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|In: Funding|Last Updated:

Cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s investment fund YouWeCan Ventures has acquired a stake in online healthcare marketplace Healthians

Healthians.com helps users discover affordable healthcare, using quality and price transparency. It aggregates diagnostic labs, crowd sourced sample collectors and nearby doctors, as well as makes patients’ medical records available online.

In another industry first, apart from tying up with leading medical labs chains, it is creating Healthians branded lab network in association with labs that will offer standardised pricing, processes and user experience.

healthians-com
Speaking about the investment, Yuvraj Singh said

Having gone through life threatening medical condition, I’m extremely keen to promote preventive healthcare in India. While most of us today have an online social profile or an online professional profile, there’s a large need to use technology to create & track individual health profile. I’m excited to see Healthians trying to solve this problem.

Raj Airey, Founding Partner, Healthstart – an existing investor in Healthians said

We like Healthians’ founders’ vision and execution, and the fact that they’re receiving strong support from entire healthcare ecosystem. Best labs, top hospitals, leading chemists and doctors are tying up, which is a strong validation of the business model. Health tech space is of prime significance to us, and we expect Healthians to become a dominant player through organic and inorganic route over next few quarters.

Speaking about the funding, Deepak Sahni, Founder & CEO, Healthians said

For a healthcare brand, there can be no better partner that Yuvraj Singh, and we are delighted to have him on-board. We will do our best to achieve his dream of taking preventive healthcare to everyone across the entire country.

Healthians’ proprietary self-assessment software ‘Healthians PLUS’ has been created with the help of leading doctors along with software engineers. Users fill online questionnaire, followed by free personal visit by a Wellness Consultant for further screening. The software establishes user’s personal health score, recommends future health checks, and tracks each user’s health over his lifetime.

Diagnostic market in India is approximately $5bn industry, with over a million tests being conducted daily according to an IBEF 2015 study. While the scope of Healthians’ service is large, the business model is asset light.

The hyper local sample collectors and doctors are crowd sourced. Apart from preventive care, the site also caters to chronic patients and patients recommended tests by Doctors.

The portal has received good response from users, with huge savings over original lab prices. The initial growth has been 100 percent MOM and recently it won ‘eTailer of the year’ award for Healthcare category.

Future Plans

In an industry first, company is targeting to form a network of over 1000 Healthians’ branded labs & help them in enhancing capacity utilisation through demand aggregation and technology support, with the first ones slated to come up in over 20 cities including Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai. It also plans to tie up with 2000 pharmacy stores to enable them to offer Diagnostic Tests along with medicine sales to their customers.

While currently focused in Delhi NCR, the company is already catering to customers in 22 cities in India and plans to expand this to over 50 cities. The company plans to profile over 1 million users for HealthiansPLUS, crowd source over 1000 mobile Health Advisor’s, and conduct more than 200,000 tests in next 8 to 12 months.

[Image Credit – Healthians]

|In: e-commerce|Last Updated:

ITC Infotech, a leading global IT services & solutions company and a fully owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd has announced the launch of iTech 2015, an annual technology conference platform to foster technology innovation.

The hackathon will provide participants with an opportunity to develop ideas to prototypes across a wide range of business challenges. This platform is also a testimony to ITC Infotech’s commitment towards accelerating innovation in disruptive technology areas.

ITC_Tech_Startup

Aimed at boosting talent amongst technology enthusiasts and providing an acceleration platform for entrepreneurs, ITC Infotech is seeking to engage with innovators and will partner with the winners to help them develop the solution, create a joint go-to market and provide market access. The programme is part of the company’s larger initiative to encourage and nurture start-ups.

About iTech 2015

An entry free competition, iTech 2015 IoT hackathon is a team-based event. Participation is open to students, professionals and developers and IoT start-ups, who will go through a short-listing and selection process. Teams can register on the iTech 2015 registration site and submit their IoT solution idea, post which ITC Infotech will notify the short-listed entries.

