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TECH30REPORT

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When I first started YourStory, “startups” weren’t fashionable. Nobody took them seriously. For me, they were entrepreneurs who were betting on their dreams, taking tremendous risks by putting aside a promising future at a big company and taking the road less travelled. Their stories needed to be told. They were using technology to disrupt the way things had been done for decades. In my mind, they deserved a platform to show the world what they were up to. A platform that got them the attention (and eventually, the investment) they needed to help them turn their visions into reality. That was in 2008 and 2010 – the year TechSparks was born. Today, startups are a buzzword – adored by many people and dismissed by just as many. The reasons are many and profitability (or lack thereof) is a big one.Of course profits matter, but no startup made a real difference to the world by focusing only on profit. Startups change the status quo to the point where we wonder: how did we ever manage without this product or service? And it’s not just for conveniences. You only have to look at the changes that technologies have brought about in the way we communicate, the way we buy everything (food, fashion and more), and the way we pay for it. And just on the horizon are large-scale deployments of advances made in affordable healthcare, diagnostics, financial inclusion, and education. What startups do today creates a massive impact further down the line. They make a difference. They Make it Matter.Today, I’m so proud to see how TechSparks has grown – we are collaborating with startups, and with organisations supporting startups from across the world. They are closely looking at Indian startups, at what they do, at the potential they have, and want to collaborate closely with them. We’ve been overwhelmed by the interest not just in India as a startup hub, but in our entrepreneurs and their ideas. As we said when we announced TechSparks this year: The funding frenzy is over. The euphoria about startups is settling down to realistic levels. The focus is now firmly on building solid business models and disruptive, sustainable products and services that make a difference, make a mark, and make it matter.The good times are just beginning.

FOREWORD

Shradha SharmaFounder, YourStory

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Table Of ContentsA maturing startup ecosystem?

TECH30 methodology

TECH30 profiles

Open Innovation at Axis Bank – Thought Factory and its partners

Blockchain, the new internet

What startups should know about corporate governance

Building better human connections makes for better business

Digital India: fintech market to reach USD 2.4 billion by 2020

Is that chatbot part of your AI strategy?

Collective innovation collaborative success!

Technology will transform the Indian education landscape

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India in 2017

A maturing startup ecosystem?

Make it Matter

Madanmohan RaoResearch DirectorYourStory

Between the quarterly rush of forecasts and reports and the daily adrenaline rush of running a startup, let us make the most of YourStory’s annual TechSparks conference to take a broader look at India’s startup ecosystem.

In last year’s report, we examined factors like social attitudes towards entrepreneurship, responses of the education sector towards entrepreneur-capacity-building, and maturity models of India’s startup ecosystem. We based the analysis on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s framework of entrepreneur ecosystems, which includes socio-economic development as an impact area, along with job creation and value creation.

Using the classic ‘maturity model’ of growth and excellence, India’s startup journey can be mapped into a series of phases:

Widespread awareness about startups (Phase 1: at least in the metros, judging by media coverage and hoardings)

Readiness and implementation of startup activity and investment (Phase 2: India has the world’s third-largest startup base)

Optimised startup activities (Phase3: accelerators, incubators, mentorship events, networking, business growth)

Macro-stage implementation of a startup agenda (Phase 4: government policies, infrastructure, education, corporate partnerships), and

Global expansion along with local social inclusion (Phase 5)

To deepen the analysis for this year’s report, let us use another powerful tool developed by The Founder Institute, called The Startup Ecosystem Canvas (see the figure on the following page). The maturity of a startup ecosystem depends on how much support startups get at various stages of their growth: idea stage, launch and growth. Let us see how India’s innovation ecosystem supports startups at these stages, and how their impact can be amplified.

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Make it Matter

1. InspireStartup Media:Centralised local info, settings, news

1. StartEstablish:Law terms & banks for startups

Inspirational Events:Open inclusive beginner events

1.RecognitionInvestor Networking:Connect founders & professional Investers

Major medai:Mainstream local business press

2. EducateBest Practices:Beginner knowledge-sharing events

2.DevelopFormalise:Accounting, Dev &HPI

Training Feedback:Skill & idea development programmes

Prepare for Seed:Incubators & advancedmentorship

2. FundingAngels / Micro-VCs:Seed-stage investors

Venture Capitalists:Series A and beyond

Successful localfounders who leadthe ecosytem &frequently mentornewbies

It takes a city to raise a startup. Plot out your local ecosystem below to help newcomers.

Local Universities:Major business ortechnical universities

Public organsationsthat facilitate local economic development

Local Employers:Major technical employers with a large workforce

3. LaunchSeed accelerations:Seed funding mentorprograms

Build First Product:Hackathons & resources to build

3. ValidateTeam Formation:Resources & events forteaming up

Patch and demo:Show startups for seedinvestment

ExpansionGrowth accelerators /consultants

STARTUP ECOSYSTEM CANVAS

EVAN

GELI

STS

GOVE

RNM

ENT

TALE

NT

2. LAUNCH

1. IDEA

3. GROWTH

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Make it Matter

At the Idea Stage, startups need inspiration, education, and validation. So how are Indian cities offering entrepreneurs such support via, for example, hackathons, business plan competitions, and evangelist support from successful entrepreneurs?

The rise of startup-centric media coverage in the mainstream and specialty publications is now at a healthy level. YourStory, for example, is now published in English as well as 12 Indian languages. The space also has dozens of other blogs, newsletters and social media groups dedicated to startups. Inspirational events such as TechSparks, YourStory’s regular meetups and other events by our partners amplify opportunities for founders to test and validate their ideas.

State-level events like Karnataka’s Elevate 100 and the Indian government’s #OpenGovDataHack are good examples of government-level initiatives to engage with new innovators. A range of books has also been published recently for Indian entrepreneur audiences, ranging from The Manual for Indian Startups to Failing to Succeed.

At the Launch Stage, startups need institutional support from a range of academic, private, and government players. How is the growth of co-working spaces, incubators, mentorship networks, and

funding in India meeting these needs of launch-stage startups?

Co-working spaces are emerging in a big way across Indian cities: Bombay Connect, BHive, Wired Hub, CoWrks, InstaOffice, Innov8, 91 Springboard, Stirring Minds, Awfis, Collab House, Hatch101, Smartworks, and Jaaga, to name just a few. International players in this space include NUMA and most recently WeWork. Seed funding from networks such as Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels is helping dozens of startups get off the ground.

Many large engineering and business schools have their own incubators as well, such as NSRCEL (IIM Bangalore), CIE Incubator (IIIT-Hyderabad), SINE (IIT Bombay), Business Incubator (BITS Pilani), National Design Business Incubator (NID), VIT TBI (Vellore) and STEP Coimbatore (PSG). YourStory has also conducted a number of workshops at entrepreneur development cells (EDC) at nine Tier-2 city colleges in Karnataka. Furthermore, there are corporate-led incubators such as IKP-EDEN, and a range of makerspaces (Makers Asylum, Workbench Projects, etc.) spreading across India.

Finally, at the Growth Stage, startups need support in the form of accelerators, business consulting, and mass-audience marketing.

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Make it Matter

How is India meeting the talent, funding and exit needs of founders and investors?

Mentorship support is being offered in India via The Entrepreneurs Organisation, TiE, and the Startup Leadership Programme, to name just a few, along with accelerators such as Axilor, Catalyzer, Khosla Labs, TLabs, T-Hub, Zone Startups, 500 Startups, BLC LaunchPad, YES Fintech, Startup Oasis, Microsoft Accelerator, and even Ashoka Innovators for the social sector.

At the macro-level, the investor interest in India’s startup growth story has been well documented – along with extensive soul-searching on issues like foreign funding, protectionism, lopsided funding patterns, limited exits, and distortion of offline business models! YourStory has tracked how, in 2016, USD 4 billion was invested in Indian startups – deal value decreased by 55%, but volume increased by 3% from 2015.

Funding predominantly went to startups in Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai – opening the door to lots of potential for growth in other cities. YourStory research also showed that overall venture capital and private equity funding nearly doubled to USD 7 billion in the first half of 2017 over the comparable period last year. The boom years of digital opportunity have just begun, with two-thirds of India still to go online, according to TRAI figures – and many of them will be using local language content, particularly via video.

In sum, analysis based on the Startup Ecosystem Canvas shows that the ecosystem is putting lots of faith in India’s entrepreneurship boom, and the challenge now is to use innovation across the board to make a broader impact in key sectors like health, education, agriculture, livelihood, transportation, urban governance, public safety, and social inclusion.

Every generation should outdo the last. It’s the best way forward, both in wisdom and wealth.

“– Anish Behera, Cheil Worldwide

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Make it Matter

We at YourStory take the TECH30 list very seriously every year. This year’s theme of theTechSparks conference is Make It Matter. It is a bid to focus on what startups need todo in order to create real, scalable, and profitable solutions for the next generation of Indianconsumers. So with this guideline, we set about discovering the diamonds in the rough -those entrepreneurs toiling hard to give shape to their ideas across India.

Around 3,000 applications were received and multiple iterations later, we havewhittled down the list to 30. The jury comprised senior editorial and research staff atYourStory, along with industry veterans from India’s startup ecosystem.

The criteria used for the selection were as follows:

Technology1. Has the technology built/ leveraged the next step in the evolution of existing tech?2. Does the technology solution have the potential to impact millions of people?

Team1. Does the past experience of the founders/ management have relevance to the problem being solved?2. Does the team demonstrate a wide range of skills and capabilities required to solve the problem?3. Do they have past entrepreneurial work experience?

Traction1.Has the team been able to demonstrate growth in user base or other forms of rapid adoption?2. Has the startup showed proof of adoption in terms of revenue?

Scalability1. Is the solution scalable to millions of people?2. Are the right building blocks present to achieve scalability?

Market1. Is the addressable market a large and potentially lucrative one?2. What is the clarity on revenue models?

TECH30 methodology

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YS takeWhen it comes to cybersecurity, India faces a humongous gap that needs to be bridged on an urgent basis as threats are mushrooming almsot every second. AppSecure has proven its mettle with its product and the solid track record of the team in vulnerability reporting.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWAppSecure India is a specialised cybersecurity company offering end-to-end information security services to businesses.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEAppSecure India has two key products:

• HackerHive is a crowdsourced vulnerability-coordination and bug-bounty platform that connects businesses to a network of some of the best and trusted security researchers. These researchers help the businesses receive and resolve critical vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. • Vulneye.com works for businesses and their projects by continuously finding vulnerabilities and issues in their dependencies.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSAnand Prakash, one of India’s top bug bounty hunters, co-founded AppSecure India with his software engineer friend, Rohit Raj.

REVENUE MODELSecurity services offered at AppSecure India are priced on the basis of parameters such as the size of application and number of URLs. On HackerHive.io, the client is charged 15 percent of each valid vulnerability reported by the security researcher. Vulneye.com offers subscription plans starting from INR 399 to INR 2,999 a month.

TRACTIONCurrently bootstrapped, AppSecure India has revenues ranging from INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore per annum. Its clients are as diverse as ICICI, Club Mahindra, Flipkart, PhonePe, FreshMenu, and Swiggy. The company is looking to raise funds to accelerate growth and focus on marketing its products and services.

SectorHealthcare

LocationEnterprise software

Team Size<10

Founded InMay 2016

AppSecure India

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This fintech player focuses on buying/selling real estate in the secondary market. Led by an experienced team and using an escrow account, this startup aims to eliminate the risk that comes with lack of transparency and fragmented laws. They have expanded to 32 centres in 9 cities, earning them a Tech30 spot.

YS take

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWBigdeals is an end-to-end platform for buying real estate online. It offers an on-demand secure neutral ‘escrow’ bank account powered by ICICI Bank for second-sale properties.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEBigdeals’ cloud technology brings the property broker and property developer to a customer’s smart device and helps conduct an assisted purchase.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSBigdeals is co-founded by Ashwin Chawwla and Manoj Manohar. Ashwin was the CEO of Outsourcing Xperts, a leader in the corporate real estate, private equity and debt syndication space. Manoj is the former AVP of DLF Limited.

