Category Archives: Money Matters

Venture Center Pune invites startup applications for seed funding from Department of Science and Technology

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Pune-based Government-funded Startup Incubator, Venture Center, (winner of a national award for best technology incubator in 2015) is hosting a seed fund with a corpus of Rs 10 crore under the scheme “National Initiative for Developing and Harnessing Innovations – Seed Support System (NIDHI-SSS)” of the Department of Science and Technology.

The basic idea of NIDHI seed support is providing financial assistance to potential startups with promising ideas, innovations and technologies. This would enable some of these incubatee startups with innovative ideas/technologies to graduate to a level where they will be able to raise investments from angel/Venture capitalist or they will reach a position to seek loans from commercial banks /financial institutions. Thus the proposed seed support disbursed by an incubator to an incubatee is positioned to act as a bridge between development and commercialization of innovative technologies/products/services in a relatively hassle free manner.

Broad Areas to be covered under the financial assistance include:

  • Product development
  • Testing and trials
  • Test Marketing
  • Mentoring
  • Professional Consultancy ( To attract Professors of institutions to work with small firms)
  • IPR issues
  • Man power for day to day operations
  • Any other area as deemed necessary and recommended by the Management Committee.

The Seed fund emphasizes:

  • Alignment with Venture Center’s Focus areas
  • Product offerings (vs service offerings)
  • IP-rich enterprises
  • Strong knowledge components in enterprises

Eligibility Conditions for start-ups to apply for seed support

  • Incubatee should be a registered company in India
  • Incubatee has to be an Indian start-up. This support is not meant for Indian Subsidiaries of MNCs/foreign companies. Persons holding Overseas Citizens of India (OCI), Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) would be considered as Indian citizens for the purpose of this scheme.
  • The share holding by Indian promoters in the incubate start up should be at least 51%.

Selection Criteria:

Here is a list of make/break criteria for applicants:

  • There must be at-least one dedicated entrepreneur involved in the venture
  • There must be a formal business plan
  • The idea and team should be technically sound
  • The venture and the team must have high ethical & professional standards
  • The venture must have a strong technology/knowledge component
  • EHS requirements must be met
  • The team should show potential and credibility for raising money in future
  • The venture must be registered as a private limited company, or must be in the process of registration
  • The amount of funding requested must be less than Rs 100 lakh
  • The entrepreneur(s) must be willing to share equity in the venture
  • The applicant must be or willing to be resident incubatee of Venture Center before investment

Applications for the seed fund will be reviewed based on criteria such as (but not limited to):

  • Is amount of funding requested enough to reach critical milestone?
  • Does the venture have a clear, potentially significant/singular value proposition
  • How big/fast growing is the potential market?
  • Are target customers clearly identified?
  • How credible is the technology? (Is PoC credible in the opinion of subject-matter experts?)
  • Are there regulatory/certification/policy risks?
  • What are the sources of sustainable competitive advantage (eg. novelty, patentability, etc.)?
  • What is the quality of the business plan (revenue model, product roadmap, market segments, etc.)?

Typical terms for seed funding:

  • Selected start-up should be/become a resident incubatee of Venture Center and should have completed three months of residency at Venture Center at the time of seed fund investment.
  • Investment mode: Equity ownership in a private limited company
  • Investment amount: Up to 100 lakh
  • BoD representation: 1 Board Nominee Director and/or observer of Venture Center
  • Reporting: Bi-annual presentation to SEED Fund committee + Annual financials/MIS

Application form can be downloaded here.

Interested start-ups are encouraged to contact Venture Center for further information @ shruti@venturecenter.co.in / 020 25865877/78/76

Pune’s @EZMove_in raises Rs 1 crore in angel funding from HNIs

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The Economic Times is reporting that Pune-based EZMove has raised Rs 1 crore in angel funding from HNIs.

Excerpts from the article:

Online home relocation service aggregator EZMove raised angel investment of Rs 1 crore from seven high networth individuals, including industrialist Hemant Bharatram, and Chicago-based Purvi Capital cofounder Ravi Srivastava, who have all invested in their personal capacity.

Founded in August last year, EZMove is an online marketplace where a user can meet a reliable packer by simply filling out an online form. The customer also receives ratings of each of these vendors based on old customer experience and also feedback based on the startup’s screening process. At a minimum, the customer gets quotations from 3-4 packers.

How are they planning on using the money?

“We will aggressively expand to smaller towns and cities, and invest on our mobile website,” said Anand Agarwal, 36, who cofounded the company with Vishwajeet Singh, who he met while working at Geometric Software. EZMove expects a revenue of Rs 12 crore by December 2014 at current run rate. The movers and packers market in India is estimated to be about Rs 10,000 crore with mostly unorganized players.

