In the past, all the founders have been through some severe accidents which have been responsible for shaping their lives. Even though this connection brought us together, what made us click was Vrunda’s accident in which people didn’t come up to help and that’s when we all thought that this is a product which is required in India.”

Therefore, beyond the safety precautions and advice given, Accelo took the charge of the case and decided to build a solution for accident circumvention. With its product, the startup is also trying to do automatic response mapping, which means that in case there’s a crash, insurance company and medical emergency company gets notified.

So, the major aim of the product is to avoid the collision, and in case there’s an accident, there would be an automated claim for reimbursement.

Lessons From Three Passionate Drivers

Talking to Inc42, Arbaz shared that the idea for Accelo was conceived in the year 2015 during their engineering days and the product development was completed by early 2018.

He shared that the founders have been passionate drivers and out of curiosity had looked at the data about the road accidents and found it shocking to know that a person dies every four minutes due to road accident and 80% of the collisions are caused by human error.

The trio also found that one of the major reasons for deaths was that the bystanders were hesitant to offer help to the victims considering the legal hassles involved in a road accident in India and the time is taken by the Emergency Response team to reach the location considering the information provided by the bystanders that led to the prediction of an inaccurate location of the accident.

This leads to the initial crucial time of about 20 minutes (as informed by various doctors) being wasted and therefore, the loss of time led to the death of victims.

It was then that the team started developing a product that was focussed on post-crash help and also included the Pre-Collision Alert through computer vision and aided machine learning about the behaviour of the vehicle, driver and other vehicles in the range of about 75 metres.

Its revenue streams range from the sale of products to cater to the cab aggregators, fleet operators, standalone car owners and insurance companies.

At the time, the founders raised an initial investment of $12,076 (INR 8 Lakh). Most of it was utilised for research and development, development of prototype and finalising the product design.

The startup is in process of receiving a grant from the Department of Science and Technology.

So, How Does Accelo Prevent Road Accidents?

In layman terms, Accelo mounts its M.A.M.A Dashcam model on the top of the car, which tracks the road and its surroundings. In case of an emergency, the camera mounted on the top gives an audio alert to the driver, if the driver doesn’t take action, then the hardware M.A.M.A product takes control of the car to avoid the collision.

The startup uses AI for image-based processing and generating an image-based alert. It plans to use blockchain technology, to make decentralised data for images they capture and thus, enhance data security.

For the autonomous street management, Arbaz shared, “The basis of any assistive driving product is having a lane management system. Our system has the ability to work even in lanes that do not have the marking of the lanes and hence, its adaptable to any condition that can occur on Indian roads.”

Following the appreciation by Nitin Gadkari, the minister directed Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI), the apex body for testing and certifying types of vehicles and engines used for both automotive and non-automotive applications to certify Accelo’s product.

The startup will also get the product tested by AVL Austria, which is the world leader for testing of automotive products and also certifies Tesla. The startup has also sent their devices for testing from the European certification through EURO NCAP test, which is the European New Car Assessment Programme to make cars safer.

With a small team of seven based in Mumbai, Accelo’s software backend is completely ready and is fully functional while the initial hardware prototype is ready and is being deployed and tested at various places. Priced at $181.14 (INR 12,000), the hardware product also has a recurring charge of $22.64 (INR 1,500) annually.

Accelo has deployed its hardware product in the local transport buses under Nagpur Municipal Corporation.

It has already deployed its first 20 products with Somaiya College Vidyavihar and will soon deploy 10 more product pieces to Nagpur Municipal Corporation.

Accelo has also signed initial agreements with companies like Axisvation and is discussing data collaborations in terms of driver analytics based insurance premiums.

Arbaz shared, “We are having initial talks for integration of our technology with the existing system that they have for insurance clearance. After we do a pilot with them, we will be taking it ahead and doing integration with insurance companies. Axisvation customers are insurance companies where they help in making insurance claims redressal easier and faster.”

Other Startups In The Accident Prevention And Cure Space

Despite more focus on road safety campaigns, there are a few startups working towards avoiding the accident from the drivers’ end.

In the segment, we have Thane-based Accident Defense System founded by Manish Rao in March 2016. Following a brutal accident which left him partially paralyzed, Rao started ADS, which uses the camera on a user’s mobile device to monitor the road ahead  uses ‘Vehicle Distance Monitoring’ to measure the distance from the vehicle ahead and ‘Collision Prevention Warning’ to alert users if it detects a collision is likely to occur.”

Next, we have, Bengaluru-based BlinkEye Labs, which is a consumer electronics company, developing an automotive IoT safety device for cars, buses and trucks that helps preventing accidents caused by drivers’ distraction. Launched in 2017, the IoT solution also helps fleet managers with driving analytics, emergency roadside assistance and vehicle maintenance.

However, amid such players, the USP for Accelo remains to be its response in the case of a crash and also alliance with insurance companies. It also provides autonomous street management for lanes without proper markings on road.

Despite a positive looking front, one of the major issue related with the dashcam model of M.A.M.A product is that the privacy of an individual can be hampered with the continued survey through the camera. In India, many areas have strict prohibitions on videography/photography, amid this, there can also be issues with continuous street mapping.

At the time when the world is grappling with Facebook-Cambridge Analytica fiasco, and India is waking up to data breaches through unique identity card – Aadhaar, we raised our concerns to Accelo.

Arbaz explained, “We believed that if someone is trusting us by installing the camera, then his personal privacy shouldn’t be hampered. So, we don’t store all the information the camera records, but take bits and pieces to save in our database. Therefore, we don’t take images of all the cars on the road etc, we take analytical data out of it like the number of cars on the road, car number, etc.”

In India, every year around 3.5 Mn vehicles roll out in the market. Accelo believes that in the next five years, it would cater to at least 2% of this market. Further, there is a huge addressable market about $17 Bn at present which is expected to reach $55 Bn by 2022 and is growing by about 20% Y-o-Y for the next seven years which can be catered by multiple players in the segment.

As the company awaits the regulatory approvals, it plans to deploy 1,000+ units in the next six months and has also started the initial procedures for its crowdfunding campaign.

[Accelo was among the four startups that pitched during Nagpur edition of BIGShift – a localised startup meetup series by Inc42 and Amazon India, click here to read our coverage on BIGShift.]

The post With Its IoT Solution, Accelo Looks To Prevent Road Accidents appeared first on Inc42 Media.

How often have you come across people who’re not smartphone-savvy or can’t read or write — say elderly people, your household help, or your local sabziwala, for that matter — whom you’ve urged to download a mobile wallet like Paytm, Freecharge, or Mobikwik and they’ve flatly refused because they find the registration process, the UX (user interface), and the transaction process cumbersome and confusing? Chances are often.

While the government and mobile wallet companies have been pushing the cause of a digital, cashless, India, the fact of the matter is that digital payments solutions like mobile wallets need to evolve in a different direction to appeal to the ‘aam aadmi’ (or ‘aurat’) in India — they need to be simple in their usage and UX. Until mobile wallet companies figure this one out, they’re likely to see transactions, which decreased 13% to 269 Mn in March because of the RBI making KYC mandatory for all users, only dip further.

The good news is that someone has realised this problem and is trying to address it. “I have seen my mother and many uneducated people struggle to pay their basic bills. I was looking for a tech solution which would enable everyone to understand and access digital payments. This is when I realised that photo-based transactions is the next step in digital payments,” says Sreekanth Eragadindla, the 24-year-old founder of Bengaluru-based fintech startup OmegaOn.

