Delhi-based Blu Smart has raised $3 Mn angel round from the Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone’s family office Ka Entreprises, JITO Angel Network, Kalpavriksh Trust, Survam Partners, cofounder of Micromax Rajesh Agarwal, and the MD of Bajaj Capital Sanjiv Bajaj among other investors. 

Cofounded by Puneet Singh Jaggi, Anmol Singh Jaggi and Punit K Goyal, Blu Smart was initially launched in January 2019 as an electric cab-hailing platform. Later in June, the Delhi-based company has pivoted to offer subscription-based car rentals, ride-sharing on both electric cars and bikes, and shared the electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across Delhi NCR region. 

“Blu Smart has served over 20K customers since its launch in Delhi NCR and aims to serve 1 Mn customers in the coming months,” said Goyal.

In June, the EV ride-hailing startup has partnered with Mahindra Electric to onboard 70 Mahindra eVerito premium sedans in its cab fleet. It plans to add up to 500 Mahindra eVeritos by April 2020 and also expand to other densely populated cities such as Mumbai and Pune.

Further, the Deepika Padukone’s Ka Entreprises-backed company had planned to onboard 15K electric cars, 2500 chargers on its all-electric ride-sharing platform by 2021, the company said in a press statement. Blu Smart claims to be setting up DC fast-charging stations at Blu Smart Hubs and onboarding charging stations being set up by public and private companies. Through 2019, Blu Smart Charge network is said to add 100 smart-charging stations across all technologies including Bharat Charge, CCS and CHAdeMO. 

The current Blu Smart’s fleet includes Mahindra eVerito, Tata Tigor EV and Hyundai Kona Electric. The average for Blu Smart cars is around 200 kms per day for each car.  

Recently in August, it had also raised $2.2 Mn in seed funding led by Jain International Trade Organization (JITO) Angel Network and other angel investors. Further, Blu Smart is said to be in talks to raise its $25 Mn Series A round by early 2020 to fuel its expansion across Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Pune, and Hyderabad. Blu Smart also has plans to launch its all-electric mobility services in Singapore and Hong Kong by the second half of 2020. 

The Indian government has aimed for 30% EV penetration in the market by 2030, under its  National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP). To complement these plans, NITI Aayog has earlier recommended that all ride-sharing companies will have to transition to EVs from next year to achieve 2.5% electrification by 2021, 5% by 2022, 10% by 2023, before hiking it to 40% by April 2026.

In addition to competing with ride-hailing majors such as Uber and Ola, Blu Smart’s car subscriptions offering puts it head-on against competition such as Drivezy, and Zoomcar. Earlier this year, Ola was also reported to be planning subscription for luxury car rentals.

The post Deepika Padukone’s Family Office Invests In Electric Cab-Hailing Startup Blu Smart appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), on September 13, had written to the association of non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) seeking details of instances where the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms had to deny loans to potential customers due to regulatory restrictions.

The letter read, “The association is requested to furnish quantitative data, if any, with respect to P2P platforms on instances of partial funding of borrowers, creditworthy borrowers registered but not granted loans.”

RBI’s move comes after 16 licensed P2P lending startups wrote to the central bank, in August 2019, regarding the NBFC guidelines issued in 2018. The guidelines limited the amount of credit such lenders could offer customers to INR 10 Lakh.

Rajiv M Ranjan, secretary of the Association of NBFC Peer-to-Peer Lending Platforms, told ET that the “regulators [RBI] quizzing” comes as a positive response to the issues they had raised last month. Ranjan also added that in the current situation, it is important to bring the ground reality out in the open to give a breather to the industry.

The NBFC-Credit Crises

Ranjan, in a letter written last month, said, “In the last 18 months since the guidelines were announced, the biggest challenge being faced by the nascent industry is the lender limit of Rs 10 lakh. This single issue…is threatening the very existence of the industry.”

Moreover, the body had sought an immediate extension of the limit to INR 1 Cr for retail investors and allowing high net-worth individuals (HNI) to lend money through their platforms.

The letter also stated that P2P lending companies are losing INR 1 K on an average per loan for borrowers who avail at least INR 3 Lakh through the platform, given that the cost of acquiring retail lenders is around INR 4K.