As part of the iTech 2015 platform this year, ITC Infotech will organise a 2-day IoT hackathon at its campus in Bengaluru on 4th & 5th July.

Competition categories at iTech 2015

Smart Retail – Retail is about continuously enhancing customer shopping experience. It is also about ensuring availability & visibility of stocks, specifically in Consumer Goods. Entries in this category can focus on anything from stock keeping and inventory management to in-store customer experience. Selected teams will be provided with actual retail display shelves, using which their solutions can be demonstrated to solve this real-world challenge.

Smart Manufacturing – Entrants should create a solution to constantly monitor and predict in real-time the health of machines and equipment to enable proactive servicing and avoid disruption of manufacturing units. Entries and solution ideas can also be shared on creating smart manufacturing units and assembly lines, which can utilise analytics to optimise the production process – a step towards realising the ‘Make in India’ drive.

Smart Supply Chains – Entries should have ideas on how IoT solutions can help create a smarter supply chain – warehouse, inventory management, transportation, planning and tracking, demand-planning, etc.

Smart Agriculture – Entries should have IoT solutions that provide feedback/recommend corrective action from remote farms to research laboratories for agriculture.

Open Category – For entries on IoT ideas that do not fall in the challenge areas mentioned above. ITC Infotech’s panel of experts will assess the submission on the strength of the business case presented and its viability for companies to adopt and implement.

Commenting on the event launch, Ms. Sushma Rajagopalan, CEO & MD, ITC Infotech, said

iTech 2015 is one of our multi-dimensional initiatives for encouraging innovation and boosting tech entrepreneurship. This year’s theme is the “connected world” and “Internet of Things”. We have created this platform to aid participants in developing prototypes of their ideas to address real-world business challenges. We will nurture some of the relevant ideas in our Innovation Lab to drive competitive advantage for ITC’s businesses or our clients’ businesses.

The winners and runners up will be awarded a cash prize of Rs. 2,00,000 & Rs. 1,00,000 respectively.

For more information on iTech 2015, please visit iTech 2015 official page

[Image Credit – iTech 2015]

|In: Entrepreneurship|Last Updated:

Taxiforsure co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna has invested an undisclosed amount in Mobile Beauty and Wellness Platform Vyomo in its seed funding. This is less than a month after his last day at TaxiForSure, the cab aggregator he and Raghunandan G sold to bigger rival Ola for a neat $200 million.

Vyomo

Vyomo is  his maiden investment. Explaining his excitement, Radhakrishna said

The Beauty & wellness Industry is a large market, ripe for disruption. I decided to invest in Vyomo based on the extremely focused & effective core team led by Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah – they have built an intuitively smooth mobile platform that is way ahead of the competition. Such a high organizational maturity is quite rare for a start-up of this phase.

Vyomo is simplifying Beauty and Wellness Industry by providing the complete fulfillment technology stack for customers and beauty professionals. We have built a curated platform. Thus, despite having more than 1500 Salons on-board, we have opened our platform only to 25% of the verified Salons and Spa in the first phase. Remaining salons are still going through product and process training by our dedicated Account Managers

According to KPMG report, Beauty and Wellness Industry in India will be US$13 billion by 2017 and within MENA region it was US$25.5 billion in 2014 as per the global market intelligence firm Euromonitor International.

Commenting on the development, Yuvraj Singh, an existing investor in Vyomo through his recently founded Youwecan VC fund said

At Vyomo our aim is to create a complete end to end solution for Beauty & Wellness, a mobile platform that is lacking so far within the industry and ultimately repeat the success story of tech startups within Cab industry. Thus having Aprameya on-board is priceless

The Vyomo Mobile App for Salons, Spas and Stylists was made available in May 2015. The Customer App is also being launched ahead of its schedule today. Within the first 4 weeks, Vyomo has already brought 1500 Salons and Spa on on-board.

