10 Incredibly Innovative Mumbai Startups To Watch Out in 2017

While the Indian startup industry might not have had a great inning last year, it for surely wasn't able to dim the spirit of the city of dreams, Mumbai. The city saw many new Startups arriving at the block with some really innovative ideas and some old ones were able to further up their game. Here, in this article, we discuss the top 10 Mumbai-based startups that caught our attention in the year 2016 and are on their way to do exceptionally well in 2017.

NanoSniff Technologies

Deep Technology

[caption id="attachment_115468" align="aligncenter" width="700"]Team Nanosniff[/caption]

Founder - Kapil Bardeja

Founded by Kapil Bardeja, an IIT Delhi alumnus and serial entrepreneur, and Dr Nitin Kale, an IIT Bombay alumnus and head of micro-fabrication for the startup, NanoSniff Technologies is an spin-off from the Center of Excellence in Nano-electronics (CEN) at IIT Bombay. It was started to commercialize products from the technologies developed from the research work conducted at CEN. The startup uses micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), which is the technology for miniaturized devices, to develop applications for the detection of industrial hazards, security and surveillance systems and medical devices. It has filed multiple patents in MEMS sensor technologies.

NanoSniff is the first Indian company to successfully commercialize to microcantilever and microheater sensor technologies and sell these devices off-the-shelf. The startup's clients include ISRO and Germany-based Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science.

Funding: Raised $300,000 (Rs 2 crore) from crowdfunding platform 1Crowd and its investor community [Funding News].

AlgoSurg

Medical Technology

Founders - Amit Maurya and Dr. Vikas Karade

Founded in 2016, the startup has developed next generation products to revolutionize the way surgeries are being performed, using advanced computing methods, enhanced visualization and automation. Notably, the startup is one of the 40 StartUps invited to Silicon Valley, USA during Indian PM Modi visit.

The team at the startup has developed a cloud based software touted as for orthopedic surgeons -- world first 2D X-ray based 3D surgery planning software -- to accurately plan deformity correction and knee replacement surgeries by turning 2D X-Rays into 3D view and in turn envisage a 3D 'virtual surgery plan' to make accurate surgical decisions resulting an accurate surgical outcome.

Funding: Self-Funded

Arya.ai

Artificial Intelligence

Founders: Vinay Kumar Sankararapu, Deekshith Marla

An alumnus of Mumbai-based accelerator Venture Nursery, Arya.ai was started with a vision of building ‘intelligence’ that can help humans in solving complex problems at a much faster pace. The startup provides advanced AI tools that developers can use to build robots that can assist professionals from different fields in their tasks. It is one of the first Indian startups to make it to the list of international innovators, Paris & Co, a French innovation agency.

The startup made news last year for announcing the global launch of ‘Braid’, an Open Source tool to build intelligence quickly into systems. Braid is being offered free and open source, to companies that use research scientists and technologists developing neural networks.

The startup's success got its founders, Vinay Kumar Sankararapu and Deekshith Marla selected to the first ever Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ Asia list [Read Here].

Funding: Raised $750k in Seed Funding.

Qure.ai

AI-based Healthcare

[caption id="attachment_116337" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Team Qure.ai - (L-R) Prashant Warier, Pooja Rao and Sasank Chilamkurthy[/caption]

Founders: Prashant Warier & Pooja Rao

Founded in 2016 and a healthcare AI subsidiary of Fractal Analytics, Qure aims to revolutionize the way patients are diagnosed and treated using cutting-edge deep learning technology, a form of artificial intelligence.

As the new sources of large, complex data such as genome sequencing, biosensors and connected devices are being adopted across healthcare industry, the startup applies the latest deep learning technology to healthcare and medical data and develop innovative solutions to help diagnose disease and recommend personalized treatment plans from healthcare imaging data.

Qure's artificially intelligent radiology solution can diagnose disease from CT Scans, MRIs and X-rays as well as outline and quantify regions of interest such as tumors or lung disease patterns. In December 2016, the startup has won the Social Innovation Award at the Nvidia Emerging Companies Summit, India.

Funding: Self-Funded

Fluid AI

AI-based Data Analytics & Insights

[caption id="attachment_116339" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Fluid.AI Co-founders[/caption]

Founders - Raghav Aggarwal and Abhinav Aggarwal

Founded by Aggarwal brothers -- Raghav and Abhinav, who are dropped out of IIM Ahmedabad and ISB respectively, Mumbai-based Fluid.AI uses uses genetically evolving neural networks to create over 100,000 iterative models from data sources and studies the data pattern which arises from the model evolves accordingly and improves feedbacks whenever the market conditions change.

The startup in a layman's term predicts what is the next best product to upsell a customer , what’s the likelihood for a bank customer defaulting on a loan, or preventing fraud from a million transactions.

Funding: Bootstrapped till date

Boltt

Sports Wearables

Founders: Arnav Kishore, Aayushi Kishore

Building a diverse fitness ecosystem of smart bands, smart shoes, and custom wireless headphones, Boltt is looking to cater to the white space currently present in the wearables domain, with its wide range of products and solution.

