Arka Venture Labs Invests in Nirmata to Accelerate Mainstream Adoption of Cloud-native Technologies

Kubernetes management company secures funding from Arka Venture Labs to accelerate regional cloud-native adoption

Nirmata, the Day 2 Kubernetes company, is excited to announce venture investment from Arka Venture Labs, a fund that provides capital and mentorship to global B2B companies. This new investment will allow Nirmata to accelerate regional APAC expansion, across engineering, support, sales and market, securing its position as a leading pure-play Kubernetes management platform.

As enterprise- adoption of cloud-native technologies accelerates, they encounter significant challenges in Day 2 operations due to steep learning curves, infrastructure complexity and rapidly changing business requirements. A significant amount of time and effort is spent on ongoing operations of Kubernetes clusters and applications. This problem is compounded by rapid increase in hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, especially in recent times.  

Nirmata enables enterprises to eliminate this undifferentiated heavy lifting, allowing precious development and operations resources to focus on delivering mission critical applications that delight customers. Recently, Nirmata in partnership with Amazon announced a new product offering, the Nirmata EKS Manager, which eliminates several Day 2 challenges faced by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service users. Nirmata EKS Manager is available in the AWS marketplace.

“My co-founders and I started Nirmata to democratize cloud-native technologies.”, says Jim Bugwadia who is a founder and the CEO of Nirmata. “As developers across the globe adopt Kubernetes, Nirmata is well positioning to solve the cloud-native application management complexities across multiple Kubernetes clusters and cloud providers, without lock-in and unnecessary abstractions.”

Arka Venture Labs invests in B2B tech companies between India and the US corridor. In addition to providing capital, the group works closely with the companies by providing expert mentorship, networking opportunities, infrastructure support and connections to valley ecosystems.

We liked the strong credentials of the founders and their ability to provide a complete solution to solve the Day 2 Kubernetes problem of some of the Fortune 500 companies with their patented platform. says Radhesh Kanumury, Managing Partner, Arka Venture Labs.

Nirmata was started by Jim Bugwadia, Ritesh Patel and Damien Toledo, a team with more than 50 years of experience building enterprise products that simplify IT operations. The Nirmata team has been helping enterprises deliver and support cloud-native applications for more than six years. 

About the Company

Nirmata is a unified management plane for Kubernetes clusters and workloads built for enterprise DevOps teams. Nirmata enables self-service cluster provisioning, provides visibility, health, metrics, and alerts, ensures compliance via workload policies, and streamlines application deployments across clusters. 

About the Venture
Arka Venture Labs is the first of its kind India-US cross-border accelerator fund that has been launched with three VC firms coming in as Anchor LPs. They are Blume Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), and Emergent Ventures. They are open to B2B startups with a strong growth in the US, backed by strong core technology and economic differentiators.  It started 2 years back and has invested in 9 companies so far

FieldOmobify Lets You Manage Your Business From Anywhere In Cloud

FieldOMobify is a cloud based field management software which connects your office to the field. It is also available as an Android app on Google Playstore. FieldOMobify works in conjunction with the FieldOMobify web application which gives you a power to manage your business from anywhere. The Pune startup was started in February 2014 by Amol and Sridhar.

It comes with web and mobile solution where a dispatcher can assign service calls to field workers and they will get a push notification about the call assigned. They can see service call details, client details, contract details etc. After completion of a service call, field worker can take the picture of asset/site etc to have a proof of work. It reduces your operation and business management efforts by automating the whole service delivery process. "Our clients have seen at least 20% growth in their efficiency," says Sridhar who takes care of the technical aspects of the startup.

"I was already working in this sector. I did some primary research, talked to many service organizations and understood their requirement. It made idea stronger and then I decided to quit my job and start FieldOMobify with Sridhar," says Amol who handles business strategy at FieldOMobify. "We decided to go to field service management solutions as many small scale service industries are looking to manage their service operations with the help of technology," he adds.

They are targeting all types of field service industries with currently approaching Retail, Logistic and Supply Chain management, Electrical and Telecommunication companies. With 23 customers using their services, they are continuously growing. This SaaS platform is very affordable to small organizations. It has a forever free option for up to 3 users and they charge $20 per user after the 3 users. FieldOMobify provides multi branch management which can be connected easily to any other system. With FieldOMobify you can easily manage your field operations and improve a service delivery. They also provide Estimating, Job Tracking, File and Photo Attachments, Automated Emailing, Client Reminders, Time Tracking, Electronic Payments, GPS Waypoints, Routing to their customers.

