The Small Industries Development Bank of India (Sidbi) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Snapdeal, an e-commerce major in India, to provide financial support to its MSME vendors. The MoU was signed by Dr Kshatrapati Shivaji, CMD, Sidbi and Kunal Bahl, CEO, Snapdeal on July 14, 2015 at Sidbi office in Mumbai.E-commerce is the buzz word in the global as well as domestic market. The MSMEs find e-commerce platforms like Snapdeal as a promising ground for increasing their business opportunities. The e-commerce sector in India has become four times its size, from $3.8 billion in 2009 to $17 billion in 2014, growing at a CAGR of 37 per cent. The sector is expected to cross the $100 billion mark within the next five years, contributing over 4% to India’s GDP.Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), set up under an Act of Parliament, has been consistently promoting, financing and developing the Micro, Small & Medium Enterprise (MSME) sector since its inception on April 02, 1990. SIDBI continued its business model aimed at addressing the financial and non-financial gaps in the MSME eco-system. Some niche financial gaps addressed by the Bank are equity / risk capital, receivable finance, sustainable finance which includes energy efficiency (EE)/ clean production (CP) technology and services sector financing.Over the years, Sidbi has pioneered a number of innovative financial products and set up new institutions to cater to the diverse credit and non-credit needs of MSMEs. In its efforts to include larger number of MSMEs in its fold, Sidbi tied up with a number of intermediaries to increase its outreach. MoU with e-commerce giant ‘Snapdeal’ is one such effort in this direction.The innovative financial products are growth capital / risk capital, receivable financing / reverse factoring, energy efficiency financing, micro finance etc. Snapdeal promoted by Kunal Bahl along with Rohit Bansal, is one of the India’s most impactful digital commerce ecosystem, that creates life changing experiences for buyers and sellers. In its journey till now, Snapdeal has partnered with several global investors and individuals such as Softbank, Blackrock, Temasek and eBay Inc., Premji Invest, Intel Capital, Ratan Tata, etcFor addressing the problem of lack of required financial assistance, Sidbi and Snapdeal have joined hands to enable latter’s MSME vendors to scale up their online business through financial support from Sidbi.
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Funding to be deployed for multi-city expansion and brand management activitiesBoxMySpace, a Mumbai-based unique storage solution provider which uses technology to enable clutter free homes and office spaces, has raised Rs 1.92 crore from a consortium of investors led by Farooq Oomerbhoy, who was one of the co-founders of the early stage fund Orios Venture Partners. Ritesh Veera and Singapore Angel Networks also participated in the funding round.The funding will be deployed for expanding operations in metros including Pune, Bangalore and Delhi and undertaking key marketing efforts. BoxMySpace also plans to launch other innovative storage solutions in the future and partner with online retailers and SMEs to streamline their need for an efficient storage solution for their goods.Established in January 2015 by Pratyush Jalan, BoxMySpace was formed with an aim to bring the same convenience of cloud storage to the physical goods of a consumer’s home. The consumer can effortlessly avail on-demand storage service for their household goods at their doorstep either through the web or mobile application across Android and iOS platforms for monthly fee starting at Rs 99. BoxMySpace delivers high quality storage boxes to customer’s homes/offices wherein they can pack their belongings in the boxes, thereafter BoxMySpace collects it and stores it safely for them! It also provides spaces for larger storage items through it’s 4x4 and 6x6 packages. BoxMySpace leverages the unused spaces in large warehouses and plugs the gap to provide a technology backed solution to retail customers. It also provides the consumer with their storage dashboard to create a visual catalog of all their stored items and a unique code to each item/box to enable recall within 12 to 24 hours.Commenting on the investment, Farooq A Oomerbhoy, said “We are delighted to partner with BoxMySpace which is poised to lead the innovation forray within the storage industry in India. Shrinking living spaces, dynamic work patterns have resulted in people adopting a transient way of life, necessitating the need for storage solutions. Certain problems which plague consumers but do not consciously warrant attention unless a solution is bought forward for them, (for eg Ola/Uber) and BmS is one of them. Once consumers realise storage is no longer a hassle and expensive, BmS will become their preferred choice. We are working closely with BmS to introduce this solution to not only Indian consumer, but given the scalable nature of the business will be looking to expand in other part of Asia very soon. ”
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The flavour seems to have returned to lending capital to small and medium businesses. Ten years ago private banks like ICICI and HDFC Bank increased their retail lending. In less than two years the global crisis, along with increased defaults in the Indian small business industry, compelled the banks to rein in their lending to the small businesses. Most of the loans, in the early 2009, ended up recovering only 75 per cent of the the total loan value.