OmegaOn, founded in 2016, has come up with PhotoClickPay, a payment product that simplifies mobile wallet transactions by keeping the UX simple and using photographs to help drive navigate on its app. The idea is that even if a person can’t read and write properly or isn’t comfortable using app interfaces, he/she would be able to recognise the picture of a bulb for electricity, a Vodafone or Airtel icon for mobile bill payment, or a house for rent etc, and be able to navigate and use the app to carry out transactions.

This is how it works: Once you download the app from Playstore — it’s just 6.5MB and downloads in a jiffy — and open it, it takes you to a Sign In/Sign Up screen where you have to enter your mobile number. The app then authenticates the user and urges you to create a 4-digit pin (a security feature). You will then land on a screen with a very simple UX with minimal text and photos to help guide you through the features.

There is GoPay through which you can ‘Add Money’, ‘Send Money’, or ‘Request Money’ marked by photos of a wallet and the ‘₹’ symbol. GoBillPay uses images such as your mobile service provider’s icon, a DTH symbol, a datacard, a bulb for electricity, a cylinder for gas, a landline telephone, a house for rent, and even icons for insurance, broadband and water. There is also GoServices, which has photos of a bus, an aeroplane, and a hotel for respective bookings. Money can be added like any other ewallet via debit or credit card.

PhotoClickPay leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and unique IDs like Aadhar and mobile number to predict customer payments and future needs. With ease of use and a simple UX being its USP, OmegaOn aims to tap a market that is currently driven towards only cashbacks and other offers on mobile wallets and wants to make people realise the ease of paying bills through its app.

The startup has more than 50 paying guests or hostel payments. Over 15 colleges use PhotoClickPay as a mode of payment

As of now, the total users of the product is about 45,000 (the app is still in beta version) The startup has been able to facilitate monthly payments volume of over INR 2 Cr.

In about three months, OmegaOn plans to launch a new innovation in vendor payments. The vending payment tool is powered by IoT and Near Field Communication and enables users to pay via OmegaOn’s App and have vending machines dispense cold drinks, tea, snacks, biscuits etc.

The Eureka Moment

From idea to startup is usually a long, experimental journey, and OmegaOn has had its share of experiments. Sreekanth says when he started working on PhotoClickPay, he thought everyone could see and understand colours, so he built a platform where users would have to tap on orange to pay electricity bills and green to pay DTH bills. “But, I soon realised this wouldn’t work as payments are not limited to bills. In fact, bill payments are hardly 10% of the monthly expenses of an average household. So, I figured we’d have to make something even simpler,” he says.

But the quest to make things simpler was not at all that simple. They next built the bills payment option in the form of photos or images, but this led to another problem. “The user needed to add bills to photos for the first time, but our end user wasn’t comfortable with that… he needed an interface of photos so that when he tapped on it, the bill got paid. So, we built a patent-pending technology called PhotoClickPay,” says Sreekanth.

OmegaOn did its homework before developing the new technology. “We know that people accept cash, cheque, cards, etc as modes of payment. We also know that people accept QR scanning and typing as a mode of payment. We spoke with more than 1,000 people over six months to understand whether they felt photos would be a more comfortable mode of payment or not,” Sreekanth says. And the answer, he says, was a resounding yes.

OmegaOn has tied up with Mahanagar Gas, Vodafone, Airtel, etc. to enable its users to pay these bills online. OmegaOn is also working closely with the Andhra Pradesh government to simplify payment methods.

With Paytm, Mobikwik etc, What’s the Need For OmegaOn?

Sreekanth says that despite leading mobile wallets such as Paytm, Mobikwik, PhonePe, Tez, Whatsapp, and Freecharge operating successfully in the market for a few years now, only 13% smartphone users carry out digital transactions. He says the reason for this is that people who are uneducated or not tech savvy find it difficult and cumbersome to register, type in bill details, enter authentication details, etc.

He’s thinking in the right direction, considering India is home to a staggering 287 Mn illiterate adults or 37% of the world’s total uneducated population, according to a report by UNESCO. Besides, 70% of India being rural with little or no access to electricity, data services etc.

Sreekanth says, “We envisioned a technology which would automatically bring all your bills in the form of photos and the platform should be personalised so that consumers can get pictorial help for their payments.”

He remembers one of their turning points when OmegaOn launched a test version of the app in a village and 300 uneducated people paid basic bills simultaneously. “That was a dream come true. These people would never have made those payments through a mobile wallet if they were required to type in the bill or card details,” shares Sreekanth.

Cash — Mobile Wallets’ Biggest Competitor

No matter how big the potential market, it’s never easy for a startup to make its presence felt, especially in a market saturated with competitors. OmegaOn’s biggest challenge, says Sreekanth, has been taking on deep-pocketed fintech companies that lure people with cashbacks and other offers, which startups like his can’t afford.

He adds that PhonePe is one the true competitor for anyone looking to make a mark in the B2C payments. “But we admire them for being so fast in implementing things and, to be honest, we need this kind of competition to help the industry grow,” says Sreekanth.

Also, while working with SMEs (as OmegaOn is), merchants are resistant to accepting digital payments as they’re scared there might be a tedious process involved and that they may have to pay huge taxes.

But more than any other competition, mobile wallet companies are trying to figure out ways to ward off their biggest competitor — cash. “The truth is that cash is the biggest competition for everyone in the digital payments game.” India’s cash-to-GDP ratio is around 12%, among the highest in the world.

The demonetisation, after which the Income Tax department warned individuals against cash transactions of beyond INR 2 Lakh, certainly went a long way in boosting the chances of digital payment companies. Besides, government schemes like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) are also encouraging users to go online.

The Future Of Digital Payments Startups

With fintech being touted as the new, bright star in the Indian startup ecosystem, digital payments companies have been trying to push ahead despite having to contend with the cash mindset, changing regulations like mandatory KYC compliance for all users, and evolving market challenges. The reason is that they see light at the end of the tunnel —the Indian Fintech software market is poised to touch USD 2.4 Bn by 2020 from the current USD 1.2 Bn in the Financial Year (FY) 2016. Digital payments in India are on the verge of reaching $1 Tr by 2023.

According to Inc42 DataLabs, the number of deals in the fintech segment has been growing significantly since 2014. The sector started out with just 26 deals in 2014 but in 2017, 111 fintech deals were reported. The growth continues as according to the Indian Tech Startup Funding Q1 2018 report, fintech witnessed the highest funding among all sectors.

However, with giants like Paytm and PhonePe sewing up the urban market, startups like OmegaOn may have no option but to target a population that wants to make payments without OTPs, passwords, and bill details.

And there is a lot of scope for that, starting right from our homes. “My biggest turning point was when I got my mother, who is uneducated, to use the PhotoClickPay app and pay an electricity bill by simply finding the bulb picture and tapping on it. Then, without me urging her, she found and tapped the Airtel logo and paid her mobile bill. In one minute, an uneducated person paid two bills for the first time ever,” wraps up Sreekanth.

[PhotoClickPay was among the seven startups that pitched during Vizag edition of BIGShift – a localised startup meetup series by Inc42 and Amazon India, click here to read our coverage on BIGShift.]

