When it comes to electric vehicle adoption, the two major concerns are the lack of charging infrastructure and the high cost of electric vehicles. While infrastructure challenges have been addressed by EV makers with their own charging stations or swappable battery solutions and more, the high cost of electric vehicles has continued to be a deterrent for consumer adoption. 

EV makers also complain about the lack of financing options from the formal banking and financial services sector, leading to a paucity of options for consumers. As a result, EVs in the Indian context are far too expensive for the average car buyer. Even as companies look to change this and introduce more affordable options, RevFin is ensuring that the current crop of EV consumers do not miss out on the electric mobility transition.  

According to RevFin founder and CEO Sameer Aggarwal, there are over 2 Mn Evs on Indian roads today, and the main reason why this number is 2 Mn and not 10 Mn is because of the unavailability of finance. He compared it to the private vehicle industry of 40-50 years back when one had to save up money to buy a car. 

Founded by Aggarwal in 2018, RevFin is a consumer lending platform enabling financing of electric three-wheeler loans in Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns. The company ties up with OEMs to directly acquire these customers, thereby reducing its cost. RevFin’s operations are spread across West Bengal, Haryana, Bihar, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan — largely away from the traditional hotspots such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and other states.

Aggarwal told Inc42 that the average customer for RevFin is either not very literate or has limited education — as a result, they are excluded by banks and lenders. The audience primarily hails from Tier 3, 4 towns and 85% of them have never taken a loan in the past, the founder said. Thus, there is hardly any credit history or CIBIL score available for these customers. But nevertheless, they have bank accounts, even if it’s dormant or not heavily used. 

How Does One Underwrite Customers With No Credit History?

“The biggest challenge that we were faced with was — how does one make a decision on a customer without any data on them. The traditional means of underwriting do not apply to these customers,” said Aggarwal. 

RevFin developed an alternative underwriting method along with the help of IIT Kharagpur engineers. This technique is basically a mix of psychometric and biometric tests to predict the customer’s intention to repay a loan. 

Potential customers sign in to the RevFin app and go through two steps of assessment. 

First, the app will assess the customer’s honesty and responsibility through a set of questions about themselves. The information sought here is usually already available in the public domain, making it easier for the company to verify users. RevFin gets access to information by pulling phone SMSes and other data based on their submitted documents. The intention behind this test is to check whether the customer is honest in their responses. 

The second step involves psychometric assessment where the customer is given a situation with either all positive or all negative responses. So, there’s no right answer. But based on the customer’s answer, the company is able to derive the personality of the customer and that is said to have a correlation with their intention to repay a loan. 

Another step of verification is biometrics, where the customer is asked to capture a video of themselves to prove that they are an authentic person. In addition to this, the company also does a face matching with the customer’s photo ID cards.

Further, the company has also added security features to vehicles bought using the loan including vehicle insurance and IoT devices that can track the vehicles and monitor driver’s behaviour to keep a check on the condition of the car for which EMIs are being paid. 

RevFin claims that its 90 days past due delinquency rate is just 0.1%. The total loans disbursed by the company stand at 831 and the total loan amount disbursed is INR 8.9 Cr, Aggarwal claimed. RevFin’s current annualised revenue run rate is said to be INR 2.4 Cr, increasing at an average of 15% month on month. 

“The Aim Is To Improve Financial Inclusion”

For now, RevFin plans to stay focussed on the EV consumer segment given the bigger opportunity and the potentially high scalability of the electric vehicle industry, according to Aggarwal.  “Our customers belong to these Tier 3,4 towns where they are sanctioning the loan and hence the chances of them running somewhere are a bit low as compared to metro cities. Also, these vehicles generate employment for them and hence they don’t want to default the loan because it can lead to them losing their livelihood.” 

The company has already expanded to enabling financing for electric scooters and wants to scale this offering. Further, the company is also working on introducing loans for other purposes to its customers. 

Digital lending is one of the fastest-growing segments in India’s fintech space. A BCG report has predicted the digital lending industry will touch a market size of $1 Tn in the next five years. Some of the Indian players in the space include Paytm, LendingKart, Capital Float, MoneyTap, MoneyView, MobiKwik, ETMoney and Avail Finance, and others. While most of the consumer lending companies focus on one particular segment or use-case of loans. 

Digital payments companies such as, Paytm and MobiKwik are attempting at becoming digital credit cards for all customers. These companies also have the advantage of having access to user’s transaction history and monthly payments, which helps them in underwriting customer who might not have a credit history. 

While these customers will intersect with the customer base of RevFin, which is also focused on these new-to-credit users, according to Aggarwal, RevFin’s customer does not yet have access to any of these apps. “They have a phone and a bank account. But their activity on any digital payment app is non-existent. Thus, we are the sole player in this category for the early wave of EV customers in Tier 3 and beyond.” 

In September 2018, Jyothis KS and Deepu Xavier launched an artificial intelligence startup, ZappyHire, which offered corporates and startups an automated recruitment solution. After ZappyHire’s successful launch, Jyothis and Xavier realised the hurdles were bigger in smaller cities in India when it comes to attracting and retaining talent. And thus was born their next venture, Move2MyCity.

Founded in 2019, Move2MyCity aims to encourage the young talented individuals from across the country to take up jobs in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. With this initiative, Jyothis and Xavier aim to showcase how each city is unique in terms of experiences, facilities and job opportunities. And the first city in the campaign is Kochi.

“We are the biggest supporters of uniqueness and diversity and that’s how this campaign started to take form. Every city is unique in its own way and once you start appreciating that, disliking a city becomes difficult,” – Jyothis KS, cofounder, Move2MyCity.

The startup claims to have received over 4K unique visits in the first three weeks of the Move2Kochi campaign, that too with minimal marketing.

Move2Kochi—From Move2MyCity For Kochi

Thanks to the unique idea, Move2MyCity attracted a lot of attention from companies willing to team up for the campaign in Kochi. Some of the most prominent startups from the state such as SurveySparrow, FullContact and CareStack joined the Move2Kochi campaign. The startup is now in the process of selecting the second set of companies for the campaign.

“Unlike other job portals, we promote each company and celebrate their unique success story which in-turn boosts the brand image and creates awareness among job seekers. We adopted the chatbot-based interface for an intuitive job application process. There will be multiple candidate touchpoints during this process to ensure a perfect match between a candidate and a company,” added Jyothis.

Backed by KSUM since its inception, Move2MyCity has enjoyed a lot of benefits, from incubation support to marketing and PR and more. Jyothis told Inc42 that the team at KSUM has worked with the startup, guiding and mentoring it through the different stages of its growth. It was during their time of working with KSUM that the two friends realised the attractions and the opportunities, along with the lack of participation of the job seekers in Kochi.

Soon enough the startup realised that the situation was almost the same in all the other Tier 2 cities in India. With Move2MyCity, the focus is mainly on such smaller cities across the country, the likes of Trivandrum, Pune, Coimbatore and more.

“What makes Kochi attractive to prospective job seekers is the increasing number of companies offering high paid jobs. This benefit, along with several other quality amenities are the reason that we selected Kochi as the first city to kick off the campaign,” added Jyothis.

In just a few months of the Move2Kochi campaign’s launch, the startup claims to have received many applications from both employers and employees to be a part of the campaign. And many of the applicants were people from outside Kerala, which only further acted as the motivation that the startup needed.

According to estimates, on an average, at least 25-30 people migrate every minute from Tier 2 cities to the Tier 1 for better opportunities and lifestyle. Estimates of the Economic Survey of 2016-17 also revealed that from 2013-17, annually around 90 Mn people migrated between Indian states.

Move2MyCity aims to tap into this migration pattern and attract young talent from smaller cities to the metros and show them the opportunities and lifestyle benefits that the cities present.

“We have enabled personalised candidate engagement with chatbots and high accuracy resume parser along with other AI-enabled recommendations engine during the application process. ZappyHire will take care of the rest of the process,” elaborated Jyothis.

Recruiting Top Talent: ZappyHire And Move2MyCity

The HRtech space in India has developed tremendously over the last half-decade and recruiters and companies are only using more and more automation to screen, assess and recruit candidates.

Companies today are digitising their recruitment process and are shifting their focus to online platforms to reduce the turnaround time in hiring.

“The new trends in the HRtech space and hiring processes provide individuals from Tier 2 cities an equal chance and help companies widen their pool of candidates. Our product ZappyHire is going strong there and with Move2MyCity we will now also enable these cities, not just the job seekers,” elaborates Jyothis.

Though the startup has only started with Move2Kochi, it does have plans to go to other cities. With ZappyHire already gaining good traction, it claims that reaching other Tier 2 cities in India is only a matter of time. “We are working on collaborating with different service providers to provide our users with a seamless experience of a new city, apart from providing the best-paid jobs on our portal,” elaborates Jyothis.

To accelerate their expansion plans, it is already in discussion with multiple stakeholders from other cities. Apart from leveraging this network and new connections, the team is also taking the help of forums and other social media channels to attract the best tech minds in different cities.

“Over time, relocating to certain cities for a job became the norm. If you chose to move to a city apart from the “usual ones” you could be sure of a million questions coming your way. But time brought changes, as it always does. Every city began to flourish and offer opportunities like never before. Once we realised this, all we wanted to do was spread the word,” Jyothis said.

The online tutoring market in India is growing apace by the day. The startups in the space are not only grabbing market share from offline tutorials but also creating new markets that don’t exist offline. With marquee investors sharpening their focus on India’s startup ecosystem and internet service providers continuously raising the bar with high-speed internet, edtech startups are disrupting the education sector.

“We can expect at least 10% of the 250 Mn K-12 base or 25Mn students to be enrolled in online tutorials within the next two years as the service will be offered at all price ranges and targeted across all levels of the income pyramid,” said Sahil Sheth, founder, Lido Learning.

Lido enables students, from class 5 to class 9, to connect online with live teachers who offer maths and science tutorials. Parents pay a subscription fee for their kids to attend small group classes through real-time interactions with teachers. The platform also provides students access to offline content to practise classroom lessons. Besides maths and science, Lido is looking to launch English tutorials in the first quarter of 2020.

“We have identified that even though students might be in an English medium school, they struggle with English. We actually have ended up adding Hinglish as a language option for classes since the level of comfort and understanding of English for most of our students is low.”

Sheth told us he has been looking to entrench in the edtech space for the last eight years. His first company was focussed on disrupting the self-paced textbook learning market by giving students access to video lessons mapped to their curriculum from a mobile app.

The company was acquired by BYJU’s in 2015, where Sheth worked for more than two years as a vice president. While at BYJU’s, he realised that most students enjoyed watching these self-paced videos, but they enjoyed going to their tuition classes with their friends far more. “There was something special about being with other kids and the discipline and motivation that came from the teacher. But I was sure that there was a way to move this online and into the 21st century,” said Sheth.

So he spent a month in China, understanding how the entire tutoring market had moved online. He saw how much more convenient and safe it was, especially for younger kids; and how parents could truly understand how much their child was learning through advanced analytics; and how learning could be improved through tracking student’s performance and using interactive mediums. This is how the idea for Lido Learning was born.

Democratising Education Through Technology

After building the platform in 73 days, Sheth set out to do trials with students in Delhi, Mumbai first and then Chandigarh and Lucknow. During the pilot, the founders realised that the idea was more engaging and interesting than their regular tuitions. They also found that the parents in smaller towns were more than happy to be getting the quality education that kids in metros get.

“Students in smaller towns were thrilled to be getting the same product and the same quality of teachers that students in the bigger cities were getting. That is when Lido’s vision changed — it was not just about making tuition classes convenient anymore, it was about democratising education for all,” Sheth told Inc42.

This is when Lido decided to deliver high-quality education, usually enjoyed by kids living in metro cities and children going to expensive private schools, to less privileged students across India and decided to rapidly start expanding with this vision.

Lido’s teachers are trained on the Teach for India’s training model and are the main point of contact with the kids and parents. The startup has onboarded over 1,500 customers since its sales operations commenced in June 2019. The platform has employed over 100 qualified teachers. Since the platform runs only post 3:30 pm, it allows teachers to work part-time, after returning from school, for example. It also gives them an opportunity to supplement their income, which is a big consideration for many teachers.

The Mumbai-based startup also conducts training so that teachers know their roles, and it also tracks teacher performance. Teachers are provided with continuous feedback and upskilling sessions as well.

Lido also has academic advisors assigned to every student to help guide them and their parents through the learning journey. The advisor is a constant resource from assessing the student’s learning levels to understanding the chapter and delivering class reports.

Addressing India’s Skewed Education System

The Indian education system is focussed on marks and teaching for test grades. However, unlike education systems in other countries, this style of education does not prepare students for real life. This is the pain point most edtech startups are trying to solve.