Abhinav Khare, Founder & CEO Vyomo added

For us, the quality and customer experience is more important than to bringing short term traction. We are spending a fair amount of time with each of our salons on training and hand-holding for Beauty Professionals, before they start accepting bookings through Vyomo. We want our customers to receive exceptional experiences. Our team is working extremely hard to bring more than 1M stylists on the platform by 2018

Having Aprameya as our investor and a member of advisory board is a great validation for our Mobile only strategy. We are looking to replicate the success of the on-demand cab industry and thus having him will only enhance our execution even further. He will be involved very closely in advising me on the Strategy, business model and leadership hiring decisions. His presence in our team, will allow us to scale and expand quickly.

About Vyomo

Vyomo is a Mobile Beauty and Wellness Platform that is backed by Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics to simplify the way beauty & wellness services are requested offered and rendered. It was founded by the London Business School classmates Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah.

  • Abhinav Khare Founder-CEO is Strategy and Corporate Development Expert with 10 years’ experience in 3 continents and 32 countries in the domain of Market Entry, Strategy Execution and Building Analytics products. He has an MBA London Business School and MSc in Technology Management from ETH Zurich.
  • Poonam Marwah Co-founder-COO has got 16 years Operations, Internet Marketing & Technology. Successfully lead 3 new ventures, growing organizations and managed complex projects. She holds MBA from London Business School, Masters in Computer Application, PMP, she is also a US Patent Holder.

[Image Credit – Vyomo]

|In: Funding|Last Updated:

Akosha, a messaging platform for all consumer-to-business interactions, announced that Sequoia is leading a new Rs.100 crore Series B round. This new round of financing will be used to hire over 200 software engineers and product managers to build out the platform & fund the exponential growth of Akosha’s new mobile app for connecting users and businesses.

Akosha

Akosha was founded on the insight that the quality and channels of consumer’s interactions with businesses are broken and outdated. Akosha handles 30,000+ consumer inquiries every day over the web, telephone and its Android chat app. Akosha monetizes these inquiries by providing Akosha’s enterprise software OneDirect to brands.

Brands are able to leverage Akosha’s software to have a fast and personalized interactions with their consumers. Over 130 large brands use Akosha’s OneDirect platform to respond to consumer inquiries every week. Around 30 of these enterprises have become paying customers who subscribe to a premium version of the OneDirect Enterprise Suite. Kotak Mahindra Bank, Voltas, Aircel, Snapdeal, Micromax and Makemytrip are some of the leading brands currently using Akosha OneDirect enterprise solutions.

140,000 users have downloaded Akosha’s new android app in just 4 months with an average rating of 4.5. Consumers use the Akosha app for product discovery, pricing information, discounts, customer service, booking appointments, travel research and so on. Currently, the app supports more than 18,000 chat sessions per day and have been growing 20-25% week-on-week.

Akosha_Android_App_Screen

Over the last year, the company has grown its employee base from 180 to well over 300 and recently opened a technology and product office in Bangalore. Building on this momentum, Akosha will use the additional financing to continue to expand its software engineering teams, accelerate product development, and invest in growing its user base. Akosha’s expects to add 400-500 people to its team this year.

Akosha was co-founded by Ankur Singla, a National Law School, Bangalore graduate who was deeply moved by the poor quality of customer service in India.

Quote from Ankur Singla, Chief Executive Officer, Akosha

We started 4 years ago to help consumers with post purchase issues. With the growth of mobile, we aim at building a messaging platform for all interactions between consumers and businesses including discovery, buying, appointments and customer service.

We hope to be doing 100,000 customer interactions/day within 3 months. But I think we’re just getting started. We are confident that in the near future, Akosha chat will be a competitive customer service differentiator for businesses

Shailendra Singh, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors said:

We have always believed in the thesis that consumers need a better way to interact with businesses. We are inspired by Ankur’s vision for becoming a single destination on the smartphone for users to interact with hundreds of businesses and online services.

We are delighted to lead our third round of investment in Akosha, starting with a $200,000 seed investment in 2011.

About Akosha

Akosha is a horizontal platform for all consumers to business interactions. Customers can connect with any businesses using an Akosha mobile app, dedicated customer care helpline and website.