The founders Anand and Vishwajeet will be familiar to Pune techies from their earlier venture, cloud-based software development environment provider BootstrapToday.

Read the full article

Druva, Pune-based backup software startup, gets $25M in Series D Funding

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Techcrunch reports that Druva, the Pune-based backup software startup, has just received $25MM In Series D Funding from Sequoia, along with Nexus Venture Partners and Tenaya capital, bringing their total funding to $92MM.

Usually, online backup providers get compared with Dropbox and Box.com and other, famous consumer oriented backup providers, but in keeping with Pune’s tradition of Enterprise Software products, Druva is differentiating itself by focusing on the B2B market:

First of all, they have concentrated strictly on the enterprise market, foregoing the SMB and consumer markets that bring with them the lure of big user numbers, but lower revenue.

Secondly, rather than being strictly a backup tool or sync and share, they have chosen a different route, what he says is more intelligent than simply offering “a data graveyard.” Instead, they look at data protection and governance on mobile devices, working with eDiscovery vendors like Recommind and AccessData to help companies entangled in litigation isolate and remove content involved in the lawsuit from the affected mobile devices with minimum possible disruption to the owner.

And thirdly they can provide mobile device recovery if a device is lost to get a user back up and running  quickly, and they can help IT assess what if any essential data might have been compromised..

and, as a result, they’re playing in a slightly different market than traditional cloud storage/backup providers:

puts them more in competition with traditional backup/governance/eDiscovery vendors like EMC, Symantec and HP than cloud storage vendors like Dropbox and Box. In fact, he says his sales typically involve both legal and IT, so it’s a bit of a different play than pure cloud storage would suggest.

The approach has gotten the attention of customers like NASA, Pfizer, Dell and Hitachi among others, and they have gained 900 customers since their last funding round, growing from 2100 to 3000 enterprise customers in the last 10 months.

Read the full article.

Or check out all articles on PuneTech tagged ‘backup’ – you’ll get a history of Druva over the years.

Overview of Helpshift: Pune-based Mobile Customer Service Software Product Company

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Helpshift, the Pune-based company that builds customer service software solutions for mobile app developers has recently raised $10 million in funding from Intel Capital, Visionnaire Ventures, True Investors, and the VC most active in Pune, Nexus Venture Partners. This funding is in addition to the $3.2 million it had raised earlier.

We decided to take this opportunity to give PuneTech readers an overview of what exactly Helpshift does.

Helpshift provides mobile developers with tools, software and an online service that allows them to easily incorporate various in-app customer support and service features in their mobile apps.

Helpshift: Product Overview

The key to understand Helpshift’s offering is to realize that the current “industry practices” of customer support were largely developed for desktop applications and still have remnants of the era when everybody wasn’t always connected to the internet. As a result, customer service is still stuck in the 80s.

However, mobile is a very different world, and it is possible to do things with smartphones that were not possible earlier. Thus, it becomes possible to create a customer service experience far better than anything else that was possible before. And mobile is eating the world, so developers need to pay attention.

Specifically, Helpshift provides the following features:

  • Support: Easily incorporate tools to do provide in-app support for customers. Integrating this with the app results in a “Contact Us” tab that has a full-fledged in-app messaging system that customer support personnel can use to interact with the customer and solve their problem. In addition, it allows easy creation of a FAQs section, that can be dynamically updated, organized, tagged by customer service, and can be easily searched and displayed to/by the customer
  • Notifications: Helpshift allows app developers / support personnel to easily send push notifications to customers. This appears as an in-app notification if the app is in the foreground, or as an alert or a badge if the app is in the background (and also updates the app icon)
  • Tracking: Helpshift allows the app to easily track user actions and events in the app, and can be used to automatically attach customer and app configuration metadata along with every support conversation with that customer. The app developer can customize what medadata is automatically attached. This removes the biggest pain of any customer service interaction – that of collecting information about the configuration and environment of the customer, and what s/he was doing at the time of the issue.
  • Reviews and Feedback: Helpshift also allows easy integration of the ability to ask customers for feedback on the app, or reviews on the appstore/play/marketplace. This can either be triggered automatically by the app software, or manually by a customer support person after an interaction with the customer.
  • Localization and Internationalization: If an app is targeted towards an international market, it is important that all of the above features (messaging, FAQs, review/feedback screens) need to be made available in local languages. Helpshift comes with support for 12 languages out of the box, and if the customer has already set their device to the appropriate language in the device settings, then the correct language will be chosen automatically by Helpshift.