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Puneet Dalmia, MD, Dalmia Bharat seeds Rs 50 crore in an one month old Delhi based reality startup targeting Delhi’s Rs 13,000-crore, contractor-built one-off home market, reports BW Online BureauDalmia Bharat Group's MD Puneet Dalmia has invested Rs 50 crore in a realty start-up, Prithu, in his individual capacity. With this, Dalmia holds 74 percent in Prithu, which caters to the individual home segment. The balance will be held by Prithu's MD Nitin Bansal.Prithu, which supplies to the individual home segment is founded by a young team of IIM and IIT alumni, seeks to disrupt the fragmented contractor- driven individual home segment in Delhi. Over the next five years, Prithu is eyeing an annual turnover of over Rs 500 crore.“Delhi’s residential stand-alone real estate market is much like the rest of India where one-off homes built by small contractors are the preferred choice. Low degree of professionalism has led to a serious trust deficit in this sector, and home owners often have disappointing stories to narrate regarding on time delivery and quality of specs” mentioned Dalmia. Prithu-built homes would include built-in safety and security features, and will cost between Rs 2,300 to Rs 6,000 per sq ft, covering all design, construction and approvals costs. The homes would also be GRIHA (Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment) certified. “We’re looking to transform the small-contractor-dominated individual or one-off home segment with a systematic and transparent approach, to ensure a superior and satisfying customer experience,” said Nitin Bansal, Co-founder and Managing Director, Prithu.
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A video analytics start-up, Vidooly on Monday (13 July) announced the opening of its new office in Noida which embraces an open design to foster collaboration and innovation, will also support Vidooly’s aggressive hiring plans to double its workforce in the next six months. It is looking to hire data scientists and analysts and programmers to boost its team strength. Vidooly recently received funding from Silicon Valley based investor, Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP).Subrat Kar, CEO & Co-founder of Vidooly, said, “Vidooly’s talent pool is largely of young people. To keep energy levels high, our focus is on creating the right culture, which is an environment for creativity where there is collaboration, a free flow of ideas as well as fun, humor and spontaneity. Our physical office space is designed to reflect this culture we wish to create and an expression of who we are as a company.”Vidooly’s new office will allow it to scale up its workforce as it gears up to respond to the high demand for its product and services and support its expansion plans beyond India. Vidooly’s new office is an expression of its company identity through physical space. Done up in the colors of its corporate identity, red, white and black, the design is open with no private cubicles and the café within the office, features a large television screen.“With expansion plans afoot to focus on the Middle East and South-East Asia because of the growing content consumption in these regions, we are looking to hire aggressively and add 25 more people to our team in the near term. We are looking for data scientists and analysts and programmers who can support our core product development”, he added.Vidooly’s growth is a result of the global megatrend being witnessed in video consumption, which comprises an estimated more than 60 per cent of all data traffic on the Web. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, next only to Google. More than 300 hours of video is being uploaded on YouTube every minute, out of which 90 per cent of the videos generate less than 10,000 views in the first one-month. Currently, content creators are putting a lot of efforts to create good quality content, but the problem is that they find it difficult in targeting the right kind of audience to watch their content. This is where Vidooly steps in to help content creators, brands and multi channel networks (MCNs), to maximize their YouTube organic views, build an audience base and earn more revenues on YouTube.
