PayPal, the global leader in online payments have announced the selection of four new Financial Technology [FinTech] startups – CashFree, D-Rewards, Notifie & ftcash – as new entrants into its ‘Start Tank’ Incubation Center in Chennai. The announcement was made after the final round of pitching during the 4th Start Tank Incubation Challenge on Friday, which saw more than 125 startups apply for a place in the incubator this year.
Start Tank demonstrates PayPal’s commitment to enabling the startup ecosystem in India. Launched in 2013, the incubator provides an obligation-free environment for early-stage startups to evolve at its exclusive facility in PayPal’s technology center in Chennai. PayPal offers incubated startups with technology and business mentorship, infrastructure support and networking opportunities with both investors and customers.
As PayPal looks to transform money and become an everyday part of people’s financial lives, Start Tank has aligned its focus around startups in the Payments and FinTech space. Applications called for startups focused on core payment features such as wallets, gateways and remittances, as well as payments enablers and adjacencies like bio-metric authentication, security and financial inclusion.
Anupam Pahuja, General Manager, Technology, Asia-Pacific, PayPal said
I am excited to see the entrepreneurial space in India take-off in just a short few years. Today, India ranks third among global startup ecosystems in the world PayPal’s Start Tank has been tremendously successful since its inception. All of our incubated startups so far have either successfully secured funding or are finalizing strategic partnerships. We are delighted to welcome this promising new batch of startups into Start Tank, and look forward to them scaling even greater heights through our incubation program.
Start Tank Incubation Challenge winners
CashFree
Founded by Akash Sinha & Reeju Datta, enables payments to provide a better buying experience for consumers making online and cash transactions. By keeping payments at their core and building tools on top of it, they want to simplify the way people pay for their products they buy every day.
Reeju Datta, Founder, CashFree said
Being associated with a brand like PayPal is a huge step forward for a young payments startup such as CashFree. Globally speaking, we don’t think there is anyone better than PayPal to handle problems associated with payments on a large scale. We hope to leverage this expertise of PayPal, specifically in the areas of risk management as that will be one of the key issues for our startup as we scale-up.
D-Rewards
Founded by Vijay Krishna & Shoaib Mohammed is a cloud-based CRM tool for offline small business retailers that enables end-to-end customer engagement using loyalty as a platform for profiling. It features in-house analytics & targeted promotions, bridging the gap between the business and its customers.
Vijay Krishna, Co-Founder & Head of Business Strategy, D-Rewards said
D-Rewards was designed to bring ease of customer engagement for businesses, keeping in mind the customers and the various ways through which they can be pampered. It has been an exciting journey so far, engaging 20000 consumers part of 48 outlets across Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad using our product to give out 8.5 lakhs in loyalty & selectively target customers with customized offers.
However, being incubated at Start Tank opens up new windows of opportunities for us. We currently don’t have an advisor or mentor on board to guide us through the process of setting up a startup and we hope to benefit from PayPal’s expertise in this field.
ftcash
Founded by Sanjeev Chandak, Deepak Kothari & Vaibhav Lodha aims to empower the under-served micro-merchant sector with the power of mobile payments. It provides seamless solutions for micro-merchants to accept payments through multiple payment instruments including debit cards, credit cards and mobile wallets.
Sanjeev Chandak, Chief Executive Officer, ftcash said
It feels great to win PayPal’s Start Tank incubation challenge and we look forward to the experience. It has been less than a year since we launched Ftcash and there is still a long way to go. We hope to leverage PayPal’s technical and business acumen to improve our product as well as service offerings to our customers.
Notifie
Founded by Dr. N. Raja Chinnathamby & Arun Nedunchezian aspires to be the one-stop messaging platform for a two-way business to customer communications via Smartphones.
The platform supports various multimedia formats and aims to be the ideal replacement for traditional SMS. Notifie currently has five paying customers from the education, financial and retail industries.
Arun Nedunchezian, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Notifie said
For a startup, validation is everything and to receive that from a company like PayPal is highly satisfying. Notifie currently has five paid clients. However, there are several factors that goes into making a startup successful and we look forward to learning those nuances from PayPal. We look up to the company as a successful startup and hope to get their support in helping us reach the next level.
PayPal’s Start Tank incubator was launched in 2013 in partnership with The Indus Entrepreneurs [TiE] Chennai. The Start Tank incubator has previously hosted six startups and provides access to global mentors, angel investors and venture capitalists.
Three companies incubated at Start Tank – Kobster, Fantain and DoPartTime – successfully graduated in May 2015. Kobster also secured an undisclosed amount of seed investment, while PiQube, another startup currently being incubated at Start Tank, recently raised $500,000 from The HR Fund.
In 2014, PayPal’s ecosystem work was recently recognized with the ‘Ecosystem Enablement for Startups’ award from Zinnov, in July 2015.
About PayPal Start Tank
PayPal India formally launched its startup incubator in association with TiE Chennai in November 2013. The exclusive facility in PayPal’s Chennai technology center provides an obligation-free environment as well as technology and business mentorship for select startups to evolve. It has an office area of more than 11,000 square feet with a world-class incubation space, state-of-the-art conference rooms and other amenities.
Start Tank is located globally across PayPal offices in London and Chennai and provides access to global mentors, angel investors and venture capitalists. More information about Start Tank here