The P2P lending platforms had been raising these demands since the announcement of these guidelines last year. In April 2019, the association of lenders had writing to RBI for the first time seeking similar relaxation.

According to Global Fintech Report Q1 2019, more than 1 Mn borrowers and 2 Mn lenders have transacted with lending platforms, with the overall exposure remaining at INR 350 Cr. As per DataLabs by Inc42 estimates, the credit demand in India is projected to be worth $1.41 Tn by 2022. The estimated growth rate in credit demand is 3.73% between FY17 and FY22.

However, the NBFC liquidity crisis, along with drying up of venture capital funds, is also a limiting factor for lending startups.

The post RBI Seeks Details Of Denied Loans From P2P Lending Platforms appeared first on Inc42 Media.

I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” They accomplished their goal, but at a huge, unanticipated cost: the processes and committees they designed ended up strangling innovation.

There’s a much better way.

An existing company or government organization is primarily organized for day-to-day execution of its current business processes or mission. From the point of view of the executors, having too many innovation ideas gets in the way of execution.

The Tidal Wave of Unfiltered Ideas

Pete Newell and I were working with a company that was getting its butt kicked from near-peer competitors as well as from a wave of well-funded insurgent startups. This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. Engineering continually felt overwhelmed. They were trying to keep up with providing the core services necessary to run the current business and at the same time deal with a flood of well-meaning but uncoordinated ideas about new features, technologies and innovations coming at them from all directions. It didn’t help that “innovation” was the new hot-button buzzword from senior leadership, and incubators were sprouting in every division of their company, it just made their job more unmanageable.

One of the senior engineering directors I greatly admire (who at one time or another had managed their largest technology groups) described the problem in pretty graphic terms:

“The volume of ideas creates a denial of service attack against capability developers, furthers technical debt, and further encumbers the dollars that should be applied towards better innovation.”

Essentially, the engineering organization was saying that innovation without a filter was as bad as no innovation at all. So, in response the company had hired a global consulting firm to help solve the problem. After a year of analysis and millions of dollars in consulting fees, the result was a set of formal processes and committees to help create a rational innovation pipeline. They would narrow down the proposed ideas and choose which ones to fund and staff.

Build the Wall

I took one look at the process they came up with and could have sworn that it was invented by the company’s competitors to throttle innovation.

The new innovation process had lots of paperwork – committees, application forms and presentations, and pitches. People with ideas, technology or problems pitched in front of the evaluation committee. It seemed to make sense to have have all the parties represented at the committee, so lots of people attended – program managers who controlled the budget, the developers responsible for maintaining and enhancing the current product and building new ones, and representatives from the operating divisions who needed and would use these products. Someone with an idea would fill out the paperwork justifying the need for this innovation, it would go to the needs committee, and then to an overall needs assessment board to see if the idea was worth assigning people and budget to. And oh, since the innovation wasn’t in this year’s budget, it would only get started in the next year.

Seriously.

As you can guess in the nine months this process has been in place the company has approved no new innovation initiatives. But new unbudgeted and unplanned threats kept emerging at a speed their organization couldn’t respond to.

At least it succeeded in not distracting the developers.

This was done by smart, well-intentioned adults thinking they were doing the right thing for their company and consultants who thought this was great innovation advice.

What went wrong here? Three common mistakes.

First, this company (and most others) viewed innovation as unconstrained activities with no discipline. In reality for innovation to contribute to a company or government agency, it needs to be designed a process from start to deployment.

Second, the company had not factored in that their technology advantage attrited every year, and new threats would appear faster than their current systems could handle. Ironically, by standing still, they were falling behind.

Third, this company had no formal innovation pipeline process before proposals went to the committee. Approvals tended to be based on who had the best demo and/or slides or lobbied the hardest. There was no burden on those who proposed a new idea or technology to talk to customers, build minimal viable products, test hypotheses or understand the barriers to deployment. The company had a series of uncoordinated tools and methodologies as activities, but nothing to generate evidence to refine the ideas, technology or problems as an integrated innovation process (though they did have a great incubator with wonderful coffee cups). There were no requirements for the innovator. Instead the process dumped all of these “innovations” onto well-intentioned, smart people sitting in a committee who thought they could precompute whether these innovation ideas were worth pursuing.