“At Lido, we aim to take a system that is marks driven and make it learning driven by teaching 21st-century skills — analytical thinking, critical reasoning, communication, collaboration, creativity – instead of focussing on 20th-century topics so that students are able to excel in and out of school,” said Sheth.

It has been widely observed that many Indian students leave school with theoretical knowledge gained through rote learning and very little knowledge to be applied in an “out of textbook” context.

Lido tries to focus on parents as today’s parents are a lot more invested in the child’s education. The startup thus offers a parent app that shares easily understandable analytics about the progress of their child with the parents. With this, parents on Lido can track learning outcomes at a microlevel.

“Another issue is the opacity of what is happening in the classroom both in school and out of school. Parents and students have no clue if they are learning and how they can improve. We allow parents to really understand where they are going wrong. And the advent of AI will really push interventions to students at the right time. If you get a 35/50 in Math, we will know which geometry and algebra concepts you are struggling with and your homework will focus primarily on these,” he added.

Talking about competition in the sector, Sheth said, “The current e-learning apps or platforms that are in the market attempt to fix this problem, however, they usually only replace one aspect; such as textbooks or doubt solving. None offer a complete solution.”

Staying Ahead In The Crowded Edtech Market

According to Datalabs by Inc42, in 2019, K-12 and test prep startups such as BYJU’s, Unacademy and Vedantu attracted the most amount of venture capital funding. The combined capital inflow into the three startups for the year 2019 was more than $274 Mn.

Overall the dominance of these sub-sectors in the funding landscape of edtech startups has declined a little. The share of online test preparation startups to the total funding amount in 2019 was 66% ($284 Mn) out of the total $433 Mn plus in total funding amount for the year.

With a huge demand for tech intervention in the school curriculum, hiring the right fit of teachers is the toughest task for most K-12 focussed startups. “Like any company looking to hire good talent, we too face challenges in putting together a team that is both talented and a good fit for Lido! Our biggest challenge is finding qualified teachers. There is a huge demand in the industry for well-qualified teachers but there aren’t many, so our goal is to actually invest a lot in teacher training,” Sheth said.

Apart from building a better quality product, maintaining high service quality levels will be a key deliverable to sustain in the highly competitive edtech category, Sheth said. Both the parent and the student should feel well taken care of at every point.

“We try and stay ahead of the competition by constantly innovating to provide the best learning experience for our students, one that will create a lasting impact on them. Lido does this by focusing on replacing both the textbook (aka the content) and the offline tutor with an online tutor that personalises the learning experience and ensuring the child is actually learning concepts and not just doing well by rote learning.”.

Lido’s Vision For The Future Of Students

While its grand vision is to build 250 Mn classrooms for 250 Mn students, Lido is looking to take steps towards increasing its user base in the next year or so by leveraging software, content, and data to stitch together transformational learning experiences for students. Sheth wants to create courses that are 10x better and 50% cheaper than what is available offline.

“The student is at the centre of everything that we do. We are constantly asking ourselves two questions when we make any decision, big or small: Will this make a student learn? Will this make a student have fun?,” he told us

To stay connected to the students, Lido’s teachers, advisors and counsellors spend time in person with the students, while the product and content teams regularly watch footage of the live classes to identify areas of improvement. The startup wants to first capture the massive K-10 space and service them well before targetting any other sections!

“That being said, education is a lifelong process so there are several other verticals that are potentially interesting to us in the longer term.”

With India being a huge market with most of the 250 Mn students currently seeking offline traditional tutor, Lido has no plans to expand outside of India.

Its upcoming English learning programme will cover both written and spoken or conversational English.“Parents are extremely smart and will only pay for what they see as end-to-end solutions, so naturally, our multi-modal approach of self-paced content and small group tutoring appeals to them.”

The growing use of internet learning apps and dedicated tablets among younger kids has increased parental concerns about kids increasing more and more time glued to screens with little to no physical activity or interaction with the real world. Around the world, technology companies have released tools to limit the screen time among children and young adults, but the concerns for Indian parents is not that children are using devices more frequently, but that after a point it becomes a passive exercise — replace textbooks with an iPad.

Various augmented reality apps have looked to replicate the success of Pokemon Go and Sharks In The Park for edtech. The goal is to get kids to interact with real objects and combine this learning with smartphone or tablet apps with augmented reality features. Bengaluru-based PlayShifu brings this AR solution to life for Indian kids, with a focus on learning aids for science and technology.

Playshifu’s flagship product Orboot is a smart world globe that can be used by young adults and kids to explore the geography and culture of any country or city. 

AR Powers PlayShifu’s Edtech Platform

Founded by Dinesh Advani and Vivek Goyal in 2016, PlayShifu products are specifically designed for kids between the age group of 2 – 12 years, to help build STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and maths) skills among kids through fun.

Besides its smart globe, PlayShifu’s portfolio also includes an array of AR-powered puzzles and quest kits called Shifu Plugo. It also offers a digital board game based on physics and chemistry concepts called Shifu Tacto, along with AR-backed magnetic figurines and AR-enabled flashcards related to space, travel, and animals called Shifu Cards. 

The company claims to have a user base of 250K children across 15 countries including India, the US, Canada, UK, Japan, Ukraine, Russia, Australia, and the UAE. PlayShifu toys are being sold both offline and online in India, with offline channels accounting for around 65% of sales in India, with the rest coming from ecommerce platforms. Speaking to Inc42, founder Goyal said that the primary audience for Playshifu products is based in cities, with up to 60% of all retail sales taking place in Tier 1 cities. 

One would expect that AR educational toys will involve better engagement than passive reading or digital textbooks and games. PlayShifu claims to have a 30-day retention rate of 46%, which is five times higher than other existing apps, Goyal said.  In the span of three years, the company claims to have become a multi-million-dollar company clocking an 8X YoY growth in terms of revenue. Goyal attributed this growth to the company’s strategic expansion across many geographies, besides India, as STEM education is being prioritised around the world. 

Goyal told us that more than 600 schools in India, the US, UK, and Canada are interacting with Playshifu products on a daily and weekly basis. In the US, over 400 schools are said to have brought PlayShifu’s educational toys into the classroom.

According to Goyal, the majority of these sales happened on an ad-hoc basis where the US school teachers discovered and ordered PlayShifu products from Amazon. Another factor driving these sales is the relatively higher budget for technology in schools in the US, which allowed them to experiment with PlayShifu’s products. 

Learning Through Doing

Goyal said that PlayShifu did not create formal networks with schools in the US or India until last year, and is only now working on formalising these links. In terms of introducing toys for a broader age-group, Goyal said that the company will be sticking to the 2-12 years age group because it understands users in this age-group very well.

“Further, the pressure for getting marks in schools and preparing for competitive exams intensifies after 12 years of age. That is the thing we don’t want to enter into at this point in time,” PlayShifu cofounder Vivek Goyal

However, he noted that coding skills are something that kids 13 years and above start learning from scratch. PlayShifu feels it can be really helpful in teaching kids programming. “So, we have the broader age group-focussed products on our horizon and in this category, we will focus on skills that start post 12 years of age,” said Goyal.

Similar to PlayShifu, startups such as Smartivity Labs is also experimenting with interactive educational toys for children. Smartivity offers STEM learning activity boxes for kids between the ages of 4 and 12. These DIY boxes are designed around fundamental scientific principles and their real-world applications. Kids can put together the building parts — made out of compressed wood, as per instructions in the booklet that explains the scientific principles behind each activity or creation.

One of the challenges for interactive edtech platforms is that the additional cost of the hardware can be a deterrent for new users. Edtech is seen as a democratising force, making learning content easily accessible and affordable for all income groups. But AR-enabled interactive toys have the hardware and manufacturing costs, which often make them less affordable. PlayShifu toys are sold starting from INR 299 (Shifu Flash Cards) up to INR 3499 (Plugo STEM Packs), so they are certainly a little more expensive than a digital textbook or a video-based tutor.  Will PlayShifu consider reducing the price points to reach more customers? Not according to Goyal. “To go below the current price points will interfere with the quality of products that we are able to deliver currently.”

Instead of thinking of bringing down the price, PlayShifu is looking at value creation. Consumers and kids need to think in terms of the learning value that interactive toys are providing, Goyal said. While parents are ready to spend thousands of rupees on teachers, tutors, and learning-oriented stuff, the retention and engagement for interactive kits tend to be higher, according to the founder. According to Goyal, parents underestimate the impact of interactive learning — 90% of learning for kids below the age of 10 years happens through games and toys or through playing with other kids, he added. 

“That’s one behavioural change we are proud to have inspired in many parents and want to continue widening the space enough that STEM toys and games actually become the largest segment of toys rather than being the third or fourth one.”

Every year throngs of students join the queue to become doctors and healthcare providers in India — with a doctor to patient ratio of 1:1445, India is woefully behind other nations when it comes to healthcare penetration. To fill this gap, the government has opened several new medical colleges in the past few years, and millions of aspirants jump through hoops and join coaching classes to break through the dreaded National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test or NEET and achieve their medical career dream. Just last year, 1.5 Mn aspirants took the NEET test in India for roughly 66K seats.

In November last year, union minister of state for health Ashwini Choubey said a total of 11.59 Lakh allopathic doctors were registered with the state medical councils and the Medical Council of India (MCI) as on March 31, 2019.

Conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), NEET is the test for those looking to take up MBBS and BDS courses in the recognised medical and dental colleges approved by the Medical Council of India and the Dental Council of India respectively.

Since 2013, when NEET came into existence, not only have the number of aspirants increased year-on-year, but the number of NEET coaching classes has also skyrocketed. To grab this opportunity, startups are focussing on niches within the test prep market — from engineering to medical entrance exams.

According to an analysis by DataLabs by Inc42 presented in its report — The Future Of India’s $2 Bn Edtech Opportunity Report 2020 — India’s online education market is set to soar from $247 Mn in 2017 to $1.96 Bn in 2021.

This opportunity is being tapped largely by test prep startups and NEET is one of the most lucrative tests in this arms race. With more than 12,000 students onboarded to their full coaching programs and over 450K subscribers on its YouTube channel, NEETprep claims to be the largest video-based learning platform for the medical entrance exam. Catering to a wide variety of aspirants, NEETprep offers Hindi and English-based coaching classes with the ultimate objective being to ace the NEET exam. Besides training material, NEETprep provides guidance, quizzes, and counseling along with one/two-year programs for candidates who want the full experience of NEETprep’s online learning platform.

“In 2015, we saw images of high school students and their relatives climb trees and buildings so that kids could cheat in examinations. It gave a clear picture that access to a good education was lacking in many states. So we decided to take it directly to the students where we build a network of teachers and use all the available online methods to help the students,” said Ghanshyam Tiwari, cofounder NEETprep.

Building a network of teachers became the foundation of NEETprep and the startup brought 200 teachers on board before it raised angel capital for the business.

NEETprep: Launch Timing And First-Mover Advantage

Founded by Kapil Gupta, Ghanshyam Tiwari, Jay Prakash, and Anis Bari, NEETprep was actually quite a different challenge for the founders considering their background in engineering, economics, public policy, and management. Working in these fields might have been easier, but as Tiwari told Inc42, the timing of the launch mattered.

“NEET happened to us around the time when the exam was new to India. It was an uncharted space and we wanted to be the first to set a benchmark. So far in the last few years, we have dominated the space.”

What makes NEETprep an interesting profile is that despite being an online learning and test prep platform with a traditional user interface website, the platform has garnered the same kind of trust that students have for coaching classes. Within three years of operations, the startup is generating profits, Tiwari claims. He added that the startup registered about $1 Mn in revenue for FY19 with a 20% gross profit and expects to generate about $2 Mn in revenue for FY20.

For the NEET exam scheduled in May 2020, roughly 8K students have come on board NEETprep for the coaching programs.

Digital content will become a companion to a student at every level of learning – Ghanshyam Tiwari, cofounder, NEETprep

Cofounder Kapil Gupta told us that the focus on unit economics has allowed NEETprep to focus on affordability and service scale. He added, “We have believed that to maintain control in the organisation and not necessarily depend on continuous rounds of funding every six months, we need to get the unit economics right. We also considered whether the market [investors] is able to put the right amount of value for the effort we are putting in.”

Gupta added that NEETprep generating profit has more to do with a focus on the cost of user acquisition and the monetisation channels. “We are not 25-year-old entrepreneurs so we understand that if a customer is not ready to pay the right value for what you are doing at some point in time you will have to come to terms with it,” he said. The alternative would be lowering the pricing or giving crazy discounts to get more users.

On the product side, Tiwari is of the opinion that consistency in marketing and distribution has allowed NEETprep to gain efficiency that is very much needed to become profitable.

Beating Heavily-Funded Competition

But given the huge amount of competition in this space, NEETprep is not alone in trying to solve these challenges or cater to this audience.