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This is the third round of funding for Grofers which has already raised over $45 million, writes Paramita ChatterjeeA clutch of early-stage investment firms -- Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and Apoletto Asia -- have infused $36 million dollar in Grofers, an online grocery delivery service, founded by Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa in Delhi NCR in late 2013.Today, in less than two years, Grofers is present in over 10 cities including Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Pune apart from the metros.While an email sent to a Grofers executive did not elicit any response, a person familiar with the transaction said the funds raised will help facilitate the Gurgaon-based start-up’s expansion plans. “Going forward, Grofers plans to expand its operations in other geographies and penetrate deeper in groceries and add new consumables categories,” the person added. Daily grocery, bakery items, flowers, fruits & vegetables, meats and baby care products, are among the products that are currently available on Grofers. It is understood that corporate law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co. acted for Grofers.So far, Grofers has partnered with over 400 vendors in Bangalore, Delhi NCR and Mumbaie. This is the third round of funding for the company. The company has already raised over $45 million in two earlier rounds. However, the quantum of stake that the investors picked up could not be ascertained.The funding in Grofers highlights how investors are increasingly betting big on Indian entrepreneurs and their winning ideas. Earlier this year, Gurgaon-based ShopClues raised $100 million from Tiger Global, Helion Venture Partners and Nexus Venture Partners, while Rocket Internet AG along with other investors infused $110 million in global food delivery marketplace Foodpanda.While start-ups in themselves seem to be the current hot favourites of private equity and venture capital investors, it is the online shopping market space that they are betting big on. "Today, the contours of PE/VC investments in the country have changed in India, with investors eyeing a lot more new age, consumer oriented companies for investments,” said Avnish Bajaj, co-founder and managing director of Matrix India, which recently infused less than $7 million in two starts ups, Treebo Hotels - a new age, tech-enabled chain of hotels -and Bangalore based recruitment startup Belong.
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Housing.com is moving on from the Rahul Yadav controversy. The real estate portal has named chief operating officer Rishabh Gupta as interim chief executive, a week after co-founder and former CEO Rahul Yadav was fired for bad behaviour.His appointment is effective immediately, Jonathan Bullock, SoftBank's representative on Housing's board, said in an internal email titled 'Moving forward & Looking up'. SoftBank is the largest stakeholder in the company. Economictimes.com reported that Bullock said in a email sent to Housing employees said: "We believe and expect that his principled leadership, tenacity, and determination will position us well."Gupta, a former Flipkart employee, had been effectively running Housing during the past few months of turmoil in the company because of Yadav's run-ins with investors and others. Gupta, Housing's first angel investor Haresh Chawla, and chief technical officer Abhishek Anand will also join an operating committee.The Housing board had fired Yadav as CEO last week, bringing to an end a tumultuous relationship at one of India's most-watched startups. Housing.com was in news again on Monday (6 July) and again for wrong reasons. The site was down for sometime after being hacked and the twitter world was aflame with rumours about who had done it. Many had pointed a finger at Rahul Yadav who had denied the allegation.Housing was founded in 2012 by a dozen college-mates from IIT-Mumbai. Four of them including Yadav now have left the company.The company is currently controlled by SoftBank, which has a 32 per cent stake in Housing. The Japanese firm has formed an executive committee that controls Housing's finances and operations, and is led by Bullock, who recently replaced SoftBank's president Nikesh Arora on the Housing board. Investor Nexus venture owns about 19 per cent stake in Housing, and Helion Ventures and Falcon Edge about 10 per cent each.There are rumours going on that Quikr’s investors have agreed to buy Housing.com for $170 million, much less than the $235 million valuation that the company garnered in 2014.