An Innovation Process and Pipeline

What the company needed was a self-regulating, evidence-based innovation pipeline. Instead of having a committee vet ideas, they needed a process that operated with speed and urgency, and innovators and stakeholders who curated and prioritized their own problems/idea/technology.

All of this would occur before any new idea, tech or problem hit engineering. This way, the innovations that reached engineering would already have substantial evidence – about validated customer needs, processes, legal, security and integration issues identified — and most importantly, minimal viable products and working prototypes already tested. A canonical Lean Innovation process inside a company or government agency would look something like this:

Curation

As the head of the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, Pete Newell built a battle-tested process to get technology solutions deployed rapidly. This process, called Curation, gets innovators to work through a formal process of getting out of their offices and understanding:

Internal and External Survey

• Other places the problem might exist in a slightly different form
  • Internal projects already in existence
  • Commercially available solutions
• Legal issues
• Security issues
• Support issues

Use Cases/Concept of Operations

• Who are the customers? Stakeholders? Other players?
• How did they interact? Pains/Gains/Jobs to be done?
• How does the proposed solution work from the viewpoint of the users?
• What would the initial minimal viable products (MVPs) – incremental and iterative solutions – look like?

In the meantime, the innovators would begin to build initial minimal viable products (MVPs) – incremental and iterative tests of key hypotheses. Some ideas will drop out when the team itself recognizes that they may be technically, financially or legally unfeasible or they may discover that other groups have already built a similar product.

Prioritization

One of the quickest ways to sort innovation ideas is to use the McKinsey Three Horizons Model. Horizon 1 ideas provide continuous innovation to a company’s existing business model and core capabilities. Horizon 2 ideas extend a company’s existing business model and core capabilities to new customers, markets or targets. Horizon 3 is the creation of new capabilities to take advantage of or respond to disruptive opportunities or disruption. And we added a new category, Horizon 0, which defers or graveyards ideas that are not viable or feasible.

At the end of this prioritization step, the teams meet another milestone: is this project worth pursing for another few months full time? A key concept of prioritization across all horizons is that this ranking is not done by a remote committee, but by the innovation teams themselves as an early step in their discovery process.

Solution Exploration/Hypotheses Testing

The ideas that pass through the prioritization filter enter an I-Corps incubation process. I-Corps was adopted by all U.S. government federal research agencies to turn ideas into products. Over a 1,000 teams of our country’s best scientists have gone through the program taught in over 50 universities. (Segments of the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence community have also adopted this model as the Hacking for Defense process.)

This six- to ten-week process delivers evidence for defensible, data-based decisions. It tests the initial idea against all the hypotheses in a business model (or for the government, the mission model) canvas. This not only includes the obvious — is there product/market (solution/mission) fit? — but the other “gotchas” that innovators always seem to forget. The framework has the team talking not just to potential customers but also with regulators, and people responsible for legal, policy, finance, support. It also requires that they think through compatibility, scalability and deployment long before this gets presented to engineering. There is now another major milestone for the team: to show compelling evidence that this project deserves to be a new mainstream capability and inserted into engineering. Or does it create a new capability that could be spun into its own organization? Or does the team think it should be killed?

Incubation

Once hypothesis testing is complete, many projects will still need a period of incubation as the teams championing the projects need to gather additional data about the application as well as may need to mature as a team before they are ready to integrate with a horizon 1 engineering organization or product division. Incubation requires dedicated leadership oversight from the horizon 1 organization to insure the fledgling project does not die of malnutrition (a lack of access to resources) or become an orphan (no parent to guide them).

Integration/Refactoring

Trying to integrate new, unbudgeted and unscheduled Horizon 1 and 2 innovation projects into an engineering organization that has line item budgets for people and resources results in chaos and frustration. In addition, innovation projects not only carry technical debt, but also organizational debt.

Technical debt describes what happens when software or hardware is built quickly to validate hypotheses and find early customers. This quick and dirty development results in software that can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Organizational debt is all the people/culture compromises made to “just get it done” in the early stages of an innovation project. You clean up technical debt through refactoring, by going into the existing code and restructuring it to make the code stable and understandable. You fix organizational debt by refactoring the team, realizing that most of the team who built and validated a prototype may not be the right team to take it to scale but is more valuable starting the next innovation initiative.

