Holidify, a Delhi-based holiday discovery startup founded by IIT-Bombay alumni has raised $100K (around Rs 65 lakh) in an angel round of funding led by Aarti Group Promoter Family.The promoter family of Aarti Industries has earlier invested in education startup Plancess, Bewakoof.com and Humming Whale, creator of Gladius Technology Cricket Bats. The funding round also saw participation from Naman Sarawagi (founder of Findyogi) and Himanshu Sarawagi.Launched in 2014, Holidify was founded by Kovid Kapoor and Rohit Shroff, both graduates from IIT Bombay. Before Holidify, Rohit and Kovid were working with Indus Insights and Opera Solutions respectively, both analytics based management consultancy firms.Holidify is a holiday discovery platform that helps users plan their trips with essential information on the question where to go for their next holiday. The funds raised will be used in technology and content expansion. Holidify App on Play Store was recently launched in June 2015 and is currently the highest rated travel app in India with more than 10,000 downloads.The website www.holidify.com receives around 5 lakh monthly visitors and it has seen a growth of 10-fold since last year. Serving over 800 holiday ideas currently, the platform has built a smart recommendation engine to show relevant results based on users' location and preferences. Users get essential information like top things to do, places to visit, how to reach, restaurants and local cuisine, etc. to plan their trip.Holidify is also in talks with a few VC firms to raise a bigger round soon which will help them expand operations and offer customized packages to their users.(BW Online Bureau)
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By Mala BhargavaNo one can do without design today. Not in this connected age where the visual rules over any other kind of content. But of course, everyone isn’t a design whiz, which is technology’s cue to step in with a good solution. And that’s exactly what Canva has tried to do with its anyone-can-design web application. Canva BasicsYou can get to Canva in two ways – on its website, canva.com, or through its iPad app. That should be particularly fun to use on the iPad Pro. Get through the simple registration, and you’re in. What you have here is a drag-and-drop design environment in which you can very quickly create anything from a full-length presentation to a Facebook cover design. There are templates to choose from and lots of customisation once you’ve chosen. Parameters such as colours, fonts, layouts etc can be user-selected. There’s a searchable database of a million images to choose from and add to your creation. There are a large number that are free, but there are also photographs you may need to pay for at a mere one dollar a photo. You can pull in your images including from social media accounts. Once your creation is done, uploading and sharing is easy enough with its easy interface. A video tutorial will help if you’re lost. How Canva Came AboutThe story of Australia-based Canva began some eight years ago, when founder Melanie Perkins was teaching PhotoShop and InDesign. “It was super complex,” says Perkins, “It became very apparent that the need would be for such things to be easy, online, collaborative and affordable in future. So we started our first company, Fusion Books, which was an online design system for the school yearbook. But later, we founded Canva – for anyone to use.” Canva was launched two years ago and immediately attracted investors like Lars Rassmusen, founder of Google Maps and Guy Kawasaki as evangelist. “There have been over 15,000 blog posts written about Canva,” says Melanie Perkins, “And thousands of video tutorials.” Movie stars Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson are among the latest to back Canva’s most recent and third round of funding of $15 million. A total of $27 million has been infused into the graphics design company. These are to be used for product development and international growth. Canva In IndiaThe Canva founding team decided to visit India when they found a sudden spurt of growth in the use of the product, making it their fourth largest user base without any promotion at all. This market has doubled over the past three months. “It’s exploding. In India we’ve had over a million designs created, 50,000 of those created just over a week ago,” said Perkins, “So it’s been growing really, really quickly.” The team wrote to users to connect with a handful but were amazed at the number who wanted to meet to discuss their feedback and the future of the product. “We’ve had a really strong uptake in the social media and blogger community,” explained Perkins, “There’s been incredible word-of-mouth spread I think because there’s such a strong design aesthetic in India, it’s all that people really need because it’s also very affordable, which is something we’ve aimed to do from the very beginning.” Canva is free to use but certain elements like photographs can cost a small amount. According to the team, those who need quick marketing material and social media graphics use it the most which is what makes it fitting for small businesses and startups. In fact, a number of media houses that bring out online content are using Canva. Globally too, the company is growing rapidly and the reason, according to the founders, is that the product solves a particular pain point while being affordable. “Also, every single profession is becoming more visual nowadays,” says Perkins, “A journalist used to have to write an article and that’s it, but today there also has to be social media posts with that. A marketing person has to make a visual pitch deck, and so on – it’s all about visual communication.” Canva For WorkAt a cost of about $9 per user per month (for an annual subscription) and $12 per user for a month without the annual subscription, users get more features. Canva for Work, launched just a few weeks ago, allows brands to upload and use their brand kit, ensuring consistency across whatever is created. Logos, colours, visuals and fonts can come from the user brand and remain in the Canva account for use by multiple people who can also collaborate to edit artwork. Brands can also create templates so that everyone isn’t constantly reinventing the wheel. There are 35,000 user brands on Canva, including 50 per cent of the Fotune 500 companies. Canva’s users also include the Huffington Post with 150 people using Canva, Upworthy, Hubspot, Lonely Planet and Yelp. Blog articles can also be uploaded to the Canva platform. Output can also be printed. Canva has just also launched a Canva for NonProfits so that various volunteer and charitable organizations can be helped to create material easily and with no cost. UNICEF, in fact, is also using Canva. In the future, Canva is exploring adding video and many other features.
