While on our six-city tour of the Tier 2 startup ecosystem with BIGShift, we discovered several promising startups. This series will cover some of the most innovative startups. This is a profile of  Ahmedabad’s Torchit, which has taken an initiative to empower the visually impaired with its assistive tech.

When Louis Braille created his eponymous tactile writing system in the early 19th century, he was just 15. Braille allowed the visually impaired and blind to read, write and communicate on paper. For nearly 200 years it has been a guiding light for those without sight, but when it comes to movement, the visually-impaired have had to rely on white canes and seeing-eye dogs to get around.

The Internet of Things revolution and technology is changing that. The lack of assistive tech is a major hindrance in the overall development of the differently-abled. But Ahmedabad-based Torchit has a tech solution that hopes to make navigation around rooms and closed spaces easier for the visually-impaired.

Globally, over 2.2 Bn people are suffering from blindness or visual impairment, and while moving around in the real world is not a problem in many cases, walking and detecting objects and barriers within rooms and closed spaces can be a tough ask.

Cofounded by Hunny Bhagchandani, Torchit brings ultrasonic sensors and sonar-like ability to white canes that the visually-impaired usually carry around. Inspired by his work with visually-impaired through an NGO, the first Torchit prototype was just a regular torch where the bulb was replaced with an ultrasonic sensor. The sensor detects obstacles by transmitting and receiving sonic waves just like a sonar or the natural ultrasonic capabilities of a bat.

Just like blind bats use sonar to navigate, Torchit’s flagship product, called Saarthi, uses the ultrasonic sensor to help those with impaired vision understand how close or far objects are in a closed room, lobby or slightly more open areas. The haptic feedback built into Torchit lets its users know how far or close objects are and allows them to course-correct.

“You switch on the product and then you select the range for a closed room – 2 ft, for a lobby kind of area – 4 ft and for open areas and streets – 8 ft, and you just mount the device on any white cane, whenever it vibrates, it is a signal that there is an obstacle in front so you have to course-correct by moving right or left which you also figure out through the device itself,” Torchit cofounder Mohit Chelani told Inc42.

Safety and ease of user were the two biggest factors that determined Torchit’s development and feature-set. To make it convenient for anyone with visual impairments or blindness, Saarthi fits into a conventional white cane that most such users are already familiar with and trained for. Torchit’s internal quality control team checks each and every unit before dispatch and provides a year-long device warranty to cover for any faults in the device.

Building Torchit One Step At A Time

Assistive tech is not something that Indian startups have focussed on too much, despite the renowned Jaipur leg being invented in India. As a result, there’s not much to go on for startups or entrepreneurs focussing on this area.

“Our mentors have played a critical role. They have helped us in product development and getting the initial set of users to test and give feedback around the device,” Bhagchandani told us when asked about the challenges in the early days.

Word of mouth has been instrumental in spreading the word as well. Torchit’s 11-member team has worked with over 18K visually-impaired across India, South Korea, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia. Within India, Torchit’s home state of Gujarat and neighbouring Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, along with Delhi NCR have seen the highest adoption. Among its users, 70% are male, and Bhagchandani claimed that year-on-year, the growth has been 60% in terms of users.

To reach customers, Torchit has three primary sales channels — corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, state-sponsored projects and individual purchases.

“We have successfully completed CSR projects with companies like ONGC, Wagh Bakri, Oil India, HDFC, GRUH Finance, MLM India, we are in talks with Haryana and UP Government for distribution in those states too. Since the device is affordable from an individual’s perspective, we have sold more than 3K Saarthis directly to users,” said Bhagchandani.

Thanks to its international appeal, Torchit has gained grants from Millennium Alliance, which is a collaboration between the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), UK Aid Direct and Facebook. It has also received seed funding from angel investors.

The founders maintained that while there are definitely international alternatives in this category of assistive tech devices, what differentiates Saarthi is the product utility, experience and affordability. “We have always tried to have the customer experience first and then integrated the tech to provide that, so even the current version of our product Saarthi that you see is the 18th prototype. We have integrated feedback from more than 2K users,” Bhagchandani added.

Using Technology For Inclusion

“We intend to stay ahead of the competition again by sticking to our philosophy of designing tech-based assistive aid which is simple, effective and affordable.” — Hunny Bhagchandani

Bhagchandani and Chelani are targetting 10K more users by the end of the year, but beyond helping the visually-impaired, the duo is looking to expand the use-cases with new tech and new products. This time it’s related to development and knowledge-gathering, but the theme is holistic empowerment.

“We are developing another product with IIT Madras & MIT, Boston to make education and learning more accessible for the visually-impaired,” Chelani told us.

It’s also in talks with Google to bring support for the visually-impaired on Google Maps for navigation and movement.

“We believe our unique proposition is our approach to inclusion. It’s not just about making products and selling them. We are also actively working towards hiring visually-impaired workers and giving them a subsistence. We are trying to build a company for the blind, with the blind,” Bhagchandani signed off.

With the advent of digital, the one thing all new-age entrepreneurs have strived for is to bring transparency, simplicity, and ease of access in the services industry. The insurance platforms within the financial services industry is no different. The likes of Acko, Toffee Insurance, Coverfox, Digit Insurance, Insure First, PolicyBazaar, BankBazaar, Turtlemint — the list goes on and on — have made it much easier for Indians to get the right insurance plans, streamline premium payments and continue their daily lives with some degree of peace of mind.

Among these insurance tech platforms, Coverfox is a startup that not only took the early plunge into the digital insurance segment, but it has also successfully created a niche for itself among the big appetite players.

Promoted and operated by Glitterbug Technologies, Coverfox, led by founder Devendra Rane, has managed to establish a clear path to scale and expand its service verticals. It has received funding from global funds such as SAIF Partners, Accel, Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures, IFC and Transamerica. Having started Coverfox with Varun Dua, who exited the company in 2017 to launch Acko, Rane has helped Coverfox tap into the insurance tech space successfully.

“We got our license in January 2014, but it was only in May 2014 that we were able to sell our first policy. People simply didn’t trust us being a digital player. We have come a long way since then,” Rane told Inc42.

With 35+ insurers on board, $58.59 Mn raised in funding and presence in 800 cities, Coverfox is now aiming to be profitable by 2023 and also float an IPO in a few years. Here’s the Coverfox key milestones in a nutshell.

Finding The Right Opportunity

The year 2013 was a time when digital platforms have just started taking shape along the rise of Indian ecommerce. Yet when it comes to investment decisions like wealth management and insurance, people were quite sceptical about turning to technology.

As Rane said, there is a general lack of awareness among people about insurance plans. This is because key information remains buried under technical words and jargon-loaded policy documents. Insurance mis-selling had been an unfortunate consequence of this very problem. “There was an air of mistrust among customers with respect to insurance companies,” he recalled.

The main reason for this gap was that among the agents, the salespersons and the insurance company, a customer did not know where to turn to in case of an insurance claim or advice. There was little accountability and a lot of dissatisfaction among insurance customers.

Coverfox wanted to create an unbiased online insurance distribution business. “We wanted to restore the power of choice to the consumers, who were buying insurance products that are generally difficult to understand,” Rane added.

Ensuring Success Through Technology 

Coverfox today uses artificial intelligence models to create technology-driven insurance platform for its users. Its proprietary technology and algorithm-based policy discovery allow users to compare and choose from a range of plans that suit their budgets and needs across top insurance providers. It is also integrating the process of policy issuance, endorsements, inspection and claims with insurance companies in order to make sales and post-sales service easier through the product.

“Our team of data scientists analyses consumer interaction with various projects to furnish better trends. The product keeps evolving as we collect data on customer behavior and product usage, said Rane.

The company claims its seller platform Coverdrive is also proving to be a big hit among insurance agents and third-party providers. Coverdrive was launched in 2017 primarily as a digital assistant for the new insurance agents, trained by Coverfox platform in the country. It claims to have issued close to a million policies across the country and witnessed 300% growth for FY 2018-19. Coverdrive currently has over 20 insurer partners like Max Life Insurance, HDFC ERGO, Kotak General Insurance, Bharti AXA, Bajaj Allianz, Reliance General Insurance etc.

“About one-third of Coverfox’s total revenue has come from PoS (Point of Sale) agents between January 2017 and June 2019. The customer base vis-a-vis the app broadly comprises of insurance agents, college students, and housewives who are looking out for new business opportunities to work either part-time/ full-time,” Rane told us.

Digital Turns Necessity For Insurance

As Rane said, in India, only 2% insurance sales are made online, leaving ample scope for growth in this market. Thus, he believes that digital is no longer a choice, but a necessity for the insurance industry to upgrade.

With plans to venture beyond India in the next 2-3 years, the platform is now working towards achieving 100% unassisted insurance buying journey for customers. It also plans to completely automate the claims and endorsement process to reduce turnaround time for customers and providers, adding value on both ends of the chain.

At the same time, the founders are also looking at scaling up within the domestic market from the point of view of volumes. For this, Coverfox is venturing into the lucrative Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The idea is to add more insurance products and build a complete insurance portfolio for all customers.

“We have achieved digitisation to a great extent with our bike insurance product, wherein 100% of bike insurance business is unassisted. And 80% of these customers insure their bikes in less than four minutes.”

Digital Insurance: Untapped Opportunity And A Maze 

The overall insurance industry is expected to reach $280 Bn by 2020. But digital insurance has a penetration of less than 4% in the country. However, the penetration is growing at about 90% annually.

Analysts are of the belief that the insurance market is big enough to absorb a lot of players. Yet the high customer acquisition costs and heavy regulations are a plague to the growth of digital insurance players amid the traditional players like LIC and GIC.

A sustainable and regular revenue flow is extremely vital to sustain long-term in the digital insurance sector. Coverfox is already working on fleshing out this part of its business. It follows a commission model and earns a 12%-18% fee from its partners on sale of policies. It also gets a renewal commission if the policies are renewed through their platform.

Yet this doesn’t seem to be enough. The company filings have shown that Coverfox spent INR 135.37 Cr in FY19 to earn INR 33.29 Cr for the year. In simple terms, Coverfox burned INR 4.06 to earn INR 1 for FY19.

The continuous burn may further put the more nascent digital insurance players in a position to take early exits through the merger and acquisition route, provided their technology or talent and resources are worthy of such a deal.

The need to maintain liquidity calls for investor money and more funding. According to Datalabs by Inc42, around $96 Mn has already been invested into the digital insurance segment between Jan 2019-October 2019, indicating the cash burn the players are going through in this segment.

Whether Coverfox will be able to do that and live its dream earning trust and funds from the public market through an IPO, well, only time will tell. But automation and AI-led processing hold the key to help streamline the insurance market, and in this regard, Coverfox has its bases covered.

While on our six-city tour of the Tier 2 startup ecosystem with BIGShift, we discovered several promising startups. This series will cover some of the most innovative startups. This profile is of ClassMonitor which has taken an initiative to help children at a young age move away from the digital source of education and towards the traditional pen and paper practice.

The years in school are imperative for the development and overall growth of any human being. This is when children develop the necessary cognitive, physical, social and emotional skills to tackle the real-world challenges they will face once out of school.

While edtech has made learning easier, it doesn’t always cultivate these skills holistically among young learners. With the penetration of technology and the internet, many parents and educators have resorted to computers, tablets and smartphones to make learning more engaging.

This is more evident among working parents, who may not have the time to engage with their kids, especially in pre-school and playgroup ages. This results in children becoming too attached to the gadgets and all learning being linked to the device, which hampers social and emotional development to a certain extent. And this issue is compounded in primary school as students find it harder to engage or grasp concepts without the help of devices. Even though schools still rely largely on pen and paper, device-based learning has become a focal point in an edtech world.

Indore-based ClassMonitor, founded by Vijeet Pandey and Vikas Rishishwar in March 2016, just might have the answer to that problem. The learning platform blends curriculum-based activities with digital education principles, monitored by parents and linked to pen-and-paper assignments.

Starting as ClassMonitor Messenger to ease communication between schools and parents, the startup developed into a learning platform in mid-2018.

Discovered during Inc42 BIGShift in Indore, ClassMonitor emerged as the winner of the BIGShift Pitch session, impressing the jury and the audience with its business model and innovative approach to education.

Its chat application is being used by more than 300 schools in India, with a strong presence in Indore and Ahmedabad. Pandey told Inc42, “Over 65K parents use this application and it was this platform that eventually evolved into our go-to-market strategy and helped us develop our second platform—the ClassMonitor learning platform.”

How ClassMonitor’s Chat App Became A Learning Kit

According to ClassMonitor’s research during its early days, the biggest concern for schools was communication. Conventionally, schools used WhatsApp or a similar tool for all basic communication, which becomes a nuisance after a point as parents have to manage their non-school communication on that too.

“This became our starting point — to ease communication through tech. We also included advanced functionalities such as a feedback mechanism for the child’s performance, attendance system, message exchange, bus tracking and calendar functionality,” elaborated Pandey.

Friends since college Pandey and Rishishwar were always passionate about the education sector in India. When Pandey returned from the UK after his master’s education and having worked there for over four years, he caught up Rishishwar and discussed starting their own venture, which became ClassMonitor Messenger.

In January 2017, the duo realised that while interactions had been solved, there was a bigger issue that needed attention. There was a lack of quality and relevant learning material for kids.

“Adding to that was the increasing concern of screen addiction of young kids, right in their formative years,” Pandey pointed out.

This sparked the idea of a different product, which would be an amalgamation of digital learning and a physical toolkit. To test and validate their idea, the duo brought in experts who have worked in the primary education system and designed the ClassMonitor Learning Kit, which was launched in October 2018.

Focussing on learning in the formative years, the learning kit was developed to help children develop better soft skills while also learning. It blends digital tools for parents with accompanying pen-and-paper practice for kids.

Designed with more than 300 study items, including flashcards, worksheets, game-sheets and more, the ClassMonitor Learning Kit focusses on traditional learning methods to engage and help the development of a child for an entire year. The curriculum and learning-driven kits have study items assigned to each subject as well as simple everyday concepts.

And ClassMonitor is going for an experiential approach — children learn about the environment and conservation through the included ‘Pencil Bud’ in the kit. With a seed embedded at the end of the pencil for the lessons, children can use up the pencil and plant their first tree at the end of the experience. This not only promotes learning through traditional means but also rewards children to a certain extent and in a meaningful manner.

Initially launched in two variants — Junior (1.5 to 3.5 Years) and Senior (3.5 to 5.5 Years) — today, the startup caters to four age groups in the same range, with more specific products based on feedback over the past year.