REVENUE MODEL• The property buyer is charged at 0.25 percent of property value + GST. • The company charges a one-time registration fee of Rs 10,000 + GST on appointing escrow fulfilment centres in India.• They also offer home loans through all leading banks and receive a fee of 0.50 percent of the loan value.

TRACTIONFunded by individual investors, Bigdeals clocks an annual revenue of INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore. The company plans to raise funds for team expansion and marketing.

SectorFintech

LocationGurugram

Team Size< 10

Founded InAugust 2015

Bigdeals in Business Network Private Limited

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YS takeBitcoin, the world’s first cryptocurrency, is traded on Coinsecure’s app. A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a store of value or a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure transactions. It is still at quite an early stage for the space as the kinks in regulations are yet to be worked out. The team has been an early adopter of the technology and could well be a trailblazer.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWCoinsecure is India’s first real-time Bitcoin exchange application. It offers open order books and provides the first app that is exclusively targeted at active Bitcoin traders.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEThe app enables users to buy, sell, send, receive and accept Bitcoin with ease. Users can place their bids and asks, withdraw and deposit funds, and check pending orders. While the app targets traders, it is simple and easy to use for beginners as well.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSCoinsecure is co-founded by Benson Samuel and Mohit Kalra. Benson started his career at ICICI OneSource and has been in the Bitcoin industry for almost half a decade. Before starting Coinsecure, Mohit was the Director of Secure Bitcoin Traders Pvt Ltd.

REVENUE MODELCoinsecure takes fees from traders and various other partnerships.

TRACTIONCoinsecure has over 1.5 lakh active users. The company clocks INR 1 crore to INR 3 crore per annum in revenues. Hitherto funded by individual investors, it plans to raise funds to expand.

SectorFintech

LocationNew Delhi

Team Size21 - 40

Founded InJuly 2014

Coinsecure (Secure Bitcoin Traders Pvt Ltd)

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YS takeThe new paradigm for solar plant management, the DataGlen platform collects and curates IoT Data. The stellar team processes more than 15 million solar data points every day. It provides customers with real-time insights into assets’ operations, helps identify and resolve maintenance issues, and boosts direct and indirect revenue streams.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWDataGlen provides IoT (Internet of Things) cloud platform solutions to manage distributed energy resources such as solar plants, energy storage, and microgrids. The company has pivoted once, from a horizontal IoT platform and marketplace to a more vertical-specific solution in the energy domain.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEDataGlen offers two solutions currently: • SunDash is an AI-driven product to manage and improve the performance of solar plants. It provides real-time and actionable business insights to help run operations optimally. • DERitos is an operating system optimised to manage distributed energy resources (DER): consider it as an iOS for DER. It can enable various demand-side applications such as demand response, distributed generation (also known as distributed energy) and storage management, without impacting the grid reliability and equipment performance while respecting consumers’ preferences for equipment usage and revenue generation. DERitos is in the pilot phase and will be commercially available by the end of this year.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSDataGlen is co-founded by Deva Seetharaman, Tanuja Ganu and Sunil Ghai, who have one-and-a-half decades of combined experience at IBM Research, India.

REVENUE MODEL• One-time hardware cost of data logger/IoT gateway • Yearly/five-yearly subscription for the web and mobile app, which is proportional to MW capacity being monitored• One-time customisation cost, if applicable.

TRACTIONCurrently, SunDash is deployed at more than 180 sites in India, both in rooftop and utility-scale installations, with total capacity exceeding 250MW. Dataglen has raised funding from strategic investors. It is clocking INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore per annum in revenue and is looking to raise funds for expansion.

SectorSocial / clean tech

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20

Founded InApril 2015

DataGlen TechnologiesPvt Ltd

DataGlen

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YS takeEnCloudEn, the world’s only fully vertically integrated private cloud software defined compute, storage and network, helps build scalable and solid businesses. The co-founders have unique technological and operational expertise, and their product is placed in a market poised for a breakout – putting them on our Tech30 list.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWEnCloudEn is a technology platform to deliver and manage private cloud-based IT infrastructure, helping mid-size organisations attain their IT transformation swiftly at less than half the cost.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEEnCloudEn helps with:• Private, cloud-based IT for organisations looking to set up an internal datacentre • On-premise private cloud as a better alternative to public cloud (AWS/Azure) • Consolidation of IT workloads with private cloud • IT deployments with hybrid cloud possibilities• Deployment of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) • Delivery of IT for users in a bring your own device (BYOD) model

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSEnCloudEn is co-founded by Abinash Saikia, Satya Kishore and Vishwa Vijoyendra Narayan. The co-founders are IIT-IIM graduates who also built SmartBuildings™, an innovative technology for energy conservation, management, and monitoring in buildings.

REVENUE MODELApart from an initial deployment fee, EnCloudEn follows a subscription-based model depending on the number of virtual machines a customer has in the infrastructure.

TRACTIONEnCloudEn is breaking even, with an annual revenue of INR 1 crore to INR 3 crore. Backed by venture capital, it plans to raise more funding for marketing and access to the global market.

SectorEnterprise software

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20

Founded InDecember 2015

EnCloudEn

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YS takeEuler’s team has a stellar background in AI. Their solutions help businesses with their AI needs, such as demand forecasting, price recommendations, personalisation and recommendation engine and image-based data classification. As a team that has managed scale in their previous avatar, Euler is a must-watch startup on our Tech30 list.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWEuler Systems uses data science and AI to revolutionise businesses that may not be native AI and data businesses.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEEuler Systems uses AI and statistical learning to optimise pricing, revenue, and cost. The company augments experts with virtual assistants. Its current work includes trader assistants for asset managers, revenue manager assistants for hotels, and retail merchandising, pricing, stock selection, and pipeline maintenance assistants for retailers.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSEuler Systems is co-founded by Himanshu Nautiyal, Krishna Raghav and Sandeep Kadam. Himanshu is the former head of Data Science at Yahoo. Krishna was a hedge fund analyst at Sequence Capital in his last stint, while Sandeep was vice president (Engineering) at Saavn.

REVENUE MODELThe company is currently experimenting with multiple pricing models, including time and material, subscription, outcome-based, as well as cash and equity models.

TRACTIONBacked by angel investors, Euler Systems has reached breakeven. It is already generating INR 3 crore to INR 6 crore per annum in revenues. Its clients include American and Indian firms, startups and unicorns, disruptors and incumbents, spanning retail, e-commerce, travel, entertainment, and financial services.

SectorArtificial Intelligence

LocationDelaware, USA

Team Size<10

Founded InJanuary 2016

Euler Systems

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YS takeBuilding a B2B procurement startup is a difficult feat, but EZkirana has demonstrated its ability to execute by achieving profitability in three years. The Bengaluru-based startup eases the procurement process by being a one-stop online procurement solution for hotels and restaurants.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWEZkirana is a one-stop shop for all procurement activities for hotels, restaurants, and caterers (HoReCa).

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEEZkirana drives its services via:• An e-commerce website for product selection, delivery slot selection, editing cart, and online payments• Delivery Boy App for easy order selection, packaging, and editing unavailable items• Integrated SMS system for order-related updates to customers

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSEZkirana is co-founded by Piyush Priyam and Srinvas Gorur. Piyush is an IIM-Ahmedabad graduate and a former consultant at Accenture. Srinivas is an XLRI Jamshedpur alumnus and was the general sales manager at Coca-Cola.

REVENUE MODELThe company aggregates orders from multiple small businesses and procures items directly from manufacturers and millers to earn a delta in between (selling price - cost price).

TRACTIONEZkirana generates INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore per annum in revenue. Currently bootstrapped, it is looking for investors and mentors to propel its expansion plans.

SectorAgritech

LocationBengaluru

Team Size<10

Founded InFebruary 2015

EZkirana

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YS takeFarmers take a bite of the sharing economy with the farMart marketplace. The team has built an asset-light model to rent out farming equipment and reaches out to farmers via an omni-channel approach. The agritech startup’s innovative approach to make farming more productive earns it a Tech30 spot.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWfarMart helps farmers get easy access to a wider range of productivity-enhancing machines. The company provides a technology platform for them to rent out their under utilised machinery to fellow farmers.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEFarmers can book a wide variety of agriculture machinery via farMart’s mobile app or through its call centre. farMart’s proprietary algorithm routes the order to the nearest machinery owner and the company undertakes the delivery of the machinery. farMart collects the payment from the farmer and credits it to the owner’s bank account. They also collect feedback on the farmer’s work.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSfarMart is co-founded by Alekh Sanghera, Mehtab Hans, and Lokesh Singh. While Alekh and Lokesh have previously worked in MicroSave, an international financial inclusion consulting firm, Mehtab was a public policy consultant at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP). Lokesh holds an MBA from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA).

REVENUE MODELfarMart operates on a commission-based model, where it charges the equipment owner 5-15 percent on each transaction.

TRACTIONfarMart is connected to over 2,000 farmers. It has raised angel investment and is looking for more funds to expand its client base and operations.

SectorAgritech

LocationChandigarh

Team Size11 – 20


farMart

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YS takeThe technology for truly driverless cars is almost there though regulation is yet to catch up. In the meantime, startups like Flux Auto are working on the software that enables level-3 driverless cars that are able to monitor the driving environment around them. This ambitious young team is determined to take on this challenge and their solution to the European and US markets.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWFlux Auto is developing modular self-driving technology for trucks. This will optimise business models by ensuring that fleets run on the best routes and are fuel-efficient. It also wants to reduce incident rate by predicting and preventing accidents.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEFlux Auto’s technology is built as an after-market accessory that can be installed on any new or existing truck with ease. The technology also uses vision systems (cameras) and other sensors to achieve a level of accuracy similar to LIDARs (light detection and ranging devices) without incurring the high costs.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSCo-founders Pranav Manpuria and Abhishek Gupta are graduates of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, and RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru.

REVENUE MODELBusiness owners can either purchase the product with a single payment or lease it for their fleet annually. There is also a chargeable annual maintenance fee and a monthly subscription fee for software updates and extra features.

TRACTION AND FUNDINGCurrently bootstrapped, Flux Auto is yet to launch its product. It is also looking for investors to fund its growth and foray into the global market.

SectorInternet of Things (IoT)

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20


Flux Auto

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YS takeIndia has audacious plans to turn every vehicle into an electric vehicle by 2030, and Gayam Motor is leading the way. The startup has built a swappable battery-based system for corporate electric vehicle customers. This team, which focused on its product for more than half a decade, wants to make the future of transportation smart and electric.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWGMW produces advanced electric bikes and electric passenger and cargo autorickshaws.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEThe electric vehicles are low maintenance and ensure zero emissions. GMW’s vehicles – SmartAuto and Limitless Electric Bike –are connected to mobile and cloud through IoT (Internet of Things) technology. This technology enables many features such as smart metering, battery health monitoring, real-time vehicle tracking, traffic-based route optimisation, and vehicle unlocking through the mobile phone.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSGMW is co-founded by Raja Gayam, Rahul Gayam and Sri Harsha Bavirisetty. Raja has been working on the idea of Gayam Motor Works since 2008. Rahul, a postgraduate in Physics, leads the tech at GMW. Sri Harsha is a business graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the co-founder of XLStreet.com and YourEvent.co.

REVENUE MODEL• Direct sales on vehicles• Recurring subscription fee on IoT integration and battery health monitoring services

TRACTION AND FUNDINGGMW has over 500 customers including Uber, BigBasket, Swiggy, Microsoft, Central American Police, and the Governments of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. GMW has exported, 5000+ vehicles to over 15 Asian and African countries. The company is currently bootstrapped and has taken loans.It generates INR 1 crore and INR 3 crore per annum in revenue. It plans to orient its tech further to government regulations and patent it.