The startup’s meticulous Artificial Intelligence reinventing successfully complements the software part of the fitness gadgets space. Its products are an impressive combination of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Health Coach and various advanced fitness wearables.

The startup was in the news last year when it showcased its 'smart shoes’ or the ‘smart sneakers’ at Techcrunch’s TechDisrupt event in San Francisco [Read Here].

Funding: USD 1.7 millions in two different seed rounds.

[box]Related Reading - 10 Most Innovative Bangalore Based Startups in 2016[/box]

VPhrase

AI-based Data Analytics

[caption id="attachment_116342" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Team Vphrase[/caption]

Founder: Neerav Parekh

It is an Artificial Intelligence-based platform that makes complex data reports more readable and helps companies make their reports easy to understand by explaining the insights in captivating words.

The startup's patent pending platform, Phrazor, analyses data, derives insights and then communicates those insights, in words, in multiple languages. It automates the work of analysis and communication which is the forte of expensive domain experts and it does this at a fraction of their cost. The startup has users in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Funding: Undisclosed seed funding via Apoorv Ranjan Sharma and Daud Ali from Venture Catalysts

Thinkphi

Clean Technology

Founders: Samit Choksi, Priya Vakil Choksi

Founded in the year 2015, Thinkphi is a clean-tech company that has a goal of developing products based on three pillars of sustainability; waste, water, and energy. Using the principles of environmental science and sustainable design, the startup designs simple but intelligent products that help in improving lives on Earth by influencing behavioural change in the way humans manage water, energy, and waste resources available to them.

The company’s first product -- Ulta Chata (in image above) is an inverted canopy like structure that provides potable water by capturing rain water during the monsoon and solar energy for the rest of the year. Each unit has the capability to harvest and filter up to 100,000 liters during the rainy season and a maximum solar capacity of 1.5KW.

Funding: Raised undisclosed amount in angel funding from serial entrepreneur Nimmagadda Prasad .

Maher Soft

3D Printer

Founders: Mohammed Khorakiwala

Maher Soft is primarily involved in manufacturing Industrial and consumer grade 3D Printers. The company does close to 500+ hours of testing on its prototype machines before sending it into production so as to maintain the quality of its products. This precision and quality is the very reason that Maher Soft has earned high repeatability of its products.

For Maher Soft, the actual 3D printing journey started when one fine day the company bought the leading consumer grade 3D Printers. Unfortunately, the leading printers ended up miserably failing the startup’s basic benchmark tests. The frustration caused by this motivated the company to build its own 3D Printers.

The startup ha built Indie, an Industrial grade 3D Printer, after more than 5000 hours of testing. This high precision dual nozzle 3D Printer is currently considered as the most reliable 3D Printer in the whole wide country. Another great product by the startup is a consumer grade 3D Printer by the name Max.

Funding: Self-Funded

ManageMyFortune

FinTech

Founders: Sameer Naringkrekar

It is an online wealth management platform for retail investors and a robo-advisory based curated marketplace for retail investors to find based on their past performance, client ratings or industry experience.

The startup's vision is to assist individual investors through its affordable, transparent and research-driven financial advisory service. The startup has recently been shortlisted for Startupbootcamp FinTech, a global accelerator for fintech startups.

Funding: Received about $16K on 6% equity through Startupbootcamp.

IntuitThings

Affordable Home Automation

Founders: Neil Savant

The Mumbai-based IoT startup for home automation started the year with a bang by being one of the four startups to be selected for on the spot funding at the annual summit hosted by the entrepreneurial cell of IIT Bombay. The startup provides intelligent and innovative end-to-end IoT solutions for home automation applications like controlling thermostat temple etc. at extremely affordable prices. The startup claims that its platform has a “sixth sense” to anticipate the needs of the user.

Funding: Received INR 70 lakh in an investment by Sanjay Mehta.


[Top-most Image - Shutterstock]

11 Promising Virtual Reality Startups in India Right Now

Virtual reality is currently one of the hottest talks of the town. The technology, which has the potential of becoming a major aspect of future technology, offers its users a three-dimensional, computer generated environment which can be explored and interacted with by the person. The person becomes a part of this virtual world or is immersed within this environment for a brief period of time and, is able to manipulate objects or perform a series of actions whilst there.

Seeing the attention Virtual reality is garnering in India, a number of companies here are working on the concept and coming up with their own products focused around Virtual reality. Here's a list of 10 Virtual reality startups in India that are currently meticulously working towards changing the way humans interact with computers.

SmartVizX

Started with an aim of eliminating barriers between the real and the unreal world, SmartVizX prides itself on being one of the highest funded startups in the Virtual reality category. The startup, which offers a wide variety of interactive and immersive VR solutions across devices such as desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile etc., has also been named 'Start-up of The Week’ in the recent past by NASSCOM under its much famous 10000 start-ups initiative.