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Startups begin with a brilliant idea by highly motivated people, who hire a couple of extremely motivated people to turn it into a reality, says Aditya RajgarhiaLeft, right, straight ahead or trackback 10 steps - if you’re somebody looking for a challenging yet promising career, you’re probably stumbling across opportunities at fast-growing startups hunting for the brightest talent.Startups have a magnetic aura around them and working for one is nothing short of the perfect north pole-south pole attraction. Be it for the culture - fun and casual, or the room for rapid growth - professionally and financially, startups are surely in the limelight today for offering the ‘best’ job opportunities to freshers and experienced professionals.Looking at the fancy websites to videos boasting of a culture that balances work, life and enjoyment, there isn’t anyone out there who doesn’t imagine themselves sitting on a bean bag with a mac in hand, working with like minded people while applying for these positions.There is no doubt about the fact that working for a startup can be exciting and at the same time, teach you a lot about the field you want to build a career in (or not). Because once you’re out there, all the rules you have learnt at your corporate job no longer apply.So how do you know the startup you’re planning to join is the right career move? A hit and trial is fine, but what if the grass isn’t as green as you thought it would be?6 things you need to keep in mind before signing up with a startup1. You’ll have to be ready for changeUnlike corporate biggies who have set offices across different cities, allocated spaces for various departments, defined work for a group of people and job titles to go along with the work, startups are forever changing. Be it the office location, job title, job role or for that matter, your seat!At some startups, even picking out your favourite chair and labelling it doesn’t work.The constantly changing environment definitely breaks your workflow once in a while; but life doesn’t get better by chance, it gets better with change. After all, startups aim at hiring highly motivated and enthusiastic, change embracing people!2. You’re either all in or simply outIf you’re accustomed to working alone, startups aren’t for you. You’re expected to be a team player, who rolls up his sleeves and dives right in at the hour of need - whether or not your job profile qualifies you for it.There is no such thing as, “This isn’t what I was hired for.”Your everyday activity could fluctuate from being exactly what your job description states to something that you had never even imagined yourself doing; including picking up donuts for your colleagues occasionally. The good part of it all? You learn how to do just about everything - tech, non-tech and so many other things!3. The flat hierarchy doesn’t stayStartups begin with a brilliant idea by highly motivated people, who hire a couple of extremely motivated people to turn it into a reality. Even though initially the pitch of a flat hierarchy sounds exactly what you are looking for, things are bound to change once the company tastes success.Don’t like someone standing on your head? Sad.The motivated early employees are often put under experienced managers who decide what needs to be done when - of course, in the best way possible. Even though a manager is a manager who might bug you on a daily basis, he or she is the one person you can learn from. After all, they know how to keep a storm in control.4. It's hard work, rewarding workWhen you join a startup, you're not just performing your individual role - you're building a company. Long hours and pressure to work on multiple things are the norm in the early years of a startup. It can be mentally draining, but a great experience at the same time. Not to mention the enormous satisfaction of building something great from scratch.Be ready to deal with pressure!Although the work is hard, fast-growing startups who have raised large amounts of capital are usually able to compensate their employees very well, even better than most large companies. It's definitely a "work hard, play hard" environment.5. You work at your own riskEverything is hunky dory while investors are coming in, deadlines are being met and there isn’t already a similar concept so big that it is hard to compete with. But when you make the choice of working at a startup, the risk you take in your career path is entirely on your shoulders.Enter at your own risk!A lot of startups don’t survive beyond a year or two of crazy working. Even when they make all the news for getting acquired, the real story may not be quite as rosy. Often, startups get acquired for a price at which even the founders don’t make anything out of the sale.But the best part of it all?6. You’ll get to innovate and start your own One of the most rewarding things about working for startups is the environment you get to bring forward fresh ideas and innovate with the best of people in the field. Since each one in the team is a motivated individual, they are always open to new ideas.Age no bar, your ideas are always credited!Working in an entrepreneurial environment is a great way to learn how to innovate. A startup experience pays you back in opportunities and knowledge to help you get started with your own venture.Whether you’re applying for an internship or a full time position, remember one thing: there is no such thing as a constant in the startup world. For as long as you’re working in a setup, make sure you make the most out of it and learn as much as you can. Having a startup experience on your profile can work wonders.The author, Aditya Rajgarhia, is CEO and Founder of Instahyre.com