The Edtech Challenge For ClassMonitor

With home-based schooling content for specific groups of age, its traditional approach and its annual learning kit, ClassMonitor claims to be a one-of-a-kind solution for the growth and development of a child.

Currently catering to an age group of up to 5.5 years, the startup aims to extend its product offerings for children up to seven years of age and wants to expand its focus on specific skills such as language building and grammar. Further to this, Pandey told Inc42 that it aims to expand its distributor network to reach over 50 by the end of FY 20, with a revenue target of INR 6 Cr for the year.

To create the evangelism for its learning platform, ClassMonitor has roped in exclusive resellers and young mom-entrepreneurs to be ambassadors for the product in over 24 cities across the country. Pandey told Inc42 that the current focus is on giving parents a clear understanding of when, how and what to teach children. And that’s why the key marketer for the ClassMonitor platform is the parent itself.

While it has started out with some impressive traction, the bigger challenge will be to attract larger educational institutions as partners, so that it can expand its learning kit for more use-cases and for different curricula. That’s where ClassMonitor will face its biggest challenge as it comes up against the likes of BYJU’s, Smartivity, Toppr and other edtech platforms also exploring multiple models.

In India, there are more than 1.6 Mn primary and secondary schools, 37,204 colleges and more than 789 universities. At the same time, there are 3,500 edtech startups (Inc42 DataLabs estimate). The former clearly indicates that traditional brick and mortar medium of education still dominates the Indian education system, and ClassMonitor is looking to address this large base, so it does have a good hook, but there’s still a long way to go.

It’s also trying to fight against the rising tide of schools digitising their curriculum and learning management. In Tier 1 cities, reputed schools have begun integrating smart learning into the regular curriculum for the overall development of the students from various digital education companies in India. With so much reliance on technology, one does wonder how long the pen-and-paper approach might be relevant, even if it does have its rewards.

When a six-year-old agritech startup — which had earned tons of headlines around its plans to change the lives of farmers and one which was recognised by the investor community as well —  puts its website on a deep freeze for more than 5 months, one cannot help but wonder what exactly is cooking inside?

That startup is Aibono. 

Founded in 2014 by IIT Madras alumnus Vivek Raj Kumar, Aibono is so far working to improve farm yield and income realisation for farmers through a singular end-to-end platform. Operating as an AI-based fresh food farm aggregator, the startup deals in high-value, highly perishable and short-cycle crops such as carrots, broccoli, lettuce etc — a group which represents a $50 Bn segment within the $250 Bn fresh produce market. 

With a growing cycle of 60-90 days and a shelf life of three to four days, very few players in India have been able to figure out the secret sauce to cater to this segment. But Aibono seems to have done it.

In March this year, the Bengaluru-based startup raised $2.5 Mn from Menterra Venture Advisors, Artha Ventures, Rebright Partners among other investors. It is now looking to expand its service to 2K farmers and 1K small retailers in 3-4 cities by 2020. Currently, it is working with about 500 farmers in the Nilgiris belt in Karnataka and 250 retailers, largely based in Bengaluru. It is also building a community center for farmers which will go live in the first quarter of 2020 in the Nilgiris. 

“We already have a retailer facing suite of applications for retail orders. It’s the consumer side suite what we have put under the deep freeze,” Kumar chuckled.

While the updated website may get live anytime soon, the company is also working to bring a feature that tells consumers can track the source or the farm where the purchased vegetables or fruits have come from. 

“That’s something that will be coming out by 2020. So far we have been working alongside farmers on the concept of seed to plate. It is an exciting thing to be able to provide for the movement of goods as well as the movement of value from seed to plate and plate to seed,” said Kumar.

Seed To Plate Vs Farm To Fork

India ranks second in fruits and vegetable production in the world after China. But there still exists a huge gap between per capita demand and supply owing to the highly perishable nature of fresh produce and the relatively poor transport infrastructure in certain parts of the country. 

Indian agritech startups working in the farm-to-fork space like WayCool, Fresh2Home, Licious and others are already building solutions to improve supply chain management by adopting best global practices in storage, packaging, handling, transportation while also providing value-added service. As a result, many claim to have reduced post-harvest wastage by more than 40%. 

Aibono is, however, operating in the seed-to-fork segment. Kumar explained that typically platforms are built by companies to focus on the demand side. They first talk to consumers and then go closer to the source to remove the intermediary, but they always start from the demand side. He added that in the farm-to-table space, startups don’t enter the farm or directly engage with farmers before the harvest. Their engagement with producers start after the product is ready. 

“Our engagement with farmers start 90 days before that — right from the first moment when the seeds are sown and going all the way until the produce is purchased from the retail shelf. We understand that yield without a price is half the problem solved. And doing supply chain without controlling the product, which perishes every two days, is like a gamble you can hardly win,” he added.

We are not a supply chain company, but an agriculture company. 

Providing Technology As A Service To The Farmers

Agriculture or supply chain, one thing is clear — Aibono is a tech company at the same time. Its  software-based assisted platform for the farmers achieves the twin targets of improving farm yield and farmer’s income realisation. For this Aibono’s platform requires visibility of data from the supply as well as demand-side to achieve the right ratio in real-time. Here’s how it goes about it:

Predicting The Demand

According to Kumar, even a simple study of consumption from a single retail store shelf on a day-to-day basis allows the observer to collect a deep amount of data and understand which products are being consumed and at what speed. 

“That’s a very beautiful thing we have about food because a weekly household purchase of food is based on the kind of recipes and patterns of eating we have at home. Likewise, businesses in the hotel and restaurant industry buy produce based on their menus. So once you start capturing data, this all becomes quite predictable,” he added.

Controlling The Supply

Once the demand has been predicted, it is necessary to control the production and release it to the shelves in line with the consumption expectation. This is divided into 3 areas:

Assessing Farms

By applying the principles of precision farming, Aibono captures more than 150 farm variables in about 2K data points for every batch itself. “It includes data all the way from soil checks to nutrient check, field images, leaf colouration etc, all done at the beginning of the batch,” said Kumar. 

All this data is collected through the Aibono suite of software applications for different areas. “The tech support team bridges farm data to the app, then there is predictive planting material suite of applications that work with seedlings producer or nursery, then there is harvest suite of applications, wherein we get to know the production details on day to day basis, and more,” he added.

Leveraging The Onground Fleet

Aibono maintains an on-ground fleet of around 30 people. These are agri-graduates from the nearby geographies and are largely young workers from farming families. They are given a three-month rigorous training programme on crop agronomy. Each such agronomer, as Aibono calls them, is responsible for 40-50 farms. They carry the equipment kits as well as data collecting sensors to farms and collect the required data while also assisting farmers in technology adoption. 

“A typical agronomer evaluates 20 batches at a time.  On our platform an agronomer manages more than 300 batches at a time due to the assistance of our AI platform. Both crop experts and the AI platform work simultaneously to make recommendations,” said Kumar.

Sowing The Seeds

Once data assessment is done, Aibono provides seeds intelligently on the basis of consumption from the retail shelves. The partner farms are then divided into multiple quadrants for sowing season.  Each quadrant is given a different crop at a given time. So a farm does 15-16 harvest cycles a year with multi-crop and multiple batches. Seeds are sown in the right quadrant every week, in line with the consumption that Aibono actually forecast. 

“All these are short-cycle crops. With this method, on an average, a farmer makes 1.5-2 times yield than a regular farmer as he is able to spread his cash flow across multiple crops thus gaining better yield and better price realisation across each batch,” added Kumar. 

Real World Reviews Are The Best Marketing Tool

With the advent of technology in agriculture, a lot of players have been tapping different niches in the last few years. Some succeeded while others failed. But the impact on the end consumer and farmers has been huge both in the positive and negative manner. 

“This was a key challenge we had to face initially. We deal primarily with small farmer ecosystem, who will compare you with every other player who may have reached out to them earlier with promises of better yields and better incomes.”

As they say, nothing beats a real-world example in creating the right impression, so Kumar started by leasing a farm in the Nilgiris and using it as a model farm. 

“In 2014, our first leased farm was of a retired school teacher and incidentally with a temple, which the entire village comes to during different events. Farmers being a closed knit community, what better way to gain word of mouth than show and tell.” 

The entry of Jio and the subsequent market penetration blitz by all telcos also played a key role in setting up the initial milestones for Aibono thanks to the boost in adoption for the application suite. “This was a true turning point for us. We were lucky to be at the right place at the right time when internet got commoditised,” he added. 

Enough Room For Agritech Synergies

Over the years, Aibono has become known among farmers as a service company rather than a technology company despite the focus on data collection and applications, with the on-ground ‘agronomers’ possibly being a factor in creating that perception. 

And Kumar has no objection to it. He believes that the beauty of an aggregator platform lies in the fact that it can not only improve the yield or income but can also provide value-added services to the farmers at a much lower cost, thus standardising the product further. 

“This is exactly the concept on which a platform like ours is built where all the equipment and expertise is aggregated into a singular data layer and the intel given to the farmers is completely centralised,” he added.

Aibono stands for AI and Bono which means doing good for the people using new-age technology — it symbolises a balance between technology and human efforts, which is certainly the recommended approach for the sustainable growth of the agriculture ecosystem. 

In line with this, collaboration with partners in the ecosystem and other agritech startups are also on the cards for Aibono in the near future. Aibono is poised to face significant competition from the players like PEAT, Earth Food, V Drone Agro, CroFarm in this segment. 

But Kumar believes that to scale, it’s not necessary to tap many geographies. “Nilgiris in itself is a region which produces 500-700 Mn worth of goods. District by district, in itself the fresh vegetables and fruits market is so huge, especially super-perishables and high-value products.” 

With the ever-increasing number of apps on the Play Store or the App Store, conversations on social media and in app reviews have increasingly emphasised on the UI/UX aspect. UX refers to user experience, while UI stands for user interface, and while they are often used together they play different roles within any software. At the intersection of these both is the user — players for games and customers for shopping apps and so on — which makes UI/UX a fundamental part of any software, internet company or brand.

The user journey is often called customer experience and according to Forrester, “CX transformation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity.” The report said that by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator.

However, not everyone has been able to crack the code to solve for the challenges of customer experience. Some of the challenges being discussed industry-wide includes value for money, fulfilling customer demand under organization structure, strategic investment, managing customer-centric operations etc.

To solve for the same, serial entrepreneurs Arihant Jain and Ajeet Kushwaha have launched Seekify. Jain told Inc42 that Seekify is a customer experience automation platform. “We easily integrate into many business CX software to aggregate all the data that drives their customer experience. We give actionable insights from this data with the help of our AI and ML engine,” he added.

Moneyball: Finding Inspiration From Sports

Jain told us the duo found inspiration for Seekify from Brad Pitt-starrer Moneyball.

“Moneyball was right — you need wins, and for the wins you need runs. For runs, you need people who can get you runs. Sports and business are similar — you don’t need top performers; you need the right set of people moving all the little indicators that come together to drive results.”

Jain said Seekify synchronises the right people, process and tools in a business for it to win the ‘championship’.

And this is not the first time the duo has come together to build a tech startup.

Jain and Kushwaha have been working together since they met as the founding team at HealthKart. While, Kushwaha was CTO, Jain was the COO then.

The duo had been involved in the launch of 1MG, and build Joe Hukum, a chatbot in 2015. The company was then acquired by Freshworks in 2017. The duo then spearheaded software implementations in several countries across the world working to improve customer experience for brands.

The company is looking to monetise via subscription model. “We are targeting mid-market customers and we expect our ARR to be in the $50-150K per year,” he added.

How Does Seekify Work?

In simple words, Seekify brings together multiple customer interaction points to a common platform to help the company make sense of data and use it accordingly.

Jain explained that Seekify takes customer interaction data from fragmented points (for a physical help desk, customer service chat, telephone calls, NPS tools and more) and generates actionable insights to automate processes to enable individuals, teams and organisation to implement the right CX strategy. The company can also set its CX goals like NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) at company level.

Then Seekify breaks down company-level goals into team and individual levels. By monitoring actual performance for the company, teams and individuals against the set goals, Seekify surfaces actionable insights.

The team of 15 in Gurugram also enables automation for feedback communication, collaborations and on-the-job training processes based on these insights. Seekify will use insights to power actions across its products leveraging application program interfaces (APIs) and robotic process automation (RPA). This enables the companies to offer personalised customer experiences to their customers.

The company claims that the USP for Seekify is its automation technology for customer experience. At present, Seekify’s initial customers are in Singapore, Delhi, Bengaluru, Johannesburg, Berlin and Chicago. “They are a lot of tech startups in fintech, retail and telecom but also traditional players in BFSI, logistics and mobility,” Jain added.

The Challenges Of Solving Customer Experience

An Econsultancy survey found 22% of companies identified CX as the most exciting business opportunity of 2019 — beating content marketing (15%) and mobile marketing (13%).

It has been widely discussed that even though the prioritisation of customer experience is a necessity, the challenges are in the backend processes. So, even building a product to solve for this has been a challenge for Seekify.

Jain told us that the biggest challenge is educating the market. “CXO’s around the world are just realising the importance of CX and the “Head of CX” is a new post in many organisations. We hope CEOs actually pay heed to CX, not just lip service,” Jain added.

One of the other players working to build for automated customer experience is US-based ActiveCampaign. The company talks about working on smarter automations leveraging machine learning algorithms.

Automation is the key to bridging internal workflows and customer-facing processes. The customer experience management market is projected to grow from $7.8 Bn in 2019 to $14.5 Bn by 2024, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.3% during the forecast period. The major growth drivers for the market include the increasing need to improve customer engagement and reducing customer churn rate.

Seekify has also seen interest from top VCs in India and are looking to find the right investor partners. While India has become renowned as a hub of innovations, most SaaS companies have had to sell abroad to build their business. Hence, it will be important to see how Seekify builds and grows its business domestically, even as it expands in international markets.

Getting a business loan can be a herculean task for small business organisations and startups because of the huge risk factor and the instability involved in the typically cash-reliant operations. While a small business loan can be the best thing for SME businesses, most lending institutions are not yet ready to take a data-led call on serving credit to this segment.

While technology is changing the game, the reach of large private banks is still unmatched by the rising breed of lending tech startups in India. Most banks provide secured loans with alluring terms and rates of interest. However, a small business without collateral to offer would fall at the risk of failing the eligibility criteria for securing business loans.