At SmartVizX, the mission is to disrupt the traditional decision-making process and buying behavior by creating Virtual Reality solutions for Businesses. They're currently catering to the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry. The startup's products VIZ, ARCH-VIZ, ARCH-VIZ (Mobile) etc., offer innovative features such as, interactive walk-through of an entire project, actual simulation of sun's light in a particular room of the project during any particular time of the day, a view of immediate surroundings from balconies and other vantage points from the project etc. Hence, the customer can get to experience a realistic simulation, of how their property would turn out to be.

Grey Kernel

Being one of India's first VR-based startup, Grey Kernel's “IRA VR”, which was the startup's flagship product, has become the most successful Indian VR product on Google Play store. The startup hosts in-house developed content and also the content its curates from several Indian/International Virtual Reality studios.

Taking birth in the year 2015, Grey Kernel's first Virtual Reality demo for Oculus Rift DK2 landed a place in RoadToVR, which is considered as one of the top most International VR e-journals. Gaining momentum from this feat, the company was successfully able to pull of an International VR project.

Whereas most of the India based VR production Studios are currently focusing their attention on creating Monoscopic 360 degree videos, this particular startup is a front-runner in the space. It has been able to achieve this pedestal by creating Stereoscopic/Interactive Virtual reality content and being able to solve engineering/distribution for their clients that are into media & publishing, real estate and marketing agencies.

Merxius

Founded by college friends Vaishali Neotia and Hasan Ali Khan in 2011, Merxius (mer-she-us) is both Augmented & Virtual Reality company from Hyderabad. Merxius has created a flagship product - RealSim Editor, or RED which the founders call it Photoshop for Virtual Reality. With RED anyone who has a 3D model can import it into this platform and in one click, can get virtual reality (VR) out of it. The RED tool is currently being tested by the Indian Armed Forces to create a training module for engine maintenance.

The startup, which is yet to raise funds, was recently added to the list of top 10 deep tech companies by IBM SmartCamp and has also been selected for a Tata Elxsi incubation programme.

Xenium

Founded in the year 2007, Xenium started contributing to the VR scene in India only in 2014. The startup firmly believes that VR has the potential of providing researchers with tools to accelerate scientific discovery, businesses with new visualization techniques and developers with fresh creative insights. The VR venture had been started even when wireless headgear like Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift etc. were not available in the Indian Market after their release.

The firm has been credited for being the fourth company in the world and the first in India to have successfully attempted doing a live streaming using Virtual Reality. Complete VR systems and application development are among many of the services being provided by the startup. Xenium's virtual reality solutions are known to cater to the needs of both enterprises and in academics as it paves the way for enhanced communication and innovation.

Tesseract Inc.

The startup managed to put itself on world's Virtual Reality map by inventing the first 360 Virtual Reality Camera ever. With Tesseract, the founder, Kshitij's dream is to able to empower everyone with the ability to capture their precious memories in 360 and VR, and relive them as if they were in the same moment back again.

With its hardware/software designed, innovated, and manufactured out of India, Tesseract's plan is to completely transform the way humans record, consume and share content currently.

Tesseract's Methane 360 VR is a hit in the travel and real-estate world and is being currently employed by big companies like Grabhouse, MakeMyTrip and Nestaway etc. It's latest invention is a consumer grade 360 Virtual Reality Camera – ViCAM, which is being termed as the world’s smallest 360 Virtual Reality Camera.

Trimensions

Based out of the capital city New Delhi, the award-winning digital services and UX design agency has been able to carve a space for itself both in the Indian virtual and augmented reality space. It is working across a wide range of verticals which includes enterprise, education and entertainment.

By focusing its energies on good, clear design and user experience, Trimensions aims to bring new exciting technologies within the reach of the common man in India. Its name is famous in the industry for developing innovative new approaches to train people. The startup is also into 360 video production and VR for training simulations and AR for machine maintenance.

Look Mobility

Started in 2015, Look is a Bengaluru-based startup founded by Ashwin Krishnan. It is essentially a flexible and powerful development platform for creating multi-platform 3D virtual reality interactive experiences for Android and Google Cardboard and a complete ecosystem for anyone who aims to build a business on creating high-end content and connecting to their most loyal and enthusiastic players and customers. Apart from this, The startup has solution for the content consuming part of the platform as it has created its own world's first flat foldable VR headsets called foloVR.

Still in a nascent stage, this startups look promising because of its offerings & solution which is unique in Indian market as not many startups are working in VR development platform as far as India is concerned.

Meraki

The country's first Virtual Reality content production studio for consumers as well as businesses, Meraki was founded a year ago by Arvind Ghorwal, Parth Choksi, Agam Garg and Sairam Sagiraju.

With an illustrious client list which includes names such as Star Sports, Network 18, Percept Pictures and Channel V, Meraki is currently into creating 360 degree films for experiential marketing, real estate, events, tourism, sports, adventure, advertisements, weddings, news and fiction.