LocationHyderabad

Team Size21 - 40

Founded InMay 2010

Gayam Motor Works (GMW)

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YS takeAfter payments, lending is the second-fastest-growing segment in fintech. On-the-spot credit is poised to become formidable competition to the credit card. Like in the West, instant shopping consumer credit startups in India are poised to satisfy the hunger of growing consumer needs. Despite the default rate and challenges in the market, the HappyEMI team is worth betting on as they bring fresh energy and execution capability to the space.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWHappyEMI is a peopleless and a paperless consumer finance platform providing shoppers with instant financing at the point-of-sale in stores and online platforms.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEHappyEMI analyses a customer’s creditworthiness through alternative data using the scoring engine. This data is extracted from the customer’s digital footprint such as from social media, text messages, and calls. The user can enter all required information via the HappyEMI app. HappyEMI uses eKYC to verify the users, eSign for the loan agreement and Aadhaar to authenticate users. Settlement is processed to retailers in a two-day timeframe.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSHappyEMI is co-founded by Suhas Gopinath and Anmol Vij. Prior to starting HappyEMI, Suhas was CEO at Globals Inc, while Anmol was the CEO of Keymind Learning India Pvt Ltd.

REVENUE MODELHappyEMI receives revenue in the form of processing fees from customers, commission from retailers, subvention from manufacturers, and cross-selling.

TRACTIONHappyEMI has a consumer base of 100 - 500 and has started generating revenues. The company has secured funding from HNIs (high net-worth individuals) and is looking to raise more to expand its operations.

SectorFintech

LocationBengaluru

Team Size21 – 40


HappyEMI / Hyperkonnect Technologies Pvt Ltd

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Innoflaps is a medi-tech play that aims to solve stuttering with technology. Not everyone can afford a royal tutor like in The King’s Speech. This startup gets a position in TECH30 for helping children overcome stammering with technology.

YS take

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWInnoflaps has developed home-based medical devices and provides dedicated services to help children needing cochlear implants, and to those suffering from delayed speech and language development, hearing impairment, Down Syndrome, autism, and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). It also helps people with stammering and tinnitus.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEInnoflaps has developed four portable, battery-operated, and easy-to-use medical devices. These include:• Speakfluent to treat stammering • Speechifi for children with delayed speech and language development • TinnitusRelief for people experiencing constant ringing in the ears• Group Speech Therapy School Solution to collectively conduct speech and language training sessions for children

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSInnoflaps is co-founded by Prashant Goyal and Soniya Gupta. Prashant has been a design engineer for almost a decade and, in his last stint, he was the Lead Design Engineer at Freescale. Soniya has been an audiologist and speech language pathologist for the last seven years.

REVENUE MODELInnoflaps provides at-home clinical assessment, devices-on-rent, and treatment progress reports, which are charged on a monthly basis.

TRACTIONInnoflaps is clocking INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore per annum in revenue and has reached breakeven. The company has 100-500 users and plans to expand globally. Hitherto backed by individual investors, it is looking to raise more funds to focus on operations and hiring.

SectorHealthcare

LocationNew Delhi

Team Size11 – 20

Founded In2012

Innoflaps Remedy Pvt Ltd

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YS takeAs our lives get increasingly digitised, we need an increasing amount of protection to keep us safe from cybercrime. InstaSafe has the experience needed to help businesses achieve the levels of security they need.

Make it Matter

COMPANY OVERVIEWInstaSafe is a cloud web security company that increases business productivity and application presence while keeping them secure.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEThe InstaSafe Secure Access is a SECaaS (security as a service) solution that provides a self-service style delivery of secure remote access (SSL-VPN) through the cloud. InstaSafe Cloud Web Security is a cost-effective, cloud-based web security service that protects company websites, web applications, and web services.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSInstaSafe is co-founded by Sandip Panda, Biju George and Prashanth Guruswamy. Together, they have four decades of work experience in companies such as Symantec, Radware, Quantum and Blue Coat System.

REVENUE MODELAnnual subscription-based pricing with separate pricing for gateway installation.

TRACTION AND FUNDINGCurrently corporate-funded, InstaSafe clocks revenues ranging from INR 1 crore to INR 3 crore per annum from 51 - 100 clients. The company is breaking even and looking for funds to accelerate growth.

SectorEnterprise software

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20

Founded In2012

InstaSafe

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YS takeThe Lavelle Networks team has built a scalable product that creates multiple points of presence (PoP) by using public cloud networks across the world to make enterprise communication faster and cheaper. As the market for software defined networks (SDN) is slated to grow to USD 45 billion by 2020, Lavelle Networks should get a good chunk of that market if they play their cards right.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWLavelle Networks builds and solves enterprise networking challenges for location-hungry markets such as retail, healthcare, logistics, hospitality, and finance. The platform allows any enterprise to order NaaS (networking as a service) for each location.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICELavelle Networks provides COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware- and software-defined networking platforms to solve the challenge of connecting enterprises to hybrid cloud applications. Key use cases include centralised cloud-controlled network management, monitoring, and data optimisations for faster and safer access to cloud applications. Its USP is keeping customers’ networks simple, safe, and swift.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSBefore starting Lavelle Networks, co-founders Shyamal Kumar and Kathik Madhava both worked at Versa Networks. While Shyamal was heading the R&D India team there, Karthik was a senior product manager.

REVENUE MODELOne-time hardware purchase priced according to bandwidth requirement and annual subscription for software plans.

TRACTION AND FUNDINGLavelle Networks’ revenues range from INR 1 crore - INR 3 crore, annually. Seed-funded by Ideaspring Capital, the company is looking to raise funds by early next year to accelerate its marketing and sales.

SectorSoftware

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20


Lavelle Networks

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YS takeMiklens Bio is working on products to boost agricultural yield, with a focus on human health and environmental sustainability. Its technology centres on farming with “naturally driven microbes” to reduce dependence on chemical pesticides. Apart from India, they are also serving the North American market.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWMiklens Bio manufactures bio-based agri inputs that aid alternative, chemical-free farming. The company is an R&D powerhouse with a biotechnolological edge in the agriculture sector.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEEntailing rigorous research, its products are developed from microbes and their subsequent secondary metabolites. Unlike broad-spectrum, synthetic chemicals, these products work specifically against particular pests, without harming beneficial organisms. Besides being natural replacements for chemical pesticides, they are cost-effective and assimilate into the ecosystem without leaving toxic residue.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSFounder Santosh Nair is the former CEO of Camson Biotechnologies Ltd, a wholly integrated agriculture biotechnology company.

REVENUE MODELSale of products to farmers through distributors in different regions.

TRACTIONMiklens Bio is bootstrapped and, with 11 - 50 customers, its annual revenue is between INR 1 crore and INR 3 crore. The company needs funds to power its growth and improve its regulation compliance and end-user interactions.

SectorAgritech

LocationMumbai

Team Size21 - 40


Miklens Bio Pvt Ltd

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Klathrate provides a real-time electronic marketplace where companies can list their accounts receivables for sale (auctioning of invoices). Accredited financial institutions and investors can compete to provide the most amount of cash against the receivables. Their proprietary ML algorithm, based on chaos dynamics, for credit scores and predicts payment delays.

YS take

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COMPANY OVERVIEWKlathrate is an end-to-end open-account trade finance platform. It connects banks, buyers, and suppliers across one network, and is designed to streamline and automate settlements, reduce fraud risk and break down costly data silos.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEKlathrate is the financial operating network for global trade powered by distributed ledger technology. The Klathrate Network acts as a global “fabric” for trade by providing partners and network participants with a much smarter, more secure, and more efficient way to move value and assets around the world.The applications and solutions are built on the Klathrate Network including a multi-bank and multi-lender trade asset marketplace. They provide flexible working capital solutions for businesses and APIs that allow easy connection into the network.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSKlathrate is co-founded by Prasen Lonikar and Akashkumar Bammrotwar. Before starting Klathrate, Prasen was an Equity Analyst at Dalwani Investments and Akash was a Project Head at Silcore Technologies.

REVENUE MODELKlathrate levies a 0.15 percent charge on every payment transaction and a 15 percent commission on insurance premia. They also charge for their financial data and analytical services.

TRACTIONKlathrate has annual revenues of INR 5 lakh to INR 25 lakh. The company is currently bootstrapped and plans to raise funds for marketing and hiring.

SectorFintech

LocationNagpur

Team Size< 10

Founded InApril 2017

Klathrate Trade Platform Pvt Ltd

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YS takeAs machines take over communication and marketing, it is possible for marketers to create context-rich and personalized conversations. The Morph.ai team is building a solid platform for businesses to take advantage of this conversational marketing technologies. The team has worked at Sprinklr, which gives them a credible experience to build and scale Morph.ai

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COMPANY OVERVIEWMorph.ai is a B2B SaaS (software as a service) platform where businesses can create, manage, and evolve chatbots to increase awareness, improve lead quality, and drive sales.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEMorph.ai offers the platform to build chatbots for conversational marketing, which helps companies reach out to a business’s potential customers in real-time and pursue high-quality leads. This creates instant engagement, personalised interactions with customers, and a one-on-one follow-up channel.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSMorph.ai’s co-founders Pratik Jain, Abhishek Gupta and Niyati Agarwal met as colleagues at Spinklr. They had earlier co-founded Supertext, a conversational commerce platform for consumers to have intelligent and engaging conversations with chatbots.

REVENUE MODELSubscription model-based on usage-based pricing, with a base price of USD 999 and a 30-day free trial.

TRACTION AND FUNDINGWith angel backing, the company has acquired a consumer base of 11 - 50 users. It is breaking even, with revenues ranging from INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore.

SectorEnterprise Software

LocationGurugram

Team Size<10

Founded In2016

Morph.ai

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AI is more than a buzz word; it holds huge potential to help improve medical diagnosis. Niramai is harnessing the power of AI with a novel breast cancer screening solution. Its core technology is an AI-led diagnostic platform that uses patented thermal image processing and machine learning algorithms for reliable and accurate breast cancer screening.

YS take

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COMPANY OVERVIEWNiramai has developed a novel, non-contact, and non-invasive breast cancer screening solution. It is safe, privacy-aware, portable, and enables detection of early-stage malignancy.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICENiramai’s solution is built on Thermalytix©, its patented technology. It is an artificial intelligence-led diagnostic-platform that uses thermal image processing and machine learning algorithms for reliable and accurate breast cancer screening to identify potential malignancies. The end-to-end solution includes off-the-shelf hardware, Niramai’s own software, training, auto-generation, and certification of reports, support, and maintenance.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSBefore starting Niramai, co-founders Nidhi Mathur and Geetha Manjunath both worked at Xerox Research Center India. While Nidhi was senior product manager, Geetha served as Lab Director (Data Analytics).

REVENUE MODEL• The revenue-sharing model is based on the number of transactions entailing hospitals and diagnostic centres.• For NGOs and camp organisers, it is a per-day lease model to use the complete solution.

TRACTIONNiramai has started generating revenues with its client base of 11 - 50. Backed by venture capitalists, it is looking at a global market now.

SectorHealthcare

LocationBengaluru

Team Size<10

Founded InJuly 2016

Niramai Health Analytix Pvt Ltd

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YS take‘Smart’ water-purifying systems will help consumers get the data they need about the water they drink. Water does not have an alternative source like electricity. Hence it imperative technology helps us conserve it and monitor our usage. OCEO Water offers an interesting software and hardware play that uses technology to help gather data on water consumption.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWOCEO Smart Water Purifier is an intelligent, sustainable, and cost-effective way to dispense drinking water in homes as well as public spaces. With OCEO Smart Sensor innovation, the company measures and monitors drinking water usage, and maintains safe drinking and water hygiene at all times.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICE• OCEO Smart Purification systems have both RO (reverse osmosis) and non-RO purification systems in one device. • OCEO Smart Connection remotely detects any increase in contamination of input water and sends necessary alerts for corrective action. • OCEO Smart Sensor measures and monitors quality of every drop of water in real time for predictive maintenance. • Its Smart Dispensing system ensures non-stop purification.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSOCEO Water is co-founded by Vikram Gulecha and Mahendra Dantewadiya. Earlier, Vikram founded SPACES INDIA, a Facilities Training & Management Company, while Mahendra worked in the packaging and manufacturing industry for almost two decades.

REVENUE MODELOCEO Water works on a pay-per-litre model.

TRACTIONOCEO has more than 500 customers and has started generating revenues. The company is currently bootstrapped and plans to raise funds to expand globally.

