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When Sunil Vallath needs driving direc-tions, he just needs to look at a six-inch transparent device on his dash, display-ing maps, messages,
music, fuel level, mileage and more. It’s in his line of sight, but is transparent and doesn’t obstruct his view.
Vallath, 27, who founded Exploride last year in Kerala, is all set to start marketing the device which can be activated by voice or gesture. The device can talk back, and comes with a 2GB RAM, quad core proces-sor, infrared camera, Bluetooth and LTE.
Vallath, who works out of the Startup Village in Kochi, expects to start selling on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter next month. As his first target is the US, he’s opened an office in Maryland and has ap-pointed a US-based public relations agen-cy to conduct a campaign.
“The US is the best for customer valida-tion and funds. If the product is successful there, it is easy to market in other coun-tries,” says Vallath, who has a degree in computer science, started working in 2009 as a technical engineer in Wipro, and after three short stints in large companies, founded Exploride.
Kerala is seeing a rise in electronic hardware-based startups thanks to the proclivity of engineering students in the state to opt for the elec-tronics and electrical streams. Add to that the early success of Ro-hildev N’s Fin. Fin is a ring-like object worn on the thumb that can be used to control smart phones, laptops or car stereos using finger gestures. In March last year, it raised over $200,000 from 1,600 people globally, through the US-based crowdfunding platform Indi-egogo. Within months of that cam-paign, Rohildev’s RHL Vision attracted $2 million in funding from Kalaari Capital, money that was used to establish an office in the US and hire former Apple employees to make Fin compatible with Apple iOS.
“Rohildev’s success motivated a number of other entrepreneurs here. They
all suddenly developed the confidence that they could sell a hardware product suc-cessfully. Also, we had created an open ecosystem at Startup Village, which re-sulted in cross-pollination of ideas. Stu-dents, particularly, were able to go through many ideas before finally coming up with a practical one,” says Sanjay Vijayakumar, chairman of Startup Village.
He adds that typical startup accelera-tors, like the ones in Bengaluru, have three
to six-month programmes, which are insufficient for developing a
hardware product. On the other hand, the ventures
that joined Startup Vil-lage in its initial days have been getting free space, internet and electricity for the past three years.
“This helped them think long-term and
develop hardware prod-ucts,” says Vijayakumar,
who dropped out of col-lege to co-found MobME in
2005 in Thiruvananthapuram, a mobile value-added services ven-
ture that has won several Nasscom innova-tion awards and which in many ways pio-neered the startup culture in Kerala.
A host of hardware startups are chart-ing a path similar to Fin. MindHelix’s Rico allows you to insert an old smartphone into a plastic toy-like device and use it as
a cheap alternative to expensive home se-curity systems. It detects smoke, tempera-ture and movements inside a room. Mind-Helix raised $119,000 through a successful campaign on Kickstarter late last year.
Sectorqube’s smart microwave oven Maid (Make All Incredible Dishes) raised $124,000 on Kickstarter in December last year. Maid connects to a recipe store on the web, reads out instructions and suggests the optimal settings based on the number of servings.
Cochin University of Science and Tech-nology graduate Nijil Y’s Mashinga has developed a touchtable for corporates that can be used for marketing products or for creative brainstorming. Its clients: IFB, Federal Bank, two Delhi hotels and a school in Chennai.
Then there’s Rethin Sylvester’s Iret Guitar Enhancements, a student startup that makes affordable music gear like stompboxes and amplifiers. “All these were mostly imported earlier,” says Sylvester.
Aronin P and his friends have devel-oped industrial robotic manipulators to physically touch and test the responsive-ness of touchscreens. Their Sastra Robot-ics has an enviable list of clients – Bosch, HCL Infosystems and IITs in Bhubaneswar and Kharagpur. Bosch uses it to test the front panels of car infotainment systems, while HCL uses it to test printers.
“We had requirements coming from Malaysia, but as our team is fully engaged with existing clients, we have postponed
our expansion overseas for six months,” Aronin says.