Heavily-funded startups such as BYJU’s, Vedantu, Gradeup, Toppr, and others have also made a mark in the test prep space, but they typically offer a whole gamut of tests on their platforms. On the other hand, NEETprep is very much focussed on the niche of medical entrance exams. On average, the platform charges INR 5000 for a single subject video module and about INR 35k for a complete two year NEET preparation course.

“With big organisations like BYJU’s and Vedantu coming into the picture, a lot of good content has been created but the challenge now is to motivate the kid to consume the content without the controlled environment of a classroom.” – Kapil Gupta, cofounder, NEETprep

Gupta told us that the challenge is around creating engagement and motivating children and students to take on bigger challenges. “How do you motivate a kid to organise himself and dedicate two years to a completely online study model while their body is going through hormonal changes with many distractions?” said Gupta, when asked what was the challenge when it comes to acquiring and retaining students.

Since inception, the focus of NEETprep has been on the Tier 2/3 student market in India, where the aspirations are super high, but access to facilities, teachers, and material is very low. There’s often no guidance for students who want to enter the field of medicine. And that’s where NEETprep is hoping to make a difference.

“We are marketing to value-conscious students who have come from a regional language background in Tier 2/3 cities. We have focused on faculty and creating a value chain around NEET rather than the brand image, where others are spending capital. This has helped us create a very high-quality product for the value-conscious students of India.”

“Right now, artificial intelligence is a huge vault in the education industry. Both learners and facilitators can benefit from this innovation. Personalisation is also the key to a 21st Century education. Embracing knowledge is not complete until learners are capable of executing it,” said Ayush Jaiswal, cofounder, Pesto.

Edtech, a term unknown a decade ago, is today an industry that has reached the streets of small towns and even some villages of India. It has leapfrogged into areas in the country where offline education was still trying to reach. With the new revolution in the form of internet penetration, the latest technologies such as experiential learning tools, artificial learning and gamification of learning are changing the way Indian students have traditionally been formulating preparation strategies.

Superskilling And Upskilling India’s Engineers

Gurugram-based edtech company Pesto is trying to bridge the skill gap between engineers and multinational companies. The startup offers two different programmes – Pesto PRO and Pesto Remote – designed for experienced engineers who want to “superskill” themselves to go from good to great and become proficient to break into international high tech careers.

Pesto Remote is the online version of their pioneering upskilling programme. Through this addition to its academic repertoire, Pesto will now provide its next-level learning, development, and skills solutions to candidates across the country from the convenience of their homes.

Pesto basically aims to enable global pay parity and borderless opportunities for Indian engineers. “Our current programmes are only suitable for experienced engineers – and it’s by design. The aim is to build on the experience and help engineers get better so that they can get international opportunities in line with their capabilities,” Jaiswal added.

Pesto claims to be working towards not just helping engineers finding a high paying remote job, but transforming engineers into lifelong learners with the ability to tackle and solve any problems thrown at them. In Jaiswal’s words,

“We are the career accelerators for top engineering talent to break into international tech careers via full-time remote jobs.” – Jaiswal

Income-Sharing Agreement, International Hiring Partners And Data-Driven Processes

Pesto works on the ISA model i.e., income sharing agreement. Once the engineers are hired, it takes 17% of their salary for the next three years. Students have to make 36 monthly payments based on their estimated income. These payments are verified every year by tax return and over or underpayments are adjusted accordingly. The agreement also caps payment at INR 20 Lakh so no students pay more than that. If a graduate doesn’t make double their last salary, then they don’t have to pay anything.

The startup works with multiple employers in Silicon Valley and has received a total funding of $2Mn from Matrix partners & Angel Investors. The startup doesn’t work with clients. It has many international companies as hiring partners and the graduates are employed for remote working for these companies. 99% of our Pesto graduates work remotely, regardless of where the specific company is located. “Although some of our Pesto grads are open to relocating, the expectation is that Pesto hires will work remotely while living in India,” said Jaiswal.

Currently, there are over half a million open software engineering jobs in the US alone. That number is predicted to be over 1.4 Mn by 2020. There are 5 Mn software engineers in India. Their average salaries are between $6,600 (entry-level) and $11,400 (senior-level) per year.

“We have proven that if we find the hardest working software engineers in India and invest in them with world-class, intensive training, they can be effective remote team members in US companies, earning more money than they ever thought possible,” Jaiswal said.

Pesto has developed an India specific curriculum that not only teaches software development but focusses on bridging cultural gaps and being an effective remote employee. Its data-driven processes ensure productivity and also helps the startup monitor students’ progress. Further, it monitors all data in the funnel and keeps records of each student to keep a check on their progress personally and then customise training methods accordingly.

“It’s still very early days though and as the volume of data increases in our organisation, we foresee using Data Sciences quite extensively. We are also using technology to automate everything — including the tax, legal, and logistical complexities of hiring overseas employees,” said Jaiswal.

This makes it easy for foreign companies that don’t have their own set up in India to hire remote teams in the country. It also gives graduates a much broader selection of companies to work for, especially startups that are working on interesting technological challenges, claims the startup.

Where The Pesto Journey Began

Jaiswal had always dreamt of starting a business. However, he soon realised that entrepreneurship only looks good in magazines and it is a lot of hard work than anyone can comprehend. He ended up spending the next two years bankrupt, living out of a coworking space.

However, soon the tables changed. During a casual conversation with a stranger, Andrew Linfoot, (who later became the cofounder of Pesto) at a coworking space, the idea for the startup was born.

When Linfoot shared a lot of insights about software engineering in the US, they both realised how Indian engineers can easily be on par with them with some upskilling. “I felt this emotion arise in me that was akin to an insane sense of urgency. I convinced him to do a test project with a US client and an Indian engineering team. We’d hire the best engineer’s in India. They’d start out writing code that was simply impeccable by Silicon Valley standards,” Jaiswal recalled.

He went on to add, “Andrew and I quickly realised how good our engineers were. They were fluent in English, had computer science degrees and worked harder than most of Andrew’s peers in Silicon Valley. If they had US visas, they would easily get jobs at US tech companies. We couldn’t get them visas but we could match them with US tech companies where they could work as full time, remote contractors. Clients loved it. It was just like hiring a remote employee in-house, only cheaper, faster and easier,” he added. Soon, the startup had signed up more companies than they had engineers trained to offer.

After contrasting the lives of engineers in India versus engineers in Silicon Valley, the founders realised that Indian engineers are not given the opportunity to realize their true potential. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. “India is an IT leader in terms of the number of engineers. I believe if we can get every engineer to match the quality of engineers in Silicon Valley, we can become global leaders,” Jaiswal said.

Hungry, Humble, Happy and Honest: Pesto’s Motto

At present, Pesto’s team size is 15 and plans to expand to Bengaluru soon. The startup follows more than just a culture of Friday bars, free coffee and a place for friendships to blossoms. “We often arrange off-sites for our Pesto family so that they can get a break from their daily hectic work-life. Pesto also has a Pesto house where we organise get-togethers for our Pesto family,” said Jaiswal.

Pesto claims to have an environment that encourages taking control of the situation, being innovative and creative and looking beyond everything.

“Pesto allows everyone to challenge their ideas and express themselves. Our main motto is to follow 4H’s i.e., stay Hungry, Humble, Happy and Honest. We also emphasize building relationships beyond work and have fun while on the journey and not solely commit to doing something only because it’s our job,” he added.

Talking about hiring the right talent, he said, “We are a very small team, one additional employee has the potential to contribute massively and drive growth in the company, they also have the power to disrupt the workflow and organization. We often look for a special kind of hire, passionate and professional people.”

Future Plans And Challenges

The startup plans to soon build a programme for lesser experienced engineers or freshers as well. “We would love to help someone get started on the journey of becoming a full-stack engineer and we are working on it.”

Talking about the growing edtech sector and competition in India, Jaiswal said. “We always try to come up with new ideas, offering that can help us to achieve our mission and our mission is to give everyone equal access to opportunity, regardless of where they were born.”

The startup plans to train 3,000 engineers over the next year.

“In 2020, we’ll scale our operations and accept a lot more people. Our goal for 2020 is to give India’s first crorepati developer working from tier towns totally remote and I think this will make us different from every other else in this field.”

Data analytics and artificial intelligence will play a very key role in the future of work.

“While we haven’t added an analytics specific programme yet we do use data as a core for almost every process, decision within the company,” he added.

Pesto Remote is the way the company is trying to scale up the business. The startup started the first batch with 30 students and now is scaling up to 100 students per batch.

Right now, the startup’s all focus is on Indian engineers and “once we accomplish our mission then we might think about targeting other verticals” Jaiswal said.

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 time, we take a look at health and fitness startup Cure.fit.

Every body type is different and thus, every fitness journey is also different. But then how does one build a scalable solution to this? Many health and fitness companies have attempted to achieve this by either introducing personal trainers, healthy food options, or customisable gym schedules. 

And then there’s Cure.fit which is doing all these things and much more. More importantly, having an array of services (Cult.fit, Eat.fit, Mind.fit, Whole.fit and Care.fit) has only increased the customer’s engagement with Cure.fit. The company claims to have an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 65, NPS is measured on a scale of -100 to +100; higher the score, higher the loyalty of a customer. 

Technology Binds Cure.Fit’s Arms Together

How did they do it? Cofounder Ankit Nagori said “Experts and facilities are the two important pillars of our business. Hence, we constantly integrate technology into these aspects to provide a holistic healthcare offering.”

He added that identification of the right locations for the centres and setting up the team with the right set of trainers and centre managers is very crucial for the company. Technology is central to standardising training and monitoring processes and systems at Cure.fit.

Further, Cure.fit has also integrated fitness trackers such as Google Fit, sleep monitoring, and Fitbit into its mobile app. This allows the company to track the user’s active minutes, stress levels, and sleep. “If you start tracking these metrics, it becomes very easy to understand the trends. So, we know a lot of consumption patterns, what works and what not!” said Nagori. 

The company’s flagship fitness centres Cult.fit also have a PULSE workouts option, which maps user heart rate to provide real-time workout-tracking, in-class competition, and a detailed workout report. The PULSE kit includes a wearable chest band and a heart rate monitor and is made compulsory for PULSE session attendees who have to pay an extra rental fee for the device.

Building An Ecosystem Of Fitness

Starting with its physical fitness and strength training product Cult.fit, the company has now expanded to include a variety of services that propagate healthy living including Eat.fit for nutritive and healthy food, Mind.fit for mental wellness, and Care.fit for primary healthcare. 

In addition to this, the Cure.fit app also sells athletic clothing, footwear, and accessories under the brand name CULTSPORT. Earlier this month, the company also launched its grocery delivery vertical called Whole.fit. 

Talking about the vision behind it, Nagori said, “The packaged food journey at Eat.fit started as an ‘attach category’ limited to product options and serving sizes which complemented the meals served. Categories like juice, yoghurt, and some baked snacks were the limited assortment the business started with.”

However, over the course of Eat.fit’s operations, the company felt the demand for a wider selection of packaged food products. This led to the launch of the Whole.fit, which has now established business collaborations with FMCG players such as RAW Pressery, Epigamia, and Bagrrys. Whole.fit now has exclusive co-branded products with these brands, serviceable all across Bengaluru city.Cure.fit is said to have more than half a million customer transactions every month and more than 50% of these subscribers are said to have used more than one Cure.fit product vertical. 

Founded by Nagori and Mukesh Bansal in 2016, the company has 270 Cult.fit centres across 18 Indian cities offering boxing, strength and conditioning, HIIT, sports conditioning, dance fitness, HRX workout, PROWL workout, and yoga. Further, the count for Eat.fit stands at 70 kitchens across 15 cities along with eight Care.fit centres in India.

Nagori attributed the brand’s success to its omnichannel approach, urban Indian individuals-focussed bold and energetic designs, the group workout format, and complementary healthy and nutritious meals or accessible mental wellness sessions.

Expanding Horizons With A Focus On Brand Loyalty

Cure.fit has recently forayed into the international market with its first Cult.fit studio in Dubai, and plans to soon launch Mind.fit in the UAE market. The company also has plans to enter other regions including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, West Asia, Europe, and North America. The entry to South-East Asia has been planned for the end of 2020.

Nagori noted that Cure.fit plans to go deep in the cities where it is currently present, especially across Cult.fit and Eat.fit verticals and expand services for all the three verticals across 50 Indian cities with over 1000 centres in the next three years. While Care.fit will continue growing in Bengaluru, Cult gear is planned to expand nationally, along with Whole.fit entering all metro cities, he added. 

Talking about the role company valuations play in building a brand image, Nagori said, “a customer is interested in their experience with the brand and not as much about the valuation of a company. We feel it does not play a crucial role in brand image.”