The post Digital Payments Go Pictorial: OmegaOn Uses Photos In Its Mobile Wallet App UX appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The coworking industry in India is expected to grow to 10 million sq ft by 2020. The entry of global players like WeWork only goes to show the opportunity for shared workspaces in the country now and in the future. The shared workspace giant entered India with a launch in India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru.

And, in its short lifespan, it has already established itself in three metro cities in India. Now, it is eyeing other cities across the country with a high potential for collaborative workspaces.

WeWork India, the Indian arm of the New York-based coworking unicorn WeWork, launched in India in association with the Embassy Group. It is is currently headed by Karan Virwani, CWeO, WeWork India. In an interview with Inc42, Karan shed light on the plans of the shared workspace giant for India, the cities that are high on its expansion radar, and the strategy it is implementing to grow in India, among other things.

Here are the details of the interview:

Inc42: WeWork India recently launched a new marketing campaign. Can you tell us about it?

Karan Virwani: Yes, our new campaign, ‘Reimagine Your Workspace’, is a three-month digital campaign incorporating digital, out-of-home, social media, and engaging events across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. As WeWork continues to make a mark in reimagining your office environment, the campaign will prove to be a game-changer locally by showcasing our unique ‘we’ culture and how WeWork will reinvent your work and everyday life.

It reflects who we are as a brand and what we offer — we are a springboard for exponential growth and we are not just providing work needs of today, but laying the foundation of the positive future. Along with macro shifts towards the future of work, we are accelerating this push through our new campaign. WeWork is reimagining and reshaping collaborative spaces which is moving to foster the workforce of today and the future beyond the conventional cubicle. Seeking a holistic environment that enables them to make the most of every day, WeWork’s new campaign will pave a new movement for welcoming people to become a part of a greater ‘we’ at WeWork.

Inc42: How important is the Indian market for WeWork? What is the strategy for growth and expansion in India?

Karan Virwani: India is an extremely critical market for us, and it will play an important role in WeWork’s global strategy given the country’s young population, growing number of startups and the pro-business policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India is forecast to grow to 7.4% in 2019 against 6.7% this year, which makes it the fastest-growing major economy in the world. It has arguably been the world’s fastest-growing startup ecosystem and we have been witnessing a macro cultural shift.

We feel we can help companies grow faster on a global network of community and help them innovate. We started operations in India in July 2017 and, in less than a year, we are present in eight locations with over 10,000 members. We are committed to serving our members by providing them collaborative spaces that allow them to unlock their potential and achieve their business objectives globally.

This commitment in meeting our members’ needs has been the driving force behind our success in 2017 and it is key to our continued development as an industry leader moving forward through a strong local leadership team, vibrant partner ecosystem, local member testimonials, and digital and physical products tailored for the Indian market.

The growth trajectory of WeWork in India signifies the increasing market demand and we are trying to meet the requirements of more India creators. We plan to enter new markets like Pune, Chennai, and Hyderabad next year.

Inc42: In the current market, which is becoming increasingly competitive owing to the proliferation of coworking spaces, how do you think WeWork’s growth has been in India?

Karan Virwani: We saw phenomenal growth for WeWork in 2017 and are anticipating even faster growth in 2018 and 2019. WeWork is a global platform for creators, providing over 248,000 members around the world with space, community, and services through both physical and virtual offerings. WeWork currently has 253 physical locations in 74 cities and 22 countries around the world.

Companies of all sizes are beginning to understand that their employees need spaces and connections that empower them to collaborate and innovate. Understanding the future of innovation and work and shifting towards this direction, WeWork bridges the gap of this market demand by integrating work and life and comes in as the solution on the global basis. We are the only company that brings together community, technology, and design at a global scale to provide an environment that creates a community where people work to make a life, not just a living.

We see that small companies want to learn from the experience of enterprises, while enterprises are looking to achieve the speed and agility of startups. This is a symbiotic relationship among our members and no other platform has the global scale, localised community experience, and support that WeWork has been able to create and offer.

Inc42: What is the current mix of occupancy in India — are there more startups or larger enterprises?

Karan Virwani: Our members are creators who run the gamut — from entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups and small businesses, to middle-market and Fortune 500 corporations. Large enterprises are one of our fastest-growing categories at WeWork in India. About 45% of our members are enterprises and 55% are startups, freelancers, and SMEs. We not only solve their real estate requirements by offering space as a service but give them a more flexible and asset-light option that helps them stay nimble.

Inc42: What is the unique service offering that you offer to enterprises at WeWork?

Karan Virwani: WeWork has more than 1,000 enterprise members (companies with 1,000+ employees around the world) that represent 24% of WeWork’s total membership across the world.

For enterprise members that are exploring international operations and require the workforce to be where the action is, WeWork bridges this challenge by providing substantial value and flexibility through spaces that have critical services, are cost-effective, and available when you need them.

We also offer our enterprise members flexibility to enter or exit markets opportunistically, grow or shrink footprint as necessary. In addition, for enterprise members, there is an opportunity to attract and retain talent by curating the exposure to the creative community.

We not only solve real estate requirements by offering space as a service but also give members a more flexible and asset-light option that helps them stay nimble.    

Inc42: What is the unique differentiator that WeWork brings to a building or a portfolio to add value?

Karan Virwani: While we’re a global playbook, we operate with a local execution — whenever we enter a new market, we work together with key partners and experts to help create the unique WeWork experience in that region. With WeWork, we bring in our design expertise that revitalises the building with our community and energy. With our strong R&D and design team, we study the everyday needs of businesses in different markets and geographies and how people interact. We go to great lengths to create communities — at the building, city, and country level.

With our buildings having the right mix of design and function, our buildings create physical and digital places where ideas can be exchanged, and creativity can thrive. Using our community, design, and technology to meet needs that no one else can, we start with the business needs — being collaborative, incorporating innovation, and doing research along with creating new designs to serve them better with these factors when we go into a building/portfolio.

Inc42: Can you elaborate on how WeWork uses technology to scale up?

Karan Virwani: Every facet of WeWork’s operations is enhanced by technology. Our use of technology across the organisation optimises our ability to source/design/build with speed and precision. We are also very dedicated to leveraging technology to build smart spaces that can remove friction and create a seamless experience for all members.

Our deployment of tech throughout our spaces allows us to continuously learn about how our spaces are being used and how we can further iterate. We use technology that uses data to determine the best physical design possible to both maximise comfort and encourage collaboration. In addition, we have a member network app to enable people to connect and collaborate more efficiently. Our ability to deliver tech solutions to our members offers them the best, most seamless workplace experience.

Inc42: The coworking space in India is expected to touch 10 million sq ft by 2020. How do you see it evolving in the coming years?

Karan Virwani: We don’t limit ourselves to co-working — co-working accounts for a small portion of our portfolio. We are disrupting traditional real estate and driving the change towards the future of work. We are seeing a new trend as more and more people — across generations, races, geographies — want personal fulfilment. This means working on projects they’re passionate about in an energetic environment where others are also working hard to bring their ideas to life. They want experiences that meaningfully add to their lives. This shift will demand innovation to transform workspaces from being purely functional to being more productive and experiential as well as meaningful.

The Collaborative workspace is excited about the opportunity in India. Since WeWork first came to India just over 10 months ago, it has established a network of creators and companies. With a robust pipeline for 2018, the company aspires to broaden its push for innovation to more India members.

