All Posts by Himanshu Sheth

|In: Funding|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Capital Float [Zen Lefin Pvt Ltd], India’s leading digital lender has raised debt of €6 million [INR 48 crores] from the Netherlands-based asset management company, Triodos Investment Management. The latter is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Triodos Bank, one of the world’s leading sustainable banks, and manages €3.3 billion in AUM.  This takes Capital Float’s total debt raise to $130 million [INR 840 crores]. The company has raised $107 million [INR 695 crores] in equity thus far.

Image Source – Capital Float

Triodos IM is the first international investment management company to invest in debt at Capital Float through its investment funds Triodos Fair Share Fund and Triodos Microfinance Fund. Through this collaboration, Triodos IM intends to increase its strategic focus on SME lending in India. Capital Float will leverage the funds from the debt raise for the purpose of onward lending, as the company continues adding to its existing AUM of over INR 1200 crores.

Gaurav Hinduja and Sashank Rishyasringa, Co-founders, Capital Float, said

We are delighted to have Triodos IM join our prominent list of investors. We have previously raised debt from some of the largest banks and NBFCs in India, such as Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis Bank, Reliance Capital and Northern Arc Capital [formerly IFMR Capital].

This collaboration with Triodos IM indicates Capital Float’s ever-growing reputation in the international financial circles. Investments like these will help put digital lending in India in the international spotlight. With this fresh injection of funds, we will strengthen our focus on expanding our MSME borrower segments.

Aditya Mohan, Senior Investment Officer said

Triodos IM has been working with companies that are the frontiers of financial services in emerging economies for over two decades, and the role of technology in delivering financial services in these markets has increased exponentially in recent years.

We are pleased to partner with Capital Float and are enthused by their approach of using technology as an enabler for collaboration in financial services. We look forward to contributing to a digital eco-system which can make credit accessible and affordable to MSMEs.

Northern Arc Capital performed a crucial role in facilitating the debt raise between Capital Float and Triodos IM.

Dr. Kshama Fernandes – MD & CEO, Northern Arc Capital, said

Northern Arc partners with clients across various sectors and phases of their life-cycle. Basis our diligence we take balance sheet exposures and enable these entities to access reputed global and domestic investors who value Northern Arc’s skin-in-the-game.We are excited to have played a critical role in an important transaction.

The investment by Triodos IM in Capital Float is a great demonstration of our commitment to back clients in every way possible along their growth path.

About Capital Float

Capital Float is the pioneer of digital lending in India. The company leverages technology and big data analytics to deliver innovative credit products to businesses and individuals across the country. Through its proprietary digital loan underwriting and origination platform, it has been able to deliver financing solutions to large sections of the economy traditionally underserved by large financial institutions. It has also developed partnerships to finance SMEs across various ecosystems such as e-commerce, manufacturing supply chains, retail, travel and hospitality, and digital remittances.

Founded in 2013, Capital Float is the trade name for Zen Lefin Private Limited, a Non-Banking Finance Company [NBFC] registered with the Reserve Bank of India. For more information, please visit Capital Float

|In: General|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Everyone dreams of having a home that is uniquely designed to their taste and style. Not only this, the home should fit within the individual’s budget. But, making or renovating a home is not easy. To start off with, everyone in the family has a set of ideas for the home/apartment’s interior design. Once a look is decided, finding the right materials to get that look is a task on its own. Also, while a look may look perfectly fine for a particular room, the overall home may look uncoordinated.

Image Source – Architect

With so much confusion and other tasks on your plate, designing and renovating your home can become a tedious task. That is why, people are starting to lean towards hiring the best interior designers and architects in India. What if you are able to find the best and trusted interior decorators at the click of a button? With the rise of ‘on-demand economy’ and ‘hyper-local’, new-age startups are building online ecosystem of home and office interior service providers, professionals, seller of products and clients/customers, all under one umbrella.

Some of the advantages of hiring experts include the following

Get the best home/apartment interior design ideas

Interior designers and architects are trained and experienced in this field. So, naturally, they will show you the best design ideas that come within your budget. Not only this, they understand how to incorporate you and your family’s ideas into their designs. This way, you end up with a more coordinated look for your home without compromising on your ideas.