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Vijay Shekhar Sharma built Paytm in 2010. Five years on, he has invested in more than 32 startups. He talks to BW Businessworld’s Vishal Krishna about the opportunity in consumer-based businesses. Excerpts:Q. How is your role as an investor shaping up?I invest anything from Rs 25 lakhs to Rs 60 lakh in a venture. A decade ago, I made the mistake of giving more than 40 per cent of my company, for some seed money. I had a bitter experience when I bought the investor out. I don’t want startups to face that problem. I also mentor them on building a sustainable business. A decade ago, people like me did not know what valuations meant. But things have changed. Startups are living in very interesting times. With a lot of support from the ecosystem in the future, we will see great companies being built out of India.Q. What should startups focus on, given the hype about the smartphone market and the Internet?I do not follow research reports when it comes to looking at consumption on the mobile Internet. I look at what is happening to my target audience. I look at family, my old neighbourhood in Aligarh, and how they are consuming technology. The numbers will grow. I only focus on my target consumers and check if they are using technology. Only then do I know if consumption is happening through smartphones.It is inevitable that people in India will go mobile. In my hometown, a lot of them have mobile Internet. How does it matter if there are 125 million people or 150 million people using mobile Internet today? It is a target. India will have 500 million consumers of mobile Internet in five years. Can we build a much better product in that time period? The market is moving fast. It’s a race against time when you work in India. Such mobile Internet growth is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and we have to be the technology company that makes it happen.Q. Many startups in India are B2B. Why do people seem more hesitant to get into consumer businesses?Payment solutions from the consumer side need a lot of innovation. The problem is that tech companies in India fear that consumer business is extremely difficult. We have remained tech producers, and not become consumers of tech. We have built very few consumer technology companies.Consumption will grow with local languages. All startups in the consumer industry must have local-language services if they have to grow in India. Q. Are funds controlling the fate of startups in India? Any advice regarding this?There’s no doubt that funds have smart people, and they will tell startups to follow a particular vision. The funds have put India on the map. They will inevitably control some decisions. But what stops an entrepreneur from disagreeing with investors? The entrepreneur is supposed to be confident enough to run his company, because he knows what works and what doesn’t. The fund is a guide. It is like in life: you listen to many people, and in the end, you have to make the decision that is right for you. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 02-11-2015)
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Kavin Bharti Mittal, son of telecom czar Sunil Bharti Mittal, has decided to chart his own entrepreneurial journey. His startup Hike — a messaging platform — has grown 100 per cent year on year, although detractors credit that to help from Airtel. Mittal Jr talks to BW Businessworld’s Suchetana Ray about Hike, the challenges that entrepreneurs face and Over The Top (OTT) players, among other things. Edited excerpts:Q. You’re a startup, and India is going through an interesting period in that space. Is this an ideal environment for a startup?Today, more than ever, is the ideal time. There is a market. Infrastructure is getting better. You can see the first wave of Internet startups in India happening. There are a lot of people working on ground-breaking technology here. More importantly, it’s the environment, the mindset. In Silicon Valley, it’s ok to have 10 failures. You really should see failure in a company as a comma, not a full-stop.Q. What are the biggest challenges young entrepreneurs in India face today?To sum it up in a sentence, everybody seems to be looking for a quick fix. You’ll go through more downs than ups in your life while building a startup. Don’t build a company to be successful and famous. If you do that you’ll face a quick death. Start a company if you’re inspired by an idea.Q. What are the challenges that Hike faces as a ‘Made in India’ brand?One of the biggest challenges we faced was, “Arre yeh toh Made in India hai, yeh kharab hoga.” We’ve had to fight that again and again. Today, we’re the 38th most exciting brand in the country. If people see companies like us growing, providing them with great experiences, then that perception will go away.Q. India is a market where most users are on 2G and entry-level smartphones. So how can one enhance the Internet experience for such users?There are cheap smartphones with small real estate that can’t handle too many apps and services, 2G which is worse than dial-up in a market where the tangibility of data is unknown. If you take away all devices from the world, what’s left with the human species is communication. Could we use that to build something very powerful?Q. Do you give feedback to your father about data packs available in India and its limitations?I think everybody knows about this. It’s nothing new. Airtel’s been trying to solve it in their own way by launching sachet packs and so on. People keep talking about Airtel, of course, for obvious reasons. However, it’s important to understand we talk to Airtel, Vodafone and Idea all the time. Messaging is driving revenues for telcos today, which is why we must work together and foster a great ecosystem.Q. Major telcos in India are demanding regulation of OTT. Don’t you think regulation will violate the spirit of net neutrality in India?The best part of the Internet is that it is not at all regulated, else we cannot come out with an update every 7.5 days. As long as we have that, we are fine. The reason people buy data packs is to consume Internet services offered by OTT players. If we were not there, people would not be buying data. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 02-11-2015)