The post With Over 10,000 Members In 3 Cities, WeWork Set To Woo Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Every startup entrepreneur has a eureka moment — the moment in which they are driven by the deep desire to do something and also realise the ‘something’ that they want to do. CarryMates cofounder Youmit Singh also had his eureka moment that set off the desire to build a community of human couriers delivering each other’s goods wherever they travel, connected by a circle of trust.

It all started when Youmit had to ship some documents to his parents in his hometown and the courier company asked for an exorbitant price without any guarantee against theft of or damage to the consignment. Unwilling to spend so much, he instead handed it over to his friend’s friend, who was visiting his hometown, and requested him to hand the package over to his parents.

“The documents were delivered safely and, in return, as a goodwill gesture, I gave the person who delivered it some gift vouchers,” says Youmit.

The incident got him thinking about the problem of logistics, the high prices charged by courier companies, and a possible solution. He realised there must be millions of individuals travelling across the globe with some space to spare in their suitcases who could be connected on a common platform and deliver each other’s consignments, against some quid pro quo, of course.

And thus the idea of CarryMates was born. Youmit founded it in 2017 along with Pushpendra Sijariya, Navneet Kumar, and Hitesh Kumar. Carrymates is a peer-to-peer platform (P2P) in the courier and logistics space that is based on the concept of leveraging the unutilized carrying capacity of travellers across the world to help deliver consignments.

“We are using cloud-based technology to connect travellers and its customers via their  mobile devices for the deliveries. We will also using GPS technology for live tracking of deliveries. To start with, we’re building our application for Android and later on will add Web, IOS, and Windows versions,” says Youmit, elaborating on the CarryMates tech platform.

How did the four co-founders of Carrymates come together and come to believe in Youmit’s idea? Youmit and Navneet, who were colleagues, were once visiting Pushpendra at his place. Coincidentally, Pushpendra too had to send some packages to his sister-in-law in Mumbai and he asked the duo, who were to visit Mumbai, to deliver the package.

“Thus, the idea and the market need was validated. When we told Pushpendra that we were thinking of a solution to service this market need, he was very excited and wanted to join our team. Hitesh joined us as an intern and showed great passion and commitment to this idea, so we asked him to become a co-founder,” explains Youmit. This was in June 2017.

How Does CarryMates P2P Courier Service Work?

CarryMates is a bootstrapped startup. In the initial days, when it was being set up, the team invested over $7,425-$8,910 (INR 5-6 Lakh) in direct investment and received an additional $37,125-$44,550 (INR 25-30 Lakh) as syndicate funding.

The Mumbai-headquartered startup is well on its way to connect travellers with people who need items delivered to various cities and, eventually, to different countries as they expand. It’s a cloud-enabled platform that promises to make P2P deliveries effective and also aims to expand into the B2B and B2C deliveries space.

What CarryMates is doing is creating a social community platform, much like Airbnb, where people who travel will be connected to an app and keep each other updated on their travel plans. The sender can pay the carrier an amount commensurate to the effort made and the distance travelled by the package.

Youmit explains, “We have built special location-based algorithm to connect travelers and senders. We have integrated our service with existing payment wallet service providers and payment gateways, but initially, our application will offer only cash on delivery (COD) mode.”

The basic premise of the business idea is that connecting this community of travellers will create ample opportunities for people to earn and save money as carriers and senders. Building trust, of course, will be an important prerequisite in executing the idea successfully.

The CarryMates platform is still in its beta version and is being tested within a closed group. The team is testing the service on about 100 people from major metros selected on the basis of initial transactions on the platform. They are taking their feedback on the service. After successful testing, the founders plan to start the initial marketing amidst the first and second connections of the same group members on Linkedin. After that, the app will be available in the public domain.

          Technology model of the startup:

But despite its novel business idea, CarryMates is facing an acute challenge since it is in the P2P segment — the lack of a technology platform to organise the information related to travellers and their travel schedules and to analyse their underutilised carrying capacity.

Youmit says, “This leads to people depending on traditional courier or postal services for parcel delivery even though these services are expensive and inconvenient due to dedicated resources (employees/logistics) used for delivery.”

The Blue Ocean Strategy: Tapping An Ocean Of CEP Possibilities

The postal and courier industry is one of the oldest industries in India. At present, there are many national and international companies in the space. The market size of the Courier, Express, and Parcel (CEP) is expected to reach $3,050 Mn by 2021.

Although the startup is working on a P2P model, which is new in the Indian CEP market, it will face stiff competition from established service delivery companies such as FedEx, DHL Express, Gati, ISP, TNT India Pvt Ltd, etc. However, one breather for CarryMates is that these companies are primarily working in the B2C segment.

Youmit says there are no startups or companies in the P2P space in India yet. “There are some players in other countries like Roadie (US) and Nimber (UK) working on this idea, but when it comes to detailed functionality and the Indian market, we find ourselves working towards the blue ocean strategy,” says Youmit.

A blue ocean strategy refers to the creation of a market for a product where there is no competition or very less competition. This strategy revolves around searching for a business in which very few firms operate and where there is no pricing pressure.

But won’t getting validation from customers in India prove to be an uphill task? The team is optimistic that high quality of deliveries and competitive pricing will help it gain an edge over its competitors.

The founders say that CarryMates’ prices will be more competitive than other courier services given the fact that it is “not building any capacity or facility for delivering couriers” and will not require dedicated manpower.

So, for instance, if a parcel containing stationary is to be delivered to Ahmedabad from Mumbai, companies like FedeX, Gati, or ISP would charge around $37 (INR 2,500), $9.65 (INR 650), or $12.22 (INR 823), respectively (approximate figures). However, with CarryMates, senders will be able to cut their costs and send the consignment for just $5.94 – $7.42 (INR 400-500).

Here’s a price comparison chart below:

To the founders, the prospects of the product appear to be immense, especially since an increasing number of Indians are travelling within and outside the country. India will be one of the largest outbound travel markets in the world in the next few years. It is estimated that 25 Mn Indians travelled overseas in 2017 and this is growing at a healthy double-digit rate. The Yatra Winter Travel Survey 2017 showed that 36% Indian travellers were planning an international holiday with 1,613 Mn being the number for Indians travelling in the domestic space.

And he may well be proven right if his blue ocean strategy is successful. According to HBR, “Creating blue oceans builds brands. So powerful is blue ocean strategy, in fact, that a blue ocean strategic move can create brand equity that lasts for decades.”

CarryMates: The Airbnb Of Courier Services?

The world has, in recent times, seen some great initiatives built around the concept of the “sharing economy” — think Uber, AirBnB, WeWork. Unlike Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers, Millennials don’t seem to care for owning stuff. They’re happy having access to good and services — from cabs and homes to clothes, books and even workplaces — and this has been made possible by the advent of the digital and sharing economies.

There couldn’t have been a more opportune time to come up with such a shared delivery service. According to a report by Accenture, the courier, express, and parcel (CEP) industry is growing at the rate of 25% and is estimated to be in the tune of $585 Mn (INR 4000 Cr). The report’s take on the sharing economy was interesting: “Sharing economy set to disrupt the last mile further.” To this end, the sharing economy has received a further boost from factors such as transportation cost-cutting, convenience, and an upsurge of funding in the sector by venture capitalists.

