Noida Startup Squadrun Raised Seedfunding From Founders Of Zomato, Slideshare, Toppr & Others

Noida-based mobile marketplace startup Squadrun has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a group of angel investors which includes top technology entrepreneurs - Amit Ranjan who sold his startup SlideShare to LinkedIn, Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, Girish Khera, co-founder of medical animation studio Scientific Animations and Zishaan Hayath, founder of online test preparation startup Toppr.

Angel investors from Powai Lake Ventures also participated in the round. Previously, Squadrun has received funding from Kae Capital.

SquadRun is a mobile marketplace. It helps businesses crowdsource micro-tasks that require human intelligence. From the user side, SquadRun is a gamified app that allows anybody with a smartphone to make money on a per task basis. A few use cases that SquadRun's mobile army is currently being used for - Content moderation, Data tagging, Categorization, Comparison, etc.

Founded in 2014 by Apurv Agrawal, Kanika Jain and Vikas Gulati, Squadrun claims to be India's first mobile workforce which acts as a platform for businesses to outsource small tasks/data jobs ('gigs') to a mobile workforce ('players') to collect useful information and opinions for their brands.

Squadrun was accelerated by 91Springboards and notably two of Squadrun co-founders - Apurv and Kanika are 91Springboard members and Apurv is founding member.

SquadRun has already worked with over 7000 users and 35+ diverse businesses. The raised funds will go in product development and expanding team.

Slideshare Co-Founder Amit Ranjan To Head Government's Open Source Project

Last month we reported that Indian government is planning to create GitHub like repository to collaboratively develop Software and apps. Now, as reports by Economics Times, Amit Ranjan, co-founder of SlideShare - a presentation sharing platform, who sold his start-up to LinkedIn for $118.75 million in a stock-cum-cash deal in 2012, is being approached by government to lead this open source collaborative project.

Github is a platform that provides code hosting services for collaborative software development, source code management services and allows its users to share codes with friends, co-workers and track & assign issue to other teammates.

Amit Ranjan has accepted the offer "in principle", according to one of the several people familiar with the plan. He may start as early as February next year, reporting to the joint secretary (IT) Rajinder Kumar. The role involves leading a soon-to-be-created open source organisation for government projects as its CEO.

Indian government software applications are all set to save millions of dollars by moving away from proprietary system and shifting to open source. This will also result in the boosting of pace at which such programmes are being developed.

As per sources, more technocrats and startup founders may join this open-source project of government in future. This move is expected to collaborate various government initiatives and app developers and can be deployed across the country.

Notably, Amit Ranjan played a pivatol role in startup & entrepreneurship ecosystem in India number of times. He leaded an important role in organizing the first Barcamp (www.barcamp.org) in India/Asia in March'06. BarCamps have since spread to all major Indian cities, and they are regarded as being instrumental in kick-starting grassroots level technology entrepreneurship in India. He was also an organizer of Proto.in (www.proto.in), the biannual event that showcases Indian tech startups.