When ecommerce entered India, little did people realise the impact it would have on businesses and the Indian economy. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that ecommerce gave rise to aspirations and hopes in other sectors as well, and threw a big challenge to the traditional retail industry, the effects of which are still rippling through the Indian economy. The shift brought in by ecommerce in consumer behaviour is also palpable and can be seen in the rise of food delivery and hyperlocal delivery and services. And in hand with ecommerce, India’s ageing logistics infrastructure also got a tech upgrade, but not all retail players have joined the rush to adopt technology.

Convenience and low prices have been the driving forces for ecommerce since the early days and a bone of contention between traditional players and new platforms. But today, with ecommerce retailers catering to every kind of product, service and shopping experience, the challenge for the retail industry has become more nuanced than just knowing what price to offer. “With the coming of Amazon into the market, many retail giants shut down and businesses realised the need to run operations in a tech-savvy manner,” believes LogiNext cofounder Dhruvil Sanghvi. He further added that today, we are using applications powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence without even realising their presence.

Founded in 2015, five years after the founding duo, Manisha Raisinghani and Dhruvil Sanghvi met at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA, LogiNext operates via headquarters in California and an office in Mumbai.

“It is at our university where we were taught data science and machine learning by the founding members of companies like Uber and Google which became a game-changing experience for us,” said Sanghvi. He added that while machine learning was a buzzword back then, the duo has witnessed how machine learning evolved from a research topic to an industry-wide application over the years.

After college, the two separated and joined different firms. “While I started working with Deloitte and Manisha joined IBM and garnered experience in retail, transportation, ecommerce, and home deliveries. The trends that were picking up in the USA between 2010-2015. This helped us in establishing LogiNext,” Sanghvi said.

This streamlining of logistics is where most ecommerce platforms failed after the initial growth spurt. As costs for deliveries and returns spiralled up and with limited visibility into the products in transit, India’s first few ecommerce companies were running bloated operations. The entry of tech-heavy platforms such as Amazon and the growth of Flipkart in the logistics domain made it clear that logistics was a crucial component in ecommerce.

LogiNext’s SaaS offering helps businesses plan and manage their dispatch schedules, delivery routes and fulfilment capacity through data and predictive analytics. The company uses artificial intelligence-based algorithms that predict location-based decisions and automates the delivery processes like route planning, ETA calculation, traffic prediction and also manages exceptions, notifications and the customer experience in real-time.

The last decade has brought transformational changes in the way Indians shop. As per Statista, India had the fastest growing online retail market in 2019. The number of digital buyers across the country was estimated to be approximately 330 Mn in 2020. The figure suggests that almost 71% of internet users in India have purchased products online. But ecommerce is just one slice of the retail market overall. And even retail players these days are recognising the need to improve their logistics operations.

Sanghvi told Inc42, “Retail companies never used to do deliveries earlier but now almost everyone does as more than 25% of their revenue is coming from ecommerce so that is a big change that happened over the last 5-7 years.”

With established majors such as UPS and FedEx, which were the traditional partners for the retail industry, also burning a lot of cash to compete with technology, the retail logistics industry was riddled with inefficiencies, lack of optimisation and a lack of automation. Founded in 2015, LogiNext bet it could change this in a manner that doesn’t impact the industry.

“While we were building this company we were seeing a lot of startups and companies failing across the world because a lot of startups ended up burning a lot of money. We, however, retained our SaaS model which is a high gross margin business and currently have more than 90% gross margin making us EBITA profitable in the fourth year of our journey (last year),” Sanghvi stated.

In January 2020, the company had raised $39 Mn funding from US-based investors Tiger Global Management and Steadview Capital. The Series B investment is its third funding round in the last three years after it raised $10 Mn in a Series A round led by Paytm and Alibaba in 2016. Sanghvi said the company will be using the funds to penetrate deeper into the overseas market, where it’s earning the majority of its revenue currently.

Loginext has been in the news for the exit of Sanjay Mehta, the company’s first investor, who made a 16x return on his first cheque investment. Mehta told Inc42, “LogiNext was one of the companies that walked the talk and delivered on everything that the cofounders — Dhruvil Sanghvi and Manisha Raisinghani — had pitched.”

Mehta had led LogiNext’s seed-stage funding round with about INR 3 Cr ($420K in current conversion rates), along with other 37 investors from Indian Angel Network (IAN).

With a team of around 100 employees, the startup currently has operations in India, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, UAE, UK, Germany, USA, Canada, and Australia. The startup further plans to penetrate countries in the Asia Pacific, European and North American markets. LogiNext has clients such as athletic goods major Decathalon, fast food giants McDonald’s and Dominos, one of the world’s largest breweries Heineken as well as consumer goods giant Unilever.

The key strength Sanghvi believes is LogiNext’s technology. Most SaaS businesses are heavily reliant on the feet-on-street model where they have salespeople and account managers visiting customers regularly. This adds to the travel cost and the cost of hiring local people in each market, he said.

“We are a pure-play software shop, we have been able to grow by establishing partners across the world. This model has been the key to our efficiency because we don’t have to stress about visiting the customers.”

Talking on the progress of LogiNext, the investor added that the company started off by focussing on small and medium enterprises in India and then moved to larger players in the segment. Eventually, the company shifted its focus to customers from overseas markets such as the US, Asia-Pacific region (APAC) and others.

Transportation being a very fragmented industry, globally there are a lot of small-scale companies that have a good relationship with local transportation companies in different countries. “We build incentives for these small companies to sell and implement our software and also do marketing in a hyperlocalised manner. Our partners become our catalysts.”

“One of the biggest trends in the coming years will be as to how people-free you can make your business.” – Dhruvil Sanghvi, cofounder LogiNext

While that might sound ominous from the point of view of jobs, it’s about striving for efficiency. LogiNext believes that inefficiencies in newer retail markets will help them solve real problems. Sanghvi even claimed the company will be ready for an IPO in the next five years.

He puts that conviction down to the market conditions. After 2010, a global shift has happened fundamentally in expectations. The customer no longer wants to wait, Sanghvi said. “They no longer want to go and buy the product but want it delivered right away. With this expectation setting in globally, there is a stronger need not just to improve home delivery but also improve the entire supply chain,” he added.

While every business considers last-mile delivery a major challenge, particularly in developing markets, Sanghvi said every leg of the process matters, which trickles down to efficiency in the last-mile. “To be efficient the service has to be cheaper and faster. The only way to do that is by real-time processing of information about routing, capacity management, dynamic pricing of the load, tracking and availability of drivers,” he said.

As a highly technology-dependent startup that uses a large scale of customer data on a day-to-day basis, LogiNext believes that while they have access to a customer’s data the ownership rights still lie with the customer. Sanghvi said that their cloud instances and architecture are designed in a manner that allows a customer to wipe-out their data when they feel like.

Pale faces, shivers and goosebumps, and perhaps even a few nervous tummies. It’s not a fever; it’s just maths.

Kids in India might not be scared of much these days, but maths may send them into panic. But the numbers and complex formulae would not seem complicated if the basics are strong. When students feel intimidated by teachers, learning the basics of maths can become a burden.

When Arpit Jain, Mayank Jain, Joy Deep Nath, and Umang Jain met as students at IIT Kharagpur, they noticed and observed the kids in and around the campus struggling to successfully do addition or subtraction for their homework, but they knew exactly how many more coins they needed to win to upgrade their car in a video game. Yes, it sounds like a movie trope, but even that cliché is based on real-world experience.

“In games, these kids were doing maths calculations that were far beyond their age but hand them a maths sum on paper and they wouldn’t be able to solve it. This proved that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we’re teaching our kids,” – Arpit Jain, CEO and cofounder, SplashLearn

In 2011, the quartet launched SplashLearn (formerly known as Splash Math), touting it as the first game-based curriculum-aligned maths programme in the market. The company was bootstrapped and raised the first venture round from Accel Partners in October 2018 to expand into other subjects and beyond the US market.

SplashLearn is a game-based learning programme that adapts to each child’s skill level and helps them master grade-appropriate skills for maths and reading at their own pace. The platform is curriculum-aligned and covers pre-kindergarten through grade 5 for math, and elementary reading for pre-kindergarten to grade 2. The programme comes with a parent app that allows parents to track their child’s progress and helps them identify areas they need to focus on.

However, this edtech venture was not the firsts for the four founders. Together, while still in college where they met, they launched their first edtech company in 2008 called Intinno. The platform was a learning management system (LMS) that was designed to encourage collaboration between teachers and students. Although Intinno broke even, the team found it difficult to scale in India at the time given the low technology and internet penetration.

In 2010, the team decided to wind down Intinno and focus on elementary school learners, initially in the US. Cofounder Arpit told Inc42, “SplashLearn was initially launched in the US due to many favourable factors like higher internet penetration and high adoption of technology in schools and homes. It’s the fastest-growing elementary programme in US homes and is also used in 1 out of every 3 schools.”

He further said, that with the democratisation of technology, the team is looking to expand to new geographies, subjects, grades/classes, and platforms.

“SplashLearn’s modular tech architecture gives us great agility and the ability to launch the product in any country in just 20 days. We already have users in more than 150 countries but we plan to offer custom curriculum-aligned products for each region,” added Arpit.

Why India Matters For SplashLearn

As per DataLabs’  The Future Of India’s $2 Bn Edtech Opportunity Report, 2020, the opportunity in India’s online education market is estimated to soar to $1.96 Bn in 2021 from $247 Mn in 2017.

Jain recalls how affordable devices and the internet boom acted as catalysts for the business like it has for others. He said, “In the coming years, we’ll see a lot of change as technology slowly moves from the periphery of the classroom to its centre. The curriculum itself is changing and how that curriculum reaches students is shifting from focusing on how teachers teach, to focusing on how learners learn. We are now able to personalise lessons for each individual learner and allow for greater differentiation in the classroom to suit student needs.”

While many complain about the fact that kids these days are born with tech skills and are hooked onto gadgets right from the time they enter the world, SplashLearn believes that this predilection can be banked upon to capitalise on the opportunity to deliver the best learning outcomes.

“Unlike passive educational videos, game-based learning puts learners in an environment where they are actively involved in the whole learning process. While playing a game, kids learn at their own pace. They learn from their own mistakes and figure out solutions through minimal assistance, thereby improving their problem-solving skills. In the long run, this improves their ability to think critically and to apply these skills in real-world situations,” said Arpit.

All Things Are Difficult Before They Are Easy

As a sector which is on the cusp of mainstream acceptance among the Indian masses, edtech has been facing some key challenges like the lack of uniform internet accessibility, quality content, the dearth of technology training, cost viability and low absorption rate. In such a scenario, running a business in this space comes with its own set of challenges.

Along with identifying, recruiting and training the right talent for business, in terms of product research, cofounder Arpit believes that building a learning program that is effective and also engaging to children across geographies was a multi-layered and complex task.

“SplashLearn was launched in the US, a market with a high penetration of technology in homes and schools. Repeating the same success in regions that are still getting introduced to technology and the internet is a challenge facing most edtech players today. Even if the technology is available, teachers still find it challenging to use edtech products in the classroom due to red-tape and low budgets. To solve this, SplashLearn is free for teachers to use in classrooms. This ensures easy access to millions of students around the world,” he added.

More Than Just An Investor

A good investor-founder relationship is no less than a marriage. In his article, Joe Procopio states that a founder’s request to investors for advice are usually welcomed, even if they can’t all be met, while requests for money are never welcomed.

This brings to light the importance of having an investor with a vision and mentorship ability on-board. SplashLearn raised its first venture round from Accel Partners in October 2018.

“Accel is very different from traditional VCs. In addition to their investment team, Accel has built an in-house team of professionals from various fields including HR, Marketing, Product. This team acts as an extension of our internal team. Since they work with multiple companies, they bring in collective wisdom, cross-domain knowledge and help us in scaling our operations across various teams efficiently,” said cofounder Arpit.

According to an analysis incorporated in the Economic Survey 2017-18, the income elasticity on education is estimated at 0.93 compared to 1.95 in healthcare. DataLabs by Inc42 assessed that this indicates that be it any income level, the Indian consumer will prefer investing more on education than healthcare. The analysis uses Engel’s law of income elasticity to arrive at the conclusion and adds that gamification will add to the interest of young users and drive the easy simulation of concepts, besides knowledge enhancement and increased user acquisition. This could even force parents to gravitate towards such learning tools as children show a better understanding of concepts.

SplashLearn believes that India’s largest population age group of five to 24, with 250 Mn school-going children combined with the wildfire-like spread of internet penetration in the past few years makes the country an arena that’s ready for online learning – gamified or not.