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Startups in India will see consolidation in the next few years, and not everyone is going to surviveBy Vishal KrishnaThe moment you step into the cheery offices of InMobi, the youthful energy that pervades the place hits you. Not surprising, given that the average age there is 25. The mobile advertising company recently unveiled a platform called MiiP, which offers advertisers animations that are customised for each individual consumer. CEO Naveen Tiwari says, “This platform will be available to all retailers, and will make their advertising more interactive, and will engage consumers better.”Between 2008 and 2014, InMobi raised $220 million. And in August this year, it raised $100 million in debt. It has grown to become one of the big success stories among Indian startups, and Tiwari says he hopes MiiP will make InMobi a billion-dollar business.TalentPad, by contrast, lasted a little over a year. Funded by Helion Ventures, the company sought to make it easier to match skilled individuals with employers. It shut shop in August, citing its inability to build a scalable model. And sources say the valuation of Housing.com has dropped dramatically. In November 2014, when Softbank invested $100 million in it, Housing.com was valued at $400 million, and the current valuation is $50 million.The smartphone-driven economy is teeming with startups, big dreams, big money — and big investment risks. Conventional wisdom is difficult — perhaps impossible — to apply in an economy built with creative ideas, technological innovation, and budding business models. It is hard to separate the winners, from the companies that will sell out, from those that will shut shop.Of course, not all sellouts are losers. Fashion e-tailer Myntra cost Flipkart a neat $300 million, travel portal Ibibo paid $135 million for RedBus, a bus reservation app, Snapdeal acquired payment company Freecharge for an all-stock deal worth $400 million, and classifieds platform Quikr reportedly acquired realty portal CommonFloor for $130 million.Huge Growth PotentialThe smartphone economy is projected to grow rapidly. According to Gartner, there will be more than 500 million smartphones in India by 2018. Currently, sales are at 160 million a year. Smartphones are already spurring entrepreneurs in the fields of health care, retail, advertising, education, travel, hospitality, and payments, and this trend is bound to grow.Many of the new smartphones between now and 2018 will be bought by Indians who will use them to access the Internet for the first time. This segment of mobile users represents a huge area of potential for startups. A report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research firm IMRB estimates that India will have 250 million mobile Internet users by the end of this year.“The next wave of growth has to come from services for low-income groups,” says K. Ganesh, founder of angel investing and business incubation firm, GrowthStory. He says there are opportunities in data analytics, payments, education, health care — any venture that can cut costs.That may well be why Tiger Global found Ather Energy’s electric scooter worth investing $12 million in: a single charge of the battery can power the two-wheeler for 75 km – twice the average daily city commute. Ather Energy is getting ready to launch the product.Then there’s a flurry of entrepreneurship in budget hospitality, with Stayzilla, Oyo Rooms, and Fabhotels. Stayzilla started in 2008 to connect travellers and hotels in small temple towns. Now it books some 300,000 room nights a month. Earlier this year, it sought to address the shortage of hotel rooms by introducing homestays. In two months, it registered 8,500 families. Before bringing them on board, each room will be verified. “With smartphones, we hope to convert every extra room in a house into a business opportunity for families,” says Stayzilla co-founder Yogendra Vasupal.Another area with potential is logistics. Flipkart and Snapdeal pioneered pan-India logistics some years ago, but more recently, the focus has been on local and hyperlocal solutions. This has spawned grocery delivery ventures such as Grofers, RoadRunnr, and Delyver, and meal delivery apps such as Swiggy. Some of them have also begun to deliver electronics, furniture, and other items. DEALSCAPE• Since 2011, India has seen 190 M&A deals totalling $2.3 bn, and 61 materialised in 2014 alone• Domestic deals accounted for 72% all transactions by volume. Of these, consumer Internet and e-commerce accounted for 60%• VC and PE investments in e-commerce/consumer Internet saw 101 deals totalling $4.2 bn in 2014-15AVERAGE DEAL SIZE• India: $11.3 mn• US: $57 mn• Israel: $113 mnSOURCE: MICROSOFT