“Digital lending is certainly a fast growing business. However, it is a lending business at the end of the day. So to that extent you have to be careful about asset quality. You cannot be growth at all costs, which you can do in other businesses. There is a natural sweet spot in terms of growth rate that lending businesses will strike,” says Indifi MD and cofounder Alok Mittal in an interview with Inc42.

According to estimates, there are 411 alternative lending startups operating in India and as per a survey conducted by BCG and Google in 2018 23% of consumers in India have availed of retail loans digitally.

According to Datalabs by Inc42 report between 2015 and Q1 2019, the total investment in Indian fintech startups was $7.62 Bn with a total deal count of 478. Out of the total funding, 50.13% or $3.82 Bn was in payments tech startups, followed by 25.49% ($1.94 Bn) in lending tech startups, while other fintech startups made up 16.35% of the total investments, and insurance tech contributed 8.03% ($612 Mn).

Industry analysts have hinted at a slowdown, and consequently credit demand is also on the rise. “With the slowdown, there is a natural expansion of demand. However, there will be more stress on the industry and you have to be more careful about whom you choose,” Mittal added.

Founded by Mittal and Siddharth Mahanot in 2015, Indifi Technologies focusses on credit solutions for small and medium enterprises (SME). The company provides term loans, line of credit, invoice discounting, and merchant cash advance services customised for small and medium businesses in travel, ecommerce, retail, food service and hospitality industries. The Gurugram-based B2B lender claims it has over 25K active customers and wants to add another 10K in the next four years.

Indifi has a whole host of competitors as the SME lending space has thrown up a huge opportunity for fintech players. LendingKart, CashSuvidha, Capital Float, Faircent, iLend, Flexiloans, Zest Money and others have begun well in the digital lending space particularly in the B2B model.

Indifi raised INR 145 Cr ($21 Mn) in its Series C funding round in July 2019, led by the CDC Group. The company also has additional investors like Accel India, Omidyar Network, Fair Finance Fund and Elevar Equity. The company is in the process of utilising the funds to modernise and expand the existing business into new areas of business, develop infrastructure, capital expenditure, repay debts and general corporate expenditure to meet objectives.

“We are in the process of using the capital. We are testing new industries and making the experience more seamless. That’s the fixed investment. Part of the capital also goes back to lending,” Mittal told us.

It raised its first round from Accel Partners and Elevar Equity. In 2016, the company ended its Series B round of investment after Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm, invested $10 Mn in the company.

How Indifi Offers Instant Business Loans

Startups and SMEs feel the need for quick and easy access to funds at many stages of growth. It could be for expanding current operations or setting up inventory or for larger projects. However, often access to funds can be a complicated process, especially when the businesses cannot offer collateral.

Mittal talked about traditional lenders mostly offering loans to businesses on the basis of collaterals, a criterion that many small businesses are unable to meet. This often leads to a need-gap for the availability of credit, which is primarily what most lending players are attempting to bridge.

Indifi’s lending platform offers also uses automated mechanisms for the whole loan application and the disbursal process. Here is the typical process of applying for a business loan with Indifi:

• A business owner needs to fill basic business and KYC details
• Indifi uses technology involving advanced algorithms to get relevant data from other sources, to determine the creditworthiness of the business
• Data analytics majorly involves funnel optimisation to understand typical lending journey and marketing analytics
• Small businesses can avail quick and simple business loans from Indifi based on their established transactions with other businesses
• Indifi offers instant business loan of up to INR 50 Lakh within 48-72 hours
• Indifi takes an on-the-fly call on which document requirements can be waived off for each loan application

Indifi’s key advantage is that can provides loans to businesses such as restaurants or online sellers on the basis of their current and previous transactions with aggregators or marketplaces.

The company also partnered with Swiggy in 2017 to provide loans for its partner restaurants.

Indifi primarily focuses on underserved sectors. While traditionally underserved sector meant Tier 2 and Tier 3, it can actually be a huge part of metro cities as well, which is also what Indifi serves.

“So far we haven’t figured out the lending and control risk across these pockets [Tier 1 vs Tier 2]. So the problem is democratic.”

Credit Growth In The Logistics Sector

Indifi’s USP lies in going for verticals than across the sectors. With a focus on verticals that are the most underserved, Indifi is now looking at the logistics sector to lend to fleet operators and truckers. It’s looking to offer loans in the ticket size of INR 1 Lakh – INR 50 lakh and the transporters can avail credit based on monthly sales volumes and projected revenues. Digital lending platforms like Indifi offer up to 2x the monthly sales as credit, without any collateral.

While the trucking industry in India is estimated to be around $100 Bn in size, around 30-40% of the sector financed by the organised sector. The rest is the opportunity for lending tech startups, and Mittal said it felt like the best move.

“About 75% of the business is based on partnership with other businesses in the ecosystem. Our basis of differentiation is the industry-specific approach. Very few of our peers are going for that. They tend to go after every SME,” Mittal told Inc42.

Speaking of partners, Indifi has brought on board MakeMyTrip, Djubo, Goibibo, Riya Travel, Shopclues, Foodpanda Yatra, Pine Labs among others to leverage their internal customer data for SMB lending.

“We prefer few verticals rather than going across the board. This is because there is an underserved category across cities and so the demand is huge. It is important to specialise in a few verticals to understand risks better.” – Alok Mittal

Mittal said a travel agency has different credit needs than a restaurant business. He feels by putting everything in one bracket, many lending companies tend to overlook some of the risk factors.

While specialising in verticals gives an edge to Indifi, most lending startups are leveraging the growing startup ecosystem. The traditional lending institutions measure a loan against the valuation and stage of startups and perform background checks like cash reserves, balance sheet, cash flow position, credit history — some may even ask for a personal assurance against the loan. This makes life difficult for startups.

Loanzen and BlackBuck are some other startups lending to driver owners, fleet operators and even first-time borrowers, to finance vehicles and also to fund purchases of spare parts.

Bengaluru-based Porter, with a network of over 40K trucks, is planning to foray into this space next year. The startup intends to offer loans to driver partners even for personal requirements, like emergencies in the family, weddings, accident costs and others, says the report.

“For us the key dimension of innovation is along the industry vertical. For example, we realised that for travel agencies one of the key risk factors is how volatile they are. They are a very large business that cash flow can vary dramatically. That is just one of the criteria we look into,” Mittal said.

While on our six-city tour of the Tier 2 startup ecosystem with BIGShift, we discovered several promising startups. This series will cover some of the most innovative startups. From this series is a startup from Raipur, Minocular that has taken a SaaS approach to boost efficiency and safety in the mining industry. 

The mining sector is a huge untapped potential in India for the tech industry. Despite being home to 1,531 operating mines, the sector’s contribution to the GDP has been below 3%. And this contribution has been declining in the past few years. While the GDP growth of the country went from 5% in 2012-13 to 7% in 2017-18, the contribution of the sector (excluding petroleum and natural gas) fell to 1.53% from 1.93% in the same period.

While the government is making efforts to refine the mining sector with the National Mineral Policy 2019 that seeks to bring transparency, socioeconomic growth and safety and the ‘Khan Prahari’ app and other such initiatives, technology startups are also stepping in.

Modular Mining, Hexagon and Minocular are three examples of startups that are focussed on mining, and the changes being brought in can be crucial for the economic development of the sector.

Based in Chhatisgarh capital Raipur, Minocular has taken a completely automated approach to mine management software. While other players in the mining enterprise tech sector uses tools such as enterprise resource planning software, it involves manual data entry to streamling fleet management and other parts of the operation. On Minocular’s automated platform, planning and operational software get auto-filled data thanks to IoT terminals for the fleet and other elements in the supply chain. This is combined with geospatial data to help mines with survey activities for expansion and planning towards it. These are provided as actional insights in real-time.

Discovered on the Nagpur leg of the six-city BIGShift tour, Minocular was founded in December 2017 by Puru Agrawal and Mohit Sahu. To increase its reach among mining operations, it collaborated with Director General of Mines Safety (DGMS) to launch Khanan Mitra with the aim of connecting mining employees with each other. Currently, the app has more than 300 mines on board.

From Digital Marketing To Mining: The Story Of Minocular

Sahu and Agrawal weren’t always mining tech players. They forged a friendship during their education years. Both engineers, Sahu opted to specialise in mining, while Agrawal chose computer science. This combination has held them in good stead at Minocular. Their first venture, though, was far from anything involving mines. In June 2016, the duo launched a digital marketing company, BlueBanyan Technologies.

Within just a few months of starting BlueBanyan, they got a pilot project from a mine. They were called on to suggest tech that could solve problems related to mine surveys.

“We noticed that there was no technology being used at any stage of the mining operations. After many visits to mines, understanding their problems, working with the managers, surveyors, blast managers and dumper operators and more, Minocular was launched as an integrated platform for the mining industry,” Agrawal told Inc42.

Sahu’s background as a mining engineer was a real boon for Minocular as it gave the startup a lot of credibilities, and it could also understand and analyse the industry better.

Raipur provided them with the advantage of being in proximity to some of the largest mines in India. And the demand from the industry was the icing on the cake. Minocular had all the ingredients for success, plus its focus on automation and emerging technology was a key competitive advantage as well.

“Mining is an area, where there are many challenges. We are using and experimenting with the latest tech like drones, AI, ML which gives us the thrill to learn as well as implement it in real life.”

The Minocular platform has two major offerings — planning tools and operation tools. While initially there were many products offered on the platform, they narrowed it down to two major modules as they realised the needs and workings of a mine.

“This basically came as a suggestion from the industry itself,” Agrawal told us.

How Minocular Helps Mines Plan Smarter

Agrawal elaborated on how mines conduct surveys. To outsiders, a survey may seem to be an occasional need for a mine, but he said that it needs to be done every day. This helps mines figure out the ideal places for drilling and blasting and other activities. “So basically, 90% of the time, they are working on their map itself,” explained Agrawal.

Minocular’s MinoDrone is a drone analytics platform customised for the mining industry. Irrespective of whether the entire system is being used or not, a mine can upload and process its own drone maps. Minocular experts use the drone to conduct entire survey and deliver results that then be used for volume calculations, short-term and long-term planning and more.

How Minocular Helps Mine Operations

“The second and major part of Minocular is the platform itself. We set up an IoT network in the mines, connecting all the major assets such as dumpers, excavators, weighing bridges, quality analysers and more,” Agrawal added, highlighting how technology is automating things that used to be done by manual checking and supervision.

Apart from providing real-time data and monitoring of assets, the operation tools work on top of the MinoDrone map, making it extremely easy for any minefield to integrate planning and operations. Mines get access to high-precision AI algorithms based on the IoT data to predict the quality of output and generate reports automatically. Further, it can also predict what the actual production would be in the future.

Is Minocular The Future Of Mining?

The startup claims that while most of the startups in this space work on compliance and business management, Minocular is the only platform that focusses on the operations of the mines and covers it end-to-end, starting from surveying to dispatch.

For now, it earns revenue by selling software licenses to mines, sales of customised hardware used in its IoT network as well as monthly or quarterly drone-based surveys. Besides this, the Khanan Mitra app lets them access new leads, client referrals and gives them an engagement platform to connect with miners and mines.

Currently, it has corporations such as Nuvoco Vistas Corp as clients and it is doing pilot work with major industry names such as Ambuja Cement and five other mines. Going forward, Minocular plans to earn revenue by licensing its MinoDrone tech to mines in Australia, South Africa and more. While its annual revenue is INR 35 Lakh till 2018-19, this financial year it is targetting revenue of more than INR 50 Lakh.

“Mining is an industry where some big players own and control most of the mines. Most mine managers know each other. The app helps us get good referrals from nearby mines and also connect with other mines operating under this company,” Agrawal added.

To celebrate India’s rising startups, Inc42 is profiling a new soonicorn every Friday in the Inc42 UpNext: Unicorns Of Tomorrow series. For the next few months, we will be speaking to founders and cofounders at these potential unicorns and shining light on their journeys and growth stories. We begin the series with a look at B2B lending tech platform Lendingkart.

Entrepreneurship in its true sense is about creating an impact on a large untouched segment. It is only then that an entrepreneur can validate the credibility of the business model. For Harshvardhan Lunia, the founder of Ahmedabad-based digital SME lending startup Lendingkart, the journey has been no different.

“Back in 2014 when we started, I still remember the very first loan we disbursed in Guwahati, 2000 kilometres away from our headquarters. That’s when we realised the potential of the platform we are building and the disruption we are set to initiate,” – Harshvardhan Lunia.

Ever since then, Lendingkart has been a part of many customer success stories and along the way, it has become part of the group of Indian companies heading for the coveted unicorn valuation by next year.

Helping MSMEs get access to credit right from Agartala to Surat and from Jammu to Kanyakumari, the company has become geographically agnostic. With offices in three cities (Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, and Mumbai), it has positively impacted small and medium businesses in more than 1300 cities across all 29 states and union territories of the nation, making it the NBFC with one of the largest geographical footprint in the country.

With more than $200 Mn raised so far from a club of investors such as Bertelsmann India Investments, Fullerton Financial Holdings, India Quotient, among others, the company is currently among a few fintech startups racing to become a unicorn soon.

How Did It All Begin?

During his stint with large private sector and multinational banks, Lunia experience first-hand how decisions were taken in the small loan divisions. “I realised how many small business owners were denied financing despite being creditworthy because they are unorganised and hardly maintain their books of accounts. Thus, in 2010, I returned to India after a successful stint in London with the aim to build a platform that makes Indian MSMEs bankable,” he added.

Initially, he started with an advisory business and realised the various inefficiencies that marred the MSME lending space in India.  In India, formal sources only cater to 22% of the total MSME debt financing. Lack of credit history, collateral and accounting discipline further harm their capacity to procure funds from sources other than money lenders and friends and family.

Lunia wanted to solve these issues by bringing processes online and devise methods to create a credit score, he joined hands with Mukul, an ex-finance director and an old school friend to give shape to the business plan.

“In the beginning, we actively interacted with small business owners to understand their needs better. There was an unmet demand of short term (up to 36 months), small ticket size (INR 50K – INR 10 lakhs) loans for these MSMEs. We then ventured onto build a comprehensive online lending institution dedicated to helping MSMEs with working capital finance and that’s how Lendingkart came into existence,” Lunia recalled.

Here’s a timeline to showcase the key milestones achieved by Lendingkart so far.

Highlighting The Lendingkart Growth 

Having evaluated around 6 Lakh applications and disbursed more than 76K loans to more than 64K MSMEs across 28 diverse business sectors, Lendingkart has a wealth of data about credit for small businesses. It told us 80% users are first-time unsecured business loan borrowers, leading to a 200% average year-on-year increase in the number of loans disbursed.