For all of this, the app developer does not actually need to write all the code; just a little bit of code is needed to incorporate Helpshift’s libraries and online API. However, to ensure that the whole experience is seamless and appears to be part of the app itself, Helpshift allows extensive theming and skinning of its SDK so it can be made to match the look and feel of the app.

Helpshift: Company Background

Helpshift has been founded by @Abinash Tripathi and Baishampayan Ghose. Abinash, who’s the co-founder and CEO, is a serial entrepreneur who was the head of Zimbra India in Pune earlier before he founded Infinitely Beta, which experimented with various startup ideas (including the now defunct paisa.com) before settling on Helpshift. You might be interested in a profile we did of Abinash on PuneTech back on 2009. He was based in Pune, but shifted to the Silicon Valley after Helpshift began taking off.

Baishampayan (aka BG) is the co-founder and CTO of Helpshift. Before Helpshift, BG co-founded a sport-based social network company and before that he was responsible for designing and creating the air ticket fare and reservation system at one of India’s largest online travel operators. BG is an active member of the Free & Open Source Software community and has contributed to many projects including Clojure, Ubuntu, Python and Django.

What are they planning to do with the funding? Abinash told TechCrunch that:

We’ve realized we have something that most mobile companies could benefit from and the only challenge for us has been the ability to scale to meet the explosive demand. This round of funding will enable us to attack each of these major mobile verticals and bring the benefits of Helpshift to thousands of app publishers.

and

most of the company’s growth so far has been organic. With the help of this new funding, the company plans to expand its sales and marketing team in San Francisco. He also notes that the company will continue to invest heavily on building the end-to-end customer life cycle tools for mobile companies to provide the best customer experience and solve the customer retention issues they face.

The company says its service has now been installed on over 150 million devices through the different developers that have integrated it into their apps. Helpshift counts Supercell, Glu Mobile and Flipboard among its customers, but as part of its plans to expand its service, the company will specifically target mobile commerce apps and on-demand services like taxi and food delivery.

Pune based AdSparx gets Rs 3.5cr Angel Funding From @IANetwork (@manish_saarthi @sharads)

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DealCurry is reporting that Pune based AdSparx, a company that allows video publishers to seamlessly and automatically insert ads into their videos at runtime has received Rs 3.5cr in angel funding from Indian Angel Network, Mumbai Angels, and GrowX Ventures

Excerpts from the announcement:

LetsVenture CEO Manish Singhal and Indian Angel Network’s Sharad Sharma acted as lead investors for the deal.

About the company:

The company was founded in 2012 by former Patni Computers employee, Kunal Lagwankar. AdSparx uses a server side technology to serve device independent, high quality, targeted, pre & mid-roll video ads for linear TV, live events and videos on demand. It counts NexGTV, Vodafone, Airtel and Sony Liv among its notable clients. The startup has done mid-roll ads for online streaming of Indian Premier League, French Open and New Zealand Cricket Series in the past.

About the product:

  • AdSparx’s unique real-time targeted Ad Serving technology works for all devices, irrespective of OS or form-factor, while retaining smooth switching between video and Ad content for a seamless experience
  • Linear TV, Live Events & On-demand Video
  • AdSparx works with your existing content delivery set up and requires no modification. AdSparx easily integrates with Wowza, Adobe FMS and Apache servers and content delivery networks
  • ‘Lowest’ time to Market: A single point of integration on your servers for all your Ad serving needs, AdSparx does not require any changes in your client apps and cuts down your time to market drastically

About the team:

The founders all seem to be people who worked in Patni, founded Novix Media in 2005, then joined Patni in 2008, and finally started AdSparx in 2012. Details:

In case you find such things interesting, here is a US patent application (not yet granted) that AdSparx has filed.

Read the full article

Pune’s Swipe Telecom gets further funding from Kalaari Capital (30cr)

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(Sorry, this news is being posted here a little late; I was on vacation when this news broke, and decided that a late update is better than no update at all.)

Pune based Swipe Telecom, which has been selling low-priced tablets in the Indian market for the last 2 years has received Rs. 30 crore in funding from Kalaari Capital, [reports the Economic Times][blink].

Here is some interesting information about Swipe from the article:

Swipe offers around 23 types of tablets which include those with 3D resolution as well as a range aimed at children. While its current products are on Google’s Android platform, it will soon introduce tablets on the Microsoft Windows platform.

and, some information about the founder:

“We want to be a leader in one category ,” said Shripal Gandhi, cofounder & CEO of Swipe who has 11 patents in nanotechnology. He has earlier worked at Unidym, where he worked on touch screen technologies for clients like Samsung and Apple. It is this focus that is proving attractive to investors.