SectorInternet of Things (IoT)

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20

Founded InJuly 2016

OCEO Water

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YS takeSince India has about 300 clear and sunny days in a year, using solar energy to meet part of our energy demand is a logical approach. Oorjan Cleantech has proven its ability to harness the power of the sun and bring consumers a frictionless experience. The team is promising, the marketing is ever expanding. Keep an eye out for them.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWOorjan is a rooftop solar platform that helps homes and businesses design, finance, and implement their rooftop PV (photovoltaic) systems. It also provides lifetime performance monitoring.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEOorjan offers instant and multiple price options and financing to customers using complex algorithms driven by geospatial info, weather APIs (application program interfaces), solar irradiation data and customer electricity consumption.• Oorjan app allows customers to keep an eye on their system’s performance and get notifications regarding regular maintenance.• Its IoT (Internet of Things) platform is powered by an integrated tech stack including battery-efficient hardware, time-series databases, and Oorjan’s iOS and Android front ends. This solar data is fed back to its engine, thus improving the solar recommendation algorithms.• Oorjan enables low-interest EMIs for financing solar products and services.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSOorjan is co-founded by Roli Gupta, Gautam Das and Hrishikesh Deshpande. Roli is a marketing graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, HAAS School of Business, and a former business development manager at Areva Solar. Gautam, an Indian School of Business graduate, has held various managerial roles at Citibank India. A Stanford graduate, Hrishikesh was the co-founder and CTO at Cholo, which was acquired by OpenTable.

REVENUE MODELOorjan works on two revenue models:• Booking the solar systems directly for businesses or homes• Providing financing to the installation partners’ customers

TRACTION AND FUNDINGOorjan has been funded by individual investors so far. It has revenues of over INR 6 crores per annum. The company is looking to raise funds to expand its operations to other locations.


LocationMumbai

Team Size11 – 20

Founded InNovember 2014

Oorjan Cleantech Pvt Ltd

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Gamification, the use of game design and game mechanics to enhance education, is at the heart of Fundamentor, a product of Paratus Knowledge Ventures. The innovative web application uses engaging methods to enhance quantitative, verbal, data inference and creative thinking aptitude in school students.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWParatus Knowledge Ventures aims to bridge the gap between academics and professional success. It helps students develop a cognitive aptitude and life skills via a series of aptitude tests, olympiads, group discussions and real-life situations on its platform called Fundamentor.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEFundamentor is an adaptive, gamified, time-effective, and fun learning platform. The primary use-case is for students from Classes 3 to 10, helping them develop capabilities in problem solving, decision making, creative thinking, and communication. The secondary use case is among underprivileged children, to learn basic numeracy and literacy skills. Fundamentor’s combination of local language videos and language-agnostic games helps develop these skills.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSFundamentor’s co-founders are Bhargavi Risbud and Amol Patkar. Bhargavi was principal analyst at IHS Global Pvt Ltd, an automotive market forecasting services and strategic advisory solution. Amol, an IIM-Calcutta graduate, was vice president and Head of Product Development at Aegon Religare.

REVENUE MODELSubscription-based model for users.

TRACTIONIn two years, Paratus Knowledge Ventures has grown to more than 16,000 active users and 5,000+ paid subscribers. The company is breaking even, with revenues between INR 5 lakh to INR 25 lakh per annum. Bootstrapped, it is looking to raise funds for product development and team expansion.

SectorEducation

LocationPune

Team Size<10

Founded InSeptember 2014

Paratus Knowledge Ventures Pvt Ltd

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YS takeVirtual Reality and Augmented Reality are the next frontier platforms after social, and we expect a surge of developer and consumer activity in this space – a bit like the early days of the internet, when people discovered the worldwide web through cybercafes. Preksh develops VR/AR for malls to enrich the shopping experience and can evangelise the technology benefit hundreds of thousand or may be millions in the next decade.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWPreksh Innovations has developed an AR/VR (augmented reality/ virtual reality) technology platform that allows retailers to create immersive online shopping experiences for their customers.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEThe proprietary technology enables users to virtually walk through offline stores on the web, pick products, and shop. Within the virtual walk-throughs, the products are ‘tagged’ and linked to the e-commerce back end of retailers using APIs (application programme interfaces). This provides a seamless and immersive experience to consumers. Preksh Innovations also has the experience available on VR gadgets where the visuals mimic a real-world shopping experience.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSPreksh Innovations is co-founded by Sathvik Muralidhar, MA Kodandarama and Sharath Chandrashekar. Sathvik is a former business development manager at Mahindra & Mahindra. Kodandarama has three decades of experience in organisations such as BEML, Wipro, and Nokia. Sharath, in his last role, was COO at Yulop Websense Solutions, a technology services and geo-coded content company.

REVENUE MODELPreksh Innovations has a SaaS model (software as a service) where retailers can subscribe to the platform to create VR experiences on their web properties. It charges a basic setup fee and a usage-based subscription.

TRACTION AND FUNDINGPreksh Innovations clocks INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore per annum in revenues. Funded by angel investors, it is looking to raise funds for customer acquisition and sales.

SectorE-commerce

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20

Founded InJune 2015

Preksh Innovations Pvt Ltd

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YS takeIn a world where millions of chest X-rays are taken every year but there aren’t enough experts to accurately interpret them, Qure.ai’s deep learning research stack makes it possible for physicians to help save lives by reducing errors and spotting and highlighting chest X-ray abnormalities that may otherwise be overlooked.

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SectorHealthcare

LocationMumbai

Team Size11 – 20

Founded In2016

Qure.ai COMPANY OVERVIEWQure.ai helps diagnose disease and recommend personalised treatment plans from healthcare imaging data. With deep learning algorithms classifying X-rays, CT scans or MRIs, Qure.ai helps physicians prioritise cases and enables more accurate diagnosis, leading to better and cheaper outcomes for patients.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEQure.ai uses deep learning algorithms to accurately detect and highlight abnormalities in medical images, reducing chances of misdiagnosis. With the help of multiple artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks such as image processing, visualising neural networks, state-of-the art research papers in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP)-based analysis of case histories, the app integrates the results of processed images with the viewing interface through cloud-based deployment.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSQure.ai is co-founded by Prashant Warier and Pooja Rao. Previously, Prashant co-founded Imagna Analytics, an AI-powered personalised digital marketing firm that was acquired by Fractal Analytics. Pooja, a PhD from the International Max Planck Research School for Neurosciences, is a bioinformatics research scientist.

REVENUE MODELQure.ai’s revenue comes through subscription-based licensing for its customers, predominantly radiology clinics, hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, public health programmes, and governments.

TRACTIONCurrently, Qure.ai is funded as a subsidiary of Fractal Analytics. It has a client base of 11 to 50 members. The company is looking to raise funds to grow its marketing and sales reach.

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YS takeRapid and accurate diagnosis is a key pillar of healthcare. Today, a pathologist can only read at most 40 slides a day for a variety of reasons. Spectral Insights moves the viewing platform to a computer monitor and makes it available locally or remotely. This allows data to be stored for review and images to be instantly shared for a second opinion. It increases speed and accuracy in counting cells for blood smears, tumor slides, pap smears, malaria parasites and tuberculosis bacteria.

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Spectral Insights COMPANY OVERVIEWSpectral Insights has built a full vertical integrated solution for pathology labs and hospitals. It converts manual microscopy operations into digital images and provides tools to significantly boost a pathologist’s efficiency in making a diagnosis.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICESpectral Insights’s core portfolio comprises of proprietary spectral camera and an image analytics studio. Its fully automated digital microscope has been built for Indian (and the developing world’s) lab conditions. The software modules deal with most of the microscopy workload in a pathology lab or hospital.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSSpectral Insights is co-founded by three former IMEC India colleagues - Prashanth Perugupalli, Dr. Sumit Nath and Dr. Dipankar Das. Prashanth was IMEC India’s Managing Director, while Sumit and Dipanakar were Principal Scientists there.

REVENUE MODELInitially, the company plans to generate revenues by placing its systems in labs/hospitals chargeable on a monthly basis. Later on, it will convert its hardware into a reference design and offer it at a one-time price to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) while including Spectral Insights branding for the software, algorithms and user tools. Revenue will be based on subscriptions to the number of systems placed for its software and algorithms.

TRACTIONCurrently, Spectral Insights is backed by angel investors. It clocks revenues to the tune of INR 5 lakh to INR 25 lakh per annum.

SectorHealthcare

LocationBengaluru

Team Size11 – 20

Founded InMay 2016

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YS takeStomatoBot is democratising access to computer video-enabled security for the common man. With a solid background in image processing, this team is poised to create an impact in this space. As more CCTVs get deployed in every nook and corner of the country, solutions like StomatoBot’s should see an uptake in adoption.

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SectorArtificial Intelligence

LocationPune

Team Size<10

Founded In2015

StomatoBot Technologies Pvt Ltd

COMPANY OVERVIEWStomatoBot Technologies is developing a computer vision product, WatchMan, an automated CCTV surveillance system providing proactive mobile alerts in near-real time, way beyond the capabilities of ordinary CCTVs.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEWatchMan functions in three steps:

• Fetches the stream of images from CCTV camera footage live and online• Processes these images using different algorithms

• Sends the relevant images and text logs as alerts over email or mobile app to the customer for further review and actions to be taken

The software identifies potentially undesirable incidents using computer vision, machine learning and deep learning models. Its cutting-edge technology uses face detection and reports instances of perimeter breach, insufficient lighting, blurring, motion and obstruction in the field of view (FoV), as well as loss of power and network to the camera. WatchMan also does vehicle counting and classification.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSAnand Muglikar co-founded StomatoBot Technologies with his wife Rajashri and his father Anil, who’s in his sixties. Anand has been working in the field of computer vision for almost half a decade.

REVENUE MODELThe company follows an annual/quarterly subscription-based model for VSAaaS (video surveillance-alerts-as-a-service), with a freemium mobile app.

TRACTIONBacked by angel investors, StomatoBot Technologies is looking to raise funds to reach out to more customers and build the product.

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YS takeCyber attacks are growing and they are not going away in the near future. What makes Threat Landscape the need of the hour is the database they have built for cyber threats. The team scavenges the dark web, the deep web and the open web to build its threat intelligence.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWThreatLandscape is a cybersecurity firm providing advanced threat intelligence to security operations teams, cyber threat analysts, and incident responders with real-time insight on existing and emerging threats.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEThreatLandscape offers one-click contexts with historical and real-time linkages between threats, campaigns, actors, and exploits. This helps prioritise alerts to reduce response time and increase the productivity of Security Operations Centres (SOCs) by 10X. ThreatLandscape also identifies trending vulnerabilities and offers first-hand information about misuse across any application to allow patch management teams prevent hacks.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSThreatLandscape is co-founded by Abhishek Bhuyan, Navtej Singh and Praveen Hebbagodi. Abhishek and Navtej have more than two decades’ combined experience in security and vulnerability research. Praveen is the co-founder and CTO of Epictions, an intelligent marketing platform. He is a former director of engineering at Akamai Technologies.

REVENUE MODELSubscription-based enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) model.

TRACTIONCurrently bootstrapped, ThreatLandscape is looking to raise funds to focus on improving customer loyalty across locations.

SectorCybersecurity

LocationBengaluru

Team Size<10


ThreatLandscape

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YS takeUnocoin has been one of the earliest players in driving Bitcoin awareness campaigns across the country by conducting seminars, hackathons and meet-ups. The team’s passion for the blockchain and digital currency and commitment to execution makes it a company to look out for in the coming years.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWUnocoin is India’s leading Bitcoin and blockchain company where users of its wallet can securely buy, sell, store, use, and accept Bitcoins.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICE• Systematic Buying Plan, Unocoin’s unique feature, enables a customer to buy Bitcoins in a periodic manner for an amount as little as INR 50, with zero transaction fees. This feature encourages affordability and helps mitigate the volatility risk associated with Bitcoin.• Unocoin’s Merchant PoS app helps brick-and-mortar traders accept payments in Bitcoins. • Similarly, its Autosell feature allows the merchant to automatically sell his/her Bitcoin in a lock-in period of 30 minutes, thereby mitigating the volatility risk.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSUnocoin’s founders are Sathvik Vishwanath, Harish BV, and Abhinand Kaseti. Previously, Sathvik and Harish founded Venture Next and Blaze Air Network, respectively. Abhinand is a former director at i4 Communications.