VENTURES, SIGNAL HILL AND ISPIRIT“Smartphones and location-based, on-demand delivery, can change how merchants engage with customers,” says Mohit Kumar, co-founder of RoadRunnr, which started a year ago and has raised $11 million from Sequoia Capital, Blume, and Nexus Venture Partners. He says third-party logistics providers – even truck drivers – could profit from such businesses. Given that only a tenth of the $100-billion logistics industry is organised, he may be right.One of the growth areas identified by Ganesh of GrowthStory is payments. Paytm, founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, started out facilitating mobile and DTH recharge, grew into a utility bill payment solution, and then into a retailer. Now it’s one of 11 companies with a payment bank licence. It plans to use its payments and ecommerce platform to collect deposits from customers and open bank accounts. This would increase access to banking and reduce the need for branches.Another innovative venture is Novopay Solutions’ virtual wallet, launched in mid-September. Started by Srikanth Nadhamuni, the architect of Aadhaar’s technology, Novopay lets individuals make deposits and withdraw cash via retail stores. The payment market, including mobile payments and mobile point-of-sale solutions, is expected to be worth $125 billion in five years.Governance is another area with potential. For instance, the Karnataka state police is in talks with eLsys, which built a disaster and accident management platform, to manage transportation during natural calamities. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, says: “Startups will be the drivers of change in Indian society. They are already becoming the people to go to for solutions.”Where there is potential for rapid growth, there is also the risk of overcrowding. There are quite a few companies in the budget hospitality segment, for instance, but given the $180-billion opportunity, as estimated by the Indian Brand Equity Foundation, there’s enough room for now.From Web To StreetWhile some startups are spotting opportunities in underserved segments such as hyperlocal delivery and budget stays, others are making room for growth on Main Street. A brick-and-mortar complement to online business makes sense for products that customers want to see and feel before buying.For example, three-year-old home design e-tailer Pepperfry now has “studios” in Mumbai, Bangalore, Gurgaon, and Kolkata, where, customers can browse, get ideas, consult, and customise solutions and products.Travel portal MakeMyTrip opened dozens of offices nationwide, to serve customers who prefer to make travel plans after consulting with a staff member, rather than simply researching their options online. Paytm has set up more than 50,000 kiosks for its customers, and baby products portal Firstcry has more than 100 stores around the country. Online eyewear retailer Lenskart and fashion apparel brand Freecultr also now have brick-and-mortar stores in several cities. Other brands use the concept of pop-up stores to enhance their visibility and cut through the clutter.While some are branching out from the Internet to the street, Flipkart is mulling over plan to go from the website to app-only. Currently, 80 per cent of its user base shops on mobile devices.Running Out Of JuiceFor every InMobi or Paytm, there’s a TalentPad. The ones that shut shop or sell out early on are not necessarily bad ideas. Sometimes the challenge is to scale up before the money runs out.For example, home-buying site RealtyCompass, founded in 2012, has fallen behind its competitors in attracting traffic. One reason for this was that home buyers tended to go directly to builders’ sites – an issue that even 99acres, Magicbricks and Housing.com struggle with. “It’s not easy being a realty portal, because the consumer today is going straight to the builder’s website,” says RealtyCompass COO Sankara Srinivasan. The second reason is that some of the company’s rivals raised money that enabled them to aggressively drive traffic to their sites. That has made it harder for RealtyCompass to raise Series A funding.Another example is DocTree, a mobile portal that lets patients compare the cost of treatment at various hospitals. Its creators had hoped to eliminate the middleman role of general practitioners (GPs). But DocTree has had to struggle with the fact that most hospitals insist on referrals from GPs. The company now has to choose between integrating GPs into its business model and raising more money so it can find more hospitals that work without referrals. “I do not want the idea to fade away,” says DocTree founder and CEO Sreenivasan Narayana. “I have to survive at any cost.” Despite raising half a million dollars from individual investors a couple of years ago, DocTree has been unable to raise Series A funding.Four-year-old CarIQ’s story illustrates the life-and-death issue of timely funding. With the help of an angel investment, CarIQ developed hardware and software products that gather real-time data from a car’s systems, and provide the owner service alerts and other useful information. For funds to market the product, founder Sagar Apte approached more than 100 investors, and just as CarIQ’s money was running out, he managed to raise $500,000 from Snow Leopard Ventures.Shake-Ups And ConsolidationIndustry insiders mull over questions such as whether Snapdeal and Paytm will merge to take on Flipkart and Amazon. This year’s festival season discount wars are already under way. As BW Businessworld