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Indian designed chipsets power satellites and future of mobility; now over $100 million private equity money will find these startups to build connected civilizations, says Vishal KrishnaIndians have moved on from making potato chips to building chip sets for connected vehicles and smart cities. Analysts estimate that startups that have a combination of software, hardware and embedded systems experience can raise money. This industry has already raised close to $60 million now. Saankhya Labs, Ineda Systems and Si2 Microsystems are all betting big on the global industry. With words such as internet-of-things and smart cities floating around, these companies are out there to prove to the world that their technology is more than just a Make in India campaign.Tucked away in a corner of Whitefield, a sprawling industrial complex, in Bangalore, is a small chip manufacturer called Si2 Microsystems. Upon entering its futuristic lab one can see machines building chips on substrate. These robots use golden thread to make integrated circuits with such precisionbecause the operating chipset ultimately lands in to defence satellites.Si2M specialises in manufacturing System-in-Package (SIP) modules that give birth to the connected machines that we see in daily life. From a mobile phone to the car and later ending with the connected lights, at home, everything carries a SIP module. To illustrate this further, a SIP is nothing but a combination of the central processing unit and its allied systems, which have different applications, packaged or stacked into a unit. The popular architecture is System-On-Chip (SOC) where functionalities are in independent chips. The engineers would know this better than the lay reader. The lay reader has to think of all functionalities in a box (SIP) versus individual chips (SOC) having their own boxes.For this Rs 50-crore company, the year 2015 has become a turning point. After five years of hard work and becoming the preferred vendor for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and work with several automobile OEMs, when founders, brothers Dinanath and Sanjay Soni invested $2 million on this lab, there were naysayers who said that they could never compete with the Chinese companies. “We have to spend a lot more on marketing,” says Sanjay Soni, Director and co-founder of Si2M, chuffed about the kind of research that has gone in to building chipsets. The company hopes to raise the bar and increase their investment by $200,000 (Rs 1.3 crore) to spend on marketing activity. They are a manufacturing company and need not spend, on marketing, like a startup focused on consumers and, therefore, spending millions of dollars becomes necessary from imperative investors.“These are ideas that can generate jobs in research,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO of Greyhound Research. It also adds up to the whole make in India campaign, which even Chinese electronics companies, like Xiaomi, are waking up to.“Chinese companies have realised the potential of Indian software engineering and they are already setting up shop here to aid their growth in chip manufacturing,” says DinanathSoni. The brothers add that the buzz around IoT and growing defence spends has made many small and medium enterprises, globally, buy their SIP modules because they offer high value in performance. “We are a premium company. Our research allows a soldier to carry the least amount of payload because the hardware is miniaturised,” says Dinanath Soni.Why are they important? Rs 48,000 crore has been allocated to the building of smart cities, cars are going to have more electronics in them - 30 per cent of the cost of manufacturing is going to be on software- and there is this whole campaign around the Internet of Things and Everything (IOT&E). The number of wearables in the world that connect to larger smarter systems is also going to go up. IDC, the research firm, predicts that the worldwide wearables market will reach a total of 45.7 million units in 2015. From there, the market will reach a total of 126.1 million units in 2019, resulting in a five-year CAGR of 45.1 per cent. No wonder automobile software centres like Robert Bosch Engineering India (RBEI), Mercedes Benz Research and Development India along with chipset manufacturers like Freescale and Texas Instruments are playing a major role in investing in Indian R&D. Robert Bosch filed 179 patents in 2013 and 80 in 2014.“The use of deep research on chips for the global automotive industry for safety and semi-autonomous driving is happening out of India,” says Manoj Koul, Director-Product Development, Texas Instruments. Another startup that has taken this deep dive in to making a standard chip for the wearable industry is called Ineda Systems. This Hyderbad-based company has raised a total of $43.3 million and has been backed by the likes of Cisco Systems. “There will be several billion wearables in the market and the industry is in need of low cost and low power consuming processors,” says Balaji Kanigicherla, CTO and co-founder of Ineda Systems. The company’s first big launch with a smart phone chip manufacturer is to happen in another six months. Ineda’s processor is an SOC, unlike a SIP of Si2M. Saankya Labs is building a solution that brings different standards of digital and analog TV on to a single chip. The have raised $5 million from Intel Capital.These chip manufacturers have taken a giant leap of faith and their products will be defined in the era of the smart city or the smart car. It is also a time of make or break for these companies. However, it looks like the world wants to make these Indian companies leaders in building cost effective and powerful chips with quality software applications. No wonder the likes of Intel and Qualcomm are betting big on Indian talent. Perhaps there will be many more companies like these chip makers.