REVENUE MODELUnocoin charges 1 percent in transaction fees on buying and selling of Bitcoins as well as on the spread between the buy and sell price.

TRACTIONWith more than 3,00,000 users, Unocoin earns over INR 6 crore per annum in revenues. It’s a venture capital-funded startup, with plans to raise more funds to focus on hiring and improving compliance for government regulations.

SectorFintech

LocationBengaluru

Team Size61 - 100

Founded In2013

Unocoin Technologies Private Limited

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YS takeThe future of wearable technology and human-computer interaction (HCI) is exciting. The next decade will see significant activity on how humans will be augmented with the way we interact with computers. The Vicara team has built promising technology for gesture-control computing. Keep your eye on this energetic team to see what they have up their sleeve.

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SectorHardware/electronics

LocationChennai

Team Size<10

Founded InMarch 2017

Vicara COMPANY OVERVIEWVicara is a human augmentation startup developing a wearable technology that can help people work with their real and digital surroundings.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEKai is a minimalist wearable device that recognises hand gestures to interact with the digital world intuitively. It enables professionals to seamlessly interact and enhance productivity by creating a gesture-based computer experience.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSVicara is co-founded by Adarsh Warrier and Abhishek Satish, both engineering graduates from VIT University, Vellore.

REVENUE MODELVicara expects revenue to be generated from the asset sales of its products and supporting services, and its units to be sold to the consumer market either through channel markets or direct online sales.

TRACTIONCurrently bootstrapped, Vicara is incubated at Technology Business Incubator, VIT, and is yet to launch its product. It has additional support through crowdfunding, angel investors, and the government.

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YS takeThis healthcare startup focuses on lifestyle-triggered chronic health conditions like diabetes, hypertension and obesity, which is the need of the hour. The team behind VitaCloud is the one we bet on to create a technology solution that the healthcare industry needs.

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COMPANY OVERVIEWVitaCloud adopts a data-driven approach to manage chronic health conditions. Its IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) platform helps care providers and patients to collaboratively manage chronic diseases by combining connected technologies, data, and the human touch.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEVitaCloud’s IoMT platform pulls data, in real time, from different health sources like wearables, in-home medical devices, laboratory reports, nutrition databases and population health studies to create a comprehensive health profile. It provides:• Continuous patient monitoring services• Type 2 diabetes management• Fitness and weight-loss coachingCaregivers and businesses can integrate VitaCloud’s services through a comprehensive API (application programming interface) or deploy a full-stack solution.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSVitaCloud is co-founded by Vinod Shankar, Rahul Upputuri and Rohin Bhargava, all previously working at Capgemini. There, Vinod was director and India/APAC head, Rahul a big-data researcher, and Rohin a data management and governance practice lead.

REVENUE MODELVitaCloud has two market-facing offerings:• VitaCloud API - Businesses and caregivers embed VitaCloud’s API/SDK into their existing apps or portals to access their patients’ digital health footprint. This is a SaaS (software-as- a-service) offering where providers are charged on the basis of number of users (slabs).• Full-stack solution - Caregivers receive a provider cockpit while consumers receive a mobile app along with a Bluetooth health device (powered by the IoMT), charged on a per-user basis.

TRACTIONVitaCloud generates INR 25 lakh to INR 1 crore per annum in revenue and is bootstrapped at the moment. It is looking to raise funds to power its marketing and sales.

SectorHealthcare

LocationBengaluru

Team Size<10


VitaCloud Digital Health Private Limited

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YS takeJust like RedBus changed the fragmented bus industry, WareNow aims to change the way people look at warehouses. The place WareNow is in now is primed for disruption and technology intervention. The startup aims to make the process of managing inventory and supply chain at every level as painless as possible.

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SectorLogistics

LocationNew Delhi

Team Size<10

Founded InOctober 2016

COMPANY OVERVIEWWareNow offers flexible, affordable, tailor-made, and on-demand warehouse solutions to connect businesses to available warehousing space across the country. It aims to systematise the highly unorganised warehousing sector in the Indian market.

DETAILS OF PRODUCT/SERVICEWareNow’s dynamic model is a viable way of purchasing warehousing services on demand – paying for only what is used – instead of owning distribution centres or signing contracts with third-party logistic providers.

Its system seamlessly integrates with the business functions and is easy to operate. WareNow puts all the information in one place so that communication between the customer and the warehouses is efficient, relevant, and transparent.

FOUNDER(S) DETAILSWareNow is co-founded by Aditya Goel and Rahul Raj, both IIT-BHU graduates. Aditya is the executive director at Ornate Solar, a distributor of solar products. Rahul was previously a sales analytics manager at Novartis.

REVENUE MODELWareNow has a dual revenue model, monetising both warehouse supply and demand:• A revenue-sharing model with businesses, utilising unused spaces in existing warehouses• Flexible charges, according to the duration of occupancy

TRACTIONCurrently bootstrapped, it is already breaking even with 10 clients.

WareNow Services Pvt Ltd

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Sponsors

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Axis Bank is a firm believer in innovation and has always been at the forefront of technology adoption, coming up with new products and solutions. The creation of the Thought Factory, Axis Bank’s innovation lab, was a major step in the direction of technology-led innovation and demonstrates the bank’s commitment to this ideology. Located in the heart of the startup ecosystem in Bengaluru, Thought Factory, which is a state-of-the-art unique 3-in-1 facility with an accelerator, incubator, and co-sharing workplace launched in collaboration with AWS.The lab was formed with the sole objective of building disruptive banking solutions – ‘Unimagined is Undone’, being the lab’s maxim. The Thought Factory team has collaborated with OCBC & Visa Innovation Lab, Singapore,

for co-innovating. A Tech Advisory Board, comprising Sharad Sharma (iSpirit), Manish Chokhani (Enam), Vishal Gondal (Founder, GoQii), and Shankar Narayan (Singapore-based serial entrepreneur), along with Axis Bank’s senior management, form the think tank for the Thought Factory, guiding the team through its various functions.

Graduation DayOn July 29, 2017, the Thought Factory team celebrated the Graduation Day of the first cohort of its Accelerator Program. The cohort ran for almost six months. The team had conducted multiple road shows and run multiple social media campaigns for the accelerator programme’s launch. Out of 108 applications received, six startups were selected. Once on board, the startups were given a structured mentorship programme, multiple cloud credits, and access to Axis

Open Innovation at Axis Bank – Thought Factory and its partners

FROM OUR SPONSORS

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Bank’s Thought Factory office space.

Axis Bank’s aim was to expedite the overall growth of these emerging startups along with exploring novel banking ideas with them. The programme ran two parallel tracks:

There were three-month-long, classroom- style workshops focussing on customers, products, and traction. Zone Start-ups, the programme managers of the bank’s accelerator, facilitated this track. Zone Start-ups organised various sessions, meeting with ecosystem gurus and investors.

A tactical Proof-of-Concept with Axis Bank was enabled by the Thought Factory team. The PoC aided a live validation of the startups’ product ideas and their market acceptance. The PoC pilots were designed on problem statements given by Axis Bank’s various business vertical leads. Through these pilots, the Accelerator’s partner startups were able to validate their product offering and the related value proposition. A successful product meant an opportunity for a strategic collaboration/partnership with the Bank.

The first cohort included:

S2Pay – Enabling offline mobile paymentsS2Pay enables single-step payment, enabling the end consumer to make secure

payments from a mobile app, even when the consumer is offline. The technology is especially useful in remote areas where internet data is still unavailable, thus making digital payments a reality for everyone. Pally – AI stack-based chatbot for investment advisoryPally has created a chatbot, which, on the input of an image of a salary slip, creates an investment portfolio that maximises tax saving for the end customer. The plan is customised for each customer; and his or her details and desired saving plans are queried by an intelligent chatbot. Perpule – Self-checkout via mobile appPerpule’s app lets shoppers scan the products they have chosen on their mobile app, and pay from within the app once they are done. It integrates with the retailer’s promos, and automatically applies discounts/offers on the go. Perpule aims to do away with checkout queues and make shopping fun.

FintechLabs – Analytics in lendingFintechLabs’ analytical models can be used in the digital lending space. With its analytics, it wants to digitise lending completely, making it quick and easy, but safe and focused.

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What do Startups Get?

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Paymatrix – Credit in the rental spacePaymatrix is trying to solve the problem of credit in in the Indian rental market by enabling payments to landlords via credit card. It also helps landlords in rent/property management. Paymatrix is trying to reduce the chaos in the field of Indian rentals by inculcating transparency and order. Gieom – Enabling operational excellenceGieom has a bouquet of products that help large organisations manage their operations, compliance, and assist change management.

LOOKING AHEADBenefits of banking for startups through Axis Bank Axis Bank’s New Economy Group at Axis Bank is a single-point contact for startups for their end-to-end banking requirements. It is a dedicated relationship team specially formed to cater to all the requirements of young startups and offers unique banking solutions. Some of the key solutions include: A zero-balance current account, Business Banking Solutions, Card Solutions, Credit Solutions and Investments and Other Banking Solutions.

Going forward, Axis Bank will continue to work on strategic assimilation of co-developed products with GIEOM, Pally and FIntechLabs into its systems. Besides the progress at the accelerator, the past six months have been quite eventful for the startups. Perpule won the semi-final round of Next Money FintechFinals ’17, and raised a seed funding of USD650,000 from Kalaari Capital; S2Pay and Gieom onboarded multiple new clients; FintechLabs and Paymatrix expanded their services portfolio and Pally evolved its product idea and expanded its team.Axis Bank’s innovation team has already started working on recruitment of startups for the second cohort of the accelerator. The model has been revamped as an ongoing accelerator for this year.

Moreover, Axis Bank is in the process of building an API (application program interface) sandbox environment, which can be used by startups for a quick plug-’n’-play, enabling much faster product testing adoption by the bank.

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Abhishek GopalCo-Founder & CEOThroughBit

Blockchain, the new internet

There are certain things that we get used to and hence assume that that’s the best way of doing them. We can’t imagine life without the internet today; that wasn’t really the case a couple of decades ago. If you had told your grandmother that she could receive a picture of her grandchild in seconds, she would have dismissed you as delusional. The idea of doing school projects within minutes was stuff fantasies were made of: not anymore.

The internet though was not God to start off with. It was treated as Satan’s lovechild – evil and untouchable. But its transformation was swift and enormous. The world today functions on the internet. It changed the world of publishing and communication. It brought to fore a slew of entrepreneurs and created enormous wealth. And the cornerstone of the internet’s success story was the disruption it brought to the existing

systems, to the way information flowed.

Communication is much older than the concept of money and, desirable or not, money is what keeps the world machinery running. The way the world communicated saw a tectonic shift in a matter of a few years and that brought about a revolution: everything was accessible to everyone. Imagine the same kind of revolution happening to money.

Money has never been rigid. From early humans who dealt in barter, to their successors who shifted to precious metals, to their offspring who stored the ingots in a vault and exchanged a piece of paper in return, to modern-day man who just prints and mints as much money as he wants, money has been the most flexible of instruments. The time has now come, it seems, for money 2.0.

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So, what really are the problems that ail money?

1. It’s too controlled. There are too many rules and regulations, mainly to make it difficult for criminals to carry out their activities. In trying to keep money clean, regulators have made it a difficult instrument for the common man to use freely. The fact that we have seen money the way it is makes it very difficult for us now to see it in any other light.

2. Money constantly gets devalued. Another control regulators have is that they generate as much money as they wish to, sometimes for the benefit of the common man, sometimes otherwise. The limitless availability of money constantly pushes down its value.

3. When man started keeping his precious metals with a second party to ensure security and ease of transaction, he effectively created what we today call a bank. In exchange for the metals, this safekeeper gave a piece of paper that promised to carry the same value as that of the metal deposited. The safekeeper has now grown into an institutional authority which tells us when we can use our money, controlling how much we can use at a time, asking us where we got the money

from and, in some cases, doesn’t let us use the money the way we want to. Banks, clearinghouses and money transmitters have become humongous and can alter the economies of the world. The world has seen catastrophes every time there has been such concentration of power.