Businesses are continuously moving from heavy asset models to light asset models and tapping into emerging technologies to create innovative solutions. “This is a new world order in which services are increasingly going from a collective mode to being personalised or customised, thanks to the shared economy,” says Youmit.

On top of this, he says, “India is also embracing global technologies like AI, IOT, sharing economy, etc, and the acceptance and reach of these technologies are going to grow significantly in the CEP industry in future.”

According to him, although there is a multi-billion courier and logistics market in India which is operating on the conventional high-asset model, it is bound to shift to the asset-light sharing economy model over time.

How Will CarryMates Deliver Trust?

Trust is the major factor that drives any organisation and when it comes to a community-driven service like this, it’s all the more essential.

In the last millennium, brands were built on institutional trust. Companies created products or services used advertising and marketing to influence consumer perceptions and employed appropriate distribution channels to reach them.

Startups like CarryMates, which run on collaborative consumption services like Uber and Airbnb, pose significant risks to the traditional couriers and logistics industry and to insurers. Therefore, the bigger companies are beefing up their marketing ideas and product policies to ensure that trust is not breached.

But now, with the growth of social media, P2P networking, and sharing economy platforms like Uber and Airbnb, consumers have gradually overcome their fear of interacting directly with peers and exchanging goods and services with strangers. In fact, people are more willing than ever to conduct transactions based on peer-to-peer trust.

Still, there has to be a lot of effort that goes into trust building in a service like CarryMates. So, the startup has “trust profiles” for its customers based on a parameter called PTF (Profile Trust Factor), which is calculated on the basis of the weighted averages of the factors below:

1.  Mobile number verification via OTP
2.  Auto profile details input from other platforms along with manual options whereby the customer’s different profiles on social media can be connected to the platform
3.  Email verification

The PTF percentage improves upon further verification and positive feedback.

The founders have also put in place a Travellers Safety Assurance and Senders Safety Assurance policy to win over trust by ensuring the security of the objects that are delivered by CarryMates carriers. So, in case there is a loss of any property involved, it will be verified if the case is genuine or not, and then a third-party insurance company will provide the cover.

But if you still think such community-driven services are still marred with risks, here is a quote from Airbnb to deliver the skeptics from their insecurities.

On any given night, 2 Mn people stay in homes on Airbnb in 65,000 cities all over the world. There are more than 4 Mn listings in 191 countries to choose from — that’s more than the top five hotel chains combined. What makes all of that possible? Trust.

If CarryMates can garner the kind of trust that sharing economy platforms like Airbnb and Uber evoke, and scale to accompany it, it could well become their equivalent in the courier industry.

[CarryMates was among the four startups that pitched during Kanpur edition of BIGShift – a localised startup meetup series by Inc42 and Amazon India, click here to read our coverage on BIGShift.]

The post Will P2P Platform CarryMates Be The Airbnb Of The Courier And Logistics Industry? appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, an American AI researcher and writer, says, “By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”

When artificial intelligence messes up, it can be unsalvageable, or downright hilarious, as can be seen from the mismatched captions on these photographs tagged by one of the most advanced neural networks in the world — Microsoft Azure. Image recognition algorithms can make really bizarre mistakes — mistaking orange sheep for flowers, sheep on trees for birds, and sticks for giraffes. And we’re just talking about image recognition here.

For AI to be on point, it needs to be deep and accurate. Not an easy game as we can see. Amit Jnagal, the founder of San Francisco-based enterprise AI startup Infrrd, seems to be aware of the danger Eliezer warns about.

“True AI systems pass the test if you can’t make out whether you are dealing with a human or a bot. I think none of the systems are there yet. However, we have learned to intersect the technologies in the AI universe layer over layer to get more customised and deep learning solutions for enterprises,” Amit told Inc42 in a recent interaction.

He is also pretty confident his company is on the right track with the AI solutions its developing. Infrrd is developing advanced algorithms used in intelligent data capture to improve the data processing, especially for financial services companies.

Amit has quite astutely set his sights on a market that’s fast-expanding— enterprise solutions. Since AI research first gained impetus in 1956, it has moved beyond robotic applications to automating the daily processes in enterprises at large scale. Today, enterprise AI is a globally recognised industry finding applications from retail to ecommerce to finance and beyond, with its market value projected to increase from $202.5 Mn in 2015 to $11.1 Bn by 2024.

A Look At Infrrd’s AI Platform, Target Market, And More

Launched in October 2016, Infrrd terms itself a ‘machine intelligence’ startup that utilises computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), and a predictive algorithm-focused artificial intelligence (AI) platform to develop enterprise solutions. The machine learning-based algorithms it has developed extract complex data from images, bulk documents, etc and derive deep insights from big data to help enterprises automate tasks and solve different business problems.

“We see huge potential in automating human tasks that need low-level cognitive capabilities like reading a document, looking at forms, understanding clauses of contracts, extracting data from images, and more. We have helped a lot of our customers cut down their manual data processing spend by over 70%,” says Amit.

Amit explains that a lot of ongoing AI initiatives in the financial services space that are focused on fraud prevention, anomaly detection, etc, are primarily working on structured data coming from customer interactions.

However, Infrrd does things differently. “We use the same algorithms that some of the world’s leading companies are using to build text extraction and analytics solutions, but direct them to solve a more immediate need of automated data processing,” says Amit.

Infrrd mainly caters to the medium-to-large scale financial services industry. The startup is working currently with more than 35 clients globally, including Fortune 500 companies in segments such as retail, finance and real estate verticals.

After bootstrapping for more than a-year-and-half now, and making the US and UK Infrrd’s primary market, the company is now steadily trying to deepen the presence in India and is further looking to enter into the European markets.

Infrrd: Offering AI-As-A-Service And Customised Big Data Insights

As Amit says, there was a time when documents and images were transformed into a structured text format manually. Not only was this time-consuming and cumbersome, but the process was also low on accuracy. Over the years, technology has evolved in this domain and we now have products like IBM Watson, Google Vision, Amazon Rekognition etc.

However, with most algorithms being aligned to work across all sectors, the results are generic in nature. For instance, when a retail customer tries to use Google Vision for identifying the features of a dress, it tells her/him that it looks like a dress and provides some basic details. Most enterprises already know this and they want to know something deeper than “this looks like a dress”. Things like: Does this dress have a distressed look? Can it be worn in summer? Is it a strapless dress? Does it have ruffles?

“This is what we try to extract from images,” says Amit. “We have three fundamental capabilities — NLP, computer vision and predictive analytics — which help us offer our clients an AI-as-a-Service model with required customisation on a long-term basis,” he adds.

Here are some of the products and solutions offered on the Infrrd platform.

The most popular of these offerings is Infrrd OCR (optical character recognition) — intelligent data extraction for complex documents. “A few years ago, it was not possible to automatically process documents that had fairly complex data elements like high-density tables or complex legal clauses. We are one of the first companies to use cognitive capabilities like computer vision, deep learning, and NLP to read and build context around documents,” Amit explains.

Creating A Differentiated Edge In Enterprise Solutions

While Infrrd may have outpaced the traditional OCR and data extraction solutions, it now has a rising brigade of enterprise AI startups in different corners of the world to compete with. In India, there are startups like Fractal Analytics, Artivatic, Mad Street Den, SigTuple, and Staqu among others in the artificial Intelligence space.

