VR Based Spiritual Startup Kalpnik Technologies Raises $500k from Venture Catalysts

Underlining its commitment to bolster innovation across sectors, Venture Catalysts, India’s first integrated incubator, has facilitated a seed investment worth $500k into Kalpnik, a start-up leveraging VR and AR technology to deliver immersive and interactive religious and spiritual experiences. The investment was led by prominent Investors from Venture Catalysts such as Ashwani Kakkar (Mercury Travels & Via.com), Mr G G Gulati (Chairman, United Group of Institutions) Bobby Reddy ( Indus Homes)Dr. Tinku Acharya (Co-architect-Webcam & MD-Videonetics) Raja Sahi ( SVP, Pixelogic Media) Anand Ladsariya (Owner, Everest Flavours), Nitin Agarwal (Owner, N M Fashions & Devesh Agriexim P Ltd) Anuj Puri, Nitesh Prakash (Senior Director, Ola), Vikash Agarwal & Manish Agarwal (Nandan Group), Dipak Agarwal (Onex Solutions), Rohit Parakh, Omi Singhania and investments from professionals from leading companies like CISCO, 24/7 etc. Mr Vansh Gulati from UGI and Anuj Puri from Venture Catalysts will be joining the board of Kalpnik.

Kalpnik’s application is already being touted as a significant development which will disrupt the country’s budding online religious activities, tourism and events space.

Kalpnikwas founded by John Kuruvilla (ex CRO Air Deccan, ex Managing Director, GenNext Ventures, a Reliance Industries sponsored venture fund and Ex Executive VP, The Oberoi Group) and business & technology veterans Ashwani Garg (ex-Director, New Business Solutions & IOT at Intel) and Apul Nahata (ex CTO GenNext Ventures, ex Qualcomm). The diverse backgrounds coupled with the need to create a disruptive Global company from India bought them together to work on this innovative idea which has untapped potential globally but is still an unexplored territory.

Kalpnik has been revolutionising the very concept of devotee engagement in India through immersive VR content& technology. Its proprietary, patent-pending technologydelivers object insertion and interactivity in 360-degreeVR video streams, enabling a viewing experience so powerful that it recreates for the devotee the experience of actually being physically present at the event.

Kalpnik supports industry-leading VR headsets and smart phones and working closely with several manufacturers. The Company has been in stealth mode for a year and it is close to releasing its application for Android andiOSplatforms. Reliable sources in the market mentioned that the company has produced immersive content for several large and small temples, religious organisations, and spiritual leaders.

One of the investor Ashwani Kakkar of Mercury Travels & Via.com believes that helping Devotees engage deeper with their faith will also provide a strong impetus to the Religious tourism sector. This is truly an innovation with a global relevance. The best part about the tech platform developed by Kalpnik is that it is sector agnostic and can be tweaked to address several other verticals like the entertainment and sports industry too.

Speaking of the potential of a disruptive solution such as Kalpnik, Mr. G.G. Gulati, Chairman – United Group of Institutions (UGI), said, “Religion and spirituality play a significant role in the lives of Indians. But with devotees significantly outnumbering available shrines, the crowded complexes at popular places of worship and the sheer physical distance between the devotee’s city of residence and the location of the shrine can often be a deterrent to a fulfilling spiritual experience. Kalpnik uses cutting-edge technology to tackle this challenge and to provide devotees with an immersive spiritual experience, regardless of their physical locations. We are confident that the Kalpnik platform can fulfil the need-gap for such tech-driven religious and spiritual solutions in the Indian market, and even scale to become the global domain leader in the space.”

Raja Sahi, US resident entrepreneur and investorclosely associated with media technologies for decades, said: “Kalpnik has a very unique take on religion and spirituality needs which is not only relevant to Indians living here but has global applicability.”

Kalpnik will be using the investment to develop content for hundreds of temples and gurus and onboard the same on its platform,thus making gurus and temples more accessible to their growing number of tech-savvy followers, both in India and overseas. As part of our Prime Ministers vision to digitise India, we believe Kalpnik will help temples digitise and VRIse their offerings. Sources mentioned that Kalpnik is in advanced stages of discussions with a few state governments to provide its services free of cost to help the stakeholders experience the benefit of their solution in helping bridge the gap between the devotee and their faith.

Ashwani Garg, CEO Kalpnik, added, “Digital disruption has beencompletely redefining how we function and operate. There is no single aspect of our lives which has not been, in some way or the other, revolutionised by technology. Kalpnik is a natural progression in the grand scheme of things. By leveraging cutting-edgeVR/ARtechnologies, we aredelivering an extremely immersive and interactive interface which isbringing devotees closer to fulfilling their religious and spiritualneeds. The investment and support from a market-leadingincubator like VCats will help us in growing our business and taking our unique value proposition to a much larger numberof religious establishments and devotees worldwide.” Our recent visit to the US where we met close to 100+ NRIs further validated our hypothesis that this is a great platform for people across the world to connect deeper with their faith. The immersiveness givesdevoteean experience close to physically being there and the Interactivity further amplifies the experience.


Venture Catalysts has established itself as a game-changer in the Indian entrepreneurial landscape by facilitating start-up development across multiple geographies, supported by an entire ecosystem of catalysts, angel investors, management consultants, and advisors. Moreover, it enables mentoring and seed funding opportunities through angel investments and supports services for the start-up community, helping highly disruptive early-stage ventures in realising their full business potential.

Venture Catalysts is currently operational in 7 cities across India. This includes top metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata, as well as tier-2 like cities Lucknow, Raipur, and Surat. VCats is aggressively expanding its physical footprint in high-potential geographies to tap into the country’s latent entrepreneurial talent.

