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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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]
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