Imaginate

Conceived and executed in November 2011 by Hemanth Satyanarayana, an alumnus of IIT-Madras and Indian School of Business, Imaginate Technologies, Inc is not just a virtual reality startup but an augmented reality startup too. Its flagship VR product called NuSpace can be used in industrial training and collaborative design, from a manufacturing point of view. Its technology can be used to provide customised VR and AR solutions to those in the retail, healthcare, defence, education and entertainment segments, among others.

The Hyderabad-based startup is backed by venture fund SRI Capital which invested Rs 3.35 crore ($500,000) as seed fund in the startup recently.

GazeMatic

Based out of Bangalore, GazeMatic has built a reputation for itself in the VR world by building “THE CALLER”, a mobile app for Virtual Reality. A first of its kind voice caller app, "THE CALLER" can help the user teleport himself when they are on a call with their friend. The app has found instantaneous success since its launch and has managed to score users in US, UK, Germany, Russia along with India.

Founded by Karthikeyan NG and MohanRaj MS in the year 2015, GazeMatic has become a hub of all the De-facto companies in the startup ecosystem of India in just one year. Thanks

AbsentiaVR

Founded in June 2015, by BITS Pilani, Goa dropouts Shubham Mishra, Vrushali Prasade and Harikrishna Valiyath, AbsentiaVR has been able to carve a place for itself in the VR startup world with its highly innovative virtual reality headset called Tesseract. The headset wishes to provide users an incremental experience in the newest available format i.e the 3-D virtual reality.

The founders decided to come together and startup AbsentiaVR upon realizing the grave need to bridge the gulf between existing virtual reality and electronic content.

[Top-most Image - Shutterstock]

10 Top Delhi Based Startups To Look Forward in 2017

The capital city of India, Delhi had an eventful year last year, startup wise. From IoT wearables to heath-tech, from fashion to Smartphones, Delhi witnessed a number of new and promising startups and entrepreneurs emerging in the year 2016. Here, we list the Top 10 Delhi Startups that made headlines in the startup world in the year 2016.

1. Leaf Wearables

IoT/Wearables

Founders: Manik Mehta, Chiraag Kapil, Ayush Banka, Paras Batra, Avinash Bansal

Leaf Wearables is a smart Jewellery startup that designs special pendants, bracelets and key chains that have a small circular device at their heart called SAFER. Whenever user double clicks the device, the corresponding app is triggered about a potential threat. Further, upon receiving the threat, the app sends an alert to the user’s network. In order to make sure that the jewellery looks appealing, the device comes with a rust-proof, non-corrosive stainless steel casing with fashionable crystals of highly refractive diamond-cut glass that have the safety mechanism below it.

SAFER's GPS function acts as the user's constant companion and let’s their loved ones know about their location every minute of the day or night. The user just needs to add her destination and the time she is leaving, and the user’s network can track her movement the entire time. Along with this, it also comes with a map showing the nearest hospitals and police stations to the user’s location.

Leaf Wearables aims to make 1 million families safe by the end of year 2017.

2. Hyve Mobility

Smartphones

Founders: Aditya Agarwal, Abhishek Agarwal, Sharad Mehrotra

The startup, which offers mid range smartphones in India, is one of the few companies offering Pure Android Experience on its smartphones through strategic partnerships with industry leaders like Google India and MediaTek.

Hyve Mobility entered the Indian smartphone market with a bang last year in June with its two launches — Buzz and Storm — priced at Rs. 13,999 and Rs 8,499, respectively. Later in the year, the company, in collaboration with MediaTek, launched a new smartphone “Pryme” at Rs 17,999.

3. Flyrobe

Fashion Rentals

Founders: Shreya Mishra, Pranay Surana, Tushar Saxena

Flyrobe is an online fashion rental platform that supplies western wear on-demand with a three-hour delivery timeline and ethnic wear on advance booking. Having 50 designers onboard, including industry leaders like Ritu Kumar, Masaba Gupta and Shehla Khan, the startup is currently live in Mumbai and Delhi and plans to branch out to Bengaluru and Hyderabad very soon.

The startup was in the news last year for raising $5.3 million in Series A funding led by IDG Ventures. The round also saw the participation from Flyrobe's existing investor Sequoia Capital and GREE Ventures, a Tokyo-based fund which made its first investment in India. With the conclusion of this funding round, the total funding raised by Flyrobe reached a whopping $7 million.

4. Morph.ai

Chatbot

Founders: Pratik Jain, Abhishek Gupta,Vipul Garg, Niyati Agarwal

Morph.ai is an end-to-end solution that aims to empower companies to make their services available over websites, apps and messengers by making use of natural language understanding and artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbots. A part of Nasscom 10000 startups, Morph.ai helps businesses in making, deploying and training their own chatbots so as to better engage with their customers. In what could be considered as a big achievement, the startup is currently powering Manchester City chatbot.