Here’s what Lendingkart has achieved over the last five years in terms of reach, credit evaluation and loan disbursements.

How Lendingkart Sets Course For The Unicorn Club

A strong foundation is a must to build any successful and sustainable business model in the long run. Lendingkart founders understood this a long while back. From adopting the latest technologies to product innovation and from scaling in the right direction to tackling failures in a right manner — Lendingkart has got all under its belt.

For instance, recently cofounder Sachan steppe down from his position of COO and left the company. According to Lunia, transparency in such matters is key in order to make sure all the stakeholders are aware and fully support the decision. “So, while this has been a shocker for others, we have been doubling our monthly run rates, our revenue and loan books have also been growing at approximately 3 times year-on-year,” chuckled Lunia.

Further, SWOT analysis is a widely used analysis to help a growth stage company figure out upcoming opportunities and prepare for threats. Here’s one for Lendingkart to assess the direction the company is going in.

So how can Lendingkart tackle existing challenges and reap in the rewards of the opportunities ahead?

Product Innovation

Supply chain finance, term loans, line of credit are a few of the more popular products from Lendingkart. It has also incorporated WhatsApp chatbot for document collection, and introducing the website in 7 vernacular languages has further eased the language barrier among its customer base.

Reaching The Target Audience

Multiple online channels, active re-engagement, digital campaigns as well as SEO based searches are used to reach and engage the target audience. The company is also focussed on building a high content base in the form of blogs that are useful for self-employed individuals and entrepreneurs.

Utilisation Of Funds

The initial focus for the first few funding rounds at Lendingkart was towards building a strong team. The next phase was all about building its sourcing and credit underwriting capabilities. Later it turned its focus towards building a strong tech platform and analytics to ensure optimal reach. Through the last couple of funding rounds, however, it is working towards scaling the business and investing in performance marketing activities for scale.

Credit Risk Assessment

For assessing the creditworthiness of a borrower, it pulls data points from bank statements, VAT/GST returns, credit bureau reports, defaulters list, social media platforms, industry databases and other partners, which is collated in a proprietary credit analysis template.

“This template forms the base to assess the creditworthiness of borrowers, capturing over 10K variables using our machine learning algorithm,” explained Lunia.

Representatives then complete loan documentation and KYC, NACH mandate and post-dated cheques are also collected. The company also makes use of alternate data like transaction data, statutory compliance, family background, educational background, etc. to strengthen the credit analysis based on financial variables. Moreover, the self-learning algorithm improves with repayment, delays and delinquencies data making it more robust with every repayment collected.

Technological Capabilities

Lendingkart claims to be completely technology and analytics-driven with automated processes throughout the funnel – from lead sourcing and credit evaluation to underwriting and disbursal. Data infrastructure is further driven by AI which helps capture every interaction with the customer: call logs, call transcripts, SMSes, email, product interaction variables and social data, in addition to traditional LOS and LMS data. It also applies a significant amount of ML and AI to clean data.

Further, it uses the microservices architecture for scalability. The entire tech stack is hosted on AWS. And as Lunia said,  “Using the right tool for the right job is very important, and that is how it works here.”

The Road Ahead

Lendingkart is one of the few companies who have not been affected much by the NBFC crisis of 2018. “Given our healthy unit economics and the huge market opportunity that lay ahead of us, we had a fair amount of traction from the investor community. Despite the fear of liquidity, the players in the fintech ecosystem have continued to raise large amounts of funds from corporate borrowers through NCDs and CPs and are growing undeterred,” said Lunia.

The company is further utilising its technology capabilities to continuously innovate and penetrate deeper into tier 3 and tier 4 cities. “For example, we are working on an NLP-based system that can convert SMS data into credit variables, and also plan to use similar techniques to convert voice transcripts from calls into decisioning variables,” added Lunia.

Hence, ML techniques combined with technology to collect data are enabling Lendingkart to:

• Approve customers that would not have been otherwise approved based on additional data
• Assess the risk and price customers appropriately
• Optimise marketing and operations cost, therefore leading to a better bottomline

Going ahead, it is also working to bring in alternative data-based credit model to serve MSMEs in diverse business sectors such as restaurants, online sellers, telecommunications among others using their transaction data instead of banking data to boost financial inclusion. It is also working on building propensity models that predict the probability of the platform in selling other loan products to an existing customer.

Lunia believes in better days ahead. The fintech startups of today are all exploring different ways to serve their existing customer base better. Digital lending and paperless personal loans will further evolve to help a large number of salaried and self-employed individuals in the country.

“We are hopeful that the coming years will further push us in our efforts to help MSMEs achieve financial mainstreaming. The rapid and healthy scale-up that Lendingkart has already begun to see, we are all set to double the book size within a year from now and continue to grow the business and remain a significant contributor to the fintech ecosystem.”

As natural resources continue to deplete at an alarming rate, the need for sustainable fuel sources has become an urgent struggle. While there’s much been done to achieve electric vehicle shift in India, the country is still struggling to build the required infrastructure for it. 

India was reported to have 650 charging stations in 2018, whereas China had over 456K charging points in the same year. In addition to charging points, the lack of private parking spaces is also a hindrance for potential owners of electric vehicles, and the lack of affordable renewable energy means charging EVs is putting a toll on the already stressed coal-powered electricity grid.  

This is where nanotechnology startup Log9 Materials’ seek to make a difference with their aluminium fuel cells which are said to offer a range of 1000Kms in EVs and does not require frequent charging as in the case of lithium-ion batteries. Log9’s fuel cells will simply run on clean water and a change of aluminium bars after 1000 kilometers. EVs powered by lithium-ion batteries have a maximum range of 250 Kms, post which the vehicle needs three to four hours to get charged again. 

Log9 has essentially built metal-air batteries which use corrosion of aluminium (anode) in the presence of air (cathode) and water (electrolyte), to generate electricity. However, the use of metal-air batteries in electric vehicles is not a unique concept. Companies such as Israel’s Phinergy is also working on a similar concept and EV market leader Tesla too have shown interest in metal-air batteries. 

Yet, the biggest reason for metal-air batteries’ limited adoption in the market is high corrosion rates of metals. Interestingly, Log9 claims to have solved this problem through the use of a carbon allotrope Graphene which is said to reduce the cost of fuel cell and increase the life of the cell. 

Responding to company’s choice of aluminium as the cathode for its fuel cells, Singhal said that aluminium has one of the highest energy densities and can can store most amount of charge per unit of weight. 

Further, India has the largest reserve of aluminium in the world which makes it a good choice from the economics perspective too. He added that if India shifts its entire fuel focus to aluminium the country will no longer need to import any kind of fuel or even lithium ion batteries.

Indian government too realises the impact of using aluminium-air batteries, given Indian Oil Corporation’s 2018 partnership with Phinergy to develop metal-air batteries for EVs.

Metal-Air Fuel Cell To Bring Down EV Battery Cost By 30%  

Log9 fuel cells are different from Phinergy’s in that the Israel-based company uses activated carbon in its cathode while, Log9 uses graphene. Log9 is targeting to achieve a life of around four to five years for its fuel cells when used in vehicles. This would mean the vehicle will travel about eighty to one lakh kilometres before having to change the fuel cell. This life time of the cell is achieved through the use of graphene, which is said to last for four to five years, but aluminium has to be changed every thousand kilometers, according to Singhal. 

On the cost front, Log9 fuel cells are expected to have a 30%-40% lower cost than lithium-ion batteries. “This is quite feasible because of the overall construct of battery which is much simpler as compared to a lithium-ion battery,” said Singhal. 

Another application envisioned for Log9’s fuel cells is in power backup (generators). In this case too, Singhal claims to offer a much lower cost of ownership as compared to traditional fuel generators. In generator business, if one particularly looks at telecom industry then there is a huge pilferage in the industry. According to him, this pilferage increases the electricity cost to INR 49 per unit from usual INR 20-25. The use of aluminium fuel cell in generators can however bring the cost down to INR 25-26. 

Envisioning An Aluminum Economy 

Expanding on Log9’s plans to introduce newer applications of aluminium fuel-cells, Singhal said “the play with aluminum is much bigger and much larger than just EVs and generators. We are trying to build an aluminium economy.”

This will include generation of clean energy using solar and wind but the problem with such energy sources is that they are very intermittent. So one has to store the generated energy either in the form of battery or something else. But, storing in batteries again makes it dirty given the manufacturing process of batteries is a dirty process and once these batteries complete their life cycle, they have to be dumped into a landfill. 

On the contrary, Log9 has proposed a larger vision of storing energy of solar and wind energy farms into lithium-ion based technology by using the electricity generated to convert bauxite (oxidized form of aluminum) into aluminium. Now, whenever one needs to generate energy whether as a power generator for office or home, or car, the aluminum can be simply used to power it up. Once the aluminium is used up, it will then be converted back into its bauxite form and be sent back to solar and wind farms. Hence, building a circular economy.

Oil Sorbent: Another Application Of Graphene

Log9 also has a product to control spills of all forms leveraging its expertise in building Graphene-based tech products. Log9’s Oil Sorbent can be used to prevent, control and clean spills in marine or terrestrial ecosystems. 

The company claims to be selling INR 50 Lakhs worth of oil sorbent pads every month. It is also setting up its huge manufacturing line in Mumbai. According to Akshay, the company will be able to generate around $3 Mn revenue from oil sorbent pads. Log9 also has a cigarette filtration product called Ppuf which is only available online but the company’s focus is said to be on aluminium fuel-cells and oil sorbents. 

Bengaluru-based Log9 Materials was founded by Akshay Singhal, Kartik Hajela, and Pankaj Sharma in 2015. The company was also a part of the Sequoia Capital’s accelerator programme Surge. Overall, Log9 has raised $4.79 Mn in total funding from a clutch of investors including  Sequoia Capital, Exfinity Venture Partners, Metaform Ventures and more. 

While on our six-city tour of the Tier 2 startup ecosystem with BIGShift, we discovered several promising startups. This series will cover some of the most innovative startups. This time, we look at Botclub which brings practical science kits or Scikits to school students for improved engagement and learning retention.

While India is taking giant strides in the edtech ecosystem with the rise of BYJU’s, and with aspiring entrepreneurs looking to overhaul the ageing education system in India, the future seems to be bright for India’s young students.

The need for India’s education system is to be ‘future-ready’, a sentiment expressed by many prominent names including Microsoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, most recently.

But this change needs to come not only in curriculum and courses at colleges and universities but right at the school level. To bring the engineers of tomorrow on par with their Western counterparts, exposure to scientific inquiry and technological concepts is important. For Indian students, science is limited to learning by-rote through textbooks, but startups such as Botclub are looking to change that with hands-on experiences and learning-by-doing.

Visakhapatnam-based startup Botclub was founded by K Harsha Vardhan and Nithin S in 2016 to help students understand the concepts of science — physics, primarily — through proprietary demonstration kits called Scikits.

Botclub’s Scikits are based on school curricula and helps motivate kids into moving away from traditional and conventional ways of learning through textbooks. As they say, practice is worlds apart from theory, and the sooner children understand this in the context of science, the better their training, learning and development are likely to be.

“I have always loved physics and I believe that instead of feeding the students with just theory and bookish knowledge, they should learn it practically. This not only makes it more exciting and fun but also helps them understand and grasp the concepts better,” Botclub cofounder Vardhan told Inc42.

Discovered during Inc42 BIGShift at Vizag, Botclub is currently working with 15 schools in southern India, in major markets such as Thanjavur, Vellore, Chennai and Visakhapatnam.

How Botclub Solved The Physics Problem

Even while working with a well-established firm in Chennai, Vardhan would often find himself wondering about doing something meaningful in the edtech space. He would get in touch with schools, meet principals and try to understand the gaps and problems that they were facing. What struck him most was the common statement he heard everywhere—students don’t understand science. A lover of physics, Vardhan decided to change this.

While still toying with the idea of bringing a practical approach to the concepts of science and particularly physics, Vardhan was introduced to Nithin through common friends. Vardhan shared his idea for a practical science learning with him and instantly brought him on board.

Vardhan and Nithin started visiting schools and meeting with more teachers and principals to convince them about backing the idea.

“We would personally go to schools and convince them that they need to make a place for themselves in the educational transformation that is happening in India. Scikits not only helps the students but teachers as well to help them conduct more impactful lessons,” Vardhan recalled.

Scikits take concepts of physics and puts them together in a puzzle format that’s more engaging than diagrams and text problems in textbooks.

“If we take the example of circuits and electricity, we have put the entire concept like a puzzle, where they will be provided with all the things such as an electric circuit, switches, conductors, insulators and more and they can create their circuits and understand the whole concept themselves.” – Botclub cofounder K Harsha Vardhan.

With these Scikits, Botclub instructors personally visited classrooms to deliver the practical learning experience through authorised educators.

“We do the entire production and manufacturing ourselves in Vizag and so right now reaching each and every school is a challenge for us. Currently, we are only targetting premium schools that can afford our products,” Vardhan told us.

Why Schools Need To Focus On Science

STEM or science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning is essential for all economies that are relying on tech startups and digital services in the future for growth. It’s no different from India.

One of the biggest problem areas in the Indian startup ecosystem is the skill gap in emerging tech and deeptech. Inculcating scientific inquiry in students is the best way to get them curious about solving problems. Botclub recognised this issue and developed 128 models for its Scikits, which cover a range of concepts and topics.

“The idea is that every model should be worked by a group of four to five students and thus we provide replicas of each model covering different concepts,” explained Vardhan.

The startup has created various plans according to the needs and requirements of schools and uses a modular approach with variations and replicas for each plan based on the curriculum being taught in the school.

After schools choose a plan for their students, Botclub takes care of Scikits deliveries and fixes dates for teacher training sessions. In one academic year, it conducts eight training sessions for teachers, the cofounder told Inc42.

Apart from its Scikits, Botclub also runs a community app called Botclub Community, which provides use cases for the Scikits products so that kids can experiment with these kits. It has videos and FAQs for all its plans, along with the option of letting students and teachers across various schools interact with each other. In the context of product education, the app also handles any queries related to assembling and repairing Scikits.

Can Practical Training Fend Off Edtech Rivals?

With a team of ten people, Botclub claims to have a revenue of INR 50 Lakh and this year it is confident that it will earn INR 2 Cr in revenue with its expansion efforts. Within India, it is planning to expand to Hyderabad and Bengaluru school and is also in the process of finalising contracts with 1K schools in South Africa.