This team of 12 people is partnering with a lot of sales and technical companies. They are currently based out of Pune and not funded. As a message for future Entrepreneurs, Amol says, "No matter on what idea you are working, It’s all about determination and dedication. Keep patience and work for the best process. Talent is a very precious and tough to retain."

Explanatory video for Fieldomobify

Bangalore-Based FrontalRain Offers Food Supply Chain Software on the Cloud

India is considered as one of the largest consumers as well as producers of food products all over the world. The sector even plays a crucial role in the economic development of the country. According to the Ministry of Food Processing Industry, India, the market size of processed food is expected to see a threefold rise from Rs. 4,600 billion to Rs. 13,500 billion by next year. FrontalRain Technologies, a Bangalore based startup, is looking to cash on this growing opportunity in the SMB food sector of India by trying to deliver industry specific affordable software products on the cloud.

FrontalRain Technologies makes the food processing and agribusiness companies available with an affordable and on demand supply chain software. The startup has been co-founded by three senior executives from SAP who have a combined product and business development expertise of over 50 years in the enterprise software business. Sreeram P, Jayaram Srinivasan and Ravi Mandayam, the geniuses behind the company, started it with a vision of delivering a collaborative platform for a connected agribusiness ecosystem. The company follows its values of integrity, discipline, dedication, passion, customer focus and teamwork to achieve its mission of delivering an on demand agribusiness solution.

Companies in the processed food manufacturing space are facing a lot of problems like lack of a dependable and strong cold chain, road infrastructure and warehousing infrastructure on a daily basis which somewhere has a huge impact on their functioning and quality but, FrontalRain Technologies has taken a note of these problems and come up with various products to help the companies deal with these problems. The startup offers products like Rain+ Serve, Rain+ Grow, Rain+ Trade, Rain+ Make and Rain+ Move.

Rain+ is an offering by FrontalRain Technologies suitable for an SMB Food company which falls between the 50-500 crore segment and is growing at a fast pace. The product brings together commodity and industry specific business applications, mobile, intranet portal, ecommerce capabilities in a single integrated Information Technology platform which can be implemented within one week.

"Uniqueness of our offerings comes from the combination of industry specific functionality along with the rich mobile and collaboration capabilities at a compelling price point to an under served market" said Jayaram Srinivasan, co- founder & MD, FrontalRain Technologies in a statement to CIOReview.com.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8WimyBzldI?rel=0]

Bangalore-Based FrontalRain Offers Food Supply Chain Software on the Cloud

India is considered as one of the largest consumers as well as producers of food products all over the world. The sector even plays a crucial role in the economic development of the country. According to the Ministry of Food Processing Industry, India, the market size of processed food is expected to see a threefold rise from Rs. 4,600 billion to Rs. 13,500 billion by next year. FrontalRain Technologies, a Bangalore based startup, is looking to cash on this growing opportunity in the SMB food sector of India by trying to deliver industry specific affordable software products on the cloud.

FrontalRain Technologies makes the food processing and agribusiness companies available with an affordable and on demand supply chain software. The startup has been co-founded by three senior executives from SAP who have a combined product and business development expertise of over 50 years in the enterprise software business. Sreeram P, Jayaram Srinivasan and Ravi Mandayam, the geniuses behind the company, started it with a vision of delivering a collaborative platform for a connected agribusiness ecosystem. The company follows its values of integrity, discipline, dedication, passion, customer focus and teamwork to achieve its mission of delivering an on demand agribusiness solution.

Companies in the processed food manufacturing space are facing a lot of problems like lack of a dependable and strong cold chain, road infrastructure and warehousing infrastructure on a daily basis which somewhere has a huge impact on their functioning and quality but, FrontalRain Technologies has taken a note of these problems and come up with various products to help the companies deal with these problems. The startup offers products like Rain+ Serve, Rain+ Grow, Rain+ Trade, Rain+ Make and Rain+ Move.

Rain+ is an offering by FrontalRain Technologies suitable for an SMB Food company which falls between the 50-500 crore segment and is growing at a fast pace. The product brings together commodity and industry specific business applications, mobile, intranet portal, ecommerce capabilities in a single integrated Information Technology platform which can be implemented within one week.