5. CoinSecure

Bitcoin

Founders: Mohit Kalra, Benson Samuel

CoinSecure is an ISO certified company that offers Bitcoin wallet, trading, exchange, and merchant services along with several other Blockchain based services. While the company's head office is based out of Delhi, its Research and Development division is in the city of Bengaluru. The company launched its bitcoin exchange for the domestic market on January 1, 2015.

Coinsecure offers an algorithmic trading bitcoin exchange where users can buy and sell their bitcoins for actual Indian money at a fee of 0.3 percent of the amount bought or exchanged, which according to the company is the lowest in India.

CoinSecure was in news last year for raising a whopping $1.2 million from a group of undisclosed Indian angel investors.

6. 8Minutes

Solar Energy for Households

Founders: Dev Arora, Anuj Gupta, Arjun

8Minutes is on a mission to solve the biggest problem being faced by our planet Earth today – climate change by leveraging the power of solar energy. The startup help customers in saving money on their energy bills by installing solar panels on their rooftop with little or no upfront cost by providing them an access to financing and connecting them with the nearest installer.

Within just six months of their launch, they had successfully signed on about 865kW – including industries, corporates, societies, homes and educations institutions. For people thinking why is the startup named 8Minutes, it is because it takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds for the sun rays to travel from sun to earth.

7. Cube26

IoT/ Mobile Software

Founders: Saurav Kumar, Abhilekh Agrawal

The idea of Cube26 originated from the basic thought that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) around the world were scouting for new, innovative ways to stand out from the crowd as hardware specifications were getting commoditised. The founders of Cube26 believed that they could successfully leverage their skills and expertise in machine learning and natural language processing to add gesture control features and help OEMs market their product better with software differentiation.

Cube26's product IOTA Lite, which is a smartphone-operated smart bulb under the IOTA (IOT-Architecture) category has garnered a lot of eyeballs since its launch. There are two main things that makes the smart bulb stand out from the rest- firstly, a user can switch it on or off from their phones. Secondly, a user can also adjust the intensity of the light bulb so that they're not constantly caught between switching lamps and light-bulbs on or off, or just flooding their room with an overly bright tube light.

8. GoBOLT

Tech-Logistics

Founders: Parag Aggarwal, Sumit Sharma, Naitik Baghla

GoBOLT is on a mission to innovate India's logistics sector with its hybrid asset ownership models, cutting edge technology and extensive network. The logistics technology startup provides transportation solutions such as right vehicle selection, route/delivery planning, reliable documentation and control, real time tracking, and reduced transit time to its clients. The startup, which has both owned as well as aggregated trucks, serves everyone from e-commerce to pharma to automobile and food processing companies. It's clients list includes A-list companies such as PepsiCo, Philips, Cadbury, Tupperware and Panasonic, amongst various others.

The startup was in the news last year for raising pre-Series A funding from startup incubator MCube8, which is a division of financial advisory firm MCube Capital.

9. iCHR

Health-Tech (Cloud-based Healthcare)

Founders: Harpreet Singh

Integrated Child Health Records or iCHR aims at bringing medical help closer by integrating doctors, hospitals and medical help all in one application for the parents. The startup provides automated vaccination records and monitors the growth schedule in addition to maintaining data for research purposes. By leveraging the power of modern technologies like Cloud Computing, iCHR is offering an opportunity to India's urban and rural population for an early stage detection of obesity and malnutrition respectively as well.

The Oxyent Technologies Pvt. Ltd. backed startup was in the news last year for raising Rs 3 crore (over $450,000) from a senior partner with financial advisory firm EY. It plans to raise as much as Rs 30 crore ($4.5 million) in its next round.

10. CustTap

Customer Intelligence Platform

Founders: Amar Parkash

The startup offers data analytics and marketing services to offline stores, and aims to help them in making optimum use of data and technology. When it comes to brick and mortar stores in India, a majority of them don't make use of any technology whatsoever to better engage with their customers. This very fact made Amar, an ex-employee of PayPal and Goibibo leave his job and start CustTap.

According to Amar, the basic challenge that CustTap is currently facing is educating SMBs about the importance of data and why they should focus on leveraging it to increase their business. Within a short period of time, the startup has been successful in attracting paying customers across Delhi-NCR, Chandigarh and Bengaluru. It plans to expand to more cities in the year 2017.

[Top-most Image - Shutterstock]

10 Hottest Gurgaon Startups To Watch in 2017

The millennium city, Gurgaon which went through a much infamous name change this year to Gurugram, saw its already hip startup scene reaching new heights in 2016. While a lot of new startups entered the scene with their out-of-the box, innovative ideas, the already existing ones also made sure that they kept themselves relevant by reinventing themselves and launching new products/ideas.

Here are the Top 10 Gurgaon Startups which made a name for themselves this year:

InOne -- Artificial intelligence/E-Commerce

Founders: Ankit Sharma, Aashish Gupta, Rahul Gupta

Founded by IIM Bangalore graduates, InOne (fomerly Yana AI) is a chat based transaction engine fully powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whether one wants to get groceries delivered to their house, hail a cab or want contacts for businesses, services around their household, all one has to do is simply message or speak to InOne. Even if you don't want to order anything, you can normally chat with Yana and unwind after a long tiring day. The app compares across multiple vendors to get its users the best price and quality.

