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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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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Former Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit has taken a stake in London-based currency transfer startup Transferwise, adding to his portfolio of financial technology investments. "Thrilled to welcome Vikram Pandit, previously CEO of Citi to join TransferWise as an investor," Transferwise co-founder Kristo Kaarmann tweeted on Tuesday. Transferwise said Pandit invested during its $58 million fundraising in January, but it declined to say how much he put in. That fundraising valued the four-year-old online money transfer group at about $1 billion. Other investors include Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and British billionaire Richard Branson. Transferwise said this year's fundraising helped it expand globally, including opening U.S. offices. It plans to launch in Australia in the next few months, and now has 400 staff. Pandit was Citigroup CEO from 2007 and steered it through the financial crisis until he resigned in October 2012. He has previously invested in Orchard, which helps institutional investors buy loans originated by marketplace lenders; Dataminr, which analyses tweets and other data to alert finance professionals; bitcoin payment processor Coinbase; and online student lender CommonBond.(Reuters)
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Digital healthcare startup Practo, on Thursday (24 September) announced the acquisition of rival firm Qikwell, a leader in appointment scheduling at hospitals for an unrevealed amount. The company said that with the acquisition, Practo becomes the world’s largest appointment booking platform with nearly 40 million appointments managed every year. Shashank ND, Founder & CEO, Practo said, “This is our 4th acquisition in the last 5 months. We continue our mission to help simplify and digitize healthcare globally and make Practo your health app. I am very pleased to welcome Krishna, Ragavendra and the Qikwell team to Practo. Practo has been the pioneer in digital health and with this acquisition Practo now becomes the world’s leading appointment management platform.” He further added, “Over the coming months, we will continue our aggressive expansion and as build the world’s leading healthcare technology platform.” Practo started its aggressive strategy in April when it acquired digital fitness solution provider Fitho, followed by Genii in July and Insta Health earlier this month. The Bengaluru-based company raised $ 90 million from a group of investors like Tencent, Google Capital and Sequoia India, taking its total rose funding to $ 125 million. Qikwell started in 2011, by Krishna Prasad Chitrapura and Raghavendra Prasad TS at present has over 100 employees and offers appointment in 250 Hospitals in 19 cities. It also has over 6000+ top doctors across in leading hospitals like Apollo, Fortis and Narayana Hrudalaya. The company will continue to be led by its founders, added the statement. “Qikwell is thrilled to join Practo in our quest to enable digital healthcare worldwide. We share the same passion, vision and commitment to customers in offering great products. We chose Practo over some other options because together we can offer superior, comprehensive and integrated solutions.” - said Chitrapura.(BW Online Bureau)
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Before every trip there is a feeling 'have I forgotten to pack something?' The list of things to be carried on a trip is long – a travel pillow, headphones, eye mask, pen knife. And, then these things get lost in the big black hole of the back pack. What if you could have a separate pocket for all travel needs in your hoodie? This is the idea behind the new line of functional wear launched by online campus merchandise brand CampusSutra.
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This will be a huge industry in five years and will add 300 million new customers, say Vishal Krishna and K Chandra MohanThere have been several payment, money transfer and wallet solutions that have been cropping up over the last six months. Snapdeal along with Freecharge has launched a wallet service. Novopay, funded by Vinod Khosla, launched its wallet service recently. Private banks such as HDFC and ICICI have launched their own wallet services. What is interesting is that Flipkart has stayed away from this business, instead, it has chosen the advertising business to bring in additional revenues. Why does finance make sense to technology companies like Snapdeal and PayTM? It's because the government has granted permissions to these companies to apply for payment bank licences. PayTM was one of the first companies to apply and get a license. But the licences are just one part of the game. Today 160 million smart phones have been sold in India and the number is expected to hit 600 million by 2018. The bet is on the new customers that will be added on the payments bank platform. Acquiring these new customers will increase the valuation of each of these businesses 50 fold. The financial payments industry is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2020. So the money raised for payments banks will be far higher than the money spent on etailing. Today, these six odd technology companies that are vying for payment banks licences are focused on a market that is not more than 40-million-strong. Their wallet businesses, where phone bills and cable bills can be paid, along with their etail platforms are suffering from low margins. They are burning money and customer acquisition cost is high and the margins are less than one per cent per transaction. This will take these businesses more than a decade to break even and meanwhile they will have to survive on the money raised. But being a bank could increase their transaction customer base to a population the size of the USA, which is 300 million, in less than 18 months. The payment banks will be a combination of the best of banking services (where there will be high margins) along with etailing services. Finally there could be a business model that could take these companies to profitability. Today none of them have sketched out a market strategy for being payment banks. They have to get people to download their apps on smartphones. They need to work on local language technologies and sync in even text message based money transfers. They also have to tie up with local folk, certified to collect money, to on board people. A payment bank carries money on the app and it becomes a deposit account. People can remit upto Rs 1 lakh in to this smart phone based app. The companies can issue debit and credit cards. They can also pay interest on deposits. What they cannot do is to disburse loans. The government expects at least 150 millions new accounts to be opened on these platforms. These six startups together have raised $1 billion just to build wallet solutions. Experts that Businessworld spoke to say there will be an additional $1 billion raised to make payments banks work. The answer, to the question about technology being disruptive to add new customers on to the mobile, in smaller towns, will be found when smart phones truly replace the business correspondents that banks deployed to win new account holders in rural towns. Perhaps cash will be burnt here by these tech companies. This will also answer a teething question; what is the real size of smart phone transactions in India. Perhaps funds have to commission a study based on the hypothesis that payment banks transactions could be their answer to big valuations.
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GenNext Innovation Hub, an accelerator programme by Reliance Industries (RIL) and Microsoft Ventures on Friday (11 September) began its second ‘Fall 2015’ batch by announcing the names of ten startups.
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In first two days of the rally, the company has got more than 1,600 registrations on their job portal.
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The Right to Education (RTE) Act may have been passed but more than 95 per cent schools are still not compliant with the infrastructure standard prescribed in the RTE Act, says a 2012 civil society survey.
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