See how some of the designs have been implemented

At times, it is difficult to visualize how a design will turn out to be when it is still in the planning phase. But, this problem can easily be solved when you hire a professional. That is because the expert may have done a similar design for a previous client, and can share images of their work with you. This way, you not only understand the design better, but by seeing the professional’s previous work, you can also trust them more easily.

Learn from their experience

At times, although a design looks perfect on paper, problems may come up when you start to implement it. Interior designers and architects have taken formal education in this industry, and may also have gained work experience for the same. Hence, they have theoretical and practical regarding how ideas can be executed effectively and efficiently.

Sit back and relax while someone else does the running for you

When you hire a professional, you can now sit back and focus on other things rather than focusing solely getting your home made in time. All you will need to do is keep an eye on how the work is progressing. Now, isn’t that convenient ?

ID Prop is an online platform which provides its users information about the best interior designers and architects in India. Previous clients leave behind ratings and reviews, making it easier for you to make a choice regarding which professional to approach. Not only this, there are multiple home and apartment interior design ideas available online for users to browse from. With ID Prop, finding the right interior designer and architect for you couldn’t have been easier.

|In: Hyperlocal|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

On-demand services are catching momentum across various cities in India. It is a well-known fact that the with the penetration of mobile internet daily requirement services are not only limited to metropolitan cities now, tier II & III cities are now becoming a larger playground for all the leading service providers across India. While the unorganized sector i.e. your local dhobi, still rules the roost, organized players are slowly making inroads into the industry.

It is estimated that by the end of 2020, more than three million Indian households would be requiring laundry services on a weekly or even daily basis. However, Laundry market in India has always lacked structure and has been lacking in terms of quality and commitment for an average.
To cater to this rapidly rising demand, DhobiLite is launching its Laundry and Dry cleaning operations in Lucknow.

DhobiLite is a Noida based cleaning service startup that has its footprints all across Delhi & NCR. DhobiLite having around 7 years of expertise in Laundry business is the pioneer of Online Laundry in India. Besides Laundry, DhobiLite provides Premium Laundry, Premium Dry Cleaning, Dry Cleaning, Organic Laundry services for garments.

Dhobilite wants to make laundry a hassle-free chore for consumers along with bringing a structured approach to the present market, a market with a 2x growth trend. Dhobilite with its Android based application and website provides end-to-end solution for all your laundry needs from placing order, tracking order, rate list, payment solutions & integration with PayTm, history, complaints, rating, referral and coupons. Dhobilite not only provides end-to-end solutions to its customers but also to vendors it is associated with. Everything is at one place.

Nishant Tripathi, Co- founder- Dhobilite, said

We are focused on making our services affordable to every middle household in India. Owning the entire supply chain is critical for this. This helps us provide the best possible customer experience. It’s not rocket science, people wear clothes and they get dirty. With busy schedules it is getting frustrating for people to do these jobs at home, hence this is a daily need and not a need of some specific segment.

May be at this stage only a % of population can afford but like food, laundry is a day to day thing. So, if there is a need there has to be a service catering to that need. A very important aspect of any service based business is to deliver quality service every time and for this DhobiLite has used technology in day to day operations right from customer placing order to processing the order and then to delivery and feedback. With the help of this fully integrated in house developed solution, DhobiLite ensures that the franchise partner doesn’t have to worry about maintaining accounts or tracking orders or communication channel with the customer.

Abhishek Kumar, Co- founder- Dhobilite said

We entered the market at the right time in 2011 that allowed us to have valuable experience regarding market and technology. Now the market is set to explode and Dhobilite is best placed to completely exploit the fruits of expansion. Market need is simple, they want laundry. Technology, branding and other things is not what they are looking for.

For us technology is the enabler to meet customer expectations, other competitors are facing issue in expansion because of this reason. We are providing our services to vendors as well which is helping them increasing operational efficiencies by at least 20~25% thereby resulting into reduced costs and better profitability for vendors and creating a win-win environment for all.