The platform's AI engine is 100 percent automated with no human being getting involved to reply if a certain query of a user doesn’t goes through. The AI engine makes use of machine learning technology, including neural networks and natural language processing in order to make sure that users get exactly what they are asking.

Fitso -- Artificial Intelligence/Fitness

Founders: Saurabh Aggarwal, Naman Sharma and Rahool Sureka

Founded by three IIT-Delhi alumni, FITSO is a social platform that enables people with similar interests of fitness, to connect with each other, participate in various fitness activities happening around them, compete with each other to win assured exciting prizes, hire professional coaches and much more.

Founded in August, 2015, Fitso was in news in January this year for being successful in raising a whopping $2,00,000 in angel round, from Varun Khurana, Ex CTO, Grofers; Samar Singla, CEO, Jugnoo and Vinay Bansal, CFO, Wildcraft. It is important to note that the startup had raised funds in just three months of its operations.

Staqu -- Artificial Intelligence/Fashion Data

Founders: Atul Rai, Anurag Saini, Chetan Rexwal, Pankaj Sharma

Staqu Technologies Pvt. Ltd is an artificial intelligence (AI) focused startup meticulously working on an automated image understanding technology that could cater automation utilising the image-related big data, since 70% of the content on internet right now is images.

The startup's products include Fashin, an Artificial intelligence powered fashion discovery app that consists of visual search, automated meta tags based filters, fashion extraction from videos, amazing deals and discounts and real time price comparison; and Vistoso, a camera filter app that that lets users create paintings from their daily snaps using deep learning and artificial intelligence and then buy merchandise with users' artwork on it.

The startup was in news this year for raising an undisclosed amount of funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN). The funding round was led by Bikky Khosla, Neeraj Singal and Ajay Gupta on behalf of IAN. The startup plans to utilise the funds in building its technology and strengthening its team. In August, the startup once again made waves for entering into a research partnership with Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi to boost its research in the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning

GAMOOZ -- Augmented Reality

Founder: Gaurav Wadhwa

GAMOOZ is a software startup committed towards getting India acquired with the amazing world of Augmented Reality. The GAMOOZ app is an an Interactive Books Platform based on Augmented Reality, which lets children scan the pages in a book to reveal hidden content, which helps them in learning more from the book, in a much more fun and interactive way. The platform allows Book Publishers to add more fun and interactivity to their books so that the students get interested in reading them.

The platform supports a Millions of Interactive Books. A user just needs to download GAMOOZ app, and then he/she can interact with any of the GAMOOZ powered books. Whenever a user scans a page, the app immediately provides for video, audio and animated content relevant to that chapter using mixed reality.

Prokure -- Internet Retail

Founder: Dhilbar Roshan, Shubham Agrawal

Claiming to be future of retail, Prokure is looking to organise the unorganized retail using the internet. It is a online wholesale marketplace where retailers can discover and purchase goods directly from the manufacturers or large suppliers.

Nearly 92% of the retail in India happens in unorganized sector and this sector is highly fragmented and non-transparent. The supply chain in the unorganized retail is broken leading to high cost of goods sold, high cost of supply chain, limited product discovery, and limited product availability etc.

Prokure's technology solution is an effort to fix this broken supply chain. By making use of the Prokure app, retailers in every category can discover and order all the products in that category. The startup connects the retailers directly to the manufacturers and wholesalers, which ends up eliminating a lot of middle layers in the supply chain leading to significant price reduction. The deliveries are fulfilled by third party.

EduRev -- Ed-Tech

Founder: Kunaal Satija & Hardik Dhamija

EduRev, which is an abbreviation for Education Revolution, is a ed-tech startup that started its pilot operations in March 2015 and officially launched its portal in May this year. The team started with operations in Chandigarh, and has now expanded to New Delhi, Pune and Haryana.

EduRev is an educational network that connects students and teachers with courses and learning material, based on a crowd-sourced library. Over 40,000 students who have joined the EduRev network platform which contains over 100 courses and more than 70,000 documents, videos and tests. The startup also sells efficiency and management platforms to institutions and teachers to help them digitize their classrooms.

In addition to its portal's official launch, the startup was in the news this year for raising an undisclosed amount of funding in a Pre-Series A round from Pradeep Reddy Kamasan, who is part of Hyderabad Angels group.

RedCarpetUp

Founders: Sandeep Srinivasa, Kartik Venkataraman and Abhay Tamaria

[caption id="attachment_112566" align="aligncenter" width="700"] RedCarpetUp Founders - Kartik, Sandeep and Abhay [/caption]

RedCarpetUp lends to customers to finance their online purchases - eCommerce, groceries, travel, etc. In India, credit and finance companies are able to service less than 3% of the customer base because there is no data, no widespread credit bureaus to profile and score customers. RedCarpetUp claims to have an access to much more data which it puts to use to service customers who never had any access to credit before.