Being a global startup, Infrrd is competing with extremely large horizontal AI & RPA systems like Kryon, Workfusion, Automation Anywhere, etc and vertical offering specialists like image recognition companies or NLP platforms like IBM Datacap, Nuance and Cvision.

However, Amit says that since the company focuses on just a couple of verticals rather than providing a wide range of solutions, it is able to provide extremely deep and high-accuracy solutions. “Our fast time to market also helps us differentiate between the players in the first category,” he adds.

He also claims that Infrrd is one of the few companies that can combine NLP and image recognition capabilities in a single solution, which helps it differentiate from vertical technology players.

Amit also says the pricing offered by Infrrd is very competitive. “We can extract data from documents that most other providers cannot, and if they can, it comes at a high price,” he says. He explains that Infrrd’s processes and platforms have been built from the ground up to accommodate for 10-15% customisation for its customers. “A one-time cost is charged for customisation and then we offer a SaaS-based solution, which companies keep for two to five years on an average,” he adds.

This customisation helps Infrrd go the extra mile for each customer and deliver solutions that have the feel of a tailored solution. Additionally, Infrrd also learns from its customer interactions as they use its platform and automatically corrects any accuracy issues.

“We initially source data from a company’s past records or the publically available data from our global repositories. With time, however, the platform learns more from the ongoing interactions. This helps us deliver a better experience for our customers and ensures their satisfaction,” he adds.

Infrrd Aims To Be The World’s Best Intelligent Data Extraction Company

The world has just started zeroing in on AI on a mass scale and the industry is far from saturation. Research company Tractica forecasts that the revenue generated from the direct and indirect application of AI-based software is estimated to grow from $643.7 Mn in 2016 to $36.8 Bn by 2025. This represents a significant growth curve for the nine-year period with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56.8%, as the report mentions.

But as Vivek Wadhwa, a Distinguished Fellow and professor at Carnegie Mellon University Engineering and Harvard University and a director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialisation at Duke, cited Duke professor Dan Ariely recently, “Artificial intelligence is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”

Apart from finding their niche in the broader spectrum of AI, this is another challenge startups are going through — to prove their worthiness and claim a product market fit.

So far, Infrrd has been able to do both and has successfully run the show without any external funding. But in global markets. As of now, 95% of its revenue comes from the US and the UK. The Indian market, owing to its vernacular language content, poses a huge challenge for such startups; besides, it’s price sensitive. But Amit seems optimistic. “India might be price sensitive, but it offers volume, which makes up for the overall price. We are working on our vernacular content offerings as well.”

“Our purpose is to build world’s best intelligent data extraction company and we are well on the way to get there,” he signs off.

The post How Infrrd Is Using Computer Vision & NLP To Offer Automated Data Extraction Capabilities To Its Partner Enterprises appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The way Indians avail of healthcare and related services has seen a sea change in the last few years. From simply booking appointments for offline doctor consultations and buying medicines online, Indians (and the world) have progressed to comparing and buying healthcare services and packages online, and are even doing remote consultations with doctors over chat and video.

The first wave of change technology brought in healthcare was in the B2C segment. Now, B2B is ripe for disruption, and a number of healthtech startups are leveraging AI, data analytics, and other advanced techs to make quality and affordable healthcare services available to corporates.

One such player is HealthAssure, which claims to be a one-of-its-kind aggregator platform with a focus on primary healthcare, specifically meant to cater to B2B requirements. The platform, which offers “comprehensive solutions, from managing complex requirements of large institutions to providing customised plans for individuals,” says it has more than 3,000 centers and is present in more than 1,000 cities across India. HealthAssure also caters to the B2C segment.

Varun Gera, founder and CEO of HealthAssure, says he started the company to “address the gap that existed in the market for customers (B2B as well as individuals) needing better day-to-day healthcare and primary and preventive healthcare providers.” “In India, while hospitalisation and emergency treatment has matured over the last decade, the primary care segment, which is still largely fragmented, is gaining importance rapidly,” says Gera.

The company, which says it has technology in its DNA, says on its website, “We strongly believe in new ideas, innovations, and new ways to push the limits to make solutions easy and efficient. With technology at the heart of everything we do, we are able to integrate our network partners — across pathology, diagnostics, consultations, pharmacy, etc — and bring good health closer to you.”

Tapping Into The $40 Bn Primary Healthcare Market In India

According to a report by Deloitte, with increased digital adoption, the Indian healthcare market, which is growing at a CAGR of about 20%, will touch a whopping $280 Bn by 2020. And the revenue of India’s corporate healthcare sector is estimated to grow at 15% in 2017-18.

Gera, who has done in-depth research into the healthcare industry for several years, seems have realised the potential, and the needs, of this market before many others. He started his journey in the Indian digital healthcare market way back in 2011 when he figured that there weren’t any organised platforms for primary healthcare services — an industry poised to be worth $40 Bn as pointed out by HealthAssure, which still functions in a haphazard manner.

At present, HealthAssure’s primary business model essentially aims to consumerize primary healthcare with the help of technology and make quality services accessible to Indian corporates in the B2b segment. The model involves end-to-end management of employee healthcare programmes, assessment of healthcare gaps, and giving corporates access to a high-quality, discounted medical network.

HealthAssure provides companies and organisations access to credible primary care centres including the services of general physicians, cardiologists, dentists, and other specialists. Ankush Chatterjee, chief marketing officer and head of products at HealthAssure, points out that the company is a tech-enabled B2B healthcare startup and not the other way around. It has developed a unique Health Risk Assessment tool for assessing the health risk or status of individuals, which can also be customised for each individual, and accordingly, solutions can be provided.

With the world talking about the importance of mental health these days, no serious healthcare player can stay away from providing mental healthcare services. To this extent, HealthAssure offers an Employee Assistance Programme — a short-term and confidential counselling service offered to employees to deal with their personal problems.

For insurance companies, which comprise a large percentage of HealthAssure’s clients, its offerings comprise pre-policy checkups along with specialty networks like ophthalmology, OPD, dietician, and counsellor networks.

Challenges In Providing Consistent, Quality Services

HealthAssure today has more than 3,000 centers in more than 1,000 cities across India. While these numbers speak of exceptional success, they have not been easy to arrive at. Like any other startup, HealthAssure had its own set of challenges when it started out — from attracting the right talent to hurdles in establishing a vast network of healthcare providers.

The most difficult challenge, however, was to be able to cater to all of the customers at any given point in time. With most primary healthcare services available only in the brick-and-mortar model and having absolutely zero online presence, it was quite a task to reach out to more than 3,000 centres, assess the quality of their services, and get them on board.

HealthAssure realised that there was no easy route to do this and, hence, decided to get its hands dirty on the field. All the healthcare centres are manually assessed to check the quality of services.

The team makes sure that these centres function smoothly and have proper digital infrastructure so that it can keep track of the services and the patients. This evaluation method ensures consistency in service quality but is a hard model to replicate because of its labour intensiveness.

Like for all startups, investments were a crucial decision. HealthAssure is very cautious about pulling in investments. The investment decision is made solely on the basis of the necessity for funds. “You can see the reflection of this logical approach in our balance sheets, which reflect a steep growth curve,” says Chatterjee. HealthAssure has invested about $2-3 Mn in total from various investors such as Rajul Garg and Shuchin Bajaj and has received an investment of $1 Mn from The HR Fund this year.