"Uniqueness of our offerings comes from the combination of industry specific functionality along with the rich mobile and collaboration capabilities at a compelling price point to an under served market" said Jayaram Srinivasan, co- founder & MD, FrontalRain Technologies in a statement to CIOReview.com.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8WimyBzldI?rel=0]

Bangalore's 'Cropin' Is Applying Cloud Technology in Agribusiness Sector (Cloud-based Farm Management)

Agribusiness as a sector is still emerging and evolving in India and Cropin Technologies is one of the leading players in this sector. The startup has an aim of using the advancements in the field of Information Technology on the agribusiness sector. The company has been successful in achieving a safer and efficient food supply chain for consumers all over the world. It was able to do so by putting up a network of ERP and BI solutions that different stakeholders of the agriculture supply chain use and update on a regular basis. This process allows a greater visibility for every participant of the process and ensures safety and superior quality of food for the consumers.

With other advance IT technologies Cropin is using a cloud-based platform to empower the Indian farmer by making every crop traceable so that harvested crops meet best global agricultural practices.

Bangalore based Cropin Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd was founded by Krishna Kumar in August 2010. Krishna left his lucrative job at GE and soon Kunal Prasad a childhood friend and classmate of Kumar joined him after completing his MBA as COO. The startup was founded with an aim of making every farm traceable but within six months the company realized that this idea wasn't feasible as farmers who were the primary stakeholder in the supply chain did not have the means to pay them the amount that was required to sustain the tracing and tracking capabilities of the farm. So, the company decided to sell their idea of traceability of farms to the companies who procured from the farmers on regular basis. This idea became an instant hit and the CropIn wasn't only able to provide benefits to the buyers but also to the farmers and that too in a sustainable way.

The startup with its cloud and mobile based approach works to simplify the complex operational challenges in farm management. The CropIn solution connects companies with all their farms and provides mobility to Farm Field force.

As the solution provided by Cropin is cloud based, thus it is rendered on cell phones and farmers can easily use voice or video to communicate and collaborate with experts to report or to seek input on an issue. They can talk in their local language or better still, upload a picture taken from their cell phone to explain the issue at hand.

It also acts as a friendly platform for farm managers and farmers to interact and react with each other. The technology used allows extensive farm data collection. This data is further backed with rich analytics for quick decision making.

The company is looking forward to take its tracing capabilities to the next level. It is making use of big data and analytics in order to create next generation intelligent systems and agriculture practices which keep learning from the past. The company is also considering using the Google glass for reporting capabilities and information capture and also toying with UAVs to evaluate whether the solution can be envisaged to map the areas under cultivation more effectively.

Bangalore's 'Cropin' Is Applying Cloud Technology in Agribusiness Sector (Cloud-based Farm Management)

Agribusiness as a sector is still emerging and evolving in India and Cropin Technologies is one of the leading players in this sector. The startup has an aim of using the advancements in the field of Information Technology on the agribusiness sector. The company has been successful in achieving a safer and efficient food supply chain for consumers all over the world. It was able to do so by putting up a network of ERP and BI solutions that different stakeholders of the agriculture supply chain use and update on a regular basis. This process allows a greater visibility for every participant of the process and ensures safety and superior quality of food for the consumers.

With other advance IT technologies Cropin is using a cloud-based platform to empower the Indian farmer by making every crop traceable so that harvested crops meet best global agricultural practices.

Bangalore based Cropin Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd was founded by Krishna Kumar in August 2010. Krishna left his lucrative job at GE and soon Kunal Prasad a childhood friend and classmate of Kumar joined him after completing his MBA as COO. The startup was founded with an aim of making every farm traceable but within six months the company realized that this idea wasn't feasible as farmers who were the primary stakeholder in the supply chain did not have the means to pay them the amount that was required to sustain the tracing and tracking capabilities of the farm. So, the company decided to sell their idea of traceability of farms to the companies who procured from the farmers on regular basis. This idea became an instant hit and the CropIn wasn't only able to provide benefits to the buyers but also to the farmers and that too in a sustainable way.

The startup with its cloud and mobile based approach works to simplify the complex operational challenges in farm management. The CropIn solution connects companies with all their farms and provides mobility to Farm Field force.