Often when an innovation pipeline runs head-on into a process-driven execution organization, chaos and finger-pointing ensues and adoption of new projects stall. To solve this problem we acknowledge that innovation projects will need to refactor both technical and organizational debt to become a mainstream product/service. To do so, the innovation pipeline has engineering set up a small refactoring organization to move these validated prototypes into production. In addition, to solve the problem that innovation is always unscheduled and unbudgeted, this group has a dedicated annual budget.

Disruptive Products

Some products and services going through the pipeline create new capabilities or open new markets. These Horizon 3 disruptive innovations need to separate from the existing development organizations and be allowed to grow and develop in physically separate spaces. They need the support and oversight of the CEO.

—

Fast forward a year, and slowly, like turning a supertanker, the innovation pipeline we proposed is taking shape. The company has adopted Lean language and process: curation, prioritization, three horizons, I-Corps – business/mission model canvas, customer development and agile engineering.

Lessons Learned

• Every large company and government agency is dealing with disruption
• Most have concluded that “business as usual” can’t go on
• Yet while the top of the organization gets it, and the innovators on the bottom get it, there has been no relief for the engineering groups trying to keep the lights on
• Innovation isn’t a single activity; it is a process from start to deployment
• In “execution engines,” committees and broad stakeholder involvement make sense because experience, knowledge, and data from the past allow better decision-making
• In “innovation engines” there isn’t the data to decide between competing ideas/projects (since nobody’s been in the future), so the teams need to gather facts outside their cubicle or building quickly
• A self-regulating, evidence-based Lean Innovation process will deliver continuous innovation and disruptive breakthroughs with speed and urgency

[This post by Steve Blank first appeared on the official website and has been reproduced with permission.]

The post How Companies Strangle Innovation appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Madras High Court has reportedly asked WhatsApp to confirm that it is complying with India’s Information Technology Act, according to a media report which cited the court order. This order is said to have come after Tamil Nadu government accused the social media platform of not cooperating with the police investigation.

The report noted the order saying, “This Court has also put a specific query…as to whether the said social media has taken a specific stand in one of the replies as to the full compliance of the provisions of Information Technology Act and rules framed thereunder.”

It was further reported that the senior counsel (for WhatsApp) is unable to respond immediately and also “prays for some accommodation to find out as to whether any affidavit has been filed to that effect.” 

WhatsApp Traceability Case

With 400 Mn monthly active users, India is the largest market for WhatsApp. Statistically, four out of five smartphone users are using the instant messaging app. With zero to minimum censorship on the platform, it has been used to spread fake news and misinformation, leading to mob lynchings and other internal security issues in the country.

The WhatsApp traceability issue and linking of Aadhaar with social media platforms are currently being heard in the Supreme Court (SC). The original petition was filed in the Madras High Court (HC) in July 2018, demanding to link social media platform with Aadhaar. The Madras HC had expanded the ambit of the case to include tracing the origin of “objectionable” messages on WhatsApp.

Meanwhile, WhatsApp has refused to give in because chats are end-to-end encrypted and it would hamper the privacy of the users. The instant messaging app has also maintained that they will have to rework the fundamentals of the app to include these changes.

Earlier this month, Facebook representatives met with the home minister Amit Shah, national security advisor Ajit Doval and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to discuss the social media company’s stance on the traceability issue. 

Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communication Nick Clegg had suggested at this meeting that the platform can incorporate the use of metadata and machine intelligence to deal with the traceability issues. Under metadata, Facebook offered basic details such as call duration of “lawfully” identified the user, among others.

The VP also offered to harness WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook linkages to help law enforcement agencies. A Facebook spokesperson reportedly told ET that the Clegg’s attempts are a way to ensure the safety of Indian users while maintaining the privacy of WhatsApp users. However, the government did not agree to the company’s proposals.

The post Madras HC Asks WhatsApp To Prove Its Compliance With IT Act appeared first on Inc42 Media.

When it comes to early-stage seed funding, the Indian startup ecosystem is going through a slowdown. The ruling government has boasted about setting up an INR 20K Cr seed fund by 2024 on multiple times, but with early-stage angel and seed investment drying up, the government’s ambitious plan looks unsustainable at this time.

If we look at the data around startup launches, India has seen over 49K startups founded till date, of which, 10K shut shop (as of September 2018), with a majority of these shutdowns taking place at the seed stage, often called the most crucial stage of the startup life-cycle.