In order to avail RedCarpetUp's services, all one has to do is download the app and chat with them about their requirement. The user is then asked to upload their verification documents in order to get their credit limit. Once this is done, the user has to communicate his/her order on chat and confirm their contract by phone. After this, the user will get their order in a few business days.

Unlaze -- Personal Networking

Nihar Manwatkar

Unlaze is a personal networking app that enables like-minded people, living nearby, to connect over common interests and hobbies. In order to use the app, the users will have to sign up using Facebook, choose the activities they like and press search to look for people with similar interests in activities in their nearby area of up to a 15 km radius. Users can send a request to people whom they find interesting, get connected and start conversing on the app. The app has allows users to unlaze with others over 9 activities – Jogging, Gossip/Chatting, Cycling, Yoga, , Eating Out, Music, Dance, Travel, and Shopping. Currently, the app is only available for Android users.

The startup was in the news this year for raising an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by Dino Morea, a famous Bollywood Fitness Icon & Entrepreneur and Sujal Shah, CXO of MissMalini Media.

Magicpin -- Hyperlocal Discovery App

Founder: Brij Bhushan and Anshoo Sharma

[caption id="attachment_112568" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Magicpin Team[/caption]

Magicpin is a Hyperlocal discovery platform that allows users to search restaurants and events, and interact with merchants in their local area. It also provides its users with real-time promotions, loyalty programmes and content updates. It is currently operational in Delhi-NCR, Jaipur and Bangalore.

The startup was in the news this year for raising $3 million in a Series A round of funding from Lightspeed India.

ParkZap -- Electronic Ticketing

Pranay Sharma

Owning a vehicle in India means always having to spend 10-15 minutes finding a safe, secure and nearby location to park whenever we head out of our homes. ParkZap enables electronic ticketing and collection of parking and highway toll fares by using image-recognition and smartphones etc. The startup aims to zap away the parking troubles of Indians by providing them an online way to locate nearest parking sites to their location with an added convenience of making online cash-less payments. The startup is a part of first batch of Intel India Maker Lab.

[Top-Most Image Via - Shutterstock]

10 Most Innovative Bangalore Based Startups in 2016

India's very own 'Silicon Valley,' Bangalore had an amazing 2016. The year saw many new startups with innovative, out of the box ideas capturing the Indian startup scene. Here's Indianweb2.com giving you a load down on all the Bangalore Startups that caught the world's eye this year.

Graviky Labs

Carbon Capturing | Founders- Anirudh Sharma

Graviky Labs is one of the few carbon capturing startups in the world and only such startup in India. It is taking stock of the growing pollution situation in the country by creating paint and ink from pollution itself. The startup has built a contraption that gets connected to the exhaust on the tail pipe of a vehicle, and once it is done collecting the raw carbon, the soot, it take it through a purification process which successfully converts that air pollution into printing ink. The same procedure can be done using chimneys or boats to collect effluence and then convert that into ink.

The startup has entered into a partnership with Tiger Beer, the famous Heineken Asia Pacific-owned alcohol brand, and had already made 150 litres of Tiger Air Ink from air pollution by September this year. The startup has also made a breakthrough device that can traps pollutants exiting a car's exhaust pipe which is then re-purposed and made into ink.[Read More]

Signzy

(L-R) Ankur, Ankit and Arpit | Pic Via - punemirror.indiatimes.com/

FinTech | Founders -- Ankit Ratan, Ankur Pandey, Arpit Ratan

Signzy makes use of a unique combination of Artificial Intelligence and advanced cryptography to provide a digital on-boarding solution for banks, NBFCs and several other financial institutions. The startup aims to make digital regulatory processes secure, simpler and more compliant than ever.

The year 2016 has been an extremely successful one for the startup as it has won several laurels and awards. This year, the startup has won the Payment System Innovation Contest 2016 IDRBT competition, which was sponsored by RBI. It also became one of the 400 startups recognized by DIPP. In addition to this, the startup was 3rd among Indian fintech players using technologies such as AI and blockchain (2016) in IBM SmartCamp, Top 30 among global fintech players at Silicon Valleys largest fintech accelerator (2016), and Top 25 among USISTEF entries selected for Empowering Citizens Category(2016).

Bempu Health

IoT/Healthcare | Founders - Ratul Narain

The Bangalore-based medical device social enterprise has been successful in garnering applause from all over the world for setting on a mission to make hypothermic newborn deaths a thing of the past, especially in India, by inventing Bempu, a continuous temperature monitoring bracelet combined with an inbuilt thermometer. The device ensures that a premature and low birth-weight newborn maintains a healthy temperature.

