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:
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.
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 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 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.
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, 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
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.
[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.
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]
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]
IndianWeb2.com is an independent digital media platform for business, entrepreneurship, science, technology, startups, gadgets and climate change news & reviews.