Based on research by DataLabs by Inc42, it can be observed that the number of startups funded at the seed stage plunged by 39.74% to 329 in 2018, when compared to the pre angel tax era of 2017, where around 546 seed-stage startups were funded. And 2019 was no different than last year. The data further shows that the count of startups funded at the seed stage in H1-2019 was 38.92% lower than the half-yearly average of 219 from 2014-2018.

In such an investment climate, startups and entrepreneurs are finding it harder to get investors on board, while investors are taking fewer risks. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Early-stage funds such as SEA Fund are continuing to back startups at seed and early stages, which is going against the trend of investments reserved for growth-stage startups. And startups could find the key to getting seed funding through the investment outlook of such funds, which still have faith in the seed-stage ecosystem.

SEA Fund: Helping Early-Stage Founders Execute

Talking to Inc42 recently, SEA Fund managing partners Manoj Kumar Agarwal and Mayuresh Raut said the fund is all about finding the right kind of founders. “The stage at which we invest founders need help in executing, the financial engineering aspects take over once they have acquired a certain size and we believe this plays to our strengths.”

An early-stage fund with a mandate to invest up to $300K in multiple tranches, SEA Fund — short for ‘Salamander Excubator Angel (SEA) Fund’ — has made six investments in early-stage startups, with the latest one being fraud investigation startup AdvaRisk, where it participated with investors such as Sprout Venture Partners, Unicorn Ventures, Indian Angel Network (IAN) and marquee angel investors. With an average ticket size of $80K, SEA Fund is on the verge of closing two more deals, the duo told Inc42.

Mumbai-based AdvaRisk’s AI-driven platform is solving a major problem in the Indian lending and banking context at present. That of fraud prevention, detection and recovery in the loan portfolio of digital lending companies. With many lending companies now coming under the scanner over loan defaults, this tool could help bring in efficiency in the credit market, even as technology changes the credit models.

“Our mission is to help the next set of technical founders, with small amounts of early capital in getting to market to build efficient and scalable businesses.”

SEA Fund started investing earlier last year with its first two investments coming in the pre-series round for content discovery platform Wigzo. Raut and Agarwal admitted that it was not a particularly early deal, but since then its investments have been relatively early on in startups such as Clootrack, Finsall, Bestdoc and AdvaRisk. “We expect all other portfolio startups to raise the next round in the next six to 12 months,” Raut added. SEA Fund has also initiated work on a larger second fund which would get operational in 2020.

In its next phase of investments, SEA Fund is evaluating an AI-based enterprise SaaS company, a sports tech venture and also a couple of interesting fintech ventures, which the duo would not name due to confidentiality reasons. “They are all Pre-Series A and have raised some money from angel investors. Fintech and the whole India stack is another area that will be a focus area. We have two investments in this sector and will continue to deploy disproportionate sums in this space.”

Finding The Investor-Founder Fit

According to Agarwal, the key to SEA Fund’s investments have been in identifying the right founders that have worked on the ground and have the market data on which they build their products and services. But it’s also about seeing the other parts of the business, such as the team and the knowledge quotient.

“We choose to bet on people. We look for founders who possess proprietary knowledge and are working on a problem we understand. teams that have an interdisciplinary mix, people with an indistinguishable flame that usually comes from some sort of adversity and an indistinguishable drive that they want to prove other people wrong,” he said.

To explain the philosophy better, Raut added that startups could either be innovating in one direction or innovating in such a manner that it transcends technologies, domains, expertise and skills. Put simply, it’s all about the impact that the startup can have on the ecosystem, society and the market.

“Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. The rewards for this are fairly predictable. Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions when diverse skill sets, cultures, disciplines and industries intersect.”

Agarwal and Raut were both quite clear that SEA Fund is looking for startups with founders that have already experienced the entrepreneurial life and are taking a second or third stab at it. “Startups have the odds stacked against them and given the nature of the beast, there are limited stabs that investors can take at being successful.”

That’s why the fund’s focus is on returning founders with non-obvious market opportunities. Raut added that returning founders bring experience from their successes and failures, and have gone through a trial by fire.