With the boom in edtech, more and more startups are looking to disrupt the traditional learning systems with tech-led intervention. Botclub doesn’t seem to be bothered by the competition, even if the competition may involve BYJU’s, the world’s most valuable edtech startup.

Armed with over 40 3D printers to make its Scikits, Vardhan told Inc42 that Botclub’s differentiation comes in the form of design and the learning methodology, which will not be easy to replicate.

“While onboarding schools, we get an idea of their plan and curriculum and then we deliver our products according to that. Every design and every technique we follow is tested and worked on by our design and research teams before we finalise the product. This also makes us unique in what we are doing,” he added.

Aren’t you tempted to enter the world of Sims and create a virtual home? AR, VR and 3D technology are supposed to revolutionise retail in the future in the Indian market, but HomeLane is already using this approach to a great extent to change how Indians design homes. The home interiors startup lets customers visualise a real-time 3D version of their home with the interiors and furniture they want, much like an online game. 

Competing with the likes of Livspace and Design Cafe, HomeLane is banking heavily on technology to help customers make the buying decision. And it’s using a hybrid approach for home design by blending online discovery with offline purchases. 

HomeLane’s Hybrid Home Design Platform

According to the HomeLane cofounder Srikanth Iyer, all HomeLane customers discover the brand online and experience the 3D home design platform, but the final sale happens at the experience centres run by HomeLane franchisees.

In addition to creating 3D renditions of a space, HomeLane’s virtual design platform SpaceCraft also offers a real-time pricing engine which helps customers keep track of their potential spending, and it also offers the option of interacting with a professional interior designer. But it’s not all cold hard tech. Consumers visit the experience centre to get a touch and feel of the furniture and home decor items. 

Founded by Iyer and Rama Harinath in 2014, the startup is currently present in seven metro cities including Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, NCR, Kolkata and Pune. It plans to expand into a few more metro cities in the coming years. These expansions will be executed in parallel with the launch of experience centres, which is a crucial component in a high ticket size business such as HomeLane. 

Like Livspace, HomeLane offers its products to a more affluent set of customers with the average ticket size said to be around INR 6 Lakh to IN 8 Lakh. “In such high ticket purchases, customers prefer being able to see the product quality instead of just a virtual image,” Iyer told Inc42. 

Home Design Goes High-End In India

As India increasingly become an urban jungle of houses and workspaces, the growth of interior design or home decor market seems to be a natural progression. Indian construction industry is estimated to grow at an average of 6.4% between 2018 and 2023, according to GlobalData. 

This in turn also increases the demand for home decor solutions in India, giving rise to a number of business models targeting home decor market including furniture rentals such as RentoMojo, Furlenco; end-to-end interior design and delivery like HomeLane and Livspace, and furniture retail such as Pepperfry, UrbanLadder etc. The market for home interiors and renovation in India today is estimated to be between $20 Bn- $30 Bn. 

Sequoia-backed HomeLane currently has 15 operational franchisee experience centres which run on a revenue share model. Franchisee partners are said to earn 10% on each order sourced through their facility. In addition to providing real estate for the store, the partners are also responsible for last-mile delivery, and installation and setup. 

While HomeLane furniture products are manufactured by the company itself with hundreds of designers on board, ancillary products such as wallpapers, home decor items are sourced from partner stores such as Urban Ladder, Elica, Hettich and others. 

Quick Turnaround Time Sets HomeLane Apart

Boutique design platforms such as HomeLane, Livspace and Design Cafe don’t have a huge addressable market base. So differentiation is key — and if the 3D design technology is not enough to bring customers in HomeLane retains them with delivery time guarantees. “HomeLane offers a 45-day guaranteed delivery or we pay rent to the customer. With this, we bring predictability to the market which is largely unpredictable with instances such as costs going higher than the initial quote and end-product not matching the customer brief, among others,” Iyer said. 

Iyer said he realised very early on that in order to bring predictability in this market, one needs to limit the product catalogue. HomeLane is said to have just 10% of the design options that competitors Livspace or Design Cafe offer, but it’s able to deliver these faster. On-time delivery is HomeLane’s first priority and every other part of the business has been moulded to support that. 

“If you want finite output, the input also needs to be finite. If the input is almost infinite, then the predictability of output is very low. If the input is finite, then the output will also be finite.”

Further, with a limited catalogue and colour choices, HomeLane says its able to offer greater satisfaction to the customer by asking engaging questions rather than drown them in design ideas. HomeLane’s customer journey involves questions such as whether the property will be used to bring in rent or for personal use, whether the house is being renovated or if it’s a new property. It also asks them to choose a look from among 10 options based on the budget. This helps the startup get a better idea of the customer, their choices.

The Challenge Of Scaling Up

HomeLane is expected to record a revenue of INR 500 Cr this year (considering the number of new orders). It had closed FY 2018-19 with an ARR of 400% higher than last year. The base price of HomeLane services is INR 1.5 Lakh and is said to have completed more than 5.5K homes till now. 

Currently, HomeLane has a team of over 750 designers on its platform. Iyer said that they go through a long vetting process and the acceptance rate is only about 5 to 7%. It’s not just about design, but also the ability to adjust to the software tools that HomeLane uses. The selected candidates then have to undergo a two-week full hands-on training followed by an apprenticeship period of two-three weeks where they shadow a senior designer. 

This long process results in a longer scale-up timeline for startups. Then there’s the fact that the addressable market is also rather small. 

Talking about other challenges in the sector, Iyer noted the sector’s dependability on blue collar workforce for installation of the final designs at home. According to him, this aspect of the interior design business space is hard to scale up because it is tough to ensure that the carpenter or installation team will show up on time, wear the right HomeLane uniform, and attend customer calls on time, while also keeping safety and quality in mind. 

With farming being a $400 Bn industry in India, leading investors are infusing capital in agritech startups that work towards revolutising farming. There are more than 1,090 agritech startups in India and according to Inc42 DataLabs, the total funding in agritech startups in India grew from $46.1 Mn 2017 to $66.6 Mn in 2018.

From being a family-funded venture in 2018 to recently grabbing seed funding from leading agritech investors Omnivore and Wavemaker Partners, precision agriculture startup Fasal is making hay while the investor attention is trained on the agritech sector.

“At Omnivore, we see horticulture as a fast-growing, high margin segment of the agricultural economy. Within that space, Fasal is focussed on progressive horticulture farmers linked to export or food processing supply chains, such as grapes, pomegranate, tea, coffee, and chili,” Mark Kahn, managing partner of Omnivore, told Inc42.

Fasal raised seed funding of $1.6 Mn led by Omnivore and Wavemaker Partners in October this year. With a model that combines of internet of things (IoT) and SaaS, the startup is using the funding to build AI capabilities for each horticulture value chain it is focussing on. Other investors participating in the round included Mount Parker Ventures and Animoca from Hong Kong and Mistletoe from Japan, via its Gastrotope accelerator.

“Agriculturalists have the willingness and ability to invest in precision agriculture, and we believe Fasal’s predictive IoT-SaaS is the optimal solution at an affordable price,” Kahn added.

The Bengaluru-based startup currently focuses on creating value at a very specific part of this chain. It targets high-value horticulture crops for cutting costs and increasing profitability by delivering farm-specific, crop-specific and crop-stage-specific precise actionable intelligence. “Agriculture is a large value chain starting from seed to plate and has space for numerous interventions,” Fasal cofounder Shailendra Tiwari told Inc42.

The Harvest Of The Startup

Founded in 2018 by Ananda Prakash Verma and Tiwari, the startup came out of a desire to operate a farm as a weekend getaway from city life where the duo planned to grow capsicum (bell peppers). “Over a period we realised that even though we did come from farming families with hands-on exposure to farming, it wasn’t easy to do. There was a lack of expertise among ourselves to decide on irrigation pattern, crop care practices, day-to-day operations, etc,” Tiwari recalled.

Verma and Tiwari were surprised to see other farmers who have been farming for decades suffering from the same issues. Most of the decisions were made on guesswork without any accurate data to rely on. For many months before starting the company, the founders interacted with horticulture farmers validating the problem they had come across to see if they weren’t just operating on confirmation bias.

The idea was to build something that can be used by farmers to monitor farming. When the founders, alumni of IIT Bombay, were sure about the product, they quit there careers in IT to start up Fasal, with initial funding from by friends and family.

Making Farming Smarter With IoT

The USP of Fasal lies in its field sensor array that can be installed by farmers in less than 15 minutes and measures multiple dynamic variables, including micro-climate, soil, and crop conditions. Fasal leverages machine learning to transform this field sensor data into farm-level predictions, anticipating various risks while helping horticulture farmers to reduce input costs by optimising crop protection, irrigation, and crop nutrition.

The platform captures real-time data on growing conditions from on-farm sensors and delivers actionable advisories based on the farm and crop to farmers on mobile in various languages, including regional Indian languages.

“We are on a mission to help horticulture farmers make data-driven, logical decisions and shift farming to autopilot mode. Our aim is to become a full-stack platform for horticulture farmers,” Verma told us.

The pace of technology adoption in agriculture is witnessing a significant jump in the segment that Fasal operates in, which is horticulture. “Even if you look at the investment trend, there is a 3X increase vis-a-vis last year on account of increased farmer interest in technology,” he added. The horticulture landscape is quickly transforming, powered by the digital and mobile boom.

From Farmers To Farmers

Hailing from farming families, Fasal founders understood the price-sensitive Indian agriculture market and its impact very early in their journey. Thus they focussed on meaningful frugality at the very heart of the solutions that they built and the solutions that would scale up.

“Fasal has been focussing on price-sensitivity for the last 1.5 years. That is why our startup is a mix of farm IoT and SaaS and our IoT devices are three times lower than the cost of a drip irrigation system for a hectare of farmland.”

The startup claims that its software subscription is cheaper than the cost of one preventive spray on a hectare of a grape farm. “We are selling value, not product per se,” Tiwari added.

The business model for institutional farmers follows a simple process. Farmers pay some upfront cost for the hardware and then a pay-as-you-go subscription fee for the tailored intelligence that Fasal provides.

The founders claim Fasal typically saves about 20-25% in irrigation/fertigation costs for farms. It saves about 8-20% in disease/pest management costs and through its use, farms have seen a yield increase of 5-10% along with noticeable improvement in yield quality.

In the case of grapes, farms using Fasal have observed that the product pays for itself within the first 4-5 months of the crop cycle itself, whereas it continues to work for the next 3-5 years.

Interestingly, the startup also takes into account the water crisis that has decimated farms in some parts of the country. For instance, in a dry zone in Maharashtra, the startup saves about 4 Lakh litres of water vis-a-vis the previous season for a grape farmer who used to irrigate his farmlands using IoT to prepare ahead of the season.

The Road Ahead For Fasal

The agritech startup currently has 10 employees and intends to expand pan-India for the crops that they are focussing on. The startup also plans to expand to Southeast Asia as farmer profiles and climatic zones are similar.

The startup is also working on a plug-and-play fasal IoT device that will bring down the deployment time on farms from under 15 minutes currently to under five minutes, without any assistance from the Fasal team. “This will enable our farmers to deploy the Fasal IoT device by themselves, thereby rendering any deployment manpower requirement to null,” said Tiwari.

In the near short term, Fasal wants to focus on the B2B2F model while continuing to create more value for allied sectors of the agriculture industry apart from farmers. The startup also intends to add other crops to its suite and build end-to-end intelligence for farmers. Fasal also plans to deepen its presence and diversify its operations in the geographies it is already active in.

What does the future of farming look like? Will Indian farmers continue to use livestock and human labour to work the land or will technology reduce this burden to a large extent? That’s the question that many agritech startups are grappling with. Even as farmland income is being boosted by the use of technology, more can be done to solve the burden on farmers. 

As Tesla unveiled its self-driving truck and Uber continues to build an autonomous car network; India too has a contender in the autonomous vehicle space — AutoNxt Automation. The Mumbai-based company’s prototype autonomous electric tractor has been developed for a range of farming operations including tilling, spraying pesticides, ploughing, sowing seeds and more. 

Once a farm is geofenced using geographical coordinates, and the farmer has defined a route for the tractor, AutoNxt’s autonomous farmhand can retrace that path endlessly on a daily basis, making sure that any operation is conducted consistently. The tractor becomes responsive in a matter of seconds and even alerts farmer’s mobile or tablet devices when it sees any obstruction for more than five minutes.  

Speaking to Inc42, Kaustubh Dhonde, CEO of AutoNxt Automation, said the problem with owning a traditional tractor in India is that there is a scarcity of people with the skills to drive a tractor. It also involves high operational expense (one needs to run the tractor for 1000 hours a year to make the purchase viable), and health hazards, because driving a tractor, according to Dhonde, is like driving a car without shock absorbers on a very bad road. 

“You can imagine the kind of pain that they [farmers] go through continuously and they tend to ignore it because obviously the average income of a farmer is like less than INR 7000 per month (in case of a small farmer), so it does not make sense for people to own a tractor.” – AutoNxt CEO Kaustubh Dhonde

In order to overcome the high ownership cost of traditional tractors, farmers usually rent or lease the tractors from big farms or businesses offering agricultural renting services. The diesel-run tractors when replaced with autonomous electric tractors effectively reduce the tractor ownership cost by half and eliminate the need for a skilled driver. However, Dhonde noted that this does not eliminate jobs as AutoNxt tractors will still need someone to drive them from the farmer’s home to the farm. 

Building Ola, Uber For Tractors?

AutoNxt envisions the adoption of their tractors to be similar to ride-hailing companies such as Ola and Uber, wherein people will buy tractors and then hire people to drop them to the farms.

Currently, AutoNxt tractors take three to four hours to be charged and the vehicle’s range can vary from four to five hours depending on the kind of farm operation that is being performed. Operating on a different battery chemistry than lithium-ion, AutoNxt tractors can be charged anywhere, whether it is a single phase or three phase power supply, just has to be a three-pin socket. 

While, the company did not disclose the battery chemistry to us, Dhonde said that their battery will last for 10 years without any complaints (considering the average use of the tractor). The company is said to have spent INR 10 Cr. in building their tractor prototype, including all the iteration costs as well. 

Founded in 2016 by Dhonde, AutoNxt Automation has raised funding from Sun Mobility’s Chetan Maini and Sandeep Maini. The brothers had invested through their new electric mobility firm, Virya Mobility 5.0 LLP. Chetan Maini is the vice-chairman of SUN Mobility and is also known for pioneering India’s first electric car REVA, which is now with Mahindra electric.