4. Money was never designed, it happened. So, all things that money aids seem to just adjust themselves to how money works. When you pay your bills, you need a receipt to prove you have paid the money. If you are carrying a big amount, you also need to carry documents to confirm that it’s legally transacted money. When you get into an agreement with another party, you have to draw up a contract. Thereafter you hope and pray that the contract is honoured, because if it’s not, then the procedure to recover the money you are owed entails infinite hassles. Instead of being a solution to problems, money itself has become the problem.

The average risk appetite of the world is quite low; this makes disruption for the sake of development a centuries-long process.

The new currenciesBlockchain and cryptocurrencies seem to have brought in some semblance of the system disrupting itself to move forward. Only this time, the disruptors are not from within the system.

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Cryptocurrencies are not just tokens that hold value. The blockchains that govern these tokens are also programes that solve the above-stated problems.

1. They are limited in supply, that’s the way they are designed. Hence, if anything, the value of the money you own will only go up, as the supply is ever-diminishing and the demand ever-increasing, nuances of economics notwithstanding.

2. The concept of blockchain has been designed in such a way that any two people sitting anywhere in the world, at any time of the day, and on any day of the year, can exchange money without a third party, and they can do so in a matter of seconds. What this essentially does is give everyone complete ownership of their money, make middlemen less powerful – even irrelevant – and make money a tool for growth, and not a hindrance.

3. There is a clear divide between systems and the instruments that fuel the system. For example, money and arbitration are separate systems working within their own limits. The absence of seamless integration of systems brings down the overall efficiency. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts have the potential to amalgamate multiple systems into one, thus eliminating

the need for middlemen and the criminal waste of time and money. To illustrate: A sells a car to B and they agree that B will pay X amount every month to A for Y months. Halfway into the contract period, B defaults. Now, depending on the mutually agreed limit on the number of defaults and if B defaults that many times, the car will automatically stop working.

This is a simple example of cryptocurrencies that can integrate both the Internet of Things and smart contracts. Mankind has long tried to make non-living objects interact for better efficiency, and also to make arbitration from a long-drawn process to a quick and instantaneous activity. Blockchain can be a solution.

Knee-jerk reactionsAnything revolutionary has to go through the churn of having to face stiff resistance, negative press, and aspersions cast over its true intentions before ready acceptance. The initial stages will see a lot of ‘going forward and coming back’. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are in that stage of the lifecycle now. There are roadblocks stopping them becoming the global forces they aim to be. Some of the issues they face are listed below.

1. Cryptocurrencies, for now, represent a new form of money. Most companies that

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operate in this sphere provide speculative services -- a platform for people to trade in cryptocurrencies with the hope of multiplying their money. This doesn’t necessarily mean a death knell for the industry, but not for long. Evangelists and companies alike need to promote the fact that cryptocurrencies can fuel digitally executed business functions; and that the cryptocurrencies’ software can be used to build applications that can replace the current systems such as finance, healthcare, law, automobile, security, education, manufacturing, supply chain, and more.

2. Lack of regulations needs to be addressed. It can be safely assumed, given the nature of cryptocurrency transactions, that if they were to be mainstreamed today, they would give the banks a run for their ‘money’. Also, lack of understanding on the part of legislators regarding the pseudonymous nature of cryptocurrency users has been preventing governments across the world from laying down regulations.

Companies can help by being self-regulated and by providing timely updates to authorities on the industry developments as well as any suspicious activities.

3. The majority of people never understand the intricacies of technologies they use. How

do TVs, cars, airplanes, mobile phones or the internet work? The average Joe neither knows nor cares about the modalities. All that matters is what a technology can do for him. A lot of ‘real estate’ online has been spent on explaining the working of the technology behind cryptocurrencies. Maybe that is necessary for the early movers and the influencers, but not the majority. Most of the information that turns up either promotes the fact that cryptocurrencies are amazing speculative instruments or ends up explaining the technology behind them. Neither does any good for onboarding the masses.

And then there is the huge problem of cryptocurrencies being used for illegal activities and for being a penetrative instrument for the black market. It is a fact that the major use case for cryptocurrencies has been illegal trade. The argument for cryptocurrencies, albeit reactive, is that the easiest way to indulge in activities not approved by the governments is by using Fiat (money that has indirect market value or is given legal tender status by government fiat).

If blockchain and cryptocurrencies come with the hope and potential of solving bigger problems, maybe the potential aberrations can be overlooked for the time being, even as innovators go on and build

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According to a study by the IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics, 90 percent of startups in India fail within the first five years of their formation and most failures are due to circumstances beyond bankruptcy or lack of funding. Many of these disasters could have been avoided or mitigated had the managements paid more heed to the principles of good corporate governance from the beginning.

Simply put, corporate governance is the system by which companies are directed and controlled. Corporate governance has two dimensions. The more prominent and easier side is a set of policies, processes and practices. The more difficult side, however, is the value aspect. While policies and processes can be documented, it is their implementation in spirit that distinguishes well-governed companies from others. Although failure can be as good a lesson,

it can do irreparable damage in terms of reputation, revenue, and time. Therefore, a clearly defined organisational structure and an ethical base are vital to a startup’s effective corporate governance system. It is always good to start early and embed the values and beliefs into the vision and the business plan of the company and, preferably, in its stakeholders. This will ensure long-term success and avoid both operational as well as reputational risks not only to the firm but also to the investor organisations.

While practices of good corporate governance may differ from company to company, these are primarily built upon the foundation of a corporate structure with checks and balances to protect the interests of all stakeholders. There is little argument that potential investors, employees and others will seek out and reward a well-

Neeraj GuptaPartner & Leader – Risk Assurance Services, PwC India

What startups should know about corporate governance

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An experienced boardThe lack of a formal board structure presents a unique challenge for startups largely because most startups are founded by a single or a small group of individuals who are busy growing the business and reaching out to customers. The board of directors is important as it is charged with governance and represents the interest of the shareholders. Therefore, startup companies should select potential directors with relevant business experience, expertise and contacts within and outside the vertical that may enhance the companies’ reputation and revenue.

Boards should clearly define the role of their directors and the directors in turn should be diligent in performing their fiduciary duties and support the management of the business. Although the Companies Act, 2013 does not mandate the requirement of independent directors for startups, nevertheless it would be a good practice to ensure that corporate business is carried out with transparency and objectivity; something that independent directors can contribute significantly.

Effective risk managementAn area where most startups fail is to develop a sound risk management framework to identify risks that may impact business objectives and to best

managed company, which will ultimately position them for future financing and growth. This is exemplified in the case of an urban lifestyle service-based startup in Delhi NCR, which has managed to become one of the largest mobile service marketplaces in India, partly due to successful management and compliance structures installed at each level of the hyperlocal sector.

The major provisions of corporate governance in India have been listed under Clause 49 of the SEBI Equity Listing Agreement and the Companies Act, 2013. Although the law mandates these provisions for large enterprises, it relaxes certain provisions for small companies and startups in India, leaving it to their discretion. (For the purpose of our understanding, startups here are taken as those whose turnover does not exceed INR 50 crores.) Nevertheless, it is advisable to address governance as early as possible and continue to make it a focus to ensure the successful running of the business and protect the long-term interest of various stakeholders in the company. Despite being amorphous, the provisions can be broadly classified into various heads which are prudent for infant businesses to adopt, namely, corporate structure and board of directors, risk management, ethics and culture, fraud prevention, data privacy, disclosure, and compliance.

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mitigate them in a cost-effective manner. The most common risks to the viability of the company in today’s environment are competition risks, constant changes in business model due to evolving customer behaviour, technology risks and regulation risks amongst others. According to the Companies Act, 2013, the board of directors “shall lay a report before the company, which shall include a statement indicating development and implementation of a risk management policy for the company including identification and classification of risk, if any, which in the opinion of the board may threaten the existence of the company”.

The risk management plan should be an evolving and collaborative document, wherein one should review and revise it according to time and need.Additionally, a strong audit function is an important pillar of good corporate governance. Even though the Companies Act, 2013 makes internal audit mandatory only for listed or private companies with turnover exceeding a certain threshold, it will nevertheless be a far-sighted exercise for startups to start using internal audit to obtain assurance around critical business risks and underlying processes.

Regulatory actionCompanies are required by regulatory bodies to comply with statutory and

regulatory compliances of the country. Accordingly, startups need to exercise adequate diligence to ensure and demonstrate that they are compliant. India is still a fairly regulated economy and companies have to comply with a number of regulatory requirements related to labour, information security, taxation, corporate secretarial, administrative, as well as a number of local laws. Unlike perception, most startups do care about compliances but a problem area could be lack of awareness of the same. This would require them to seek backing of experts to put in place an efficient system that helps them run the company.

It is also equally important for startups to pay attention to board processes and disclosures as mandated by the Companies Act, 2013 which requires a company to document and record all key board decisions, and also to report related-party transactions.

Fraud prevention mechanismsIncreasing frauds within the startup space bring a mound of reputational and organisational risks to companies. Good corporate governance, however, provides a number of defence mechanisms such as code of conduct, whistleblower policy and conflict of interest declarations that would equip them to avoid such pitfalls. For

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example, having a strong whistleblowing regime would prevent executives from being tempted to use illegal and immoral measures to bolster business or sometimes even misreport to the board. Besides this, ensuring timely investigations and actions on ethics complaints are equally essential to the company’s functioning.

Data privacyA large number of the technology-driven startups maintain highly sensitive information about the consumer. The growing number of cyberattacks and breaches mandate startups to install sound data protection policies and procedures in place. With the right to privacy being a fundamental right, companies need to adhere to the data privacy and security laws so that they don’t breach the trust of their customers.

In saying all this, one should also realise that adherence to the conducts can be overwhelming for startups, which often want to retain a lean and agile setup and demonstrate compliance in a cost-effective manner. Further, this would also require them to invest in greater numbers of skilled professionals and managers. Hence, more and more startups are hiring professionals on a retainer basis or vesting their confidence in consulting firms that are able to guide and put in place sound governance strategies, risk management solutions, and a compliance framework.

In conclusion, a bright idea, good intent and fire in the belly are by themselves not sufficient to ensure a startup’s sucess. An essential ingredient to reach the mark is good corporate governance, which brings in the necessary transparency and oversight into the ecosystem.

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Karan VirwaniDirector WeWork (India)

Building better human connections makes for better business

If you stop for a moment and look at how the world is choosing to work today, you might be forced to ask, “What would Dilbert say?” The beleaguered cubicle worker is the archetype of how previous generations worked, chained to a desk by landlines and fixed office hours. Cut to this generation, and mobility has proved to be the big game-changer. In an age of compulsive sharing, via Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram, it was only a matter of time before the whole concept trickled down to the workspace. Today, you can be sitting on a mountain with just your phone, and be as productive, if not more, than the generation that braved traffic to reach work on time in the hope of getting that coveted corner office one day.

This generation is not interested in working in silos. They want to be a part of something bigger, and that is where the concept of collaboration or sharing comes in. Wikipedia

has a fairly comprehensive definition of the sharing economy – “The sharing economy (sometimes also referred to as the peer-to-peer economy, mesh, collaborative economy, collaborative consumption) is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of human and physical resources. It includes the shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services by different people and organisations. These systems take a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology to empower individuals, corporations, non-profits and government with information that enables distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. A common premise is that when information about goods is shared, the value of those goods may increase, for the business, for individuals, and for the community.”

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Now imagine ‘sharing’ in the workspace and having access to a variety of global resources at the flick of a button, sharing a physical or virtual workspace with a diverse community that could help you advance your innovation – and you will understand why the kind of collaborative workspaces that WeWork creates are in demand all around the world.