And information about their revenues:

The fast growing company, founded by Gandhi and Aman Gupta two years ago, has seen a three-fold increase in revenue which touched Rs 100 crore in fiscal 2014, with an estimate to touch Rs 300 crore next year. Swipe Telecom, which says it can develop and roll out products in five weeks, is able to customise its tablets for enterprises and plans to make pre-loaded tablets for education institutes and banks.

Read the full article

Pune-based Sci/Math Learning Platform @FunctionSpace get funding from @NexusVP

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(Sorry, this news is being posted here a little late; I was on vacation when this news broke, and decided that a late update is better than no update at all.)

Pune-based Function Space, an online “social” platform for learning science and maths has recently raised seed funding from Nexus Venture Partners.

Function Space is trying to make STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education fun and engaging, something that is seriously been missing from our education system

Function Space, already offers a strong community consisting of users from over 190 countries, including students, professors and researchers from MIT, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, Indian Institute of Technology campuses, Indian Institute of Science and other prestigious institutions.

The funding will be used for expansion: of their content, their tools, and their customer reach.

Function Space was founded in 2013 by Adit Gupta, Sakshi Majmudar and Sumit Maniyar.

Note, this makes NexusVP the most Pune-friendly venture capital firm with 9 investments in Pune.

Read the full article

MasterCard acquires Pune-based Electra Card Services

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Credit Card company Mastercard has acquires Pune-based Electra Card Services, (owned by Pune’s Opus Software Solutions), reports the Times of India.

Excerpt:

ECS […] provides software products and processing services for electronic payments. Its customer base includes financial institutions, retailers and telcos in over 25 countries. ECS’ suite of products enables customers to issue and manage all types of payment cards and electronically process card transactions across multiple channels such as ATM, point of sales, internet and mobile.

More information:

Pune based @Clogeny Technologies acquired by US based MSys Technologies

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(Sorry, this news is being posted here a little late; I was on vacation when this news broke, and decided that a late update is better than no update at all.)

According to a press release:

MSys Technologies, a Georgia, US-based company that provides technology and product engineering services in storage, cloud computing, embedded systems, telecommunications, quality assurance, test automation, and technical support, has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Clogeny Technologies, based in Pune, specializing in storage, big data, cloud computing, and DevOps

Here are further relevant excerpts from the press release:

About MSys Technologies

MSys was founded in 2007 in Chennai, India by CEO, Sanjay Sehgal. After gradually progressing through technology projects for several clients, mostly from the United States, the company established two additional locations: one in Johns Creek, Georgia and the second one in Bangalore, India.

MSys has close to 300 employees with exceptional technical expertise in all the industry verticals they serve. With several directors of engineering, senior managers, and technology managers, the company has a proven delivery team most suited for undertaking high-level technical projects. Since its inception in 2007, MSys has shown remarkable financial growth. MSys has had several clients from both the United States and Europe. The decision to acquire Clogeny came up as part of an expansion plan for MSys through which it could serve a larger client base with varied requirements.

About Clogeny Technologies

Clogeny Technologies was established in 2009 as a private company headquartered in Pune, Maharashtra, India. The company was established by CEO, Kalpak Shah, and CTO, Chirag Jog. Clogeny is an outsourced product development and software services company with expertise in DevOps, storage, cloud computing and Big Data. Since its inception, Clogeny has served 35+ customers and has created a differentiated set of offerings in cloud, storage, and DevOps domains.

See full press release.

Quick Heal plans initial public offer in Dec-Jan – Financial Express

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Financial Express reports that Pune-based computer security software products company Quick Heal is planning an IPO in Dec-Jan.

This is likely to be Pune’s first software product company IPO, unless Pubmatic manages to do an IPO before that (which is still quite possible).

Excerpts from the article:

In 2010, the Pune-based company was valued at Rs 600 crore, when Sequoia invested Rs 60 crore for a 10 per cent stake.

Sales have grown from Rs 10 crore a decade ago, to over Rs 215 crore in FY 13 and expects to cross Rs 250 crore mark in FY 14, Katkar said.

“Over a span of 20 years the company’s R&D has focused on computer and network security solutions. We now plan to expand new products range with the launch of new version of end point security (EPS) in July-August this year. We are also offering data loss prevention and mobile devise management to our customers,” Katkar said.

The company has more than 8 million customers in 60 countries. The company has strong global presence with offices in Dubai, Japan, USA and Kenya. It plans to strengthen the staff strength in these offices and looking at opening new office in Europe and Australia in the near future, he added.

QuickHeal, which claims a 35 per cent market share in India’s consumer anti-virus market, was founded by Pune-based brothers Kailash Katkar and Sanjay Katkar.

Read the full article