As the solution provided by Cropin is cloud based, thus it is rendered on cell phones and farmers can easily use voice or video to communicate and collaborate with experts to report or to seek input on an issue. They can talk in their local language or better still, upload a picture taken from their cell phone to explain the issue at hand.

It also acts as a friendly platform for farm managers and farmers to interact and react with each other. The technology used allows extensive farm data collection. This data is further backed with rich analytics for quick decision making.

The company is looking forward to take its tracing capabilities to the next level. It is making use of big data and analytics in order to create next generation intelligent systems and agriculture practices which keep learning from the past. The company is also considering using the Google glass for reporting capabilities and information capture and also toying with UAVs to evaluate whether the solution can be envisaged to map the areas under cultivation more effectively.

Data Resolve Technologies, the only Indian company solving the problem of end point security using cloud

Started by IIT Kharagpur alumni, Data Resolve Technologies is an emerging player in the area of Cyber Security and Cyber Intelligence that helps businesses secure their data from theft & loss. Their award winning product 'inDefend Business' performs security analytics for the same. Data Resolve Technologies provides integrated end-point security from a single security integrated platform hosted on AWS. They are the only Indian company in this space offers this from cloud. "We are focused on addressing data theft, data loss with security analytics from on-premise and cloud," says a founding member, Dhruv Khanna. "Our product 'inDefend' can be used by Enterprises, SMB and End-Consumers," he adds. Dhruv Khanna, Devesh Mittal, Dipanjan Biswas and Nagarjun Kota are leading the team at Data Resolve Technologies.

A technology like that of Data Resolve is highly useful for all institutes to assess the risk of their business through Cyber Intelligence and achieve global standard of data security. "The core idea behind our technology is to find out actionable 'business intelligence' report by monitoring the exit routes of information from a computer like USB ports, CD-DVD drive, email and chat clients etc," says Devesh. "We can secure the loss and theft of critical business data through customized access policies," adds Dipanjan. The company is currently headquartered in New Delhi and has direct sales presence in Mumbai and Kolkata.



Here is a list of innovative services they provide:

1) Cyber Intelligence Reporting Service – Analytics
Based on the data gathered by inDefend, they are offering a reporting system called CI (Cyber Intelligence) Reporting for the management where you can get incident reports of Data Loss, Sensitive Online Search Activities and Internet Bandwidth Loss etc.

2) Cyber Seal-Assurance
Customers are provided the option of availing the Cyber Seal service for showcasing themselves as a data secure organization.

3) Real-Time SMS Alerts
Customers will be able to use the cyber seal on their company website. The customer will be able to receive SMS Notification for the most sensitive activities happening in the network.

4) Daily Email Reports
With the option of daily email reports, customer will be able to receive every day, an email containing summary of various sensitive activities detected within their organization network throughout the day.

5) URL Filtering
Monitor and restrict access to sensitive websites using real time URL classification.

6) Enforced Encryption
Enforce end users to copy data to removable storage devices in a hidden, password protected and encrypted vault.

7) Screen shot Monitoring
Periodic screenshots of end-user’s desktop activities

8) Shadow Logging
If the feature is on admin gets the exact copy of the outgoing mail.

9) Stealth Monitoring
Monitoring of any activity will be done in a covert way.

10) Messenger Monitoring
Content wise chat monitoring of the outgoing messages and attachments

"inDefend assist to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership. All monitoring and control done directly at the endpoint level, this reduces cost to implement and sustain. The Cloud based deployment allows monitoring and control, anytime and anywhere," says Nagarjun. This provides wider scope of monitoring and analytics capabilities to offer greater benefits than traditional DLP. Along with this, they also provide offline control and monitoring available for computers disconnected from organization network. It can handle bypass scenarios of data card, onion routing, tunneling, etc. very easily, which cannot be addressed by traditional DLP. It also monitors data leak from messengers, skype sessions, G-Talk etc.

The company was incubated in IIT Kharagpur in 2008. They have 70+ enterprise customers, 50000+ retail product downloads, Customers in 15+ industry segments and with presence in 13 Countries. Their inDefend business has suite of products all integrated into a single client, delivered from a single security dashboard. . inDefend offers end-point security for all mobile and end-point computing devices.