With these fresh funds, AutoNxt is looking to execute product changes based on customer feedback received during the pilot tests. Following this, it will work towards attaining certification such as green number plates, and road transport office (RTO) clearance which is expected to take four to six months. It’s only after this that the tractor can be launched commercially, with the initial target audience being affluent farmers in the direct-to-consumer model, and collaborations with companies like EM3 Agri Services and other state government schemes, which allow farmers to rent tractors.

AutoNxt Looks To Tackle The Challenge Of Affordability In India 

Geographically, AutoNext wants to first sell to grape cultivators in wine-producing regions such as Nashik and Karnataka. According to Dhonde, “This will be an ideal location to test the new technology both autonomous and electric, because conditions are much more in control in horticulture as compared to other crops.”  

The farmers in these regions are comparatively richer and thus would be more open to testing new technology, he added. 

But the real success would be in making these autonomous tractors more affordable to own for all kinds of farmers. Dhonde believed that the Indian automobile industry has always focussed on the price point as they want to sell it directly to individuals, as the purchasing power of Indian customers is relatively lower than the first world countries. 

But that’s where AutoNxt is different, due to the high-tech nature of the product. 

“We don’t want to make cheaper products by eliminating two crucial technical elements in the product. We will definitely want to scale but initially we are focused on making sure that whatever electric vehicle we are making, tractor, for example, is perfect and people trust it,” said Dhonde.

AutoNxt knows that not each and every farmer can afford to buy its tractor — Dhonde tells us only 18% of farmers can actually afford to own a tractor. Currently, the company is said to be in advanced talks with major tractor manufacturers to start offering the electric tractor to farmers.

After the successful launch of their tractors, the company plans to explore newer applications of their autonomous electric vehicle technology in other places where vehicles or labour follows a predefined path. One such example are the coaches used for taking passengers to and from planes at airports. 

Another company working on a similar autonomous electric technology is Israel-based Taranis, which has also developed functionalities for farm analytics and predictions as well. Further, US farm equipment maket John Deere has also announced an autonomous electric tractor earlier this year. However, the tractor comes attached with a long extension cord to help it navigate through the farms. 

The Indian government has been aggressively pushing for electric vehicle adoption across the country to reduce greenhouse emissions in one of the world’s most polluted countries. In line with that vision, AutoNxt’s electric tractor can help bring down carbon emissions at the farm-level too. 

Further, India’s agriculture ministry was said to have developed a farm equipment rental app for farmers in August. The app was envisioned to help farmers hire tractors, rotavator and other farm-related machinery on rent for with flexible tenures. The government had set up 38K hiring centres to support this renting process. 

The government’s renting model is similar to what AutoNxt is looking for their upcoming market launch and after bringing consumers on to the sharing economy, perhaps it’s time to bring the same concepts to the agriculture sector to make autonomous technology more accessible to a lot more farmers. 

To celebrate India’s rising startups, Inc42 is profiling a new soonicorn every Friday in the Inc42 UpNext: Unicorns Of Tomorrow series. For the next few months, we will be speaking to founders and cofounders at these potential unicorns and shining light on their journeys and growth stories. This week, we are featuring the furniture ecommerce startup Pepperfry.

“Irrespective of whether a customer is surfing on an electronic device, or walking through a mall — it’s essentially the same customer to us and as a brand it is important for us to interact with them in the way they want to interact with us.” 

Pepperfry cofounder Ambareesh Murty is clear about the future of furniture marketplaces and the omnichannel route. 

Well before the ecommerce bigwigs decided to enter the retail market and make their hybrid commerce moves, Pepperfry   opened its first studio in December 2014. Since then it has married the online and offline approach and has been growing its studio strategy ever year. In the last six months, the company has opened 25 new stores or Pepperfry Studios. Overall, the company has 67 (including both owned and franchise) such studios across 24 Indian cities. 

And it is also close to matching the sales through the studios to its online sales. Murty told Inc42 that 35% of Pepperfry’s business comes from users have registered at Pepperfry Studios, within 60 days of registration. “This number last year used to be about 27-28%, we see this number settling at about a 35-40% rate over the next year or so,” he said.  

However, Pepperfry is not the only interior design company to go omnichannel. Other interior design focused startups such as UrbanLadder, HomeLane and Livspace have also opened physical stores to complement their online operations. 

Other competitors in the interior-design space are home product rental startups such as RentoMojo, Rentickleand Furlenco. These companies allow customers to rent furniture, home decor items and electronic appliances against a monthly fee and security deposit. 

How does Pepperfry plans to fight this competition — especially now that it has pulled out of the rental market? Murty spoke about Pepperfry’s pilot with rentals in six cities which was received poorly by customers. Consumers felt buying products on EMIs was cheaper than renting and so Pepperfry discontinued rentals. Murty thinks furniture rental startups are entering areas that have nothing to do with furniture, using the examples of TVs, fridges and washing machines.  

According to the cofounder, what sets Pepperfry  apart is its mix of marketplace and private label products. In addition to over 10K sellers, the company has 10 private label brands including Woodsworth, Mintwud, Casacraft, Amberville, Bohemiana, Mudramark, Mollycoddle, Clouddio , Primorati and Mangiamo. 

This variety allows Pepperfry a lot of freedom to cater to a wide audience and room to experiment with new designs as well. In that regard, it’s testing new finishes, new materials, and working with merchants to develop finishes in brighter colours for solid wood furniture.

 “I think some of this puts us at the cutting edge of design when it comes to making choices for our customers,” said Murty. 

Founded in 2012 by Murty and Ashish Shah, Mumbai-based Pepperfry is a home and furniture products marketplace. Pepperfry has more than 1 lakh items and operates in categories across furniture, décor, wall art, showpieces, lightings, mattresses, carpets, furnishing, cookware, kitchen, dining,  bar, bath, laundry, housekeeping, hardware and electrical.  

Private labels allow the company to operate with more freedom in terms of margins, and Murty noted that marketplace brands make for half of the company’s business while private labels account for the other half.

From a financial standpoint, the Mumbai-based company claims to be operating at 50% gross margins because of the high margin gains from private label brands and its contribution positive business economics. According to Murty, for every INR 100 of product that it sells, the company makes close to INR 25.

Further, the furniture marketplace had also built its own logistics network to help rationalise time and costs along with overcoming sector-specific challenges around damages and handling issues.

Pepperfry has 400 last mile delivery trucks, a team of 250 carpenters and 19 hubs across the country. The Mumbai-based company delivers to over 500 cities across the country.  It claims to have  more than 6 Mn registered users and a repeat rate of more than 50%.

Will Virtual Reality Change Retail? 

“We have been trying to blur the line between offline and online through our omnichannel strategy by opening Pepperfry studios. Now we want to blur the lines further with virtual reality,” said Murty. 

In the next 12-18 months, Pepperfry plans to open 500 sq ft virtual reality studios, where customers can walk in, choose a room layout and view how products will look in that room on a VR headset. If they like what they see, they can also checkout to finally place the order.

The company is currently said to be in talks with technology partners and figuring out its VR catalogue, before finally launching the VR studios. “This is a long gestation project and it requires a lot of work because one need to do create a pixel framework which can render fairly fast.”

Reliance Jio too has announced plans to bring virtual reality and augmented reality shopping through Jio Fiber and its upcoming hybrid ecommerce. Nykaa told Inc42 that it too is working to find the right partner who can add value to customers through virtual reality or augmented reality shopping experiences.

But aren’t virtual reality studios gimmicks? Murty says the biggest benefit is that Pepperfry studios can be shrunk down from the current typical size of 2000-2500 sq ft. Studios do not need to have a single item of furniture, which gives Pepperfry much higher scalability potential. 

“Think of it as Pepperfry Express Studio at every mall that you can think of, be it at a suburb or in a central location in a city,” he added. 

Globally, foodtech startups are now experimenting with robotics in the kitchen. Alibaba’s The Robot.he restaurant in Shanghai, Boston-based Spyce serving $8 salad bowls as well as robotic chefs making egg sandwiches and burgers, some of the most novel applications of robots are in the restaurant industry as industrial robotics applications make the trip to the kitchen.

And this trend is also something that has caught the fancy of Indian startups which are now coming on to the scene to build scalable automated solutions across industries including in restaurants. Hyderabad-based Robot Kitchen with robot waiters was recently in the news for getting robots to act as servers. However, with the industry 4.0 revolution fully automating processes across businesses, it won’t be long before robots start making dishes. In fact, Chennai-based startup RoboChef is already doing this.

Launched in June 2017, it claims to be the world’s first fully-automated robotic kitchen — right from prepping ingredients to cooking and serving the final dish.

“When it comes to outside food, one has zero clarity in quality and hygiene. Even the best restaurants cannot ensure consistent taste of your favourite dish. Plus, the restaurant industry is plagued with challenges like high operational costs and even high attrition rates,” Saravanan Sundaramoorthy, founder and CEO of RoboChef, told Inc42.

RoboChef is determined to solve these problems leveraging automation and IoT for the cooking process. It currently has more than 800 dishes in the menu with an ability to make 2000 servings in a single run. It also claims that the time taken in preparing the meal is 60% faster than the manual processes.

“In the last two months, we have served three marriages with an average of 12K people and 40 dishes taking a record time of 3.5 Hours and manpower of only six people.”

The Technical Aspects: How Do RoboChef In The Kitchen Work?

At RoboChef the only thing that is done manually is the loading of the ingredients.

“We use state-of-the-art computer vision techniques reinforced by deep learning algorithms to grade the quality of eggs, fruits and vegetables based on their colour, size and shape – our systems approve intake only if confidence rate is above 99%, which is above most human accepted standards,” said Sundaramoorthy.

The system also cleans itself with hot water every day at the end of the working hours.

Here’s the standard workflow process:

One of the biggest challenges in robotics is handling the failure rates of hardware components and sensors. RoboChef was no exception to this. The team initially faced the failure of mechanical instruments a number of times.

“We don’t think there will be any greater challenge ahead. We mitigate these risks intelligently using our proprietary hardware, high availability techniques, self-healing robotics system and by applying DevOps in the kitchen,” said Sundaramoorthy.

The founder added that rather than avoiding failure, RoboChef’s robotic systems are purpose-built to tolerate any failures. For instance, while preparing the meals, its IoT-based system collects real-time metrics to tackle failures at the right time.

To keep things in control, sensors and components are constantly monitored so they can use predictive analytics to service any parts or hardware components well before the customer notices the problem.

Another challenge here is keeping the maintenance cost minimal. At RoboChef, an engineer visits customers every two months for maintenance service, which in addition with predictive analytics, fixes any problem due to wear and tear even before the customer finds out – thanks to AI.

“In addition, we have built multi-vessel RoboChef systems, to increase parallelism and availability.  So that there is no halting of operations,” he added.

The Commercial Aspect: How To Monetise And Gain Market Positioning?

RoboChef claims to have a monthly revenue of INR 45 Lakh currently and is targeting INR 3 Cr per month revenue in the next 3 months. The startup claims to be earning profits right from the very beginning. “We became profitable in the first 3 days of operations,” said Saravanan.

As a kitchen service, it has partnered with online food aggregators and caterers to deliver the food to the customer doorsteps. Besides this, it has a proprietary food ordering app as well as a web-based service. Through the app, users can even customise the ingredients for any dish they order.

RoboChef is also looking to monetise through subscriptions, franchise partnerships, corporate or commercial orders as well as its own restaurant outlet. “Right now we operate six cloud kitchens in Chennai and two ghost kitchens”.

The expansion strategy involves setting up RoboChef-powered cloud kitchen hubs across cities at an ideal distance of every 3 Km. Robochef can serve one-time or regular subscription-based orders without the trouble of manual fatigue, which reduces the hiring cost considerably, though the tech costs more than make up for it. Another advantage to this model is that due lower reliance on human resources, the kitchen’s availability is 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

“With our subscription model and automation in place – we ideally promote cooking as a service model – as the advantages are huge in time-saving and cost-effectiveness. We ideally want to market it as ‘The nearest RoboChef may be behind you’.”

The Road Ahead For RoboChef’s Automated Kitchen

It is expected that in the next 50 to 100 years, the world will truly embrace the industry 4.0 technologies across all manufacturing and creation industries. A trend towards automation and data analytics is already visible within the manufacturing sector, and industry 4.0 is a culmination of new-age technologies including cyber-physical systems (CPS), the internet of things (IoT), industrial internet of things (IIOT), cloud computing, robotics, 3D printing, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence.

The global food robotics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.7% from 2019 to 2025 to reach $3.1 Bn by 2025. Asia-Pacific is expected to record the highest growth rate over the forecast period, owing to significant adoption of industrial robots throughout the region including India.

In line with this, Sundaramoorthy believes that the business opportunity is very promising for the startup as consumers have accepted RoboChef for its consistent taste and the customisation potential.

Robochef supports multiple global cuisines like Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Italian, dishes. “We have also launched fully autonomous snack making systems, thereby bringing us to the centre of the food ecosystem,” he added.

Robochef team have also proposed a global solution for cooking, called CookOps. CookOps is applying the automation techniques widely adopted in the software world specific to cooking.

“Since RoboChef does all the heavy lifting we potentially see huge scope of scaling up with almost zero manual effort. we are well prepared and ahead of two years with our advanced tech stack to compete in case any competitor arrives.”

On the way back home, an autorickshaw driver wondered, “Do you use Paytm? Can you please recharge my phone?”

Facing trouble in adding money to his digital wallet, he had to turn to strangers to ask for help. This is not an uncommon scene in India, where despite the penetration of mobile internet and digital transactions, many first-time internet users need assistance in finishing tasks such as paying bills or recharging phones through online platforms. This adds a layer of local agents and young family members who provide assistance and troubleshoot issues. 

But technology can improve this several times over. With instant resolutions to fintech queries from novice users, Bengaluru-based conversational AI assistant Niki is looking to do just that. The startup aims to replace hyperlocal agents or the middle-layer of human fintech assistants with its voice assistant. 

Founded in 2015 by Shishir Modi, Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, and Nitin Babel, Niki allows consumers to pay utility bills, recharge their prepaid mobile accounts, book tickets for travel and accommodation, avail local deals and more, simply through voice commands. 

Backed by Ratan Tata, Niki (which began life as Niki.AI) is compatible with three Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Tamil — besides English. This makes it a great companion for those who are using the internet in regional or vernacular languages. 

According to Jaiswal, voice is the best way to approach such use-cases as even typing in local languages is not always simple thanks to the use of matras, bindis, and half letters. 