A small business owner once bought a couple of trucks as an investment strategy and leased them out to other businesses whenever they needed to use the vehicle to transport goods. Of course, at first, it sounded like a great option to earn extra income, but soon he realised the difficulty of keeping track of the trucks, had to spend a lot on their timely maintenance and struggled to obtain regular business within the local circle. While he had to keep paying off the loans for the trucks, the business suffered as the assets were not being utilised in an efficient manner. Eventually, the man lost his trucks, had to give up on the transport business and went nearly bankrupt. It sounds like a warning for small business owners in India, but it’s the story that inspired Prasad Sreeram to launch COGOS and target truckers in India.

When Sreeram’s friend, who went through the troubled times described above, wanted help, there wasn’t much he could get to organise the business. This made Sreeram realise just how important it could be for other truckers or transport business owners. He believed his friend’s situation could have been avoided had there been proper tech intervention. As soon as Sreeram finished engineering in college, he began working on vehicle-tracking systems and maps APIs to came up with a logistics management platform.

Joined by Dr. Rama Mohan Katta, he founded COGOS to solve the worries of small transport owners, many of whom are not very tech-savvy. As a former carry forwarding (C&F) and stevedoring agent, Katta had the experience of working in the logistics and freight industry, and he knew just how difficult it is to find a reliable way to deliver materials locally, something he observed regularly with cargo at ports. Getting a clear picture of the fleet, the pricing, and the truck capacity were some of the major challenges and Katta knew COGOS could operate in niches that other companies haven’t yet tapped.

Founded in 2016, COGOS is an AI-led logistics platform that claims to offer tools that solve the challenges for most intra-city supply chain businesses that are run on trucks or smaller tempos. The startup has received funding from like Padmaja Ruperal, Saurabh Srivatsava, Anukur Jain, Charles Owen, Niraj Saran, Raman Roy, Suresh Kumar, Farhat Ali among others.

With integrated advanced sensors, IoT technology, and third-party applications, COGOS helps truckers plan, execute and control the movement and storage of goods, with a clear view of the fleet in real-time. The platform also provides related information in an actionable manner between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet customer requirements such as delivery tracking features within some ecommerce or other delivery apps.

The COGOS delivery management system (DMS) claims to help businesses book trucks, track their whereabouts and manage the movement of cargo while allowing live tracking of vehicle location. It also provides electronic proof of delivery to prevent theft and protect against other incidents in transit.

The company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool assists in planning, scheduling, and dispatch of goods. It uses a just-in-time (JIT) management to clear the queue in real-time. Besides this, COGOS offers trucking businesses automatic billing and invoicing upon delivery features, which helps them stay ahead of market demands, and solves liquidity issues. Businesses can also keep track of their trucking expenditures through a dedicated dashboard.

Finding The Niche In A Large Market

“In the current gig economy where the ability to respond quickly to the market dynamics is the key, COGOS is fast becoming the de-facto player for marquee customers such as Flipkart, Amazon, Udaan, Delhivery, and Bigbasket for city logistics and fast-expanding the presence which will aid network effects,” Sreeram told Inc42.

COGOS claims to operate in more than 150 cities across India with a strong presence in northeast India, due to the lower degree of competition in this particular market.

Like various other logistics entrepreneurs, cofounder Sreeram also believes that the logistics sector is highly fragmented with 85% of the trucks owned by individuals or small-time entrepreneurs, where discovery and reliability are two major challenges. Along with working capital crunches and delayed payments as long-standing issues in the market.

“While technology will weed out the earlier challenges, we believe that fintech and early payment discipline will help the sector in the longer run,” Sreeram added.

What Sets COGOS Apart?

The highly fragmented supply of trucks, inconsistent earnings from truckers, delayed payments by customers, poor vehicle utilisation and lack of adequate management tools are some of the other challenges, according to Sreeram, which are the hurdles in front of other startups in the logistics sector in India too.

COGOS falls into the same category of players such as Rivigo and Blackbuck that are heavily funded and operate in more cities across the globe. The competitors focus on solving problems like fuel analytics, route planning, human behaviour analysis or pure-drudgery elimination tasks like auto-alert systems and intelligent decision systems.

Reiterating the focus on finding the right geographies to achieve growth, Sreeram said that while there is a lot of work being done in the market for truck discovery by many startups, they are largely concentrated around metros and tier-1 cities. “However, there are no consolidated pan-India players for city logistics covering Tier-1, 2 and 3, along with metros. COGOS is looking to bridge this gap,” Sreeram said to explain how COGOS is trying to outpace the competition.

For now, COGOS charges customers based on the kilometres driven by the truck, time utilised and the deliveries made.

Ecommerce did not bring the logistics industry into existence, it only validated its existence by bringing a paradigm shift in how things operated. Earlier, deliveries from warehouses happened in bulk, now single products started moving out of the warehouses.

India spends around 14.4% of its GDP on logistics compared to less than 8% spent by other developing countries. The logistics market in India is expected to be worth $307 Bn by 2020 and the unorganised nature of the sector opens up huge scope for disruption. Startups that capitalise on the right technology to solve the pain point of the industry are here to be in the long run.

The interplay of infrastructure, technology and new types of service providers will define whether the logistics industry is able to solve the real problems and help businesses reduce their transportation costs and inefficiency in a meaningful manner.

“As someone who has been in the banking industry for more than 15 years, I have been familiar with the shortcomings in the traditional lending sector. So, there isn’t one but multiple experiences that urged us to launch LoanTap.” Satyam Kumar, cofounder and CEO, LoanTap.

The first signs of change in the Indian payment ecosystem appeared on the scene post the formal commencement of operations of the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2009. Fast forward to 2015, the average Indian consumer was aware of digital payments and a small fraction of users had started utilising digital payment instruments like credit/debit cards, IMPS, USSD, RTGS, NEFT, and digital wallets.

Once payments went digital after 2016, entrepreneurs started looking for gaps and shortcomings in other areas of financial services, marking lending another sector ripe for disruption. The traditional financial institutions (FIs), with its own limitations, were not an easy place to borrow credit.

Consumers had to jump through several hoops — from documentation hassles to assessment of creditworthiness to long turnaround times, which made it impossible to get loans in an emergency. And when you did get them, they were vanilla personal loans — one size fits all — no matter the specific need. These several gaps meant lending startups could find a niche by solving for one or many problems.

“Our market research also pointed out that a majority of barriers to credit penetration could be easily countered by leveraging an array of technologies and non-conventional data repositories, especially with reference to salaried professionals,” said Kumar.

Although we have a plethora of lending players now in both business and consumer segment, considering the period between 2015-2016, this was a significant opportunity to pursue.

“We wanted to redefine the retail asset distribution model by eliminating the information gap between lender and consumer. So, we integrated our respective specializations in retail loans and technology domains to create a consumer-friendly credit facility in the competitive fintech space and hence LoanTap was established,” he added.

LoanTap: Key Products And Growth So Far

LoanTap has customer-centric products such as rental deposit loans, EMI free loans, salary advance and a personal overdraft. These products are designed to meet different life needs of the customer.

It also offers a differentiated product stack of end-use based products such as wedding loans, holiday loan, rental deposit loan as well as flexible loans like personal overdraft, credit card takeover loan, which gives more financial control in the hands of the borrower.

“With changing times and changing needs of customers, there is a demand for customised products for end-use ranging from holiday, buying a luxury bike or wedding. Thus, there are different factors affecting loan origination and therefore their repayment cycle should also be different,” said Kumar.

Technology At Play At LoanTap

In India, one of the major challenges is the evolving regulatory situation and this is true for lending too as it is for other fintech models. “Besides this, in the last 12-15 months, India and specifically its NBFC sector have seen unprecedented levels of liquidity squeeze, which has separated the boys from men,” said Kumar.

This requires companies to build their processes in a manner that they can smoothly accommodate the new changes. A major role here is thus played by the technology-induced at the backend processes.

As claimed by Kumar, LoanTap has maximised the use of technology to enhance all processes, from credit origination to the final loan disbursal, thereby ensuring that a loan reaches every applicant within 24-36 hours of the initial loan application.

“We use technology to deliver smart and innovative products for millennials. Our flagship product – EMI Free Loan provides the flexibility of payment to customers along with 40% lower monthly instalments as compared to regular personal loans,” he added.

LoanTap has also developed an in-house lead origination and loan management system called Finsome. This software ensures seamless data flow from lead origination, customer set management and lead processing, loan management, credit processing, disbursement to post disbursement care.

“Till date, we have serviced more than 25000 + customers and have received high appreciation for our services,” boasted Kumar.

Personal Loans: A $1 Tn Opportunity To Tap

The personal loan market is expected to reach a size of $1 Tn by 2025. However, as large is the opportunity, so is the players tapping for a significant share. This includes both the deep-pocketed players like MoneyTap, CreditVidya, PayMeIndia, Capital Float, ZestMoney, IndiaLends, Incred, MoneyTap, PaisaBazaar and the new age players like Earlysalary, Finzy, Shubhloans among others.

A lot of players are now also moving towards the tier 2 and tier audience, while further diversifying their offerings in a relative manner. LoanTap is no different.

Although, the company is currently focussed on the urban demand coming from salaried professionals with its business footprint across 20 cities in India. “Five years from now, we can see ourselves making deeper inroads into tier2 and tier 3 markets and diversify our loan offerings based on customer requirements,” said Kumar.

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 time, we take a look at self-drive car rental startup Zoomcar.

Amid growing urban congestion and air pollution levels, the need for sustainable mobility solutions has become apparent and is something most automotive companies are working towards. Even within the transport tech arena, many players are trying to bag the piece of the pie with solutions ranging from carpooling to self-drive rentals to electric vehicle fleets. 

While big mobility startups such as Uber and Ola are yet to introduce electric cars in their fleets in any significant manner. Shared mobility startup Zoomcar has already helped bring more than 500 EVs to the Indian roads.

Talking to Inc42, founder Greg Moran claimed that Zoomcar is set to add another 1000 cars to its fleet within the next year and a further 10K cars by 2021. He also noted Zoomcar is planning to introduce new electric vehicle-related offerings in the next few months.

“The very business model of Zoomcar is centered on reducing the burden of increasing vehicles on the infrastructure and the environment. In my opinion, a car shared takes 20 other cars off the road,” said Moran. 

The Sequoia-backed company was founded by David Back and Greg Moran in 2012. Currently, Zoomcar is present in more than 45 cities, including Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, Kochi and Pune among others. The company serves over three thousand customers every day and has over 48 lakh subscribers and a fleet of over 6.5K cars. 

What Will Drive Zoomcar’s Unicorn Status?

Talking about the factors that would help Zoomcar reach a valuation of $1 Bn, Moran said that it would essentially be driven through expansion in terms of market share and overall wherewithal.

“One of our main focus areas has been increasing this exponentially by adding more and more vehicle models which will be offered on a subscription basis. We are also aggressively partnering the major automobile OEMs to offer a subscription as an alternative to vehicle ownership,” Moran emphasised. 

India is said to have 127 Mn driving license holders with a ‘cars to people’ ratio of 22:1000 in 2019. The consumer preference leans towards renting bigger, safer and more powerful cars for intercity trips, which can accommodate typical-sized Indian families to the self-driving market size and addressable base. 

A Mobility Insights 2019 report estimates the self-driving market to be a $100 Mn opportunity in India, which is currently highly under-penetrated. Moran claims that Zoomcar currently owns about 80% of the market in the self-driven space.

Further, in the shared subscription mobility market Zoomcar also plays the role of the lender for more than 10K cars, as compared to 4K listings on its competition, peer-to-peer car rental company Drivezy. 

In October 2019, India’s mobility unicorn Ola also entered self-driving rentals with the launch of Ola Drive. Since then, Zoomcar has been adding funds to its Indian entity. In December 2019, Zoomcar received $4.8 Mn from its US-based parent company Zoomcar Inc. In January 2020, the company again raised $30 Mn from Sony Innovation Fund, the venture capital wing of electronics giant Sony.

Till now, Zoomcar has raised around $100 Mn across funding rounds. Its investors include Trifecta Capital, InnoVen Capital, Sequoia Capital, Empire Angels, Mahindra and Mahindra, among others.

Zoomcar claims to have grown at over 2x this year compared to last year because of the higher platform inventory.

According to its filings for FY19, Zoomcar increased its revenue to INR 266 Cr in FY19 from INR 157 Cr in FY18. However, the company’s expenses also almost doubled to INR 468 Cr as compared to INR 274 Cr in FY18. This also spiked Zoomcar’s losses to INR 201 Cr (FY19) from INR 116 Cr in the previous year.  

Last month, Zoomcar had shared plans to invest more towards expanding its presence across India, technology, data science and innovations around the internet of things (IoT).

Building A Smart Fleet For 2020

Doubling down on its commitment to disrupting the status quo, Zoomcar has introduced features such as car data-tracking solution Cadabra and the AI-powered Driver Scorecard. These will complement its primary self-driving business. 