After expanding its services in every nook and corner of Delhi NCR region, DhobiLite is now opening in Lucknow and inviting people for franchise opportunities.

DhobiLite has a different model of franchising where entry ticket to open franchise is small and subsequent payouts are based on Pay-as-you-grow model. DhobiLite views its franchisees as partners in growth and if franchise succeeds than company succeeds automatically. Experience of more than 6 years in industry has helped them to develop a unique understanding of laundry process and have been able to bring gross profit margin at 38% which gives enough room of profitability for franchisee and franchisor. Small entry ticket and a low royalty fee of 8% gives the franchise owner a flexibility to utilize the funds for marketing which helps in scaling the business faster.

Depending upon the interest of business owner, DhobiLite offers a range from pure offline model franchise [in Delhi NCR region and Lucknow] to a fully owned master franchise. Each franchise model is uniquely designed after study of the demographics of the area, the geographical spread of the area and then arrive at the fee structure.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Uber, the world’s largest on-demand ride-sharing company marked the 29th National Road Safety Week by announcing a slew of initiatives for driver partners, to spread road safety awareness. Reiterating its commitment to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Uber will conduct free medical and eye check-ups for over 4.5 Lakh driver partners over the next 6 months in-line with this year’s theme of ‘Sadak Suraksha – Jeevan Raksha‘.

Speaking on the launch of its initiative, Shri Nitin Gadkari, Hon’ble Minister for Road Transport & Highways pointed out

Ensuring road safety is a key priority for the government and we are committed to reducing fatal road accidents by 50 percent by 2020. The endeavor to make our roads safer has to be a collaborative multi-pronged initiative that needs joint action from policymakers, civic authorities, companies such as Uber and commuters in general.

Reinforcing Uber’s commitment towards road safety awareness, Pradeep Parameswaran, Head, Operations, Uber India & South Asia said

Safety is an on-going endeavor and we work tirelessly towards that goal. We are proud to be a part of the Ministry’s effort to curb road accidents and fatalities on Indian roads which constitutes to nearly 5 million annually.

Taking our collaboration, a step ahead, we aim to create a comprehensive safety ecosystem for our driver partners. We believe improving driver wellness and health is critical to making our roads safer as well as ensuring a comfortable driving experience. By rolling out free medical check-ups, for driver partners, we hope to strengthen existing efforts towards improving driver well-being.

India accounts for 12.5% of global road accidents, with 55 accidents & 17 deaths occurring every hour. In 2016 alone, 68% victims in road mishaps were between the age group of 18-45 years and almost 97% of the road accidents are caused by negligent driving including drunken driving. It, therefore, becomes imperative to spread awareness against the menace of driving under influence. Consistent with their partnership with Ministry of Road Transport and Highways [MoRTH], Uber also unveiled an impactful public interest campaign on “Don’t Drink and Drive” which will be showcased on various social media platforms.

Link to Virat Kohli’s Tweet

Another initiative by Uber to raise road safety awareness is the development of learning aids on road safety for budding drivers enrolled in driving schools including Driver Training Institutes [DTIs] run by the government. With these learning aids, Uber will hope to sensitize drivers operating across four-wheelers, two-wheelers and auto rickshaws in over 200 driving schools across the country. Utilizing interactive mediums and animated content to stimulate maximum absorption of these learning aids, Uber aims to leave no stone unturned in spreading the importance of road safety. 

Over the years, Uber has launched various initiatives to re-affirm its commitment towards its driver partners including UberBADD [Bars Against Drunk Driving] in Kolkata, the ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’ campaign in Pune, UberBAZAAR – a one-stop shop for driver partners – to access services ranging from car maintenance to health camps across 11 cities. In August 2017, Uber also rolled out India’s first ride-sharing insurance program in partnership with ICICI Lombard General Insurance for over 4.5 Lakh driver partners with free coverage for accidental death and disablement, hospitalization, and outpatient medical treatment in case of an accident while online on the Uber App.

|In: Marketing|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

CleverTap, the advanced mobile marketing solutions provider, will be participating at the Seamless Asia, 2018 event in Singapore. To be held at the Suntec Convention Centre on May 3~4, 2018, Seamless Asia promises to bring together the biggest names in the retail, e-commerce, and digital payments space from across the region – under one roof. Over 6,000 attendees, 150 exhibitors, and 200 speakers are slated to attend the event, as the future of a tech-driven and mobile-first Asia takes shape.