“With voice support, new users do not have to worry about user interface and can simply talk to the app as they would do with a local travel agent or a friend.”

But it’s not just about coaching consumers to pay online —  Niki goes one step beyond and also helps them complete these transactions online and pay for them using cash. Currently only available in Bengaluru, Ajmer and Bikaner, cash on delivery (COD) operations are handled by Niki employees who visit the user’s home to pick up the cash. 

While Jaiswal agreed that COD is heavy on operations, he added, “If you are solving for an agent use-case, you have to build the user experience in terms of how the customer wants it.” 

He also noted that even in product ecommerce, close to 60% to 70% orders are cash on delivery. For Niki, about 30% of the users are opting for the COD option.

Niki Joins India’s Frenetic Digital Services Market

Niki claims to have completed about 1 Mn transactions across Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. Out of Niki’s 4.5 Mn user base, 80% users are said to be from Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities such as Jaipur, Gharsana, Surat, Aurangabad, Muzaffarnagar, Ludhiana, Patna, Indore, Sri Ganganagar, Faridabad, and Agra. 

Online transaction use-cases such as utility bill payments and travel ticket bookings have become a battleground for many technology majors such as Alibaba-backed Paytm, Flipkart-owned PhonePe, and Google Pay. While each continues to offer discounts and cashbacks to acquire a larger market share, there is no clear winner. 

Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm did see massive adoption initially, because of its first-mover advantage and the post-demonetisation fintech wave. However, the company was recently struggling to make profits with losses jumping by 167% in FY19 as compared to last year. 

Also, Paytm’s transactions volume were reported to have fallen down in July 2019, while the numbers for Google Pay and PhonePe have been on the constant rise, with retail expansion also happening simultaneously. Amazon has doubled down on Amazon Pay and is also expanding into retail payments with the UPI-based service. 

Other global technology companies such as Uber and Facebook-owned WhatsApp have also shown interest in India’s $1 Tn worth digital payments opportunity. Even though most of these players do not have vernacular voice support like Niki, Amazon and Google both have developed voice assistants that are already integrated into many Indian customers’ smart devices. 

Is Services Commerce The Next Big Thing?

So what sets Niki apart? “Many digital payment companies are trying to aggregate services commerce in their ecosystem, but their solutions are limited because payment companies are adding new use-cases to increase customer engagement and not solving the customer pain points in accessing those services.” 

While Jaiswal may have a point there, Amazon has also recently entered the voice-based payments space with flight/hotel bookings and its own digital wallet, Amazon Pay. In addition to this, Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa also has Hindi language compatibility for Indian users. 

Responding to this, Jaiswal said it is a $100 Bn market and multiple players will try to take a bite out of this market, but none of them have built capabilities around what he calls ‘services commerce’ or the service delivery aspect which is blended with digital payments. Thanks to its on-ground network, Niki is in the position to fulfil a range of services that the other fintech giants may not be able to match yet. 

“None of these companies are focussed on services commerce and therefore, by just focussing on this problem we can solve it much better. Even if we just capture like 20% of the market, it will be about $20 Bn revenue opportunity,” he added. 

To support its expansion and the potential user growth, it is looking to add seven more languages including Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Marathi in the next 12 months. Operational in 18K pincodes, the company wants to further include 25K more Tier 2, 3 and 4 locations by March next year. 

Its expansion efforts will be backed by its on-ground user acquisition strategy. Niki has partnered with local agents to setup kiosks that help promote its service commerce offerings among the local population. The company has also partnered with influencer networks on apps such as TikTok through which it is able to expand its reach beyond this network. According to Jaiswal, its current cost of acquisition per user is around INR 23 and on average, a user spends close to INR 14.6K in six months on Niki or just over INR 2K per month. 

Niki earns revenue through commissions levied on merchants such as bus operators. For a bus ticket booking, Niki charges 8% commission from merchants, while the customer avails the service at the same cost as they would do offline. 

Niki claims to have 85% customer retention in the first month of sign-up which settles down to 48%-50% over a six-month period. The company is currently doing close to $44 Mn in GMV. By financial year 2020, Niki aims to reach a GMV run rate of $120Mn with a revenue run rate of $20 Mn and a customer base of over 10 Mn by FY2020. 

With eyes on capturing the huge market of upcoming new internet users in India, Niki is now working on increasing the user spend per user by moving beyond digital payments. 

One of the new use-cases that the company is exploring is social payments, where friends or family can pay on the user’s behalf. It is also looking at spiritual tour bookings for destinations such as Vaishno Devi or Kedarnath. In addition to this, the company is currently piloting grocery retail, which would make it the first grocery delivery platform to rely on voice commands.  It also wants to add use-cases such as delivery of egovernance services such as passport, Aadhaar card and more. 

Clearly, Niki is going all-in with its model of service delivery combined with the ease of use of voice-based payments. Will it work in the long run as more and more payments platforms such as Paytm, Amazon Pay, Google Pay and PhonePe solve for the same set of problems, backed by their deep pockets and higher brand value? 

• The article subhead was changed to ‘Niki Joins India’s Frenetic Digital Services Market’ from the earlier ‘Niki Joins India’s Frenetic Digital Services Market’
• Some sections of this article have been edited after publishing to fix typographical errors and improve the clarity of language.
• Headline changed from “Niki Looks To Solve Payment Pain Points With Regional Language AI Assistant”

To celebrate India’s rising startups, Inc42 is profiling a new soonicorn every Friday in the Inc42 UpNext: Unicorns Of Tomorrow series. For the next few months, we will be speaking to founders and cofounders at these potential unicorns and shining light on their journeys and growth stories. We begin the series with a look at gaming and sports media company Nazara.

As India’s GDP growth slips below 5%, onion prices cross the dreaded INR 100 per kg mark and automobile sector sales hit the lowest numbers in ten years — everything seems to have slowed down. With the exception of gaming. 

“When the economy isn’t doing well, it’s the best time for being media entertainment segment,” Manish Agarwal, Nazara CEO

Agarwal’s belief stems from the notion that when the economy is not doing well, one will tighten from fine dining to casual dining, and then from casual to homemade food. Now because one had to cut down on their frequency of going out, it creates a demand for accessible in-house entertainment and that’s where media and entertainment industry prospers. 

Founded by Nitish Mittersain in 2000, Nazara is a global gaming and sports media company with a network of over 100 Mn players in India. 

Over the last couple of years, the company has seen exponential growth like many other gaming startups, but there is speculation that Nazara is on track for an IPO. “I think our ability to work with founders and find these niches in gaming sector has been instrumental to our growth as a preeminent gaming giant in these emerging markets,” Agarwal told Inc42. 

Over nearly two decades in the industry, Nazara has built a strong network of companies in interactive gaming and sports media through investments and acquisitions in various gaming categories including esports, fantasy sports, mobile cricket games and real money gaming among others. 

Agarwal told us that while Nazara might be operating in various segments, these acquired teams continue to be focused on their target audience and industry; thus we are not digging ponds, we are digging wells. This collective acumen and knowledge aids the company to grow much faster.

In the last two years, Nazara claims to have made investments worth around $50 Mn in 13 companies, including in HalaPlay, Nodwin, Next Wave Multimedia, Hash Cube, Mastermind Sports, Moonglabs Technologies, Bakbuck, CrimzonCode, InstaSportz, NZWorld, HalaPlay, SportsKeeda, and  Paper Boat Apps.

The company also has mobile gaming rights to popular Indian characters like Chhota Bheem, Motu Patlu, Mighty Raju, Roll #21, Shin Chan and more. It also owns IPs like World Cricket Championship (WCC), EPIC Cricket, India Premiership and IPG.TV.

Nazara is backed by marquee investors which include West Bridge Capital, IIFL Special Opportunities Fund; Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Turtle Entertainment GmbH, the IP owner of the world’s largest esports franchise (ESL). With these backers and the content and IP, Nazara is looking to achieve the ecosystem affect. 

Meet The ‘Friends Of Nazara’ 

“Over the past few years, we have been building a ‘friends of Nazara’ ecosystem, where we want to partner with companies and founders who are like-minded and share the same DNA in terms of how the business should be done and can have synergies with our existing investees,” cofounder Mittersain told Inc42. 

Mittersain said that when Nazara acquires or invests in a company, it leaves a tangible part of the equity with the founder. Because the company does not believe in interfering in the operations of the investees, Nazara’s job is to operate as a platform and connect the dots.

According to the founder, post-acquisition these companies have seen notable growth in their revenues. Particularly, Nodwin which he claimed has grown its revenue by 300%. He added that these multiple investments also complement Nazara’s portfolio by enabling cross-networking and cross-selling opportunities as well as strategic partnerships for the ecosystem. 

One example Mittersain gave is the possible synergy between Sportskeeda and HalaPlay, when it comes to engaging with cricket enthusiasts who are already interested in the sport and who are definitely Sportskeeda’s target audience. 

“So we might introduce a Sportskeeda column in the Halaplay app for users to keep track of the game trends and scores — which would in turn also multiply the user base for Sportskeeda,” he added. 

Getting India To Pay To Play

The online gaming industry in India is expected to generate a revenue of INR 11,900 Cr by 2023, growing at 22% CAGR, according to a report by consulting major KPMG and Indian Federation of Sports Gaming — industry’s self-regulatory body. 

The report also noted a hike in the number of gamers and game developers in India. The number of developer companies has touched 250 in 2018 as compared to 20 in 2010, while the number of gamers is estimated to have reached 250 Mn from 25 Mn in 2010. 

Despite this growth, Nazara’s Agarwal believes most gaming companies still don’t understand the grammar of retention, engagement and KPIs in gaming — because a lot of gaming startups are born out of pure joy of playing a game.

A game can be uploaded on Google Play Store or the App Store at no cost, but running a gaming company is the toughest business out there. The discovery of game, getting people to come back on the game, monetizing those users in India; these are all difficult tasks, he added.  

In India users need a reason to pay and it is very unlikely that a user will pay for for unlocking new game levels or to get rid of the advertisements. With so many gaming options to choose from, users simply move to a new game or rather watch the advertisements instead of making the decision to pay.

“About 250 Mn Indian gamers are absolutely coming from instant gratification or stress bursting. They like one game but if you push them for paying they will uninstall and move on to the next game,” Agarwal added. 

This is also related to core gaming audience in India, which is largely made up of middle-income users. These users do not have the disposable income for discretionary spending such as in-app purchases. There needs to be a big reward at the end. This is also the reason many real-money fantasy games have done well for Nazara, according to Agarwal, because players feel they can win a lot of money by putting in some money. 

That being said, how does one tap into the value-conscious customer base of India? Agarwal thinks competitiveness or collaboration are the only two behaviours which will bring monetisation to gaming businesses in India. Describing the users, Agarwal told us, “When my ego gets hurt, then I pay for it, or if it’s a super huge gratification or collaboration happening and I feel nice — that’s only when I am going to pay.” He added that this is usually seen in real-time multiplayer games.

But for multiplayer gaming to achieve scale, a market needs to have massive addressable base. The Indian market is skewed towards single player gaming, he added. 

Given, the growing internet adoption, better infrastructure and higher smartphone penetration —  the industry potential is huge. Reliance Jio recently announced its foray into the digital gaming space with Jio Fiber. The conglomerate’s gaming platform is expected to support both online multiplayer or social gaming. Jio Fiber users can play or compete with their friends, with multiplayer chat and video conferencing, just like on Microsoft’s Xbox or Sony PlayStation, Jio had said earlier. 

Reliance has promised that the platform will provide zero latency gaming experience in 4K resolution, powered by its Jio Fiber broadband connection which is said to have speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, which range from INR 700 to INR 10K per month. 

According to Agarwal, building the habit of paying in the market takes time — it might take five to seven years, but he was confident of it happening through strong multiplayer gaming experiences. 

“One thing is for sure, the digital gaming market will keep growing and evolving in newer and newer ways. And we’ll all wonder if we are sitting smack in the middle of it, or if we have been left outside.” 

Television shows have become passé, with majority of the younger generation preferring digital series and movies in India. It’s not just because of international players such as Amazon Prime and Netflix, or even Indian streaming platforms like Hotstar and Alt Balaji — all of which have mega corporations backing their efforts. In fact the trend of web-series or digital video was established by digital content creators such as Pocket Aces, The Viral Fever (TVF), ScoopWhoop, Gaurav Kapur’s Oaktree Sports and many other ‘indie’ channels. 

Initially, much of India’s online content was dependent on YouTube for visibility as well as monetisation through ads, but as content has evolved and as creators realise the lack of revenue growth through YouTube, independent streaming platforms — at much smaller scales than YouTube — have done exceedingly well. With the growth in content consumption trends, the share of digital advertising has also expanded. An early mover in this space, Pocket Aces seems to have mastered the monetisation bit around digital content. Pocket Aces might not be very familiar to casual observers, but it is the company behind YouTube channels FilterCopy and Dice Media. 

Since the very early days Pocket Aces have been using short form videos of its franchise  FilterCopy to test various content ideas. 

“We make videos on everything and anything on FilterCopy and then see what really resonates, and what people want to watch more of,” cofounder Ashwin Suresh told Inc42.

This approach seems to have paid dividends as the likes of PepsiCo, Amazon, Samsung, OnePlus, Google, Kingfisher, Flipkart and Kotak Mahindra among others are now advertising partners for Pocket Aces. According to cofounder Anirudh Pandita, the company has a 70% retention rate of advertisers and has recorded a revenue of INR 33 Cr in FY 19, which is four times the INR 8 Cr revenue generated in FY 18. 

Audience Analytics Attracts Advertisers

Talking about the reason behind this growth, Suresh told us, “One of the things we do very well is we pay very close attention to what the consumer is saying, we are reading all the comments, anything that is written about the show —  why the user likes it, what they don’t like it, which actors do they like.”

Armed with this information, Pocket Aces takes various decisions such as which story goes on their long-form channel Dice Media and which ones can be developed into ideas that fit the advertising partner’s brief. There are two ways the company brings advertisers onboard — it lets advertisers partner with a popular title or show and integrates the brand’s messaging into the existing storyline. 

The second route is when the advertiser approaches the brand with a brief about the brand messaging and target audience. Here, Pocket Aces relies on the customer data and audience analytics from its content library to come up with an idea that fits within its many properties and creates content accordingly. 

Pandita added, “Another thing that has helped us to monetise content is our ability to integrate customer point of view with advertisers’ needs.”

The company has worked well on understanding the frequency at which advertisers plan their marketing campaigns, and the things that brands need to market their products effectively to the 18-40 year old demographic, he added. 

