Simar Singh Sometimes there’s that suspicious rash creeping up. Should you be concerned? You could go to a doctor but there's no time. But you’d rather get an expert opinion. That’s where DocsApp wants to step in, right in your palm, guaranteeing a specialist opinion within half an hour. Created by two IIT Madras graduates, Satish Kannan and Enbasekar D., DocsApp is a mobile-based application available for download on both the App Store and Play Store, that connects patients with specialist doctors, moving the entire process of consultation online. Its services are available across five departments - Gynaecology, Dermatology, General Medicine, Paediatrics and Psychiatry. “DocsApp is like the WhatsApp for patients and doctors,” Kannan jokes. The duo always had an interest in the healthcare space and knew that they wanted to do something in it. Kannan joined Philips Healthcare in Pune and to walk on cardiac and orthopaedic related technology, while Enbasekar worked at the Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre for a year, only to quit to develop DocsApp. The startup’s tagline—No Appointment, No Travelling, No Waiting, perfectly explains what it essentially does and why people should use it. “We essentially have three types of customers — people who are too busy to physically make it to the doctor’s, those who are seeking privacy and those in smaller towns who do not have access to specialists who are generally city based,” he says. According to research, 72 per cent of health issues are common illnesses which do not require a physical examination and 97 per cent of specialist doctors are concentrated in the top ten cities in India. One time consultations cost Rs 150 and the app connects patients with the relevant specialist who is nearest to them. This can be followed up through chat or call. In case a doctor suggests a physical examination and the consultation is not completed, the money is reimbursed. Doctors, too, have a good incentive to hop onto the platform. Kannan says, “To grow their practice, doctors have to visit more clinics. Most doctors visit three clinics a day. DocsApp provides a platform for them to grow and also offers more publicity, without all the travelling.” However, not just any doctor can be on DocsApp. There’s an intensive screening process and all doctors need to have at least five years of experience. It's like recreating the multi-super speciality experience online, the first consultative part at least. As of today, DocsApp has serviced 25,000 patients and over 150 doctors registered across Delhi, Mumbai and home ground Bengaluru. Kannan hopes to expand this base to at leat 1000 doctors and facilitate a million consultations in the next one year. Apart from, the on-mobile consultations DocsApp also provides at-home diagnostic services and medicine delivery. The startup has ties with over a thousand labs across the country. The medicine delivery service is limited to Bengaluru at the moment, but Kannan expects this to be rolled out to other cities over the next few months. The startup was incubated by IIT Madras and Rajesh Sawhney (who is also an investor in the company) led GSF Accelerator. The company has engaged in a larger round of funding but has withheld the details for now.
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Simar SinghLetsVenture, an online startup funding facilitator, announced that it had brought on Ratan Tata and Mohandas Pai as advisors. The two corporate heavyweights have also invested an undisclosed amount in the company’s Series A round of funding. Founded by Shanti Mohan and Sanjay Jha in 2013, LetsVenture provides a platform for entrepreneurs to meet investors, simplifying the fundraising side of things. CEO Shanti Mohan said that having Tata and Pai on was an endorsement go the company as a trusted platform for investors and entrepreneurs. Reportedly, LetsVenture has around 750 startups and 1,200 investors registered across 20 countries. Around 375 of these are India. To date, LetsVenture has raised around $17 million for 53 startups and should be able to close 35 funding deals by the end of the year. Since his retirement, Tata has been actively involved in the Indian startup scene as a venture capitalist. His portfolio includes taxi aggregator Ola, furnishings portal Urban Ladder, marketplace Paytm and Car Dekho, to name a few. LetsVenture’s Series A round which was conducted last week saw the participation of many high profile investors including Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, Wipro’s director Rishad Premji and Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
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Even as the startup ecosystem is thriving in the country, former Infosys director T V Mohandas Pai believes that only 10 per cent of the new-age companies would be successful while a majority of these would fail. Still, startups are set emerge as a major job creator in the country if government evolves an enabling policy environment for these budding firms, say Pai. Typically about 10 per cent of the startups will do very well, about 25 per cent will stay afloat, and the rest will fail, Pai told PTI. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India initiative takes wings, the startup ecosystem will thrive with over 1 lakh new-age firms in next 10 years, employing 3.5 million people and targeting a value of $500 billion, he said. "Digital India is the biggest experiment that will transform India if Modi gets it right," Pai told PTI. "For that, most Indians should be connected with wireless devices and children in class six and above should have a tab connecting them to the Internet with 3G. If his happens, it will transform the country in the next 15 years," he said. Currently India has 18,000 startups valued at $75 billion, employing 300,000 people. On the back of right policies, the startups could grow over five-fold in number in the next 10 years, and will target a value of over USD 500 billion, Pai said. Pai believes that about 10 per cent of the startups will do very well, about 25 per cent will stay afloat, and the rest will fail. "Once a startup fails it remains in limbo as the bankruptcy code is still underdeveloped. We can't kill companies. It takes a long time," he warned. He also urged the government to come up with a detailed startup policy. "We are working with various state governments, including Rajasthan, Karnataka and West Bengal, that are unveiling their own startup policies," he said. "I'm hoping for swift policy change like making listing requirements more favourable, and taxation issues should be be addressed," he added. Pai said he is optimistic about "startup value - not valuations". He pointed out that in the IT industry Indian firms were solving problems of the US and Europe, however startups can solve the problems the domestic industry. "Startups are solving India's problems. What India needs is 100s and thousands of problem solvers, who can add value," he said. "The country will be a $10 trillion economy by 2030, and the huge growth can be driven by entrepreneurship," Pai pointed out. A recent report by IT industry body Nasscom had said that India ranks third among global startup ecosystems with more than 4,200 new-age companies. The report said that Indian technology start-ups landscape has seen a "tremendous" growth in the emergence of innovative start-ups and creative entrepreneurs. "Three to four startups being born every day, and nearly $5 billion of funding coming in 2015," it said.(PTI )
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Startups are the buzzword in the Indian economy and are the epicentre of economic activity. However, India is not a tax-friendly haven for startup investments and there are over 100 startups that have registered abroad. Most of the Indian startups register themselves in Singapore, the US or Hong Kong to raise capital.
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Third party logistics is a Rs 48,000-crore business. But how does one organise a rent seeking and unorganised business where technology is not the panacea? Hyper-local is suddenly the favourite word for investors. It has almost become a cliché with everyone seemingly having an opinion about the potential of such a business. Investors say it is the next big boom and is supposed to wipe out middlemen in the logistics trade. Recently Opinio Raised $7 million From Delhivery And Accel Partners. RoadRunnr too raised $11 million recently from Sequoia, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures. But who has got the metal to take on this industry by looking at the problems of logistics and delivery from the ground up, the history of the system, rather than throwing technology at it?
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Arshad KhanWhile e-commerce and tech companies appear to be in favour when it comes to start-ups, Mayank Dhanuka of Origo India has zeroed in on post harvesting management solution to capture the big commodity market in India. Since starting operations in 2010, Origo India has witnessed a tremendous growth in providing warehousing and allied services. Dhanuka, Co-founder and Director of Origo India, explains that in order to set equilibrium in the operation and bring convergence in the business, Origo will concentrate more on expanding their procurement business. “Procurement service which we have started two years ago has started emerging as one of core focus area. We are sure that in a year or two, it will outrun other services provided by us,” says Dhanuka. In the current fiscal 2015-16, the company aims to generate revenue of Rs 200 crore. The company at present operates 50 plus warehouses across 15 states in the country. It provides warehousing services to giants like ITC and to government agencies. Origo has been managing the foodgrain stock of FCI through its nodal agency PUNGRAIN, in Punjab, for capacity of over 27 lakh MT, which represents almost 5 per cent of total MSP procurement of food grains (Wheat and Rice) by FCI across the country. The company has grown manifolds by providing financial services to Indian farmers. “Origo provides certificates of guarantee to banks for loans to farmers in lieu of the crops stored in their warehouses. These bags of crops act as collateral for the lending banks,” says Dhanuka. On the prevailing condition of Indian warehouses, he said India lags developed nations by more than 50 years when it comes to sensible storing of food in warehouses. The concept of zero wasting is not followed in India. He believes Indian warehouses are affected by unfriendly monsoon and labour problems. Origo currently manages 35 lakh tonne of agricultural produce across 15 states in 500 warehouses with total assets under management worth Rs 8,500 crore.
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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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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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