TLabs Shortlists Five Startups For Next Batch

TLabs, which is a startup accelerator funded by Times Internet, has selected five startups for its next 6th accelerator batch. The five selected startups span across sectors like big data, mobility and video etc.

This new batch of five startups has taken the TLabs portfolio count to an amazing thirty six startups. The programme spans over four months where the accelerator invests Rs. 12 lakhs in a startup for eight percent vests equity. The accelerator also provides the startups with a panel of over sixty mentors in order to support the young and new entrepreneurs.

The five selected startups include big data tool Neuron, mobile app developer Mobapper, YouTube marketing and analytics company Vidooly, mobile browser Flynx and Wibe, which will soon launch something similar to Wikipedia for videos. These five startups were selected from some 600 odd applications that the accelerator received for its sixth batch. Tlabs usually deals with companies in the mobile and internet technology space.

"The startups coming to us now already have a product ready. After iterations in a few weeks, they are ready with the final product", said Abhishek Gupta, who is the head of TLabs, in a statement to Economic Times.

India has over forty startup accelerators, which include Kochi’s Startup Village, multi-city accelerator GSF and Microsoft.

According to experts, valuing each startup equally works best for an accelerator, as most of these startups are still in their very initial stages and during this time projections really do not matter.

According to Dr. Krihsna Tanuku, the executive director at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, “What matters the most is how timely the investment is. It could mean the difference of running or shutting down the company.” This statement was given to the Economic Times.

Keeping in mind the rising operational costs for startups and market dynamics, TLabs has increased the amount of its initial investment in the startups. "The Indian ecosystem needs it. The valuations are now in line with startups overseas", said Gupta. According to the current trends, a company is valued at about twice the price in Silicon Valley than that of its peer in India.

TLabs Shortlists Five Startups For Next Batch

TLabs, which is a startup accelerator funded by Times Internet, has selected five startups for its next 6th accelerator batch. The five selected startups span across sectors like big data, mobility and video etc.

This new batch of five startups has taken the TLabs portfolio count to an amazing thirty six startups. The programme spans over four months where the accelerator invests Rs. 12 lakhs in a startup for eight percent vests equity. The accelerator also provides the startups with a panel of over sixty mentors in order to support the young and new entrepreneurs.

The five selected startups include big data tool Neuron, mobile app developer Mobapper, YouTube marketing and analytics company Vidooly, mobile browser Flynx and Wibe, which will soon launch something similar to Wikipedia for videos. These five startups were selected from some 600 odd applications that the accelerator received for its sixth batch. Tlabs usually deals with companies in the mobile and internet technology space.

"The startups coming to us now already have a product ready. After iterations in a few weeks, they are ready with the final product", said Abhishek Gupta, who is the head of TLabs, in a statement to Economic Times.

India has over forty startup accelerators, which include Kochi’s Startup Village, multi-city accelerator GSF and Microsoft.

According to experts, valuing each startup equally works best for an accelerator, as most of these startups are still in their very initial stages and during this time projections really do not matter.

According to Dr. Krihsna Tanuku, the executive director at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, “What matters the most is how timely the investment is. It could mean the difference of running or shutting down the company.” This statement was given to the Economic Times.

Keeping in mind the rising operational costs for startups and market dynamics, TLabs has increased the amount of its initial investment in the startups. "The Indian ecosystem needs it. The valuations are now in line with startups overseas", said Gupta. According to the current trends, a company is valued at about twice the price in Silicon Valley than that of its peer in India.

Wibe: Surf Wikipedia with the power of YouTube

Akshit and Ankit, students of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Ghaziabad, like all of us faced problem while studying from Wikipedia and found it easier to learn from YouTube videos. They decided to solve the problem for all of us by developing Wibe. "Wibe is a combination of Wikipedia and YouTube so that we can save the time in switching over to YouTube and searching for videos relevant to the topic we were exploring on Wikipedia," says Akshit Agarwal, a python lover.

Wibe has been recently funded for INR 1.2 million by TLabs Accelerator.

Wibe is a product that increases the "Interest Quotient" of Wikipedia and YouTube content by combining the power of both at a single place. You can leverage this combined power of both just by installing the Wibe's chrome extension after which you can watch out the relevant Videos corresponding to the Wikipedia Page.

Wibe provides videos from YouTube corresponding to every heading and subheading of Wikipedia article, so that you can get a better insight about every part of the Wiki Article. Wibe also gives you "Stick Tabs" feature by which you can stick a video tab on top of page while scrolling through Wikipedia content.

Explanatory Video -

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98uDPo7ZjVI?rel=0]

"Wibe started in April 2014 while we were still in college," says Ankit Agrawal. He was the Research Intern at IIT Delhi under Prof. K.K. Biswas in the field of ML/AI also he likes to work on different techs, he had made a project named AutoEmo which inserts emoticons in the text messages according to actual emotions by detecting brain wave pattern. Akshit on the other hand was the Student Developer in Google Summer of Code 2013 and developed a small tool named Mp3fm. One of his projects was presented at the DerbyCon Conference.

Wibe allows its user to watch videos corresponding to summary and every heading and sub-heading of Wiki article. The current version of Wibe has been made using Javascript and Jquery. They developed an algorithm through which the Wiki article is processed and relevant videos are fetched from YouTube.

This very talented 2 member team is located out of Delhi NCR with 3 more team members, Harsh Bhatia, Priyank Jain & Shivam Khandelwal. “We started as a group of more than 10 people initially, but as time passed, a lot of them left,” says Ankit. “We got good investment offers from some of the organization but for now we have not partnered with any as we are looking for a good mentorship rather than investment,” adds Akshit. They are currently bootstrapped. Their team has been mentored by Mr. Manish Kr. Thakur and H.O.D. Prof. Sanjay Goel from college. "The founders of Scrablabs, Mr. Saurabh Aswani and Mr. Akshay Agarawal have helped us in every possible aspect," says Akshit.

[caption id="attachment_94691" align="alignleft" width="376"] Co-Founder, Wibe - Akshit & Ankit Agarwal[/caption]

We learnt a little about how they are working without investment and they shared a little story with us. “Currently we both live together in a flat, far away from our parents and teach robotics in schools to earn some money for our monthly expenses. We both don't want to take money from home to carry on our passion,” says Ankit. “Ankit is the cook of the house and I try to learn from him once in a while,” adds Akshit. “At the end of the day, we go for a walk and discuss ideas and realize that we are the happiest people on earth because we get to pursue our passion,” he adds.

They plan to make a generic plugin which can be used by any website and they look to extend their product to other content rich websites which will give them a lead over their competitors. "Using our plugin in E-commerce, blogs, How To's websites will make their content more powerful," says Ankit. "For e.g. E-commerce website can include product videos as well as product review videos so that their customers may get all the necessary information at one place," adds Akshit.

As an advice for future entrepreneurs, Ankit says, "You are allowed to make mistakes, but be sure to learn from them as well." To this Akshit adds, "Never run behind money in life because it can give you temporary satisfaction and happiness. Do what you love to do. You should be so passionate about your work that you even dream about it."