Cadabra is a vehicular data tracking solution that plugs into the car’s on-board diagnostics (OBD-II) port and collects information such as distance travelled, fuel usage, engine health, seat belt usage, clutch performance and more. This functionality comes with Bluetooth and 4G connectivity allowing cars to interact with emergency services in case of an accident. In addition to this, the feature helps drivers optimise riding speeds, save fuel, and get engine alerts for maintenance.

The company has also recently launched the Driver Score feature, which vehicle-agnostic. The AI and machine learning algorithm tracks the mechanical condition of the car being driven, the driving style and behaviour, and identifies critical events while driving and rates it on a scale of 0-100, said Moran.

The company plans to invest its recent fundraise towards growth, technology and data science with a strong focus on enhancing an industry-leading IoT layout.

And that could be the key difference for Zoomcar as it battles Drivezy and now Ola in the self-driving space. The Driver Score and Cadabra platforms are extensible to other services and could even be integrated into larger fleets managed by large corporates or within the logistics sector. But for now, Zoomcar is focussed on its strong points and with self-driving becoming a real option in the metros where new car ownership has fallen quite a bit in the last year. 

How many payments app do you have on your phone? Yes, just that number can give you an idea of how cashless payments have taken off in India — perhaps faster than any other country. Along with payments pioneer Paytm, we now have PhonePe, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, BHIM, official mobile banking apps and many other options riding on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) wave.

With approximately 8.74 Bn digital payment transactions enabled through UPI in 2019, India is slowly shaking off its cash reliance. Add to cart, click, click, click and done! The order is placed, the tickets are booked and the hottest new products have been delivered the next day. Everything is just one tap away. But not for everyone in India

However, in the bid to make India into a cashless economy, have we really taken everyone on board?

The answer is no if you ask Abhishek Bhayana and IIT Roorkee alumnus Himanshu Garg. For the duo, while digital payments are taking off in metros, the gap in smaller towns is too big for the fintech revolution to vault over. So the two entrepreneurs want to merge online buying with offline payments with “NearPe”.

Founded in 2019, Nearpe allows consumers to pay at the nearest store for online services ranging from on-demand video and music streaming services, ecommerce, online ticketing and travel bookings and most other online services that one takes for granted in the cities. All a user has to do is place an order online, select “NearPe” payment option and pay the nearest NearPe partner retail store.

“In the game of digital payments, where you have UPI, all these wallets, credit cards, debit cards and netbanking, we are actually the cash option,” Bhayana said.

Bhayana elaborated that NearPe works like a regular payment gateway, but with an extensive focus on the end customer that does not want to go digital just yet. Now, people, who are not so comfortable with digital payments can book airline tickets, pay for their favourite OTT platforms and other digital services that typically exclusively work on digital transactions.

He noted that NearPe transfers the cash to the merchants in roughly three days like any other payment gateway, and it also takes into consideration the requirements of the merchants to keep a transaction open for however long they want.

What’s Plaguing Tier II And Tier III Digital Payments?

As per a Credit Suisse report, even though digital payments have been successful in metros and Tier 1 cities in India, the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities are still facing many hurdles in adoption. Plus, there is a huge section of the population still feeling the friction of digitial payments, largely because of the trust factor.

According to Sajith Pai, director at Blume Ventures, not all tech products in the Indian market are solving for the universal needs of the market. In fact, many products or services have broad universal use cases to break into Tier 2 market and beyond. For example, Pai contends that India 2 and India 3 have the potential to become massive markets in themselves, even if you remove the more affluent and digitally-savvy India 1 out of the equation. And this is the India-2 and India-3 that NearPe wants to target.

Bhayana has previously founded Nikola Tech which had developed a cloud-based point of sales platform, Strawberry POS, for restaurants. Whereas, Garg has served as the CTO for tour and travel company Via.com and fintech startup EbixCash. Garg had also founded an ecommerce consolidator platform, Shoppoke Technology.

But what made them come up with the idea to push for offline payments when digital payments is so fashionable? Bhayana told Inc42 the main reasons was solving the friction for the older generation of consumers, and targetting users who do not have bank accounts or means to make digital payments.

“In Indian we have 500 Mn smartphone users, only 80 Mn have done a digital transaction through credit card, debit card or UPI. We are the option for the other 420 Mn that prefer to pay in cash.”

Bhayana elaborated that the digital transactions have left Tier II and Tier III market out of the growth arc. Moreover, he noted that almost 60% of the UPI transactions are peer-to-peer and not peer-to-merchant. NearPe is looking to tackle that challenge and provide solutions for the friction in the digital payments for online shopping and other purchases, well beyond peer-to-peer transactions.

Bhayana clarified that NearPe’s offline payment solution is converting the so-called postpaid payments (cash on delivery) into prepaid orders and helping out ecommerce companies in cutting down the cost of servicing CoD.

“We are trying to go after cash-on-delivery. It is very expensive for ecommerce merchants and it has very high rates of returns. What happens is that people order four things and return three things on the doorstep. We are trying to cut the cost of cash-on-delivery by one-third, which also reduces the returns by four times,” Bhayana said.

NearPe’s India-Wide Network In Six Months

Still in the initial stages of its journey, the Y Combinator-backed company currently has a network of more than 10K retailers in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Western Uttar Pradesh — including Meerut, Bijnor, Najebabad, Muzaffarabad and others.

Soon, the company will be expanding to Tier 2 and Tier 3 areas of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The company claims that its retailer network is growing “day-by-day” and plans to go nationwide in under six months.

For this, NearPe works with distributors to power the network. “So even if we want another 10K retailers in another week’s time, it is very possible for us. We go through the distributor agent model and not through the retailer directly,” Bhayana added. It has also partnered with a few online travel agencies (OTA), ecommerce platforms, OTT platforms, taxi services, other digital services and is underway to get more onboard.

To bring more retailers on board as payment points, NearPe splits its commissions. Bhayana said, “NearPe charges 2.5% per transaction with a minimum of Rs 25 per transaction”. He added that almost 70% of this commission is passed on to retailers and the distributors.

Through its business model, NearPe aims to provide an alternative to small retailers to earn extra income for doing nothing different and with relatively low capital expenditure. Shopkeepers can also hedge their bets on spending towards online and offline payments in a more sustainable manner. “We have made retailers into the mini CTOs, who will handle all the transactions for you,” Bhayana added.

“Over 7/10 kids in schools take an after school class and over 75% of them go to an after school class for maths,” said Manan Khurma, founder of Cuemath.

Yes, maths remains as daunting for kids today as it has been for generations past. But technology and startups are definitely reducing the learning curve to a great extent. Like SplashLearn, BYJU’s Toppr, Vedantu, Unacademy, and Cuemath.

Since 2014, Cuemath has been providing online lessons under its Foundation maths Program and live online classes. The former caters to kids in the bracket between kindergarten and grade six, where Cuemath partners with teachers, and provides students and teachers with the right learning material and a Cuemath tablet. Its live online classes are for kids between grades seven and ten and include slightly more complex lessons.

For Khurma, maths has always been a passion — and when it comes to maths, a passion for numbers is half the battle won. He started teaching maths basics to other students even when he was a student at IIT Delhi leading him to start LOCUS Education in 2007. But after teaching thousands of students he arrived at the conclusion that by grade tenth, the fundamentals are either built or not. “It is very difficult if not impossible to build capability in later grades without a good foundation in earlier grades. So I exited the business and founded a new startup focused on younger grades i.e K-10, the crucial years that create the maths ability needed to win in today’s world,” he said.

But what is it that makes most children dread maths as a school subject?

A 2012 paper published by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education at the Tata Institute For Fundamental Research states, “If one were asked to isolate and point to one single challenge as the most important among the plethora of problems that we have mentioned, it would have to be that of creating a pool of good mathematics teachers in the required numbers.”

Further, introducing systemic measures to achieve quality in teacher preparation is perhaps the most urgent need in Indian mathematics teaching today.

On similar lines, Khurma believes that by building user-friendly pedagogy and customised tools, Cuemath can enable every teacher to be a great maths teacher. “The real problem we are solving operationally is the lack of quality maths teachers at the scale, the world now needs,” he added.

Can Cuemath Teach Teachers?

As per an analysis by Datalabs by Inc42 in The Future Of India’s $2 Bn Edtech Opportunity Report 2020, live online classes will gain popularity in the year ahead and in 2021 as a visual explanation of concepts will be a crucial factor in creating engagement.

In today’s business environment where there are many players for every category of product, consumer experience is the king. Thereby, offering the best quality no longer serves as a competitive advantage and businesses need to look beyond.

For Khurma, the focus is on the teacher. That’ll be the difference, he reckons.

“Quality content is available for free at Khan Academy, then why buy a video lesson?”

Cuemath bets high on the “presence of teacher” factor in online classrooms offering individual attention. “For many other platforms content is the business they are in. We don’t believe that only content leads to better outcomes. We need to customise it for every child and that is the role of the teacher,” said Khurma.

The brand competes with other players in the same market offering personalised online classes namely, Khan Academy, SplashLearn, Byju’s, Toppr, Vedantu, Unacademy, Mathspace, Prepworks and MySchoolPage among others.

Unique to Cuemath is LEAP, its platform that customises every class, every worksheet for every student, and allows the completion of course curriculum 20% faster than other competing options.

“Our data shows that kids almost double speed in six months and double logical ability in a year,” Khurma added.

Backed by Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, Manta Ray Ventures, Unitus Ventures, Alphabet and Trifecta Capital Advisors among others, Cuemath believes that the investors have helped them in various aspects but largely through mentorship and guiding the team to building tech for a global scale.

The Tough Sums Of Business

The emerging edtech sector of India is faced with various challenges that range from parental bias, brand discovery challenges, language barriers and disrupted content streaming among others. Khurma believes that the challenge is always about creating the capability to learn better and faster amongst kids at scale. It’s not about doing this for just a few kids, but delivering better outcomes for an entire generation.

He added that to deliver massive learning outcomes at scale the key is to personalise the learning journey for each kid, get them to love maths and do this consistently for millions of kids.

“Every kid can be good at maths, there is no such thing as a maths gene.”

However, Khurma believes that this is not just a pedagogy issue but a deep tech problem. “In the last two years, we have invested over 50% of our engineering team strength to this task. We have now created a unique maths teaching platform. The technology allows kids to complete the coursework in 80% of the time that is standard across medium, with about half the amount of time spent in a formal class with top tier results,” he said.

He added that the progress so far gives the startup the confidence that it can serve the needs of millions of students worldwide. A student typically pays about INR 2000 per month for 12 classes.

Khurma said the company does not want to operate its own centers but rather wants teachers to operate from their own homes with the use of technology. With over 5K teachers currently on board, Cuemath handles training, certification and enters into revenue-sharing arrangements with them.

Cuemath claims a gross revenue of $10 Mn ARR (annualised run rate) and is banking high on its digital platform. “Our growth focus is through the digital platform that we have built in the last 12 months. Our digital business is growing at breakneck speed and by the end of this year will account for more than 50% of our revenues. Digital classes are also instrumental in expanding outside India as well and have students from over 15 countries,” said Khurma.

As for trends, Khurma believes that for maths the complexity will dramatically increase as the world becomes more AI-driven and rapid adoption of new techniques will be required, which give maths-focussed platforms a massive opportunity.

Over the years, the notion of learning has changed drastically. Decades ago, children got the world-view from their ancestors, then books and now tablets and smart devices. And video has become the default instruction of medium for many kids.

According to a 2019 Zinnov report, video-based content is becoming the most preferred content type. This is combined with the demand for vernacular content in tier 2 and 3 markets. So, while we have seen increased traction for TikTok, ShareChat, Helo, YouTube and others in the regional language content domain, edtech is only slowly coming to terms with it.

Infotainment or video-based learning is an opportunity being tapped by Toppr, BYJU’S, Unacademy, Vedantu and others, but what about video-based skill development?

Gurugram-based Josh Talks wants to own this niche. The startup is working to reach tier 2 and 3 markets with its skill development platform and helping them achieve their aspirations. Founded in 2015 by Supriya Paul and Shobhit Banga, Josh Talks began with a vision to give India the choice and chance of a better future.

The company has now bagged Pre-Series A funding from New York-based media development investor MDIF and angel investors. Cofounder Paul told Inc42 that the company has raised INR 11.2 Cr ($1.5 Mn) from the investors which the company will use to scale its e-learning programme, Josh Skills. Prior to this, the company has raised undisclosed seed funding from angels such as Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham, Innov8 founder Ritesh Malik, RateGain CRO Apurva Chamaria among others.

Paul recalled that the initial idea was to create a platform that actually gives direction to a person’s potential and also handholds them to help achieve their dream. “Our goal is to eventually unlock human potential,” she said.