VR/AR Startup ShilpMIS Technologies Raises Funds Through the IvyCamp Platform

ShilpMIS Technologies Pvt Ltd has raised an undisclosed amount of funding via the IvyCamp platform from digital industry veteran and investor Mr. Puneet Gupta, Nimitt Desai, partner at Deloitte USA and other HNIs.

Founded by IIT Guwahati graduates, Hardik and Vivek, ShilpMIS is a fast growing VR/AR technology venture which aims to empower people to create, consume and spread VR / AR content seamlessly. It is the Instagram/PowerPoint of Virtual reality that helps users create and share amazing experiences.

ShilpMIS Technologies Pvt Ltd product, PPTVR.in, enables people to create complex VR applications with few clicks of a button. PPTVR can be used in a variety of ways to allow wider set of audiences to experience locations, travel, events, photography, products, without writing a single line of code. For example, a realtor can build an immersive flat walkthrough, a science teacher can build an immersive physics experiment or a traveller can create an interactive VR travel blog of their journey. The created content can be instantly published to the web and shared globally through social media. i.e. with one click, the VR content can be published online and viewed globally using only internet, without requiring any download. Furthermore, VR hardware is a luxury not a necessity, for content created on the platform. Even if a user doesn't have VR hardware they can still view the content as 360 content on a desktop/smartphone. Being web based makes it mobile, local, social.

There is a growing potential across industries for using virtual and augmented reality applications. Many marketers are moving towards using AR/VR for advertising campaigns, which will create more demand for VR Content creation, says Anju Gupta, President IvyCamp. IvyCamp is able to engage with start-ups from a variety of industries because of it’s Global Alumni network. The recent investments on the Platform across different sectors shows the value of the IvyCamp Alumni network in sourcing, mentoring, evaluating, and investing in the Startup Ecosystem by leveraging connects inside and outside India.

Says Puneet Gupta on this investment, "The opportunity around Immersive experiences led by the VR revolution is at the verge of exponential expansion. The biggest opportunity and the biggest constraint at the same time is the pace at which user generated VR content is created. Today this is restricted to super speciality content firms. Democratising this is what will make the biggest impact on the industry. PPTVR is a very impressive effort towards this goal. In a very short time they have put together a solid foundation. Both the technology and the B2C as well as B2B2C model. I am excited to bet on the team converting this opportunity into excellent returns."

Mr. Puneet Gupta is global leader in the Innovation & digital transformation space. He has been rated by Enterprise IT world as among top 100 C-suite leaders that are re-defining the tomorrow using digital. A futurist, strategist and a passionate inventor, Puneet has over 70 granted and published patents in AI, mobile, IOT and immersive experience spaces. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer of Brillio. He was earlier with Infosys, Lucent Technologies and Bell Labs. He is very active in the startup circle, as an angel investor and mentor, and has been advising several Silicon Valley and India based startups.

Says Hardik Desai, CEO & founder SMIS, "In our quest for evolving into a new-age media platform powered by frontier technology such as VR and AR; having someone like Puneet on board is a huge advantage. Puneet brings domain expertise, relevant connects and a wealth of experience. Crowd sourced content is the key to winning the VR market and the best opportunities lie in enabling the masses to create and consume VR easily. Incidentally, the same platform can also double down as the much needed back-end of the highly covered Indian B2C services juggernaut. That is where our technology will scale beautifully going forward. Building a platform allows us the luxury of being B2C and B2B2C, as the need arises."IvyCamp has been a fresh experience with their ever-supportive team and hands-on approach. We found that the investors introduced were from the relevant domain, and a lot of hand-holding was done by the team to see the deal through to completion.

This VR Startup Facebook Acquired for $2 Billion is Facing Complete Shutdown

Oculus, a $2 billion acquisition that Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook made almost three years ago, has landed the global giant in a huge mess now. A while ago, popular video game publisher ZeniMax, which is best known in the market as the owner of Fallout and Skyrim developer Bethesda Softworks, filed a lawsuit against Oculus accusing it of using copyrighted ZeniMax technology without permission.

In the lawsuit, ZeniMax had accused that Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of the company, stole trade secrets from ZeniMax to build the company’s signature product, the Oculus Rift. It also accused video game design legend and former employee, John Carmack, of stealing trade secrets. ZeniMax argued in the court that Luckey didn't even have the skills and brains to design the Rift. The lawsuit was dragged on for quite a bit with shocking revelations and accusations being made by both the companies against each other. At one point, even Mark Zuckerberg was dragged into the case. One of the most shocking turning point in the case came when Carmack admitted to stealing code and documents from ZeniMax on his way out of the company.

Towards the end, the jury ruled that even though Oculus didn’t steal any trade secrets but its founders had surely violated a non-disclosure agreement and also was guilty of “false designation." On the whole, Oculus is on the hook for a whopping $300 million, Luckey for $50 million, and co-founder Brendan Iribe is on the hook for $150 million.

Experts claim that even though the amounts of this judgement are most likely to be reduced on appeal, but trouble is still not over for Oculus.

ZeniMax is now seeking an injunction to block sales of any product that make uses of their technology. It is important to note here that the technology has already been widely distributed to developers who were working on several games for Oculus products, and notably the most popular Oculus Rift. If and when the injunction is granted by the court, it will result in limiting the games available for the Rift to only a few, which could really burn a huge hole in the sales of a company whose sales figure are already on a downwards trend.

Now the main question is, whether Oculus will be able to survive the $500 million judgment and the injunction if it is granted. The word in the market is that ZeniMax is putting its pressure on forcing a settlement and ending Oculus and its founders appeal process as early as possible. Whatever may be the case, the road ahead for Oculus doesn't look so smooth either way.