Akosha has received over 40,00,000 consumer queries across sectors, including telecom, consumer appliances, ecommerce, mobile, banking and insurance in 2014. The company has 350+ employees and 3 offices in India.

On the B2B side, Akosha OneDirect is a social CRM platform that helps brands in managing their customer experience across all online channels.

|In: Funding|Last Updated:

Zopper, India’s leading hyper-local mobile marketplace, has recently unveiled its fully operational office in Bengaluru. The underlying motive behind this strategic move is to bolster its technological prowess, by recruiting talent in vital areas of operations and technology. With the city famed for its IT talent, the company aims to invest in the same to scale the growth ladder through rapid improvement in its technological foundation.

Zopper

Neeraj Jain, Co-founder & CEO, Zopper commented

With the hyper local mobile marketplace trending, thanks to the increasing proliferation of smartphones in the country, we realize that in order to leverage this opportunity, we must strengthen our services in terms of technology.

Our vital presence in Bengaluru gives us access to head-hunt and hire across the cream of talent in terms of IT. This will help us architect a seamless and solid infrastructure for Zopper’s fast expanding network in the country.

The company aims to activate expansion on an accelerated pace pan India and is taking definite steps to successfully execute its plan on the back of steady technological progress.

About Zopper

Zopper is India’s largest hyper local mobile marketplace featuring over 5,00,000 offline retailers. Founded by serial entrepreneurs Surjendu Kulia & Neeraj Jain, Zopper taps on the benefits of shopping at a retail store and marries them with the convenience of shopping via mobile phones.

Users can buy from the comfort of their homes/offices and get the product instantly from their nearby trusted stores. It is backed by investors such as Tiger Global, Blume Ventures & Nirvana Ventures Advisor’s, the company has raised over US$ 6.5 million in venture funding.

[Image Credit – Zopper]

|In: Business|Last Updated:

Urban-LadderWeb & Technology entrepreneurs Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan have made an investment in Urban Ladder, India’s leading online furniture and home decor company.  The Silicon Valley based entrepreneurs have come on board as investors at a time when the company is ramping up its technology platforms and offerings, to redefine furniture shopping in India.

Technology will be a key driver in Urban Ladder’s growth. The company is working on several tech innovations to solve complex furniture e-commerce problems.

Some of the key focus areas for Urban Ladder are mobile, data and analytics and product visualization. In an effort to provide world class furniture shopping solutions, the company will triple the size of its tech team in the next 6 months.

Speaking about the latest round, Ashish Goel, CEO & Co-founder, Urban Ladder said

We are thrilled to have veterans like Anand and Venky onboard as investors to mentor and guide us. They have done some fantastic work in technology, and set very high global benchmarks. It is great that they believe in the potential of the Indian e-commerce industry and are reinvesting in the ecosystem

Speaking about the funding, Anand Rajaraman, Founding Partner, Cambrian Ventures said

Furniture and home décor is a highly unorganized category in India, and Urban Ladder has been able to fill the need gap by finding great solutions for customers. The company’s journey has been very impressive. It’s a great team, off to a terrific start, and well positioned to be the leading furniture and home decor company in India

Urban Ladder is on massive growth path to achieve its vision of making a million homes beautiful. The company is strengthening its product portfolio and introducing new categories, along with geographical expansion to 30 cities by the end of the year.

Urban Ladder has thus far raised $77 million from Sequoia Capital, TR Capital, Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners and Steadview Capital in the last 3 years. Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus, Tata Group made a personal investment in the company in November 2014.

|In: Entrepreneurship|Last Updated:

Yuvraj Singh’s recently floated Startup Fund Youwecan Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount in Mobile Beauty and Wellness Platform Vyomo in its seed funding.