And I say around the world because this is not something that is happening only in a certain country, and it’s not something that has been copied from Manhattan and pasted onto Mumbai and Bengaluru. In fact, the model we work on ensures that geographies, borders, etc., become redundant concepts. The WeWork community is a large global community that connects seamlessly, in person or over a digital platform. Any member who joins the WeWork community get access to an app over which they can connect with every WeWork member across the world. Imagine, you are a writer who needs information on agritech. Just run a search for agritech on our app, and you will get a list of every agritech firm that is a member of the WeWork community across the globe.

Even within a physical WeWork space, a variety of community-building exercises such as TGIM (Monday morning breakfasts), Wellness Wednesdays, and Happy Hours

take place to ensure that people are interacting with each other. For example, we recently had a TT tournament at WeWork Galaxy (in Bengaluru) and it was so encouraging to see people from different companies sitting with each other and communicating in a space that would not have existed it were not for a collaborative workspace. This also leads to better business relationships in the future. This is borne out by the fact that about 70 percent of our members actually do business with one another or have transacted in some way with each other.

Other than the app, being a part of the collaborative community at WeWork also comes with a host of other benefits. For example, we have Shopify, Monkey Box, Meghshala, and Microsoft working out of WeWork Galaxy. We provide Amazon Cloud Credits or Office 365 to all our members at a discounted price. WeWork members also get great rates on health insurance and other lifestyle benefits. We have even tied up with Divrt, who provide parking solutions for our members. Collaboration truly is the lifesource of what we do.

Several other organisations like TiE reach out to us to host events here. The whole idea is to be extremely open and collaborative on all spectra. We even invite other co-working space founders to come and

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experience what we are doing because that’s the kind of ecosystem we are trying to create.

India, of course, has its own unique flavour when it comes to work. Infrastructure can pose a challenge when it comes to connectivity, and that is where a space like this will make a difference. A space like this ensures you will have the same experience and service whether it is on Residency Road in Bengaluru, or BKC in Mumbai, or when our spaces open in Koramangala and EGL (Bengaluru), Andheri (Mumbai), and Gurugram between November and early next year.

Educating people about a space like this has been a challenge. While people are aware of ‘co-working’ spaces, the magnitude of what is possible only hits home when they experience it. But through a variety of exercises, including digital adverts on Facebook and stories on platforms like

YourStory, the word has been put out there and the response has been terrific. We have 120 offices already working out of WeWork Galaxy and the response in BKC has also been excellent, with companies like Discovery Channel, Twitter, and several smaller businesses already signing up to be a part of the community. There’s a heartening irony in the fact that the more we grow, the ‘smaller’ the workplace world gets.

As the world talks more about moving towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) and whether humans will be ‘replaced’, our founder Adam Neuman is convinced that we are moving in the opposite direction. We believe that human connection and interaction is the future and will make for a better world for future generations. We also believe that a machine will never give you the same sort of output or creativity as the human mind, and that we truly work better when WeWork together.

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India has taken giant strides in bringing millions into the digital payment space, thanks to the mobile phone revolution. The growth has helped fulfil Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push for financial inclusion of the masses. Digital payments have also become a user’s entry point into the formal financial system. The compound annual growth rate of digital payments grew by 28 percent between 2011 and 2016 and during 2016-17 alone, it grew an astounding 55 percent. Simultaneously, mobile phone penetration rose, with 350 million people getting access to the internet on their smartphones. This has enabled them get a better reach of various financial services.

Needless to say, fintech companies have been on the forefront of the digital revolution and coupled with the Jan Dhan Yojana, they have transformed the financial landscape of the country. In fact, the fintech

adoption rate stood at 52 percent in India along with other developing countries such as China and Brazil, considerably higher than the global average. According to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), by 2020 the digital payments industry in India will be worth USD 500 billion, constituting 15 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP) while digital payments will comprise more than 60 percent of the transactions. The Indian fintech market, on the other hand, is expected to reach USD 2.4 billion by 2020. And the factors that could propel the growth further would be partnerships between this dynamic sector and the experienced traditional banking sector. Cashless economyThe sustained campaign for a cashless economy with digital payment mechanism appears quite promising and growth is

Digital India: fintech market to reach USD2.4 billion by 2020Bipin Preet Singh

Founder & CEO Mobikwik

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likely to be proportional to the number of internet users. No wonder the BCG’s projections about the digital economy paint a rosy picture, pointing to the way ahead for the fintech industry. More and more conglomerates and tech giants are queuing up, with an eye on the USD 2.4-billion pie of the fintech business. However, the differentiator between fortune hunters and real winners will be sustainability and credibility with proven track record. I tend to agree with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley when he recently said the [inevitable] ups and downs should not be the yardstick to gauge the fintech sector.

Collaborations between the dynamic sector and key banking sector could result in the rolling out of unique products to a larger number of people in India. Collaboration between the government and fintech startup sector can help India move at the speed of light in realising its digital ambitions.

In November 2016, the government took the decision of demonetisation to enable a clean economy, free of black money, and to promote digital payments for better accountability. Private players, such as wallets, worked determinedly to support the government, enabling digital payments for use cases, ranging from paying for the local cab, medical supplies, milk, groceries and

so on. The envelope was pushed beyond paying bills and organised retail to include daily use cases of masses and minimise the use of cash. Acceptability of digital payments, led by wallets or UPI (Unified Payments Interface), has had a remarkable impact on India’s digital economy.

High returnsOverall, India offers the highest expected return on investment on fintech projects at 29 percent, compared to the global average of 20 percent. A PwC report underlined that despite significant reductions in incoming global investments in the fintech space, the India opportunity remains promising. India offers the largest unbanked or under-banked population, along with a strong technology and entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Major technology players have entered the retail financial services market, teaming up with fintech firms to provide new or improved propositions with wide uptake. Money transfer and payments services were, and continue to be, the most popular fintech service, growing from 18 percent in 2015 to 50 percent in 2017.

The millennials have been a major contributing factor in transforming India into a digital economy. And users in this group are not confined to urban India alone. The younger generation in rural areas too

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is reaping the dividend from innovative products and services offered by the fintech companies. The rolling out of lighter apps by payment wallet major MobiKwik in areas with poor connectivity is a big boon to this age group which is enthusiastic about adopting the digital mode of payment. This demographic, at present, is spending an average of 17 hours online daily, more than any other age group, and 40 percent transacts online. Many telecom companies such as BSNL have started to work on the financial inclusion to the vast under-banked masses by fostering associations with new-age wallet companies. So much so that in one stroke, more than 100 million BSNL customers, largely in rural areas, can benefit from digital payments. Free of hasslesThanks to digitisation, people today are financially empowered and are benefited by hassle-free payment solutions in everyday situations like, say, petrol stations, parking slots, unorganised retail, highway toll plaza, grocery and dairy outlets and so on. More importantly, they are gaining by the digitisation of the healthcare delivery system. MobiKwik alone is impacting 260 million lives and consumers along with 2 million business partners. By 2022, the payment wallet major will enable a billion Indians with a one-tap access to digital finance, loans, investments and savings.

According to a statement by a government body, the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), the volume of all digital transactions increased by about 23 times - with 63.80 crore digital transactions for a value of Rs 2,425 crore in March 2017 - compared to 2.8 crore digital transactions worth Rs 101 crore till November 2016. This growth means that collaboration between government and fintech startup sector can help India realise its digital ambitions. The coming decadeThere is no doubt India will be a digital superpower within the next decade, leading to a digital payments revolution in Asia. The advent of financial literacy and mass disbursement of financial services will ensure that a billion Indians realise their financial aspirations, removing ‘under-banked’ from India’s economic phrasebook. Financial and digital literacy, however, still remains an area of concern in rural areas. Though the digital revolution has brought benefits to millions, an understanding of the various financial services is limited across large swathes of the population. Digi Dhan Abhiyan, the government’s digital financial literacy drive launched earlier this year, facilitates access to such instruments to one crore rural citizens.

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At the NITI Aayog’s Champions of Change meet recently, entrepreneurs underlined the inclusion of financial literacy as a subject or module in schools and colleges, as well as

skill development institutes for endorsing Digital India. Hopefully, such an early start will inculcate digital literacy in every Indian citizen in the near future.

Venture investments in India are entering a new cycle with founders focussing on problems that are unique to India and those impacting hundreds of millions of lives.

“– Rahul Chandra, Helion Venture Partners

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Is that chatbot part of your AI strategy?

Would you ever buy a window without taking the entire house into consideration? It may not make sense logically but if you observe the buzz around the chatbot space, you will wonder why enterprises are doing just that.

These days, everyone is looking for a chatbot, even if a good web form works perfectly well instead. It is almost a craze: ‘I want it because others have it.’ A self-propelling thought process. But aren’t chatbots really just an interface? It’s like having a window in place and ignoring the rest of the structure.

We know from a user perspective that chatbots are able to give you responses when you chat with them. From a developer’s perspective, they are algorithms that can be trained with keywords that help identify intent and send out scripted

responses. This unit could be set up on a tree structure so, at various levels, we can classify intent and we can respond. But this takes on a new meaning if chatbots are part of an AI (artificial intelligence) strategy. This is the need of the hour because the benefits are simply too large to ignore.I have listed a few points that any enterprise (top management, innovations teams, business heads included) needs to look at if it is considering chatbots as part of its AI strategy, and not in isolation as a stopgap solution that gets obsolete and fragments the touch points.

Are you looking at the text ?This is key. Enterprise text has grown exponentially over the last few years and we must be prepared for much more as it is expected to reach about 40,000 exabytes by 2020.

Animesh SamuelCo-Founder & Chief Evangelist Light Information Systems

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Just to give you an idea, 1 exabyte is 10 raised to the power of 18 bytes. That’s a quarter of a billion DVDs!

You could be an organisation that has highly fragmented data across the board, as is in most cases. You should have a strategy around the data itself while looking for interaction points and driving efficiencies. If so, you should be looking at specific AI/NLP (natural language processing) capabilities put to a modest use today that can scale across the organisation and function while you are taking better control of your data.

Or, you might be one of those rare enterprises with consolidated data across functions, ready for an AI partner to come in and build different use cases, whether automating a process or interacting with a customer, or deriving insights. Good for you, you should be looking for a solution that can scale to connect the text that flows around in your organisation on every communication – email, chat, collaboration platforms, documents of every kind (legal, policy, process, product), structured data from your CRM, ERP, HRMS, WFM (customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human resource management software, workforce management), and all the letters of the alphabet. This information then needs to be disbursed either as free-flowing

conversations or graphs, or even pictures and text with all stakeholders of the enterprise.

How deep is your algorithm?Any solution you deploy should have algorithms that must have at least the following capabilities in general for it to scale:

A. Machine comprehensionThe set of algorithms should have at least some level of comprehension when it comes to processing unstructured and structured data (read emails/documents and relational database). If you are looking at deploying chatbots, you should look for those that can comprehend language, not just intent. Given a text input, the chatbot should get a semantic understanding rather than just the intent. It should be able to connect with your data sources if need be, and derive an answer from it rather than give only a scripted response. And you should still be able to define the scope of an interaction. You should be able to repurpose this capability as per your operational demand and increasing data, sources and channels.

B. Reusable learningAI is not based on brute force learning alone; it is childlike learning rather. Pretty much like children where the text has to

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be understood and hence won’t be perfect on day one. But depending on the quality, quantity of data, and machines watching the way humans are responding to it over time, you can reach over 95 percent efficiency, which is great for your organisation. This means that millions of hours can be saved every day.

To summarise, ensure that any AI tool you are looking at should be trained to understand and reuse all the learning within your enterprise.

What’s in it for me?Every stakeholder has this question. Who are the stakeholders that benefit with AI/NLP? Pretty much everyone across the board eventually, if not already. And more so when other departments seek access to the data.

The benefits of looking at a solution for a department is obvious and departments tend to go in waves when it comes to innovations within them. The adage, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, is especially true when it comes to organisations that are profitable. They tend to remain in their comfort zones, swinging into action only when the board or some external agency says they can do more to improve efficiency. But when we look at innovation at an inter-department

level, we realise that it is almost non-existent. The current corporate wants every department to do really well, and thus the whole organisation will do better. That’s the thought of the day, but that is fast changing too.

We now realise that a lot can be leveraged when the bond between departments is stronger. Elon Musk wrote a detailed email to employees at Tesla stressing just that. And that’s an organisation that’s as futuristic as it gets!