Image Source – Seamless Asia

CleverTap will showcase the dynamic capabilities of its data-driven mobile marketing solution suite that empowers marketers to intelligently identify, segment, engage, monetize, and retain users across the entire app user life-cycle. In an extremely competitive e-commerce Southeast Asian market that continues to grow rapidly on the back increasing smartphone penetration, falling data charges, and rising popularity of online payments, building loyal segments of repeat users across both web and app is extremely challenging.

Highlighting the pressing need and underlying significance of an advanced mobile marketing approach relevant to the e-commerce industry, Anand Jain, Co-founder of CleverTap will also be speaking at the event on May 3 at 10.30AM SGT.

Anand Jain, Co-Founder, CleverTap, said

We are excited to be a part of Seamless Asia, 2018. Our dynamic platform can enable web and app businesses to address diverse use cases that help them eventually drive greater user engagement and retention.

Southeast Asia is an extremely promising market. We believe that our cutting-edge marketing automation solutions will empower marketers to not just drive top-line revenues, but also contribute towards the socio-economic growth in the region. We look forward to interacting with some of the brightest minds in the business and share our own insights at Seamless Asia, 2018.

Today, marketers need to embrace the power of AI/ML-driven omnichannel marketing that accounts for user-level behavioral, geographic, and smart device-specific information. This lays the foundation for delivering hyper-personalized, contextual, and timely interactions across channels such as push notifications, in-app messages, email, and/or SMS. Delivering differentiated and satisfactory user experiences at scale help brands create long-term customer relationships.

About CleverTap

CleverTap is a powerful mobile marketing solution that helps marketers create differentiated omni-channel customer engagement strategies that drive growth. Every day, thousands of brands build valuable customer relationships using CleverTap’s intelligent mobile marketing platform, which provides actionable, real-time insights to help create amazing customer experiences.

Over 4,000 global brands, including Star, Sony, Domino’s, Vodafone, Go-Jek, Astro Group, Fandango, DC Comics, and BookMyShow, trust CleverTap to help them connect with users and grow their mobile apps. To learn more about CleverTap, visit CleaverTap on Facebook and Twitter.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has entered into a global agreement with Google Cloud to address the digital transformation needs of enterprise customers. This agreement will see the creation of secure solutions in areas including hybrid Cloud, data analytics & machine learning and the digital workplace.

Going beyond the traditional IT landscape, today’s data-centric digital transformation generates an ever-increasing need for data lakes, data management, analytics and cognitive technologies. Machine Learning is key to discovering and leveraging new business & marketing opportunities, but also demands secure solutions to protect data against cyber risks and ensure compliance.

Addressing this fast-growing demand, Atos is working with Google Cloud to provide businesses worldwide with secure cutting-edge solutions.

Secured Hybrid Cloud – Atos will develop and expand its Canopy Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud with Google Cloud Platform as Atos’ preferred public Cloud platform, leveraging its scale, security, reliability and availability while ensuring data localization. In addition, Atos will also take advantage of specific technology, such as container orchestration with Google Kubernetes Engine, to drive Hybrid Cloud adoption in global enterprise organizations.

The expanded Atos solution will also complement Google Cloud’s advanced and comprehensive set of security features with a multilayered defense approach delivering enhanced security to customers. The Atos platform will support clients in meeting access and control requirements that European and global regulations demand.

Data Analytics & Machine Learning – Atos will develop a machine learning practice that will leverage Google Cloud’s ML APIs to create industry specific solutions across multiple verticals.