YouWeCan

Vyomo is the first investment of the Youwecan ventures. Explaining his excitement, Yuvi said

We would like to support empowerment of millions of Beauty Professionals and help them improve their lives, income and be part of their personal milestones. Ultimately, we decided to invest in Vyomo based the execution capability of the team headed by MBAs from the London Business School, a truly great product and our belief in the vision of Vyomo that the Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics can simplify the lives of millions of Indians

According to KPMG report, Beauty and Wellness Industry in India will be US$13 billion by 2017 and within MENA region it was US$25.5 billion in 2014 as per the global market intelligence firm Euromonitor International.

The Vyomo Mobile App for Salons, Spas and Stylists will be available for both IOS and Android from May 2015. The Customer App will be launched in July.

Speaking at the occasion, Abhinav Khare, Founder & CEO, Vyomo said

Signing-up with Youwecan Ventures for securing our seed funding is an important milestone for the company, and one which will allow us to scale and expand to meet the demands of our global users.

In 3 years, Vyomo will shift the paradigm of Beauty and Wellness Industry where the Stylists and Beauty Professionals will get the place they deserve. Vyomo will bring more than 1 million stylists on the platform by 2017 and improve their earnings by allowing millions of customers to instantly access and book a hassle free Salon and Spa experience.

Our aim is to create a complete solution for Beauty Professionals to manage and grow their business through a smart-phone, and customers to book appointments instantly through their mobile devices, and ultimately repeat the success story of tech startups within Cab industry.

The App for Salons will provide professionals from the Beauty Industry an end to end salon management software that grows and simplifies their business by providing increased traffic, CRM, ERP, EPOS, Performance Management, Booking Management and Online Presence backed by state of art Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence.

About Youwecan Venture Fund

Youwecan is a 50 CR seed fund that is created to empower young entrepreneurs on their journey to build brands and successful business ventures and improve the life standard of society. More information at their website.

About Vyomo

Vyomo is a Mobile Beauty and Wellness Platform that is backed by Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics to simplify the way beauty & wellness services are requested offered and rendered. It was founded by the London Business School classmates Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah.

  • Abhinav Khare Founder-CEO is Strategy and Corporate Development Expert with 10 years’ experience in 3 continents and 32 countries in the domain of Market Entry, Strategy Execution and Building Analytics products. He has an MBA London Business School and MSc in Technology Management from ETH Zurich.
  • Poonam Marwah Co-founder-COO has got 16 years Operations, Internet Marketing & Technology. Successfully lead 3 new ventures, growing organizations and managed complex projects. She holds MBA from London Business School, Masters in Computer Application, PMP, she is also a US Patent Holder.

Image Credit – pixr8

|In: Business|Last Updated:

Urban Ladder, India’s leading online furniture & home decor company has raised $50 million in a new round of funding. Sequoia Capital led the round along with TR Capital and existing investors Steadview Capital, SAIF Partners & Kalaari Capital.

urban-ladder

Urban Ladder was launched in July 2012 with a vision of making a million Indian homes beautiful. It offers a curated range of over 4000 products across 35+ categories in furniture and home decor. The company is on a massive growth path and is making distinctive designs and exceptional customer service accessible to many Indian shoppers.

Speaking about the round, Gautam Mago, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors.

We are delighted to partner with Urban Ladder in their vision of making quality home products available online to millions of Indian consumers, and look forward to working with Ashish, Rajiv and the rest of the Urban Ladder team to help build an enduring business.

Ashish Goel, CEO & Co-founder, Urban Ladder mentioned:

Over the last 3 years, we have stayed sharply focused on our design thinking, product quality and customer experience. While these will continue to be important themes, geographical expansion will also be a key focus area this year. We will be present in 30 cities by the end of 2015.

Rajiv Srivatsa, COO & Co-founder, Urban Ladder said

Technology will be a key driver in Urban Ladder’s growth. The company is working on several tech innovations to solve complex furniture e-commerce problems. “We are investing heavily in technology to introduce world class tech innovations that will massively simplify furniture shopping

Urban Ladder has attracted $27 million from Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners and Steadview Capital in the last 3 years. Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus, Tata Group made a personal investment in the company in November 2014.