We Plan To Service 3 Mn Customer By 2020: HealthAssure

As Gera says, “Our vision is and will remain to bring good health closer to everyone. In this endeavour, we are committed to investing $15 Mn over the next three years to create an efficient ecosystem in the fractured infrastructure of primary healthcare in India, so that more and more people can gain access to better healthcare and do so at significantly affordable rates.”

“We plan to have serviced 2.5-3 Mn customers by 2020 with this fresh round of investment towards the growth of our business,” he adds. Gera further explains that there is an increasing demand for preventive healthcare in the Indian market that he plans to tap into.

In the near term, the startup is working to improve its IT infrastructure and establish deeper network assets such as geographical and vertical expansion.

Preempting Competition From Deep-Pocketed B2C Peers

While all healtech startups in India chose the relatively easier path of catering to the mass market — direct consumers — Health Assure decided to swim into the unknown territory of the B2B market. The prominent players in the B2C healthcare market are Practo, Portea, Netmeds, and 1mg, among others.

Though this is a niche market, HealthAssure has managed to uncover an entirely new segment for healthcare aggregators. At the moment, there aren’t any other major players operating in the B2B space, but it won’t be long before the B2C giants find a way to explore this niche market, and all of them have heavy investor backing, unlike Health Assure.

So, how does HealthAssure plan to maintain an edge over these startups or traditional providers of primary healthcare services once it has competition in the B2B space?

The startup believes that despite limited resources, it has been able to differentiate from the big B2C providers in terms of the consistency and quality of services it offers on its platform.

To begin with, all the primary healthcare service providers listed on the HealthAssure platform are thoroughly verified. Besides, though the B2C players may have bigger networks, they don’t guarantee the quality of service being provided by doctors or other service providers on their platforms.

But HealthAssure continuously monitors the consistency and quality of the services offered on its platform. The team first manually assesses the infrastructure and quality of services provided by the primary healthcare centres (PHCs) it plans to bring on board. They also ensure that these PHCs have reliable internet connectivity and systems in place so it’s easier for HealthAssure to keep a track of the services and the patients.

Only once all these boxes are ticked, PHCs are officially listed on HealthAssure’s platform. After the onboarding, the startup maintains a database of the service providers to ensure optimal quality of services.

HealthAssure is also looking at implementing technologies such as AI and ML to expand its business. It plans to incorporate AI to map the customer journey with a view to improving the customer experience on its platform. It also plans to mine all the data it has collected so far to forecast customer needs and requirements. “This is something that will certainly help us get an edge in the long term,” adds Gera.

The Next Disruptor In Healthtech?

HealthAssure doesn’t believe in following trends or disruptors and adapting itself to the changing market. Rather, it intends to walk a few steps ahead and set trends in B2B healthtech services.

When asked about the next big probable disruption that is likely to pose as a challenge or an opportunity for Health Assure, Chatterjee replies,

“We won’t wait for the next big thing to happen and then follow suit; we want to be the disruptors instead, and drive the industry with our innovations.”

The healthcare and well-being sector is garnering a lot of attention from the startup world these days because of the urgency to deliver good services, digitally, and at a fast pace and at competitive prices. And companies such as HealthAssure are a critical anchor in bringing about this change as they bring the end consumer and the service provider closer, making it a hassle-free journey for both the parties.

HealthAssure’s reliable and consistent network of healthcare service providers and service monitoring differentiator is just what India’s healthcare space needs. And it might just help this B2B startup realise its vision of becoming a disruptor in the healthcare aggregator space.

Correction: HealthAssure was written as Health Assure. The error is regretted. This post was last updated at 2pm on June 4, 2018. 

The post HealthAssure Has Found Itself A New B2B Market In The Healthcare Aggregator Space appeared first on Inc42 Media.

After spending 15 years in high-profile roles at Google’s venture capital arm and VC firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Hemant Mohapatra decided to move back to India. He has now joined VC firm Lightspeed India Partners as a partner and will be scouting for startups for investments in India.

The decision to move back wasn’t easy, says Mohapatra, but he got his answer when he questioned himself where he wanted to be at the time of his death. A slightly morbid question, but it gave him the answer he was looking for — India. In a Medium post, Hemant shared how he arrived at his decision to move back to his family and country and join another company.

Global VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners via Lightspeed India has been investing in India since 2004, with a focus on direct and cross-border businesses. The Silicon-Valley-based firm generally invests $1 to $25 Mn in growth or early-stage startups seeking to disrupt or transform large markets in the domestic economy. It raised a $115 Mn India-specific fund in 2015 to invest heavily in India’s burgeoning landscape.

With its continued emphasis on investing in Indian startups, the company has now onboarded Mohapatra as a new partner. Mohapatra is the sixth investing partner at Lightspeed India, all of whom focus on investing in the enterprise and consumer categories.

Before Hemant officially moves back to India for his new role at Lightspeed India, he has already started his work from San Francisco.

Mohapatra has a technological background — he was an engineer for more than six years, did his MBA, and then joined Google Cloud in a strategic business development role. A few years into the role, he started doing due diligence for deals at GV and CapitalG (VC arm of Google) and also participated in and led a few investments for Google. After this, he joined well-known VC firm Andreessen Horowitz as a partner.

In conversation with Inc42, Hemant talked about his experiences in Silicon Valley, Google, and Andreessen Horowitz, his plans for Lightspeed India, and more.

Inc42: After being in the US for such a long a time, what made you head to India? What excites you about the Indian startup ecosystem?

Hemant Mohapatra: For me, India was never a question of why, it was a question of when. My whole family still lives in India; I studied at IIT Bombay and still have a huge circle of friends back home. Many others I know well from my life in Silicon Valley and my career at Google have moved back to India as well, so I was working towards the perfect opportunity, which I found with Lightspeed India.

Moreover, I felt that someone like me, who has experience building and launching products, has an empirical understanding of tech, empathises with the founder’s arduous journey, and has strong ties both with the US and India, is a profile that can add strong, differentiated value in India.

One of the key reasons Silicon Valley is so successful in starting up is not access to capital, but access to capital together with access to mid- and senior-level talent who know how to scale businesses. Where would Google be without Eric Schmidt? Or Facebook without Sheryl Sandberg? This talent pool takes multiple hype-cycles to surface and it brings with it a rare camaraderie of optimism in the face of failure and objectivism in the face of hyperboles. India has gone through this cycle of reflection and rebuilding a few times now, and that to me is the most exciting thing about returning: Mature, passionate and self-aware founders looking for smart capital.

Inc42: What will be your exact role and duties at Lightspeed India?

Hemant Mohapatra: The structure of the fund is very flat, which is what attracted me to Lightspeed India. There is a lot of autonomy and ownership available to everyone, every deal is looked at thoroughly, and we are not afraid to ask the difficult questions — both to founders and internally to each other.

Venture is a long term business, so, I will, in the beginning especially but also beyond that, spend a lot of time listening and learning, connecting to smart, passionate founders, and helping out wherever I am needed by the broader startup ecosystem. Meanwhile, if there is an opportunity I come across that looks really compelling, I will not be shy of chasing it down and investing.

Inc42: What are your thoughts on the growth and the late-stage startup funding scenario in India?