Josh Talks: Reaching 45 Mn Monthly Viewers Through Stories

Storytelling is intrinsic to Indian culture and a key part of the learning traditions. Kathas (fables) and other oral folklore traditions are part of nearly every child’s upbringing in India and the stories vary from family to family and from language to language. As the medium of engagement changes from oral storytelling to visual, Josh Talks is exploring the ideas of bringing these stories to video for skill development.

At Josh Talks, the success stories are told and curated with relatable role models for people from the hinterland of India. This audience finds it easier to connect with role models and learn from them on a regular basis. To build authenticity and relatability, the company offers eight regional Indian languages — Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam and Telugu.

After organising events initially, the company has shifted completely to an online approach in 2017, with YouTube being its most active channel. Today, the company has a monthly viewership of 45 Mn on its platform having hosted speakers like Sonam Wangchuk, Super 30’s Anand Kumar, Anshul Tewari among others. Paul said that it conducts 2000 talks every year. Beyond this, the company has added Josh Kosh, an inclusive career-guidance platform and Josh Skills, a platform to equip low-income students and job seekers in India with the training and tools they need to get a job.

India’s Skill Development Market 

On the B2B front, Josh Talks works with government bodies, associations and corporates to create skill-based models and activate them through on-ground training and workshops. The company has associated with brands such as Facebook, TikTok, United Nations, Oxfam, MGIEP, the Election Commission of India etc to engage and mobilise the power of the youth for social change using the digital medium. These are the company’s sources of monetisation under the B2B model.

Key Kiarie, chief investment officer from MDIF, said, “We see an exciting intersection between our mission to support companies that support the flow of reliable, quality information between people in challenging environments and Josh Talks’ belief in content, community and empowerment.” Key will be joining the Josh Talks’ board as part of the Pre-Series A funding.

On the government level, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2015 launched the Skill India

Campaign. It is aimed at training more than 40 Cr people in the country in a variety of skills by 2022. Initiatives such as National Skill Development Mission, National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), Skill Loan Scheme and Rural India Skill are part of this campaign.

Some of the startups working on skill development in India include Quizizz, Simplilearn, Dronstudy, Toppr etc. India’s skill development market is expected to be $463 Mn in 2021, with a CAGR of 38% between 2016-2021.

In The Future Of India’s $2 Bn Edtech Opportunity Report, DataLabs by Inc42 has noted that in terms of the number of unique edtech businesses funded between January 2014 and September 2019, skill development-focused startups are the most preferred. Between 2014 to 2019 skill development startups raised $14 Mn across 36 deals at seed stage which is higher than other edtech subsectors.

Skill development-focused edtech startups can play a vital role in brushing up the technical skills of students in India. Startups can streamline the supply of interactive learning modules which are in turn more efficient compared with those employed in brick-and-mortar institutions and universities.

Building Basics Through Josh Skills

After inspiring many young students and workers, Paul tells us that the company was trying to understand how to make people capable of achieving their dream independently. About five months back, the company piloted the e-learning platform Josh Skills. “We started launching basic courses that can actually help somebody go up from zero to INR 12K- INR 15K job to INR 20K-INR 25K job,” she added.

The 90-day course takes learners down to the basics — from helping them construct proper sentences to personality development and confidence building courses. The personality development course is led by Ankur Warikoo, founder of Nearbuy.

“And then there are other courses which are popular like financial literacy or managing your money better. If you see people from the bottom of the pyramid as soon as they have some form of savings they decide to buy an asset like a house, which is a dream for many Indian parents. But in this course, we actually teach them the basics of banking, how to save money, where to gain the most interest, where to invest etc,” she explained.

The current focus is on growing the skills vertical out. “Right now most of the courses that are taught on the platform are in Hindi and English. We are also looking at replicating these courses in other vernacular languages.”

With 50K paying subscribers for Josh Skills, the company’s courses are priced around INR 299 to INR 599 for 90 days.

“It’s extremely affordable and low cost because it’s targeted only towards people who come from an economically weaker section of society,” Paul explained.

“We also have some individuals who are above 50+ learning English etc to be able to talk to their children and families and communicate with them in a better manner,” Paul said.

Ed Koch, an American lawyer, politician, and movie critic, once said: “In action, be primitive; in foresight, a strategist.” The journey of API based platform YAP could be said to be the same. Founders Madhusudan R, Muthukumar A and Prabhu R exemplify the Koch ideology in the most relatable manner. 

“We incepted YAP in 2014. This was the time when the only digital payment instruments people were aware of included the likes of credit/debit cards, IMPS, USSD, RTGS, NEFT, and digital wallets. While the traditional banks and businesses wanted to reinvent and seen as digital savvy, but they don’t know how to do that efficiently and effectively,” says Madhusudan.

YAP was thus started as an idea to help businesses work with banks more efficiently. In the last five years, the startup has grown into a full-stack API based platform that helps companies to roll out their own payment products rapidly. It has operations in India as well as Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, UAE, Egypt as well as other key markets in Asia Pacific and Middle East Asia.

The modular mobile-first API banking platform is backed by leading banks including Yes Bank, DCB Bank, Equitas SFB, SBM Bank and allows companies to rapidly develop, test, iterate their own branded debit, credit products as well as prepaid accounts. It even claims that a fintech product can go live in as little as 3-4 days and monetises for every API hit or in case of financial transactions, for every transaction processed.

“We are helping 200+ companies manage their payment products more efficiently with our API platform. 15 banks are live and transacting, over 50 Mn transactions and $2 Bn has been processed in the past year. We intend to grow our reach to 500 fintech companies and 25 banks in the coming year,” he adds.

Taking The Cue From Lego To Build “Lego Banking”

Madhusudan and other cofounders spent a significant part of their career in banking and payments industry working with brands like Visa, Citibank among others. “Our role at Visa gave us a global perspective in terms of what is working in the markets and you are also able to relate to the local businesses that are running around you,” said Madhusudan.

The founders realised that while everyone wants to have a share in the digital pie, it was difficult to convince both the banks and businesses to jump on an entirely new digital strategy. 

“Internally, we term ourself as a Lego banking platform. The pieces to assemble remained the same, its how you assemble made the difference. So we piece together different bits of banking together, yet delivering entirely different solution every time, in line with the needs of the banks and businesses together,” he adds.

The results speak for themselves. YAP now has a clientele including the likes of Ola, Cred, Bank Open, Niyo, Redcarpet, Slice and many others who have opened new accounts, issued and processed payments and co-created new products.

YAP’s Banking Product Architecture 

YAP uses an amalgamation of AI, machine learning and data analytics in the backend. The YAP API engine follows REST-based architecture (Representational State Transfer), which is a fairly well-supported standard and can be accessed by a common interface such as browsers or communication protocols using HTTP standard methods. 

Developers can enable simple functions such as balance checks and wallet top-ups using the API engine. This enables customers to perform these tasks with ease and fintech products can even customise features based on the customer’s capacity to pay for them. 

YAP currently offers products in four broad divisions: 

• Prepaid cards, with a value-addition of reduced lead time and complexity
• YAP Tatkal, allowing a  new-age lender, a wallet issuer or a micro-credit institution offer physical or virtual prepaid cards
• YAP Fleet, where the fleet company gets real-time access to expenses besides being fully in control of toll payments, fuel and driver expenses
• “OR Payments” with the capability to bundle in QR in mobile wallets by embedding open-loop interoperable QR

Regulatory Concerns For Neobanks In India

India is poised for exponential growth in digital payments over the next few years. A KPMG report on the Indian fintech market said the evolution of mobile payments has led to a boom in the number of merchants adopting digital banking. 

From close to 1.5 Mn digital payment acceptance locations in 2016-17, the number of merchants accepting digital payments modes has increased to over 10 Mn, in a short span of two to three years. The global digital payments market is expected to touch $10.07 Tn by 2026. 

This shift can be attributed to driving factors such as robust payment infrastructure, the evolution of form factors, availability of structured data, the shift in consumer behaviour and the government’s vision of transforming India into a cashless economy. Also, UPI has created a global benchmark for India in the fintech space, making India an attractive opportunity fr global players.

And though neobanking as a concept is new to India, there is no dearth of players trying to broaden the customer base and increase awareness in this segment. The likes of Namaste Credit, NiYO, SBI YONO, Kotak 811, Hylo, PayZello, InstaDApp, 0.5Bn FinHealth (YeLo), Forex-Kart, Walrus, Epifi, Neo-Bank, Amica, Fin.in, RazorPay X among others have already been gaining significant attention from consumers, industry and investors. 

According to Madhusudan, the most successful neobanks from the US and Europe are looking at different ways to enter the Indian market, as India’s vibrant payment ecosystem and low-cost data access make it a compelling opportunity. 

“In a large market like India, there is enough space for a few players to become large institutions. However, it entirely depends on the go-to-market strategy and the access to capital the neo banks may be able to deploy. Neobanks can become the glue for a number of fintech ideas to be executed at scale, thereby collaboration is the only way forward.” 

India is second only to China in terms of international student enrollment in overseas colleges and universities, according to QS World University Rankings, but Indian students have a mountain to climb even if they are ever admitted to a college abroad. That’s because student loans are often daunting, to begin with, and the prospect of finding no suitable job after college and having the burden of loans scares away most students.

“These are smart, hard-working students who got in the best programs and have a great future ahead. Yet, the education loans they avail of are at interest rates twice as high as their American peers,” said Vaibhav Singh.

The Leap Finance cofounder is positive that technology can solve this too. While there is no dearth of lenders for students in terms of personal loans or even education loans in India, not many digital lending startups are focussed on higher education. This is where Leap Finance is looking to carve a niche with low-interest rates thanks to its full-stack underwriting model.

Founded by Singh and Arnav Kumar, Leap Finance began operations in August 2019. It has now secured seed funding of $5.5 Mn from Sequoia Capital with the participation of angel investors such as Bhupinder Singh, founder and CEO, Incred and Kunal Shah, founder, Cred among others.

With offices in Bengaluru and San Francisco, the focus of the company is to bring financial access to Indian students pursuing higher education in international universities and colleges.

Talking to Inc42, Kumar said the company will use these funds to hire aggressively for its technology team in Bengaluru and the capital team in San Francisco. The company aims to enable 1000 students for the coming Fall 2020 courses.

Leap’s Full-Stack Student Loan Tech

In simple terms, Leap Finance is a financial services platform for students seeking loans to study abroad. But the difference is that it’s a direct lender and uses a proprietary underwriting technology.

At present, much of the education-related lending in the country is also governed by the credit score or is in lieu of guarantees or securities. Leap Finance is offering unsecured loans. So how is it able to afford these loans? Singh said the unsecured loans are disbursed in US dollars instead of INR.

“Essentially, we are financing the students in the US because, at that point, the student needs foreign currency, and borrowing in Indian currency is more expensive than the foreign currency. You don’t only get the benefit of FX but you also get a substantially cheaper loan,” Singh explained.

Another big advantage is that the company offers better interest rates than its Indian peers, who charge a rate between 15% and 30%. For Leap Finance, the interest rates right now are around 7.9%, which is half the battle won in many cases.

The lower interest rate is all thanks to the underwriting engine, which takes into account several alternatives and derived data points to predict future income potential. Some of the 700 to 800 data points include past academic background, future earning potential, work experience and more. These data points are matched together to identify the student’s earning potential, based on which, the loan is sanctioned on a particular interest rate.

The Focus On STEM

Leap Finance provides loans to cover the full tuition cost, stay and incidentals. In markets such as the US, health insurance is an essential part of a student’s living expenses. Even if colleges don’t include insurance in their tuition fees, Leap Finance takes up the charge. It has tie-ups with 150 US colleges for nearly 1000 STEM courses.

So why the focus on STEM courses and why only US? Singh believes STEM courses are the most active streams in India. “Almost 90% of the total students going abroad opt for this, so it was a clear choice for us. We may add additional courses over time, as need be,” he added.

As for choosing to begin with the US, Singh has good things to say about Canada, Australia and UK in terms of growth, but again said that the most active market is the US. Hence, it was a clear choice as a starting point.

In terms of repayment, the company follows a similar model to other players, where students have to pay some part of the loan during the course and in monthly instalments after graduation, along with a buffer for the job search.

Singh also talked about building the credit behaviour for the students, saying that many students who go abroad, decide to settle there after finding jobs and credit behaviour is an important metric in international markets. He added that students are then able to build credit management habits, which are beneficial for them to further their expenses, which does not happen with loans from traditional banks.

Debt At An Early Stage: Is It Risky?

In India, lending tech has been the flavour of the season for the past few years, and it was no different in 2019. There is no stopping the up-and-coming businesses in the lending space, with electronics companies joining the hordes too. But the reliance on NBFCs or venture debt is a big hurdle.