Kallidil Kalidasan, founder & CEO of MindHelix, admits it’s not easy designing for Western markets. “You tend to be driv-en by Indian aesthetics. So you need to hire designers who understand Western cul-ture, design methodology, and the thought process. It is not an engineering challenge, but a design one,” he says.
Most are clear that the US has to be the initial target market. “When it comes to early adopters of consumer technology, US customers top the list,” says Rohildev. Sec-torqube co-founder Sabarish Prakash agrees: “Only those products which have been adopted in the West are being ac-cepted by Indians.”
Despite the difficulty and expense in-volved, Vijayakumar expects many more hardware product startups to emerge in Kerala. “We have just established a Fab Lab at Startup Village with the help of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This will make hardware prototyping and circuit board designing and printing a lot easier. We have also procured two 3D print-ers that can produce complicated moving parts,” he says. That could significantly reduce costs for startups.
People even trade cows and buffaloes
on our platform
Recently valued at $900 million, Pranay Chulet’s Quikr has become India’s biggest platform for people to trade in everything
from cars and apartments to sweets and pets
Sashank Rishyasringa met Gaurav Hinduja
when the two were do-ing their MBA degrees at Stanford. They shared a similar feeling of discontent in corporate jobs and wanted to return to India to start something of their own. They found a common thread among Indian small enterprises—all were struggling for fi nance. Thus was born Capital Float, an online platform to provide quick loans to SMEs through data analytics. The Sequoia-funded ven-ture is today a major provider of loans to sellers on the Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm, and EBay platforms.
Jayashree Nayak used to be the COO of a digital
agency called Half Cookie. As part of the job, she had
meetings in south Mumbai ca-fes and malls, after which she
usually ended up checking out products and shopping with
colleague and CEO, Rajesh Chokhani. She wanted to bring
the same window-shopping experience to an online plat-
form and started Sweet Couch with Rajesh in
2013. Sweet Couch aggregates products from retail sites, and unlike other e-comm portals, lays them in a format that indeed
gives a window-shopping feel.
EDUCATION TECH’S GETTING HOT
Innoviti, Bengaluru; swipe machine technology; founded by Rajeev Agrawal; $5 million from Catamaran Ventures, New India Investment Corporation
Mobikon, Pune; SaaS-based engagement platform; founded by Samir Khadepaun; $2.3 million from Jungle Ventures
Quikwallet, Mumbai; consumer mobile wallet app; founded by Mohit Lalvani, Yudhajit Nag Sen, Vinay Pinto and Suma Bhattacharya; $1.6 million from Snow Leopard Technology Ventures
JoybyNature, Delhi; online retail store; founded by Shailesh Mehta and Rahul Kumar; $1 million from Contrarian Vriddhi Fund, Mumbai Angels
Roadrunnr,Bengaluru;
on-demand local delivery service app
$11 millionfrom Sequoia, Nexus,
Blume Ventures
DONE DEALS PERSON OF THE WEEK
Russian entrepreneur and billionaire Yuri Milner, 53, is on numerous lists of the world’s most powerful/rich/influential people. He has invested in Facebook, Twitter,
Flipkart, Ola Cabs, Alibaba, Airbnb, Spotify and more, taking his personal fortune to more than $1 billion. If that wasn’t stratospheric success enough, on Monday, he announced—along with Stephen Hawking—that he would be investing at least $100 million over the next decade in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The Breakthrough Listen project is said to be the most comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond our planet. It will survey one million stars closest to the earth. Milner, who dropped out of a physics PhD in 1989, was named after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was the first to orbit the earth. Milner, for whom science has always been a passion, co-founded the Fundamental Physics Prize in 2012 which awards $3 million to physicists for research, far more than the value of a Nobel Prize ($1.2 million).