Hemant Mohapatra: I don’t think there is lack of funding in India at any stage for the right startup. The bigger question is how to create the right conditions to ensure that startups can grow into healthy, profitable, and sustainable businesses, ready for late-stage funding and eventually for public markets. That should be the goal, regardless of the outcome.

From a regulatory perspective, India should make it easier for both founders and investors to take risks through better tax policies and company registration processes. Investors and founders also waste a lot of time negotiating unenforceable term-sheets, so we need to simplify that so founders can focus on what really matters: building companies, not spending months negotiating term-sheets.

Investors should think of themselves as partners in the entrepreneur’s journey and there I am a strong believer in a “venture services” model to support portfolio companies. We, at Lightspeed India, have focused a lot of energy in this direction with the hiring of Sunil Rao from Google in 2016. All of this should set the ecosystem on a path where we will see more and more startups surviving the product/market chasm and moving into growth stages with growing repeatable revenues, stable organic growth, and top-notch hiring at all levels.

Inc42: India is witnessing a lot of consolidations and exits. For instance, Flipkart was acquired by Walmart, eBay acquired a stake in Flipkart last year and then ended its ‘strategic partnership’ after the Walmart-Flipkart deal, itzcash was acquired by Ebix etc. Do you think it’s good for the ecosystem?

Hemant Mohapatra: Absolutely! We need to celebrate any and all flavours of success for the entrepreneur. I read somewhere that the Flipkart “mafia” has founded over 250 other startups! Can you imagine how many more now have the economic freedom to leave and follow their own startup ambitions? How many will become savvy angel investors and advisors? Or join growing startups as “adult supervision” like Erik Schmidt did for Google?

These events are like the whistle from the pressure cooker. They relieve the tension in the ecosystem for all players, everyone can enjoy a good meal for a while, and then many will go cook for the consumers something great somewhere else.

Inc42: A lot of startups in India are now looking at SME Emerge to list themselves. What do you think is its future in India?

Hemant Mohapatra: It feels like this is a potential exit mechanism for companies in the $10-30 Mn (INR 50-200 Cr) enterprise value range. While there are a number of companies that could benefit from getting liquidity at these enterprise values, this is not a viable path for large exits that institutional venture funds look for where enterprise values will range from $100 million to $1 billion and above. The BSE/NSE and international stock markets like the NASDAQ and the NYSE support companies with these larger enterprise values.

Inc42: You were associated with Andreessen Horowitz, which is among the top VC firms. How was the overall experience and what are the things Indian VC firms can learn from it?

Hemant Mohapatra: I learned a lot from Andreessen Horowitz. As a firm, they have redefined what it means to be an investor by going beyond providing what had so far been the usual for VCs: cash and counsel. Andreessen Horowitz is a well-oiled machine of talent scouts, deal operations, outreach and events, go-to-market teams, PR, and even an engineering team! All these work for the benefit of portcos in critical areas such as helping them hire, or setting up product demos between portcos and potential buyers.

The venture industry is pretty crowded — every week a new fund is raised — and VC funds like Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz that value the company-building experience in their investors, treat founders fairly and with respect, and always try to add value to an entrepreneur’s journey even if they cannot be part of it directly, are the ones that will differentiate and dominate over time. The phenomenal exits that Lightspeed has had recently (Mulesoft, Snap, AppDynamics, Nutanix, India Energy Exchange, etc) is a testament to this approach.

Inc42: You have written that you believe more in AR and not VR. Can you explain why?

Hemant Mohapatra: For the most part, the VR wave has come and gone. It is extremely hard to time the market for new technologies, so it’s anyone guess if VR is going to make a return. In my opinion, VR technology was socially isolationary — you wear a headset which isolates you from the environment — so the use cases narrowed down to gaming and a few others. The devices were expensive and it was an additional device the user needed to buy, which added friction.

Finally, developers had a tough time developing apps for them because of different platform architectures. Compare that to AR: your devices are essentially cell phones so the distribution problem is solved. Next, you only have two platforms to develop for: iOS and Android, both with a huge pre-trained developer base. And finally, AR still keeps you integrated to the environment, so the use cases really open up: from learning more about an artifact while traveling, to gaming apps like Pokemon Go, to just using AR to record fun videos from your cell phones with animated characters exploring around your physical space.

Inc42: What are your thoughts on emerging technologies like blockchain?

Hemant Mohapatra: As with most emerging tech, a lot depends on what is the application that will help prove, scale and socialize the technology. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have done a great job proving the underlying blockchain technology to a degree but there is a long road ahead with many difficult engineering challenges around scalability, security, and speed that need to be solved before mass adoption, not to mention regulatory clarity on many aspects of the blockchain stack. As most people who have been tracking this space, I am excited about the possibilities and am keeping a close eye on how it is developing and where the biggest opportunities are.

Inc42: Globally, the AI sector is poised to grow to $16.06 Bn by 2022. You previously said that AI would be gaining a foothold but people are confusing it with machine learning etc. What do you think is the problem?

Hemant Mohapatra: AI is an overarching concept of creating intelligence that possesses the characteristics of a human. Machine learning and deep learning are the tools to achieve AI.

While AI is not a new tech — it’s been around since the 50s — it has suddenly become part of the tech zeitgeist because we now have the perfect storm of limitless compute power available to analyse limitless data stored on infinitely scalable and cheap storage.

Like with anything that gains popularity so quickly, there are bound to be buzzwords and terminologies that conflate and obfuscate. Rest assured, the smart crowd knows exactly how to separate the wheat from the chaff and that is where the smart money is going.

Inc42: What’s next in store for AI?

Hemant Mohapatra: That question could take an entire book to answer, so let me focus on some of the interesting problems that the next-gen AI-prenreneur will have to solve.

First, biased data leads to biased results — for example, an AI programme used by judges to determine if a convicted criminal was going to commit more crimes was found to be biased against minorities. Unbiasing data that is going to drive the AI decision-engine is going to be an area of intense scrutiny and opportunity.

Second, the authenticity of content. The University of Washington recently published research that shows Barack Obama giving a speech and the incredible thing about the video is that it is entirely made up. An AI listened to and watched a lot of Obama’s publicly available videos, de-constructed his facial features and speech patterns, and then created a video of him saying something entirely different. As this technology becomes mature, it’d be difficult to believe almost any content online and new ways to certify what’s real would need to be designed.

Finally, until we reach what is called “generalized AI” — AI that is indistinguishable from a human in doing any task just as a human would, much like C-3PO or Terminator — we will have to depend on a lot of humans to make our AI models effective for the specialised tasks they are designed for. Things like correctly labeling raw data that is fed into the AI model or ensuring an AI model behaves as expected still need a lot of human input. There is a new generation of startups coming up to build what is being called “AI Ops” that are tackling these tough challenges.

Mohapatra has a deep understanding of technology along with many years of experience in investing for some of the top VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz in the US. This, combined with his empathy for startup founders and understanding of the Indian and US ecosystems, will sure help him sniff out some of the best deals in this new market and play an active part in making entrepreneurial dreams come true.

This article is part of Inc42’s latest series, MoneyBall – Get up close and personal with the pioneers of the investment world. Dive in to find out about what excites them, their views on the latest technology & investment trends and what the future looks like from their viewpoint!

The post MoneyBall: Lightspeed India’s Hemant Mohapatra Is Not Shy Of Chasing Down ‘Compelling’ Deals appeared first on Inc42 Media.