Leap Finance is confident enough in its differentiated product that it compares itself to players in the international lending market rather than Indian companies. This can also be attributed to the decades of experience behind the founders.

Singh has 12 years of experience working with big banks and in the fintech space, he has worked with Capital Float and InCred. For Kumar, he has worked in derivatives structuring with Deutsche Bank. Kumar co-founded GoZoomo, a used car marketplace, and went on to work with SAIF Partners, which has helped them bag investors in the US.

That’s where the confidence stems from. That and the fact that it does not have to concern itself with the liquidity issues in the current NBFC market in India.

Singh said that while Leap has begun with the US, it will quickly expand to other countries, so the funding and liability strategy has to be global as well and cannot be rooted to the Indian venture capital market. Hence, the company believes that its liability strategy, which is leveraging global capital markets and global debt providers, strongly backs its ability to actually fund these loans. Kumar would be more than happy if the company is able to give its investors a healthy yield in the global market, where the conversation is very different than the Indian debt conversation.

“The global debt market stands at $17 Bn, which is currently earning in negative. There is a supreme hunger in all developed markets to get quality assets, which are getting reasonable yield,” he said.

India loves cricket, so much so that every family has multiple members who consider themselves experts. That’s also the biggest reason for Indians going crazy for fantasy sports games. And this upward trend of fantasy sports adoption is contributing to the popularity of smaller or lesser-known sports tournaments. 

According to Saurabh Chopra of BalleBaazi, women’s cricket World Cup viewership numbers have never been as high as they are right now. “Fantasy sports are one of the major contributors to this traffic on TV, Hotstar or other OTT platforms. Since people are already playing the game, they also want to continue following the match in real-time,” he added. 

Founded in 2018 by Navkiran Singh, Chopra, and Puneet Dua; BalleBaazi is a fantasy gaming platform focussing on kabaddi, cricket and football category. The company is also said to be in talks to add basketball and hockey too, soon after the IPL ends in the middle of the summer. 

Among the existing games, football contributes 15% to BalleBaazi’s gaming revenue, while Kabaddi makes for 7%-8% revenue, and the rest is dominated by cricket. 

Typically mobile games are more prevalent in urban areas, but fantasy spots have bucked this trend. Here, the demographics are predominantly male from the age group of 18-40 years, but from Tier 2, 3 cities. Users from semi-urban regions and smaller cities account for 70% of BalleBaazi’s user base, as compared to 30% users from Tier 1 locations. 

Chopra attributed this to the growth in connected Tier 2, 3 markets that have more internet users now than three years ago and a majority share in the new internet user base, who are often just coming online to take part in such fantasy games that have garnered national appeal. 

Doubling Down On Engagement Through Content 

“If you look at other platforms, many fantasy platforms and players depend on media platforms such as Cricinfo and others for strategy information. We want to reduce this dependency of players by building a one-stop platform for players to play, analyse and evaluate their game,” said Chopra. 

He added that the company is building a content creation platform, which will allow people to access all the content around fantasy gaming. The app will curate content from across media platforms to keep users more engaged on BalleBaazi. While Dream11 has also adopted a similar approach with the FanCode partnership, it’s not as tightly integrated as BalleBaazi. 

Another customer engagement strategy is the rewards system around BalleBaazi Coins. These coins can be redeemed to win gifts or re-invest in tournaments. 

These engagement points have helped the company register 45% customer retention in the first month of acquisition. Further, the company claims to have 20% paying consumers as compared to 80% free users. The average investment per month by a contest-playing customer is about $7-$8. 

“Our focus is on retaining the existing paid customers, instead of increasing the percentage of such users. We currently have 4 Mn users and are targeting to reach 10 Mn users by the end of 2020. The vision is to retain the paid customers along with scaling up,” said Chopra. 

Fantasy Gaming Boom In India

According to Inc42 DataLabs between 2014 and Q1 2019, the total venture capital funding in Indian gaming startups was over $337 Mn. The investment in Indian gaming startup is growing at a CAGR of 22%, with the top-funded startups being Dream 11 with $100 Mn in total funding, followed by Smaaash Entertainment with $82.6 Mn in funding, and Nazara Technologies with $79 Mn.

Chopra reiterated the USPs of content curation and rewards-linked engagement as USPs against these deep-pocketed players. With most fantasy gaming platforms choosing similar gaming models, the differentiation will be driven by ancillary features such as the content that BalleBaazi is focussing on. 

With the new session of the Indian Premier League beginning at the end of this month, fantasy sports gaming in cricket is about to explode. Newer products are expected to hit the market in the days to come. 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. A large part of this is contributed by fantasy gaming in cricket. 

Chopra also believes that fantasy sports are here to stay in the Indian market, and it could be the key part in making India a valuable part of the global gaming economy. 

“India has essentially not been gaming or a sports country in the past few decades but in the last ten years, there has been a strong wind of change. Sports like badminton, hockey, and football have also started picking up in India, which is a great sign for the gaming industry.”

The growth of digital lending in India is a reflection of country’s aspirational mindset, which is also highlighted in the growth of ecommerce, private labels, consumers services and other digital products. But most other sectors are linked to the growth in spending, digital payments and credit access. 

According to a BCG 2018 report, India’s digital lending market has the potential to become a $1 Tn opportunity by 2023. Given this huge market size, it is not surprising that various business models have entered the lending tech space in India with players such as LoanTap, Credy, EarlySalary, Qbera, PaySense and i2iFunding among others.

The biggest driver for companies’ growing interest in India’s consumer lending space is its untapped credit gap. A whopping 80% of the formal loans in India are accessed by just 24 Mn households falling under the elite and affluent income categories, whereas the other 124 Mn households, who earn an annual income of INR 1.4 Lakh to INR 4.5 Lakh, have only received 10% of the total credit from the formal market.

Consumer lending platform ZestMoney is targeting this underserved customer base by not through loans, but enabling purchases through equated monthly installment (EMI) options. “This approach eliminates the need for a credit card or a credit score. The customers can use this feature to purchase products, which cost up to $3,000 (INR 2.12 Lakh),” said Lizzie Chapman, cofounder of the company.

Bengaluru-based ZestMoney was founded by Chapman, Ashish Anantharaman, and Priya Sharma in 2016. With partnerships with over 3K merchants from ecommerce, travel and edtech sectors — including Amazon, Flipkart, Xiaomi, Myntra, Makemytrip and Pepperfry  — it covers a wide gamut of use-cases. 

Targeting Tier 2, Tier 3 Market 

“We serve customers from more than 17K pin codes, many of them located in Tier II and beyond since these are the places where credit is incredibly under-penetrated.”  

According to Chapman, many customers cannot access traditional credit because the unit economics necessary to serve them are not adopted by banks. While the minimum monthly income required for a credit card is INR 25K, the average monthly income in India as of 2019 is INR 10,533, Chapman added. 

For ZestMoney, the average ticket size varies from merchant to merchant — for electronics it would be about INR 20K, while for edtech and healthcare services, it can go up to around INR 50K, if not higher

The cofounder claimed that 50% of ZestMoney’s customers make a second purchase within six months and that number jumps to 75% within nine months. ZestMoney claims to have more than 6 Mn registered users and a net promoter score of over 75. The company expects to cross an annual run rate of over $1 Bn in loan disbursal run rate by 2021.

Talking of future plans, Chapman said that the backbone of ZestMoney’s service lies in the technology platform that enables EMIs, and thus it plans to expand the tech use-cases across the entire lending chain. For example, ZestMoney is exploring the possibilities of UPI-based installments with an ‘EMI on UPI’ product. 

In the online and offline merchant lending, the biggest competition faced by niche lenders are payments majors such as Paytm, PhonePe and MobiKwik who already have acquired a huge customer base and thus have a competitive advantage in scaling their product.

Talking to Inc42, MobiKwik cofounder Upasana Taku earlier said that none of the existing digital lending players has access to the volume of customers that MobiKwik is able to acquire organically every month. Taku also feels lending rivals are usually solving for a single use-case whereas MobiKwik’s credit offering can be seen as a general credit card which is compatible with all kinds of user needs.  

But ZestMoney believes that its end-to-end digital and automated credit process gives it an edge in the crowded consumer lending space. Chapman said, “our automated process leads to superior user experience, ensures 24/7 service, and has the lowest possible operating costs, translating to lower fees for our customers.” 

She also noted that ZestMoney’s proprietary decision and risk engine, which is trained on alternative data over the past three years, can approve more customers than other lenders who rely heavily on CIBIL score. 

“We’re incredibly focused on building an encompassing ecosystem to cater to our customers’ various lifestyle needs by expanding our existing network of online and offline merchants to strengthen segments like travel and edtech while venturing into new categories like automobiles and insurance,” said Lizzie Chapman.

“People think that lack of infrastructure is the biggest challenge for the adoption of electric vehicles in India, however, that is only in the case of four-wheelers,” said Jeetender Sharma, cofounder of Okinawa Autotech.

Sharma’s belief stems from the fact that detachable batteries are becoming more and more popular among EV two-wheelers. He likens it to users charging a smartphone or any other gadget at home. With a focus on battery swapping and charging the replaceable battery packs at any electrical plug, Okinawa Autotech is looking to flood the market with its EV two-wheelers over the next couple of years.

“The scooters have a detachable battery that can be charged as simply as a mobile phone at homes.”

As a mechanical engineer and with over a decade of experience with Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India, Sharma established Okinawa Autotech in 2015 along with Rupali Sharma with the aim to break the myth that electric vehicles cannot compete with petrol and diesel two-wheelers in terms of performance, speed and reliability. Along the way, it also realised that it needs to solve the mindset of Indian consumers of wanting as much value as possible and not wanting to spend extra to change their habits.

“I visited this island in Japan called Okinawa which is known for its zero-pollution environment. This experience worked as an inspiration to start something that would contribute to creating an eco-friendly environment in India,” said Sharma.

With two manufacturing units in Rajasthan, Okinawa has eight variants of electric scooters. The company prides itself on its patented battery manufacturing system that is backed by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the Internet of Things ecosystem. It has made manufacturing a key target for itself with big investments in 2019.

In June 2018, the electric two-wheeler maker also ran a ‘Praise De Himalaya’ campaign. The event was aimed at creating awareness about the capability of electric vehicles and Sharma attributed its success to the use of detachable high-performance batteries.

Okinawa claims revenue of INR 150 Cr in FY19 and expects income to remain constant in the current financial year as well. So far Okinawa is self-funded and has a PAN-India presence and has plans to launch a gender-neutral motorcycle in the near future.

“We recently launched PraisePro with a detachable battery, which would ensure easy charging. We also came up with an anti-theft battery system which enables the battery to get locked in, thus avoiding any theft. Hence, we have been taking steps to provide products that are efficient in every manner,” said Sharma.

Tailoring EVs For The Indian Consumer

As India bets high on small vehicles for easier adoption of EVs, the market is witnessing an influx of more participants. The growing number of companies, however, is not deterring Okinawa’s Sharma who believes that the electric vehicle market has no competition because there’s so much to tap still that the EV industry will grow exponentially in the next few years. “If you see, at present, the market size is so big that there is space for everyone. You only need to offer good products with the right technological innovation.”

Entering a market where the consumers are skeptical or hesitant about the product comes with characteristic challenges.

“I was advised not to venture into this space as EVs are difficult to sell but if you understand the consumer and take action according to that then nothing can stop you.”

Change in consumer mindset, in-house battery manufacturing, and efficient supply chain management pose challenges for the EV sector. But Sharma believes that higher adoption of electric vehicles will eliminate these hurdles automatically. And the only way to catalyse adoption is by tackling the range anxiety and the need for charging infrastructure in the meanwhile.

Various industry participants earlier expressed their concern on the government’s missing mention of electric vehicles in the recent Union Budget. Among the major concerns raised by the industry, the primary one is around nationalised banks not extending loans to EV startups over their assets. Secondly, there is a huge delay in the subsidy fund disbursal under phase 2 of FAME. In addition, the EV makers had demanded to reduce the GST on lithium-ion batteries from 18% to 5%, This could reduce the cost of electric bikes by almost 10%.

Naturally, Okinawa will also see the price benefits of any reduction in battery cost, but there’s a long way to go for the industry before the government makes this happen. Sharma believes that the private sector alone cannot afford to build an infrastructure that would address the requirement of masses.

“It is motivating to see the government announce ambitious targets and policies that are favouring the mobility revolution. At the customer level, if we see the EVs are economically viable in the longer run. Over the period this is sure to push the demand in the market,” he added.

Okinawa claims to have a running cost of 10/20 paisa per Km. Highlighting the propensity of Indian consumers to look at ways to save in every little way. “You often hear the phrase, ‘Yeh dekho, cycle wala aage nikal gaya.’ The Indian consumer is extremely range-conscious and we understood that.”