STARTREK
GOD’S OWN COUNTRY CHASES
SAFE RIDE: Exploride founder Sunil Vallath (right), with team members Rahul Agarwal (centre) and Salin Sunny (left), shows off a 3D printed dummy of the device they have developed for distraction-free driving
WHAT’S COOKING? Founders of SectorQube tinkering with a prototype of MAID, a smart microwave. (From left) Midhun Skaria, Biniyas V L, Nibu Alias, Ani Abraham Joy, Sabarish Prakash and Arjun Sarath; (below) Kerala government-supported Startup Village in Kochi
AMERICAN DREAM
Source: Tracxn!
OTHERS WHO RAISED FUNDSKetto ($700,000), Omnikart ($100,000),Instalively, Zenify, Zenradius, ZO Rooms
KICKSTARTFOR STARTUPS
For the last three years, the Kerala government has been giving startups
a hand and is especially encouraging of student entrepreneurship. Its Technology Startup Policy 2014 aims at incubating 10,000 technology product startups by 2020 and becoming one of the top five startup ecosystems in the world. “We did startup boot camps in engineering colleges and introduced incubators at the Technology Innovation Zone in Kochi. Startup Village is one of them,” says P H Kurian, principal secretary-IT, Kerala government. It has introduced a gap year for student entrepreneurs as well as grace marks and flexi attendance. These initiatives had an impact on the student community. “We received applications for 900 ideas from 7,000 students in three years. The 533 startups we incubated have created 2,890 new jobs,” says Sanjay Vijayakumar, chairman, Startup Village, promoted by the government and MobME Wireless Solutions. TNN
Entrepreneurs across Kerala are building electronic devices and software products with an eye on the US market — because that’s where they see clients and investors. And approval from America means the rest of the world will follow very fast
Mohit Kumarco-founder
Arpit Daveco-founder
EUREKA MOMENTS
SASHANK RISHYASRINGA: QUICK BUCKS JAYASHREE NAYAK: WINDOW SHOPPING
Funding to education technology companies globally is booming. Financing grew from $944 million in 2013 to $1.6 billion in 2014, a 71% increase. In the last four quarters, including Q2 2015, ed tech startups attracted $2.3 billion, a jump of 96%
compared to the previous four quarters. The second quarter of 2015 set a new high for ed tech financing, with $765 million in funding—equal to about 40% of the dollars going to education tech in all of 2014
BIGGEST DEAL IN Q2 2015
$100million
in China-based education app
developer Changingedu
BIGGEST DEAL IN Q1 2015
$186million
in education and training site
Lynda.com; venture was acquired by LinkedIn in Q2 2015 for $1.5 billion
BEST-FUNDED COMPANIES (2010 – Q2 2015)PLURALSIGHT | Online learning platform for software developers, IT specialists and creative technologists
DESIRE2LEARN | Integrated learning platform, partners with thought-leading organizations to improve learning through data-driven technology
ALTSCHOOL | It is building a network of micro-schools that offer personalized, child-centred learning experiences
17ZUOYE | Provider of services and products for primary mathematics and English
learning for students K-12
OPEN ENGLISH | Online school created to reinvent the English-language-learning experience
TUTORGROUP | Specializes in English training in Asia and Mandarin Chinese training for
global business professionals
UDEMY | Online education marketplace
CRAFTSY | Platform for people who want to gain knowledge and mastery of arts and crafts via online video courses
KNEWTON | Platform that continuously personalizes online learning content for individual students
KALTURA | Provider of open source online video platform, transforming the way people work, learn and entertain using online video
Most Active Investors (2010 – Q2 2015)NewSchools Venture Fund | Learn Capital |500 Startups | Kapor Capital | Accel Partners |Intel Capital
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Anand J & Sujit John | TNN
Tell us about your early life…I grew up in Rajasthan, in a very small mining town, about 80km north of Udaipur. Dad was working in the min-ing industry and the town had a popu-lation of just 10,000. These were zinc, lead and copper mines that go one to two miles deep into the earth. It is quite an experience to see the hole in the earth and descend into this entire world of dump trucks below…It is like a Legoland of sorts.