The startup made India proud this year by being the only Indian company to be selected among 12 global innovators who will be receiving millions in funding from Saving Lives at Birth partnership, which started in the year 2011 and includes US Agency for International Development, the Government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, U.K’s Department for International Development, Grand Challenges Canada, and the Korea International Cooperation Agency. [Read More]

FluxGen Engineering Technologies

Renewables & Environment | Founders: Ganesh Shankar, Dr. Gopala Krishna Murthy, C N Thimmapiah, Vinod Prabhu

The startup aims to develop IoT based products for sustainable technologies with a special focus on rural development. The startup's flagship product, "Energy and Water Manager" (EWM) makes use of energy and water micro-grids. It employees Internet of Things (IOT) to solve the prevailing problems that are present in Indian micro-grids.

The startup's vision is to push towards technologies that are associated with renewable energy systems so that energy by renewable energy become economically viable as well as the engineering wisely reliable. The startup's founders are alumni of Indian Institute of Technology, Indian Institute of Management and Indian Institute of Science. FluxGen’s customers include Indian Railways, Robert Bosch and Titan.

MUSEinc

Medical Device | Founders- Arvind Badrinarayanan, Sumukh Mysore

The two-year-old medical device startup aims to produce advanced, affordable and customizable devices for a variety of needs. It has made a name for itself by developing Taal, a low-cost, highly functional digital stethoscope, that aims to improve the quality of diagnosis, and reduce the time that is currently required to measure cardiovascular parameters among many other possible applications. The device consists of a circular hardware device, that is paired with a smartphone app and can function across species from cats to humans.

Though Taal isn’t the first digital stethoscope, what makes it different from others is the fact that MUSEinc team has inserted a processor that enables automation of the calculation of the heart rate and recording of other sounds from within the body. [Read More]

Creo

Smartphone | Founders- Sai Srinivas, Shubham Malhotra, Rachit Rastogi

(L-R) - Shubham Malhotra, Rachit Rastogi andSai Srinivas -- Co-founders of Creo,

Ever since smartphones came into our lives, nothing much has actually changed in them. All the smartphones, irrespective of the brands and configurations, are almost the same. Indian smartphone startup Creo understands this problem and promises to offer something new and different everyday when it comes to Android phones.

The startup's flagship product, Mark 1 comes with frequent updates to the phone’s Android skin that are so unique that the smartphone users will be "getting a new phone every month."

Creo's aim is to build an OS with features that no other Smartphone has ever had, and which they can easily get licensed to the international hardware manufacturers. After launching and finding a base in the Indian market, they will work on expanding to Southeast Asia. [Read More]

Cooey Technologies

IoT Health | Founders- Manu Madhusudan

An end to end health monitoring IOT platform, Cooey aims to collect (device), store, analyze and provide insights of the vital signs of patients. It connects a user with various health services and provides them personalized services according to their health state.

The startup was in news this year for launching India’s first IOT glucometer that wirelessly syncs data with a smartphone. The small, pocket-sized device is portable, can connect to a smartphone using the 3.5mm headphone jack and transfers readings automatically into the Cooey mobile application. [Read More]

OmiX Labs

Biotech | Founders: Sudeshna Adak, Abhinanda Sarkar

Infectious diseases make up for nearly 50% of disease burden in India and more than 50% people in this percentage belong to people at the bottom of the pyramid and are children below the age 5. Delay in diagnosis and treatment leads to increased risk of complications, higher morbidity and mortality and increased treatment costs to patients. This is where OmiX Labs comes into action. It is a technology platform that allows cost-effective DNA testing for early diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases.

The startup, which is in its nascent stage, aims to bring substantial advancements in the field of molecular diagnosis and provide access to lower income groups, who mostly do not have an access to laboratories.

Cardiac Design Labs

Medical Devices | Founders -- Anand Madanagopal, Ajax Thomas, Praveen L Murthy, Mosin Badkar

Cardiac Design Labs is a start-up company engaged in the design and development of, state-of-the-art, next generation medical products. The company has built a medical diagnostic device -- MIRCaM, that combines communications and heart monitoring technology and is designed for use in rugged rural conditions. Through the device, the patient can be monitored from home by doctors. The cardiologist will be able to remotely interact and diagnose the patient using his cell phone.

The device priced at one-sixth the cost of other comparable devices can identify Arrhythmia and coronary heart diseases. The device is an important invention in a country like India where 35.9% deaths occurs due to heart diseases.

Preksh Innovations

Augmented Reality | Founders -- Kodandarama M A, Sathvik Muralidhar, Saikat Sinha, Sharath Chandrashekar

Founded in the year 2015, the Augmented Reality solutions company provides omni-channel solution for consumers to seamlessly interact with a brick and mortar store offline as well as online at their own convenience.

The startup came into the limelight this year for its last year's achievement of launching World’s first patented augmented Reality solution for retail and filing two patents for same. The technology solution provided by the startup can be rendered on AR gadgets to allows consumers to shop from stores while sitting at home, and provides an experience similar to the way one shops in offline stores. [Read More]

[Top-most Image via - Shutterstock]