We are dealing with use cases where the customer engagement teams at an automobile manufacturer want to link the data from the shop floor to the customer and in another use case, the R&D (research and development) data (of course the patented part) at a pharmaceutical company is accessible to sales (market research) teams to answer doctors’ questions. This boosts the productivity, engagement and experience of all the stakeholders.

Does it extend across every interface / omnichannel ?A chatbot is just one of the interfaces or channels of information disbursement. There are several other channels such as email, dashboards, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and collaborative tools like

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Slack, Skype, etc., that any organisation would be using for interactions. The information needs to be disbursed to the stakeholders both internally (i.e., employees, management) and externally (i.e., customers, vendors) across these channels. It’s only then you realise the full potential of the solution.

For example, in one use case, we work with an organisation where the AI extracts information from dynamic sources in real time on prospective clients. Now, this information is displayed on a dashboard with the option to download it in PDF (portable document format). This, which would typically take a week to 10 days for an analyst to complete, gets done in a matter of seconds.

Now this information is made available to the sales team on Skype for business. The bot action gets triggered when it comes across an entry in the calendar of anyone on the sales team that mentions any prospect or client that has been analysed by the AI. It sends a prompt on Skype for business to the salesperson enquiring if he/she would like to know more about the prospect. So now when he/she is at the meeting, they already have the information such as the background of the person they are about to meet, the company, strategy of the company, the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities, threats) report and so on.

Hence, when your AI strategy considers every channel of communication between every stakeholder, the sky is the limit for benefits that ensue.

I hear thunder: is your AI listening and learning?There cannot be AI if there is no listening and learning. You can train in history and data sets as a starting point, but AI has to keep listening and retrain itself on the new data. As part of the learning experience of any AI, one of the major inputs is going to be real-time escalation. What this means is whenever the AI solution is not confident enough of the response it has prepared, it has to be intelligent enough to forward it to a human. Depending on the criticality, you can adjust the rate of learning. So if it’s essential that only perfect answers go out as it concerns finance, health, manufacturing, etc., then we need to slow down the rate of learning so the AI doesn’t learn from even human errors and needs more transactions to grow confident. For less critical use cases, the rate of learning can be fast as in the case of pizza ordering, ticketing and the like.

Supervised learning is the simplest form of AI learning. This means humans give the feedback for responses and also guide the responses whenever the AI is not confident.

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humans in the team. Are we ready?Dan Ariely once said about AI, “AI right now is like teenage sex; everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…”

Hopefully, the above points try and break it down for businesses. Even though I am an engineer, I assure you that I am not a techie. My learning about AI, specifically when It comes to text and images, is the learning I got from my years at Light Information Systems, where we learnt how to break down text and understand it semantically, retrieve information from unstructured and structured databases, and generate a response that sometimes terminates in an action. Light is part of a revolution where we are transforming the workforce, both within organisations and as a whole, where the workforce is being shifted from “doing” routine stuff to “creating” machines that do it for them. So for me that is AI. Moving from actual action to creation. Transferring some level of intelligence into which we have now evolved to machines.And machines, like humans, learn when they are trained with some guidance from other humans.

This is the essence of AI.

This also ensures that the AI is still learning.

Then there is machine learning where the system observes the way humans react to the questions and tries to bring that up as a learned answer. Deep learning helps to look at the overall picture when the AI is trained on millions of data points and creates its own layers and thereafter a model that is able to predict the next response.

So in any AI system, learning has to be a continuous, evolving process so that the solution gets better over time. And it will come to a point where, when it sees the lightning, it can predict the decibel of the thunder.

Tech departments within organisations are used to dealing with software for the different departments. So Finance needs an accounting system, Customer Care will need a CRM; Production an ERP; HR an HRMS and, of course, email and security for all employees. This is what tech departments typically manage. However, in the new era, with AI at the core, operations of various departments will be part of the tech team’s work. An automated HR helpdesk will mean that technology will be responsible for engaging the workforce; Customer Care will mostly have an AI workforce and very few

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When it comes to disruptive innovations, chances are that the first thing that comes to mind is a genius and the ‘light bulb’ moment preceding the discovery. However, at Microsoft, we choose to think differently — we think partnerships. We leverage these partnerships to foster creativity and bring about disruption, as proved by our historical footprint. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that we naturally endorse the concept ‘great partnerships bring about great inventions’, much like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and India’s very own Bansal and Bansal, to name a few.

The recent growth of our startup ecosystem can largely be attributed to this ethos. Innovation and collaboration cannot operate in silos. On the contrary, they need to feed into and build on each other — a point best illustrated by Diageo’s recent

collaboration with our alumni Yellow Messenger, to build the world’s first bartender chatbot.

The need of the hour is that enterprises adopt the ‘let me learn from you, and partner to succeed’ as opposed to ‘let me learn from you and copy it’ formula. This year, we saw many CXOs, along with ecosystem thought leaders and entrepreneurs emphasising on this and accepting that one of the most critical factors affecting businesses today is the holistic collaboration between enterprises and startups.

Elucidating on the importance of startup-enterprise partnerships, Judson Althoff, EVP, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft, highlighted the emergence of ‘Five New World Aspirations’ that drive corporations to engage with startups. These

Bala GirisaballaManaging Director Microsoft Accelerator India

Collective innovation collaborative success!

FROM OUR SPONSORS

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include innovative offerings for the business, enhancing the customer engagement paradigm, and optimising operations using IT and intelligence, among others.Naturally then, the question that comes into focus is, how can startups and enterprises leverage each other’s combined strengths to access a wider market? If you ask me, the answer lies in a simple solution — the startup metric. All that startups and enterprises need to do is adopt this simple, result-oriented tool into their existing organisational structure. The two-pronged solutionThe startup metric, an insightful concept conceived at Microsoft, showcases how enterprises and startups can gain each other’s trust instead of focusing on individualistic, self-serving needs. It comprises two vital elements:First order — focuses on the value a company extends to a startup to build a sustainable relationship. Once the startup sees that the enterprise truly cares about their progress, the partnership starts to cementSecond order — stresses the value the startup provides to the company (after the first order is achieved) so that both can work together and scale new heightsSimply put, to strengthen the startup-enterprise partnership, corporates need

to reach out to startups, analyse them, and engage with them. A good example is Microsoft’s collaboration with Wipro. Both companies decided to embark on a year-long engagement to understand the mutual values that could be derived from each other before formalising the partnership.

The new normal: disruptive partnerships To begin with, it is imperative that the partnerships are crafted as a win-win relationship for all stakeholders. Additionally, multiple needs must be addressed simultaneously. While corporates ensure that the partnership proves valuable to their customers, we at Microsoft have to make sure that the startups gain from this partnership as well.

This brings to mind several pertinent questions. What kind of distinct, but equally integral benefits can each stakeholder bring to the table? How can they leverage each other’s strengths, and optimally work with each other?

The enterprise advantage: scaling up, not starting up Startups aren’t the only ones that bring creativity and credibility to the fore; enterprises play a vital role as well. Enterprises:• bring a level of trust and an in-depth understanding of how to close a deal

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• nurture startups and provide them with a ‘seal of approval’ through in-house accelerator programmes and incubators• help address scalability and funding issuesSeveral enterprises are now setting up their own innovation labs. However, if they don’t engage with the external ecosystem, they run the risk of losing out on rich, robust solutions that come with diversity. The lesson here is that enterprises need to collaborate, not compete, with startups for long-term success.

The startup DNA: inspiring and path-breakingWhile enterprises bring with them extensive experience and credibility, startups are synonymous with creativity and disruption. Startups have a propensity to:• innovate much faster due to their nimble, agile nature• think out-of-the-box and implement new ideas not vested in the existing business modelHowever, this agility and innovativeness does not make them fail-proof; a single drawback can force them to shut shop. Hence, it is critical to carefully orchestrate the enterprise-startup journey. To arrive at a favourable destination, startups need to monitor the speed with which they take projects, while also being picky about the

kind of projects they select in the initial months. After all, success breeds success, and this is as true for startups as for any other business entity today.

Fostering startup-enterprise partnerships organicallyIndia’s growth footprint indicates that the enterprise-startup alliance is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. As predicted, corporates and startups continue to think of ‘me’ before ‘us.’ Althoff had commented, “Companies are at different stages of maturity. This is an opportunity for us to reach out and help enterprises see the truth in their business through startup solutions.”

Consequently, ecosystem enablers need to collaborate, connect, and derive value from each other to help business environments grow through partnerships — which is the core intent of Microsoft Accelerator.

For us, the primary objective is to create an ecosystem driven by thought leadership, elevating conversations and learnings across entities. Needless to say, if we’re not being productive and participative, we’re not creating sustainable businesses and symbiotic relationships — the key to any economy’s success.

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Byju RaveendranFounder & CEOBYJU’S – The Learning App

With over a million-and-a-half registered schools and over 260 million students on their rolls, India has the largest K to12 (primary and secondary) education system in the world. By 2020, we will have the world’s largest tertiary age (under 25) population, and the second-largest graduate talent pool. There have been significant strides in scaling up the education sector to make it more relevant and inclusive. However, though the Indian education landscape has seen rapid change, growth, and expansion over the years, the ground realities are far from ideal. Issues such as lack of access to quality education, a one-size-fits-all approach and outdated learning methods contribute to consistently low rankings for India in the global education assessment indices. The situation is much worse in rural India where a large chunk of the population still struggles to access basic,

quality education. The sector is deeply fragmented with no binding cord between school education boards, competitive exams for graduate and postgraduate courses, and the needs of the job market. It also lacks a standard mechanism that can measure or improve learning for students. No country can achieve sustainable economic development without substantial investments in education as it is inextricably linked with economic and social progress. Consequently, as an emerging superpower driving global economic growth, it is imperative that India works towards addressing the myriad problems confronting the education sector. Fear of exams, not love of knowledgeHere, learning is still driven by the fear of exams and not love for knowledge. The focus on marks and grades as the end

Technology will transform the Indian education landscape

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result is so high that students miss out on actual learning. The system needs to change drastically and the smart use of technology can bring about a paradigm shift, completely overhauling the ways students consume content and teachers deliver lessons.

At the same time, it is also interesting to see how the Indian edtech ecosystem is using technology as an enabler. Technology has played a key role in disrupting this sector, and will continue to shape the teacher-student relationship by offering better accessibility, distribution, and formats of delivery. Integrating technology in education not only increases engagement, but also simplifies the way students learn. It addresses the need of delivering content that is relevant and matters the most to students in a simple and best possible way. Technology can also be a huge enabler of effective one-on-one learning experiences. Data analyses of millions of students, powered by technology, can drive personalisation to an extent that every child can learn according to his or her own style and pace. It allows teachers to trace and understand their students’ learning footprints and helps personalise the way concepts are taught and explained.

Dynamic nature of future jobsTechnology has already shown some traditional classroom teaching models transforming into digital learning programmes that are highly self-driven and backed by active learning. Studies show that most future jobs don’t even exist today. In fact, in the next 10 years, a large percentage of current jobs will be automated. But, the changing face of technology will lead to the creation of a whole lot of radically new jobs for which our students should be prepared. We should train them in versatility and real-life situations to adapt themselves to technology-driven change.

With an active smartphone user base of over 300 million, the data consumption habit across age groups is changing, especially amongst students. Close to 70 percent of students in the K to 12 segment already have access to smartphones and it is their entry point to a whole new world of content and information.

Children are primarily visual learners and explaining concepts with visual representations makes learning exciting and easier. Newer technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will play a major role by making learning more of an immersive experience.

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Overall, technology in education will change the traditional blackboard teaching methodology to an effective, personalised, one-on-one learning experience. A lot has been happening in this space, and with the right approach and planning, technology

can help us transform the way India learns in the coming years. In this sector, the fun is not to create the largest company by valuation, but being an education company that is the largest in terms of impact, student engagement and success rate.

In the past 10 years, India has absorbed approximately USD 100 billion in VC/PE investments. In the next five years, India needs over USD 200 billion of investments.

“– Sudhir Sethi, IDG Ventures India

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