They are partnering with Amazon Web Services for hosting, working with leading IT MNCs as partners. They are a team of 25 Defenders heading the Data Resolve Team from Delhi & Mumbai and plan to augment their sales and marketing presence across US, MEA markets in next 6-12 months. They also look forward to build security adaptors for Apple and Windows Mobile. The company got funded by SRIC, IIT- Kharagpur. (SRIC or Sponsored Research & Industrial Consultancy, a special R & D Cell, was set up in 1982 as an interface between funding agencies and the Institute to handle sponsored research projects and industrial consultancy assignments). The team is mentored by Mr.Steffen Naumann, Mr. Kaustav Ghosh (Ex Senior Vice President of Business Development & Alliances, India of Connectiva Systems), Dr.Rajesh Sanghi, Mr.Jens Geitmann (Managing Director at TriStone Partners)

As a message for future entrepreneurs, Dhruv says "It's a different world with full of excitement, learning, personal sacrifice. And hire people who are ready to walk with you extra mile, give them tasks and monitor them."

Chennai start-up Nysym launches OPtacus - a cloud based solution for optical showrooms

Nysym, a product startup company based out of Chennai has developed OPtacus, a cloud based product solution for optical showrooms. oPtacus provides all the integrated solution related to billing systems, inventory management systems, store management and sales.

oPtacus is a result of research done at two different levels, one at a larger market level to underscore the advantages of cloud applications, and two at a focused market level to understand what exactly the target market needs.

Speaking about the product, Mr. Lakshman, Founder, Nysym says "oPtacus was born out of a thorough understanding of the optical industry and is perfectly aligned to the workflow of the optical industry. The architecture has been carefully designed to ensure it caters to the target market, and is also scalable to a larger global market. Migration has also been meticulously planned to ensure users can manage the entire process online with little or no help."

He further added "A cloud based solution provides some key features like a subscription model which users can unsubscribe from at any time, no infrastructure is needed except for a stable internet connection, hassle free sign up, access to all upgrades for the subscription period, etc. Since oPtacus is also compatible to tablets and mobiles, it gives users the liberty to basically manage their establishments on the run too. These, in our opinion, provide the perfect platform for retailers to migrate to more exciting technologies to make themselves more competitive."

Nysym is a Chennai based company providing software product solution to leverage cloud based retail management system in the retail industry. The company has been incepted in 2014 by Mr. Lakshman to provide better product solution to make life simpler, more productive and enjoyable for all stakeholders.

ParaBlu offers personal cloud and complete enterprise cloud file sync and share (EFSS)

ParaBlu is a 2012 Bangalore startup, which gives its user the ability to secure and control their digital data which is stored in existing public clouds such as Google drive, Dropbox etc. or on storage systems such as NAS. It allows the users to encrypt all the data stored in public clouds or any device.

ParaBlu offers it consumers Blu-Cloud, which is a new age personal cloud appliance. It stores and syncs the user’s file with complete privacy and security. The user can access his or her data anywhere, anytime over the internet. Blu-Cloud allows its users to store, sync, share, stream and search their data securely.

Blu-Cloud provides a full proof privacy and control system as the user’s entire data is stored in his or her personal cloud. The company doesn’t store or save any of the user’s data.

With Blu-Cloud, users can share files as links. It also provides them with the feature to password protect their files so that only intended users get a hold over their data. It even creates a minicloud and provides access to the user’s collaborators. The collaborator can access the files in the minicloud by simply logging into it. Minicloud acts as a sharing circle which the user creates to share data privately between work, friends and family etc.  Blu-Cloud has no storage restriction and it even works with an external hard drive.

Blu-Cloud is of great help to its users, it makes family sharing of media files, e-books, recipes, documents, and everything else very easy. It lets the user to create mini-clouds which lets each and every member of the family have his or her own shareable area. Now, passing around links and passwords have become a thing of past. Blu-Cloud allows its user to automatically upload and consolidate their videos, pictures and music from other devices and the users can also stream those media files back for their consumption. Blu-Cloud is possibly the easiest appliance to set up which sets up in less than 60 seconds.

ParaBlu has been founded by Kameshwaran Subramanian, who is an IIM Bangalore alumnus and holds several management positions in companies like IBM, Nokia and Robert Bosch. ParaBlu is Subramanian’s second startup.