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A june afternoon in New Delhi can’t be anything but sizzling hot. Yet, Sashwati has a fleece jacket handy in her office drawer. Reason: It gets so chilly indoors that she gets goose bumps. At around six in the evening, when it’s time to go home, Sashwati quickly puts her desktop in sleep mode and leaves, as do the 125 employees in her office.This scenario is replicated in millions of offices every day, resulting in a massive wastage of electricity from air conditioners and computers. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), commercial buildings waste up to 30 per cent of the energy they consume.Now, there is help available for such companies from Zenatix, a Gurgaon-based startup that helps commercial buildings save on the their energy bills, by understanding their power consumption patterns and providing insights.“The main reason for this wastage is that people are not able to measure their energy consumption,” says Rahul Bhalla, co-founder and CEO of Zenatix. “Unlike the mobile bill that lists the cost incurred from calls, messages, and use of other services, the electricity bill just mentions the units of electricity consumed. It doesn’t brief how much energy is consumed by ACs, or UPS. If one knows how much energy is being consumed by which appliance in real time, one can take corrective measures,” he adds.Zenatix installs energy monitoring equipments, smart meters and controllers on different appliances such as ACs, lighting, UPS, etc. to monitor the energy consumed by them through their cloud-based software. Then it analyses the data and sends information on energy-saving measures to customers via SMS or email.ZENATIXYEAR OF FOUNDING: December 2013 WHAT IT DOES: Enable commercial buildings become energy-efficient USP: Provides actionable insights driven by energy analyticsFUNDING: $1,61,000COMPETITION: Boston-based EnerNOCREVENUE (BOOKED): Over Rs 1 crore NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 12PATENTS: NoneThis energy-efficiency model was a part of the research done by Amarjeet Singh, co-founder and CTO, who was a faculty member at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in New Delhi. During his research (2010 to 2013), he deployed energy sensors on campus to collect over five million data points every day. Insights developed from the data collected over the years helped in reducing energy consumption by 15-20 per cent at the institute.In December 2013, he took entrepreneurial leave from IIIT Delhi to start Zenatix with his IIT Delhi batchmates Rahul Bhalla and Vishal Bansal. He launched this model commercially for large consumers of energy like office spaces, hospitals, schools, manufacturing units.As they were doing their market research, the partners came to know of several companies that were engaged in gathering data and informing building managers about their energy usage using graphs and trend charts. But then, the building managers did not have the know-how to interpret this data and take corrective action. “So, instead of providing the information on energy consumption, we decided to interpret the data and give recommendations to customers by email alerts and messages to trigger action in real time”, says Singh.This, according to Singh, is Zenatix’s biggest differentiating factor. “We have not seen any company in India that analyses the data and delivers solutions to customers to reduce their energy consumption and link all this to cost savings.”Globally, Boston-based EnerNOC is helping commercial buildings automate energy operations.The partners launched their first product in May 2014. But they are still working on building different algorithms and use case studies, so that this system can be deployed across a variety of customers with varying infrastructural support systems in various circumstances, such as factories, for instance, where the Internet connection might not be stable.The biggest challenge for them initially, says Singh, was sales. The customers wanted to know how much they would save in costs. This meant installing their system and getting the data. But clients were unwilling to pay a huge amount upfront for this product. It was a chicken and egg situation, says Singh. So, they refined the business model and transformed it into a SaaS model, where companies pay a monthly subscription fee proportional to the area over which the sensors are installed. And, there is also a guarantee: if the client doesn’t make cost savings, Zenatix would remove the software without any charge. This proved to be a game changer for them. Within one year, they had 32 clients with sensor installations at over 100 sites. Some of their large clients include Google, Mother Diary, NIIT, United Health Group, and IIT Delhi. In fact, they recently raised $1,61,000 from Google’s India chief Rajan Anandan, Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal and Trifecta Capital’s Rahul Khanna, along with a bunch of other individuals.Gaurav Bhatnagar, National Head of Infrastructure & Facilities at NIIT says, “We commissioned the project in April 2015 and in just two months we have been able to make energy savings of 5 per cent with just the low hanging fruits. For instance, Zenatix suggested starting the chiller at 7 am instead of 6 am, so the building reaches the optimal temperature just before people arrive. The best thing is they don’t suggest any retrofits but give deep insights about performance of electrical equipments and how the building reacts to them.”The company is now focusing on getting more customers and also making its technology seamless and plug-and-play. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 27-07-2015)
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