reported recently (“Caught in the Big Sale”, issue dated 13 July 2015), deep discounting and unaccounted-for losses could be as big as Rs 9,700 crore for the country’s top three e-tailers.Shakedowns seem inevitable, and not everyone is going to survive. “Consolidation will be a major part of the startup over the next five years,” says Sameer Brij Verma, partner at Nexus Venture Partners.According to a report by research agency iSpirit, Microsoft Ventures, and Signal Hill, there have been 190 tech product mergers and acquisitions between 2011 and 2015, worth a total $2.27 billion. Domestic transactions accounted for 72 per cent of buyouts, and 23 per cent of the total value came from e-commerce acquisitions.About a year and a half ago, meal delivery company Foodpanda acquired TastyKhana and JustEat. But it’s not just retail businesses that are seeing consolidation. There is action in the business-to-business segment as well. Restaurant locator and review app Zomato has been on a global acquisition spree, and among its purchases is Delhi-based MaplePOS, which will enable it to offer restaurants services such as cloud-based menu and inventory management, analytics, electronic receipts, and payment gateway integration.Some of the consolidation is a shortcut to growth. For example, Flipkart bought mobile engagement and marketing automation company Appiterate to beef up its own app, and Snapdeal bought Doozton and Wishpicker for their tech platforms (Doozton is a fledgling fashion products discovery site, and Wishpicker uses machine learning to deliver recommendations for gift purchases.) “Most of these acquisitions are termed as acqui-hiring, where the quality of the founding team and the technology that they have built is imperative for a large organisation,” says Ravi Narayan, Managing Director, Microsoft Ventures.Mohandas Pai, co-founder of Aarin Capital, says, “In consumer Internet services, only one or two businesses will survive in each category.” The average deal size in India is still small ($11.3 million), when compared with a tiny country such as Israel (average deal size $113.8 million). Looks like the next five years are going to be exciting. îvishal@businessworld.in, @vishalskrishna(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 02-11-2015)
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A study conducted by The Lemelson Foundation reveals that India’s entrepreneurial space falls short of its potential due to the fragmented nature of networks and knowledge systems coupled with gaps in financing and technical support structures.By Simar SinghFocusing on initiatives and inventions that create a positive social impact, are environmentally responsible and financially self-sustaining, the report claims that while India was an early entrant in the growing global movement towards impact-driven entrepreneurship, it fell short of making the best of its potential somewhere. “In spite of the numerous university curricula, business competitions, and enterprise incubators anchoring the sector, Indian entrepreneurs still struggle to transition their ideas from compelling concepts to viable businesses,” it says. Undertaking a field study to examine the impediments in the country’s “impact ecosystem”, Lemelson observed the broad network of existent businesses, funders and intermediaries that enable a social enterprise. During the course of this exercise they realised that, “networks and knowledge platforms in India are fragmented and weak” and that there are “numerous financing and technical support gaps’ which are making it difficult for invention-based enterprises to find investors and mentors, particularly at the business’ early stage of development. One of the study’s key findings is that there is a disconnect between the expectations of entrepreneurs and investors, with investors often shying away from putting in money at the blueprint or the development stage, where monetary backing is direly required to kick the idea off the ground. Instead, investors, behaving cautiously, prefer coming in at the validation stage which is when the product has already been created. Titled ‘Catalysing Capital for Invention: Spotlight on India”, the report makes recommendations to fill ecosystem, financial and capacity gaps that adversely affect the mobility of impact based enterprises in the country. It suggests the development of an early stage grant facility, the creation of an affordable capital fund, the establishment of a fund to finance intermediary services such as helping in the raising of capital and investment attraction, and facilitating access to financial expertise through targeted mentorship.
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It's not easy being a startup, especially when it has been funded well and commanded a stellar valuation. The curious case of Housing.com has got "curiouser" as it has seen a plunge in its valuation. A year ago when it had raised $100 million from Softbank, the PE company, the startup was valued at $400 million. In less than six months, the company is valued at less than $50 million. Sources close to BW|Businessworld say that a large listings and classified business approached the company to buy them out for as little as $30 million.
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The Union government will introduce entrepreneurship education in 3,000 colleges across India in the next five years to support the growth of startups, a senior official said.
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