How did you get to IIT?Nobody in my school had taken the IIT entrance exam. I heard about it when I was in Class 12. It was diffi-cult for me to assess whether I would get it because there was nobody to exchange notes with. Then I joined Agarwal correspondence course for IIT and I got in.
You soon moved to the US…I moved to the US within six months of starting to work in India in P&G. I was there for a decade, mostly in man-agement consulting; always in New York City. At the time I spelt my name Pranaya. But the Americans could never get the pronunciation right. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of changing to a Western name. But I was tired after six years of explaining it. So I changed it to Pranay. I also learnt filmmaking in New York.
Did you make a film?Yes. Audiences were shifting towards interactive forms of entertainment. So I wanted to make a film that played like a video game, where audiences would feel they were part of the nar-rative and could decide outcomes. We wrote the technology so that the film could be played like a game. The story was about a hostage crisis happening in New York.
How did the film do?It took more time and money than we anticipated. We showed it in festivals and got good reviews. But it had to be watched online, and there was no way to distribute this film then. Perhaps now would be a good time to release it. I could build a company around this (laughs).
How did you think of Quikr?During my management consulting days, many of my clients were large media companies, including newspa-per businesses. The advertising used to be mostly classifieds, almost 70%. And this platform called Craigslist was taking over that market. The clas-sifieds revenue share of traditional media went down from 70% to 10% between 2000 and 2004. Quikr is in-spired by Craigslist. It is a classifieds portal that lets users meet on the plat-form. But in India, people still want to touch and feel, the trust level is low. So we let people haggle and negotiate and meet. There are also a lot of catego-ries like real estate, cars, jobs that you cannot do as e-commerce, but have to see the product. And so I started in 2008, but it coincided with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and it became very dif-ficult to raise funds. But such was its appeal that the business grew on its own.
What were some of the surprising elements of this growth?We saw people buying higher value items like cars. We expected only end consumers to list, but found electri-cians, plumbers, cooks and maids also listing on our platform. Small busi-nesses too got on to the platform to sell. We also have India-specific services, like astrology, which are extremely popular. Astrology was the first cate-gory to take paid listings.
Quikr is a collection of various city chapters. In Rajasthan, there will be listings for how to tie the safa (turban), in Punjab for the Bullet engine used as ploughs. People have started trading cows and buffaloes on our platform! And sellers are sometimes keen to know that the people who buy are going to look after the cows well. People sell sweets on the platform. When I get bored, I look at the kind of transactions happening on the platform and it is a reflection of where our society is head-ed. Consumers are aware of brands like Apple in small towns but can’t afford new phones and hence they come to Quikr to buy used ones.
How fast are you growing?The value of transactions happening on our platform has gone up four times in the last 12 months. We get 1.5 million transactions a month. About 50-55% of our transaction value comes from real estate. When people come to delete their listing, we ask them for the rea-son, and we ask them if they sold it on Quikr. We find that around 50% of the things listed on Quikr get sold on our platform itself; that is a big ratio. Our biggest competition is offline— people giving or selling their products to their maids or drivers or friends.
So
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SELLING FAST: Pranay Chulet, CEO, Quikr
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IN THE HOT SEATPRANAY CHULET
IIT-Delhi and IIM-Calcutta alumnusStarted career as engagement
manager in Mitchell Madison Group, advising clients in financial services and media
Was a principal in consultancy major Booz Allen Hamilton
Was an associate partner in PwC Consulting
Started Excellere to develop web-based educational products
Founded Quikr in 2008
QUIKR COUNT
30millionunique users a month
Present in
1,000 cities in India
Operates in 10 categoriesthat include mobile phones,
household goods, cars, real estate, jobs, services and education
Valued at
$900million
© C
orb
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16 THE TIMES OF INDIA, BENGALURUFRIDAY, JULY 24, 2015