Digital Workplace – Atos will develop a G Suite practice to further enrich its market leading Digital Workplace offering for enterprise customers. As a Cloud-native intelligent productivity and collaboration suite, G Suite is completely inter-operable with other collaboration tools, and will enable Atos to further transform and automate the digital workplace and enhance user experience and productivity.

With these solutions, Atos will offer enterprises a fast and friction-less way to use Google Cloud technologies alongside their existing assets and processes, while at the same time leveraging data to create new insights and value for their own customers.

To accelerate product availability for customers, Atos will establish three ML/AI customer innovation labs and R&D centers in France, UK and the US. Atos will leverage training from machine learning experts in Google Cloud’s Advanced Solutions Labs to bring the latest advancements in ML to their customers.

Thierry Breton, Chairman & CEO of Atos, said

I am extremely pleased to announce today this first global partnership with Google Cloud, one of the world’s leaders in Artificial Intelligence. Together, we will enable fast and smooth adoption of AI for enterprises.

By combining Atos integration capabilities and technology expertise with Google Cloud technology, we enable organizations to thrive in the most innovative and trusted environment, in compliance with global regulations. With this partnership, Atos becomes the ‘last mile’ of the digital information chain.

Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud, said

We are excited to collaborate with Atos to bring Google Cloud to more companies. Together with Atos we will allow companies to transform and improve their business by enabling access to the most advanced Cloud infrastructure, cutting-edge machine learning capabilities and intelligent collaboration tools.

Google Cloud will be Atos’ preferred public Cloud partner. The first phase of the global partnership will concentrate on working with Atos global customers. In parallel, Atos will open new innovation centers for future business transformation projects with its customers.

|In: Guest Blogging|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The evolution of digital technologies such as Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud [SMAC] is having a significant impact on IT within enterprises. By 2020, a staggering 20+ billion connected devices will be in place, which would be about three times the size of the current world’s population, enabling us to crave for a perfect synchronization with just about everything around us. You will need to decide if you are one of the early adopters of technologies that will drive your business just ahead of your competition, working with the newest and most advanced solutions and leaving your competition to play the catch-up game.

Image Source – Digital Transformation

Transformation today begins with digital Infrastructure and data is the key theme within the orchestration layers of digital infrastructure. Enterprises have been accumulating data and literally have not even come close to exercising the real worth of it. Empowering business with actionable information can fundamentally change the way business can operate and transform. Here is where automating managed services operations will accelerate digital transformation journey within an enterprise.

So what are the areas one can possibly apply intelligent automation within the IT operations framework? Let’s look into the top three areas where automation is already underway.

Automating Service Desk Operations – We need to re-look at how enterprises engage service desk for end-user support. With digital transformation accelerating at very high speed, information technologies are changing rapidly in the way businesses are getting done today. With rapidly changing technologies there are high turnover of services desk engineers that leads to lack of knowledge and experience.

This leads to high risks and low quality of services. Besides providing a 24×7 support takes a toll with the costs going north. Enterprises can look into building AI/RPA into their service desk support operations. In fact, with roughly 30-40% of Level 0/1 services desk support cases being repetitive, you can leverage the power of Natural Language Interpretation [NLI] and cognitive automation in the form of AI bots. AI powered RPA and cognitive automation are quickly becoming the main driving force for digital transformation today. Traditional service desk and being transformed to Digital Service Desk providing end users the flexibility to talk to someone anytime from anywhere with 50~70% reduction of costs to handle each incident.

Automating IT Operations Management – Modern enterprises that are adopting Hybrid-IT will need a solution that will allow them to discover everything they have in real-time. Auto-discovery of IT assets and complete visibility of all your IT resources, no matter where they are will also require automation in management of incidents.

Automation in streamlining the process of creating and managing incidents, as well as notifying the right teams with correlation between the resources in real-time basis, it becomes even more important on how you handle the false positives from here on. Escalation and alert on critical events to ensure rapid problem resolution and consistent service performance will lead to meaningful insights to providing the actionable information to the CIO organization to better manage the business of IT today.