Pocket Aces content IP library is syndicated across platforms such as Ola Play, Reliance Jio, onboard airlines such as Emirates and Cathay Pacific, cable partners like Tata Sky, and international platforms such as China’s Youku Tudou and Bytedance. The company has also co-produced two seasons of its popular digital web series Little Things on OTT major Netflix. 

How Pocket Aces Solved For Boredom 

Founded by Suresh, Pandita and  Aditi Shrivastava in 2013, Pocket Aces recently raised INR 100 Cr funding from Sequoia India, DSP Group, 3one4 Capital in July 2019. It operates three socially distributed content channels including FilterCopy (short videos), Dice Media (long​-form videos), and Gobble (food ​and lifestyle videos​). Interestingly, the company had also acquired a live and interactive esports app, Loco. The gaming app currently has over 15 Mn registered users, with active users spending an average of 30 mins daily on the app. 

But how does a gaming app fit in the content creator’s portfolio? 

According to Pandita, Pocket Aces is not just a content distribution business. “Our mission is to solve boredom and when consumers are looking at sources to entertainment themselves, gaming is a big part of it. Hence that becomes an important space for us to spend time and effort on.”

Pandita added that when viewed from the outside, the gaming business might seem a little different than creating digital video content, but according to him, a lot of the skill sets required in the gaming business are similar to content. “In terms of how we use a data DNA to drive viewership retention and also use existing content network to drive viewership,” he said. 

The company looks at Loco as a digital parallel of ESPN or Star Sports, while its other franchise are more like the digital equivalents of Star Plus or Star Movies.

Interestingly, a majority of Loco’s users come from Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4 cities and thus the platform is accessible in multiple Indian regional languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali. 

Video Streaming Goes Regional 

Every video streaming company and platform is focussing on bringing regional content, and so is Pocket Aces. 

“I think regional content is very exciting space. As we penetrate with smartphones and internet data to more and more of the country, different cohorts of audience are coming online. These new cohorts are more comfortable in regional languages than the first set of cohort that came along in the country,” cofounded Suresh told us

However, the company will likely partner with regional content creators or adapt its content to vernacular languages instead of creating new original content. Suresh also hinted at the possibility of acquiring regional content creation companies to get there. 

Further, the cofounder spoke about plans to diversify genres to cater to audiences that love crime dramas and thrillers. 

“Today, everybody is trying to create the big gangster show, the big crime drama, the big fancy large scale production, but I think there are a few of those every year. And some will do well and many won’t.”

The company is exploring stories from different genres told from young adult perspectives. For example, it is working on a financial crime drama which is based around young professionals in the world of stock markets and business deals. In addition to this, it is also working on its own take on the gangster shows, but from a college student’s point-of-view. 

Pocket Aces, Suresh claimed, is looking at a niche segment of young viewers and telling these different stories from their perspective. 

“I think the depth of India’s young adult market is quite huge and we want to continue to play in this space.” 

When it comes to most technology startups, 2016 is something of a watershed year. And that stands true for the Indian fintech ecosystem as well. UPI, payments bank and demonetisation were the three developments that gave fintech an adrenaline boost. Between 2015-16, the sector saw more than 490 startups launching, primarily in the payments and lending segment. And Mumbai-based Creditmate was one among those. 

Founded by Jonathan Bill, Ashish Doshi, Swati Lad and Aditya Singh, CreditMate started its journey as an alternative fintech lending startup and reached Series B stage with backing from fintech unicorn Paytm last year. 

“But I was not looking to be one in a thousand. I wanted to create something unique,” said Bill.

After spending more than a decade in the telecom sector, what attracted Bill to the fintech sector were the unexplored niches, and the problems that required unique solutions through tech products. However, after a year building a lending platform, he realised that the problem is not identifying whom to lend to but timely returns in a low-cost and effective manner. This has a direct impact in reducing the NPA percentage in a lender’s account books.

“Every month 10 to 20% of consumer and SME loan repayments bounce putting 100s of billions of dollars at risk and costing 10s of billions of dollars. Unresolved loan collection failures lead to NPA for lenders and bad credit scores for borrowers,” added Bill.

The urge to do something unique encouraged Bill to pivot to the debt collection model eight months back. The company uses technology and data science insight to streamline the process and to improve the experience for both lender and borrower. It aims to resolve issues such as data security, collection agency performance, and reporting and accounting for all bounces and NPA. The company is ably supported by digital payments providers and an extensive cash pickup-and-drop network.

Since its launch, it claims to have increased collection for lenders by 15-20%. Considering there are 200 Mn consumer loans disbursed in India annually, CreditMate is staring at a massive lending market (growing at 28%) which it can organise and influence.

CreditMate: The Growth So Far

Bill told Inc42 that CreditMate is a fully-featured collections platform with machine learning enabling collection strategies, and automation. It operates on software and intelligence only model or a full-service model with a nationwide network of collection agents, cash pick-up, cash drop points and professional call centres. 

“Collection is a consistent pain point for all. While large finance companies are looking to strengthen their existing collection mechanism, small players are trying to understand how they can create collection capabilities for themselves. Our business models caters to both these requirements,” the cofounder added. 

Further, the solution provides real-time tracking of payment status, payment integration across gateways and customised regional communication. Its offline, secure network offers borrowers options to pay their EMIs via various digital payment solutions such as UPI and eNACH (electronic national automated clearing house) mandate setup. 

Using Machine Learning To Optimise Debt Collection

Collections is an intensely decision-driven process. Field agents are constantly deciding on who to call/visit, when and what to say. It’s resolving conflicts and figuring out what triggers the user. Currently, this knowledge resides in the chaotic minds of a million agents as experience. 

“Our job, using AI and machine learning is to extract all of that individual knowledge and make a single ultra-smart and evolving intelligence layer. Recommender systems match content to a user. Behavior models predict strategy for collection resolutions and Propensity models drive efficiency,” he added.

The company has also introduced its Sherlock product which uses a proprietary machine learning algorithms to score debt defaulters, manage debt resolution processes and optimise results and costs. Its data scientists and software teams have deployed the complex algorithm for agents and field staff in all states across India.

Factors such as language, paying trend, followup trends, field agent visit trends and more help the machine learning algorithms automate the processes in the right manner. Its predictive modelling with the help of machine learning, helps ascertain the best strategy from among SMS, phone calls or doorstep visit by a field agent — to go for collection, in line with the cost and importance of that collection.

“Making a field agent travel for 100 Km for say an INR 50K outstanding will not be worth if the borrower has a good credit history. Machine learning helps in identifying the methodology and frequency of each type of communication as well, thus reducing the burden on the field agent, “ said Bill.

This also helps in increasing the amount of resolution of bad debt through automation, significantly improving efficiency in last mile or filed collections and thus making lenders of all sizes more able to lend and fuel India’s economy. Further, all communication with borrowers, such as calls, messages and emails, are routed through the collections platform, helping CreditMate keep a check on the service quality.

Breakeven And International Expansion On The Cards

According to a report by Markets And Markets, the debt collection software market size is expected to grow from $2.9 Bn in 2019 to $4.6 Bn by 2024, at a CAGR of 9.6% from 2019 to 2024. The increasing need for self-service payments models to speed up the collection process and automation in the debt collection process are some of the major factors expected to drive the growth of this market. This opens up a plethora of opportunities for CreditMate.

CreditMate currently operates pan-India and is in the process of launching in Southeast Asia and Africa soon. It is also expecting to hit operational breakeven in June 2020. Bill believes that while in India they are leaping ahead as a first mover, expanding into other countries will be competitive. 

Going ahead, he expects that more players will emerge into debt collection in India, considering the market size to be worth several billion dollars and the diversity India offers in terms of language demography, household incomes among others. 

“While the gap between financial services which adopt or develop ML and AI and those that don’t will continue to increase, we expect to see the scale benefits of our collection platform making micro-lending viable and aggregation meaning lenders can confidently lend in new geographies.”

Before PlayerUnknown’s BattleGrounds or PUBG got Indians hooked, finding Pokemon and catching them on smartphones had caused a frenzy among Indians.

Young Indians were seen thronging beaches, parks and malls searching for Pokemon. While Pokemon Go mania died out soon after, it introduced many to what augmented reality can do.

According to the TechSci Research report, the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) market in India is projected to register a CAGR of 55.3% from 2016 to 2021. The rising applications of AR and VR in education, defense, healthcare, finance and shopping along with the ecommerce industry and many other sectors are anticipated to give rise to business demand for these technologies in the Indian market.

Many believe that AR and VR can have the same impact that the internet had on retail businesses, that Amazon effectively leveraged to score one over Walmart. Similarly, AR and VR are expected to be disruptive technologies that will lead to a shift in how consumer demand is generated and business models. For example, AR applications can enable consumers to make more informed buying decisions while for retailers, the technology will make it easier to engage with the target audience.

With AR in retail or even ecommerce, a customer can juxtapose various products next to real-world elements in a 3D view. This has a major impact on which product is finally purchased.

“Human sensory perception is highly visual in nature and humans experience the world with strong depth perception. However, digital consumer experiences are severely limited to 2D digital screens on mobile phones and desktops. This creates a huge experience gap between offline and online retail.” said Sravanth Aluru, CEO & cofounder of Avataar.Me

An AR marketing platform, Avataar.Me was founded in 2014 by Gaurav Baid and Sravanth Aluru. The company provides solutions to ecommerce players to convert 2D photos and videos into life-size 3D visual discovery experiences on social media platforms. This helps bridge the online-offline experience gap in online shopping.

Avataar.Me claims to be running such AR campaigns in partnership with Instagram and Facebook, offering direct integration onto its partner brand’s social accounts globally.

“Today, there are about 1.5 billion smartphones with in-built AR capabilities, but the projection is that it would more than double to 3.4 billion smartphones by the end of 2022, opening a big opportunity for the 2D to 3D visual discovery shift.”

Aluru told Inc42 that the AR advertising is projected to grow from $453 Mn in 2018 to over $8.5 Bn in 2023 and that Avataar’s partnerships with social platforms help them target over 50% of this ad spend. He attributes this growth to the increasing camera AR engagement happening on mobile devices. “The graphics compute power of mobile phones has also helped us a lot, enabling us to do a lot more on mobile devices now than just two years back.”

What Avataar.Me’s AR Platform Brings To The Table

So what do companies gain by having the AR/VR model as a part of their business? Aluru said that as per consumer tests conducted by Facebook, there is a 53% uptick in clickthrough rates for a brand campaign when consumers are interacting with immersive content.

Decoding market trends and feedback from customers, Aluru stated that brands understand the power of interactive content in terms of higher engagement and conversion and have been eager to bring such experiences to their end consumers. “What seemed to be critical, however, was to present a feasible working AI platform that caters to the consumer base realities/constraints in India.”

The high bandwidth requirement for such applications is down to the realism in the AR campaigns. Aluru added, “At Avataar, photo-realism has been the primary focus of our platform R&D. This applies to our personalization AI (life-size 3D avatars) as well as our 3D Fashion AI (2D website apparel images converted to 3D life-size renders) with fabric realism, realistic folds and drape, etc.”

Avataar has clientele primarily in the US and in Asian countries outside India at present. The company is focusing on building penetration into digital volumes in these markets while eyeing possible expansion to European markets in the future. The company currently works with Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Google ARCore, and Apple ARKit, which gives it wide acceptability.

The startup generates revenue from two channels. One is AI-led content creation from the brand’s existing 2D product catalogue and the other is the platform’s end-user reach in terms of actual AR/VR engagements. While the first is a fixed cost as per the AI render cost, the other is a volume-dependent platform pricing for customers based on the number of end-consumer impressions the campaign ends up driving.

“We have profitable unit economics and do not have to incur heavy customer acquisition costs – our revenue model is geared towards scaling up with profitable growth,” said Aluru.

Avataar.Me has raised close to $3 Mn in funding from angel investors in the USA and India and is looking at a Series A round in 2020, which Aluru said will be primarily geared to expand its global client base and R&D for the product roadmap.

The Challenge Of Bringing AR To India

Even though Indian businesses have been slow in adopting this 3D marketing tech, Avataar claims its AI platform has been developed with the Indian market’s constraints and realities in mind, and its AI-powered campaigns can effectively run on high-latency internet connections and device configurations that are most common here in the Indian market.

One of the biggest challenges Avataar.Me faces is that of financial constraints mostly driven by intensive manual labour involved in 3D asset creation. Aluru told Inc42, “While Hollywood movies can afford to pay such exorbitant manual effort for each video, digital marketers and commerce players simply would not be able to justify it on a unit-economical ROI basis.”

Low internet bandwidth is another pain-point. India as a consumer market is riddled with low internet bandwidth — while 4G works quite well now, 5G would be a real game-changer for innovative experiences and allow for far more immersive experiences that are possible today, said Aluru.

“The USP of our fully automated 3D AI platform is that it can manage huge scale and product inventory volumes at “no-manual-labour” AI compute costs. This makes financial unit economics viable for interactive life-size 3D visual experiences on digital discovery platforms, and more importantly viable at scale to drive a holistic adoption of the experience upgrade from static 2D video engagement,” he added.

Key players of the industry include names like Google, Facebook, Atracsys, Augmented Pixels, Blippar, COSY, liateR, Holition, Infinity AR, NavVis and Quytech. However, Avataar claims that the rigorous bar it sets for its visuals helps it outperform competitors in terms of responsiveness and drives better user experience eventually.

The Indian market has the potential to have a billion users online before the middle of the next decade. The current issues of a low addressable base for ad-spend and commerce volumes will be solved in the near future with newer models and the rise of the regional language internet ecosystem. India’s unique position as a predominantly mobile-first internet economy is another advantage for AR/VR applications for mobiles.

Aluru said, “India’s technology sector is shaping up well, driven by our high-quality talent pool – we are perhaps one of the leading geographies along with Israel and China on AR/VR innovation. Digital bandwidths, online consumption, user growth rates are all tilted in favour of India becoming the next big technology hub globally.”

The number of startups working in the field of virtual and augmented reality in India is growing steadily and attracting the attention of conglomerates such as Reliance, which acquired VR startup Tesseract earlier this year. However, the ecosystem is still emerging and the domestic market is still a niche category, so both startups and venture capitalists face challenges in navigating the space. As the VR/AR ecosystem takes hold and as technology penetration grows, it remains to see how quickly such technology is infused with the existing advertising and marketing models so that they not only become mainstream, but also cost-effective for businesses.