Integration of RPA/AI in IT Operations Management – The network operations center or the digital command center [as I would like to put it in today’s scenario] is the focal point for a 24×7 IT Infrastructure /Application and Data Monitoring and Management. With everything-as-a-service, connectivity becomes the principle driver for any digital journey. Ensuring health of these connected devices to ensure 24×7 availability is the key element for a greater customer experience [CX].

Enterprise will need to plan to bring in RPA that will perform health check [including security checks] of systems & applications and take corrective remedial actions to ensure the environment performs giving the experience that is needed. Automation on service requests post work-flow approvals coming out of IT service management needs to be automated.

Robotic process automation [RPA] is the important step in the evolution of new business models since it significantly reduces the need for IT service agents to perform routine, rule based, high volume activities, enabling them to instead focus on more innovative ideas.

Thinkers, enthusiasts, market researchers and many others place 2020 and 2025 as an important milestone in the coming years. Is this because of ‘conversational‘ banking, ‘self-driving‘ vehicles, and ‘drones‘ to deliver packages? You are talking to ‘robo-advisors’ on market trends and investments, ‘cognitive‘ coach on your phone designing your next day diet based on your previous days workouts and the list keeps adding up. To make all this a reality, enterprises that develop or adopt such innovation must have their IT Services automated to handle the kind of demand in implementing Hybrid IT in their journey of digital transformation.

About the author

Nilesh Gupta is the VP & Global Head – Digital Infrastructure Management Solutions & Strategy, at 3i Infotech Ltd. More details about him can be found here

|In: Fintech|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Capital Float [Zen Lefin Pvt Ltd], India’s largest digital lender has raised $22 Million [INR 144 crores] in equity funding from Amazon. This latest fund raise takes Capital Float’s total equity funding to nearly $110 million from Amazon and other existing investors including Ribbit Capital, SAIF Partners, Sequoia India, Creation Investments, and Aspada. In addition, the company has also raised debt amounting to $130 million till-date [INR 840 crores] from leading banks and NBFCs. Capital Float has enabled large numbers of SMEs with customized credit solutions and is actively expanding into new customer segments. The company’s unique model of lending from own balance sheet as well as a co-lending model of loans for other lenders [banks and NBFCs] gives it access to large pools of capital to serve a vast customer base.

Image Source – Capital Float

Gaurav Hinduja and Sashank Rishyasringa, Co-founders, Capital Float, said

We are tremendously excited to bring Amazon on board as an investor at this key juncture in Capital Float’s journey. This partnership has enormous potential. In the past 6 months alone, we’ve added several new products and crossed INR 1,200 crores [$185 million] in overall loan portfolio outstanding. We have also achieved tremendous growth on the customer acquisition front, adding 50,000 new customers across the country. With this investment from Amazon, we enter FY19 with relentless focus to add 300,000 customers and originate over INR 5,000 crores [$800 million] in loans this year.

The funds will be used to bolster Capital Float’s proprietary end-to-end digital loan origination system and to design innovative credit solutions for customers.

Amit Agarwal, SVP and Country Manager, Amazon India, said

We are excited to work with Capital Float and invest alongside other investors. We are highly impressed with what Gaurav and Sashank have built and we back missionary entrepreneurs and management teams. Credit in India is highly under-penetrated and Capital Float is bringing the right kind of credit solutions to the underserved and informally served segments of SMEs to help realize their full potential. The company is well positioned for the digital age with its strong technology and data-driven approach to lending.

About Capital Float

Capital Float is the pioneer of digital lending in India. The company leverages technology and big data analytics to deliver innovative credit products to businesses and individuals across the country. Through its proprietary digital loan underwriting and origination platform, it has been able to deliver financing solutions to large sections of the economy traditionally underserved by large financial institutions. It has also developed partnerships to finance SMEs across various ecosystems such as e-commerce, manufacturing supply chains, retail, travel and hospitality, and digital remittances.

Founded in 2013, Capital Float is the trade name for Zen Lefin Private Limited, a Non-Banking Finance Company [NBFC] registered with the Reserve Bank of India. For more information, please visit Capital Float