Backing Startups With “India For India” Play

Another key for startups at an early stage is identifying how large the market is for their products or services. Agarwal said that going beyond this, the timing for products is also crucial. And sometimes the idea may not be right for the time being, but it could have a good shot in the future and could disrupt the market. The first clear marker for SEA Fund is the domestic market-fit.

“We value an India for India play that can be scaled to similar markets initially, and subsequently globally. Healthcare, fintech, agritech, media, hardware and embedded systems are some of the industries that we have invested in or will in the future. We are also looking at how machine learning and deep technology are deployed to build startups that operate in the enterprise and consumer space.”

Coming to the question of seed-stage funding and the crunch of capital, Raut added that the government’s efforts such as Atal Incubators and Fund of Funds, MSME initiatives have enabled the rise of the ecosystem. “A lot more needs to be in the area of taxation both in terms of incentivising investing in startups in the form of tax benefits and also in the form of long-term capital gain. We expect positive movement in this space in the next year or two,” Raut added about the government’s policies.

India’s mature software industry and IT services legacy mean young professionals have handled extremely demanding customers using cutting-edge technologies. This has also enabled this cohort to identify gaps in the market. “Mid-career professionals are now branching out on their own and building products that can be used to tackle problems unique to India and at the same time, taken to the world. The frictionless nature of the Internet has led to centralisation and gate-keeping in the consumer space [by leading players], even as it has led to a dramatic rise in competition in the enterprise space.”

According to Agarwal and Raut, these two factors are a precursor to the expected boom in the enterprise SaaS space, which is underscored by the rise of Druva and Icertis to the unicorn club this year. “We have two investments in this space [enterprise SaaS] and will continue to invest more here. This is very exciting for us.”

Disclaimer: SEA Fund is an investor in Ideope Media Private Limited, which owns and operates Inc42.

The post With AdvaRisk Investment, SEA Fund Continues Backing Early-Stage Startups With “India-For-India” Plays appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The ministry of information and broadcasting (I&B) has decided to set up a model for the certification of online video streaming content after Diwali amid discontent among religious groups regarding the same. Last month, I&B minister Prakash Javadekar had met members of the film industry and Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) at the film industry meet.

At the meeting, he announced that the I&B ministry, along with the ministry for electronics and information technology (MeitY), had decided to organise a meeting with stakeholders — representatives from OTT platforms, members of civil society, the technical community, media, ISPs, and legal expert— to discuss regulations and certification of the online content.

However, the government cannot regulate online content as video streaming platforms do not come under the Cinematograph Act of 1952. Therefore, these OTT platforms do not require certification from CFBC or any other body.

In a response to public interest litigation (PIL), the Karnataka High Court, in March, had issued a notice seeking these video streaming platform to be brought under the act. The Karnataka High Court had also urged the ministry to speed up the action on online content.

To ensure streaming platforms voluntarily adopted a self-regulatory Code of Best Practices, nine OTT platforms had adopted a “self-regulation” policy under the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), earlier this year. These platforms included Netflix, ALTBalaji, Hotstar, Voot, ZEE5, Arre, SonyLIV, Reliance Jio and Eros Now.

Shows Created ‘Suspicion And Distrust’ For Hinduism?

The stress on the regulation of online content comes after some religious groups had expressed their concerns over Netflix’s original series Leila. According to the religious groups, the show has created “suspicion and distrust” for Hinduism and “maligned its symbols”.

Besides Leila, the religious organisations have also been unhappy about Zee5’s The Final Call and Kafir, and Netflix’s opinion-based comedy talk show The Patriot Act hosted by comedian Hasan Minhaj, who, in his show, had talked about the Indian Lok Sabha Elections 2019 and the Kashmir Issue.

According to the Ficci-EY media and entertainment industry report 2019, paid video subscribers grew from around 7 million in 2017 to 12-15 million in 2018, while video subscription revenues grew almost four times in 2018 to ₹13.4 billion.

With the government looking forward to regulating the online content, the real problem is not just limited to the OTT platforms, but for the viewers who pay to watch unfiltered quality content online, as well.

The post I&B Ministry To Set Up Certification Model For Video Streaming Platforms appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Gurugram-based fintech platform OfBusiness has raised its next round of growth capital from existing and new investors.

According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings accessed by Inc42, the company in a resolution passed on September 17 floated an offer to raise INR 242.35 Cr ($34.2 Mn) in Series D funding. The company is offering 3,632 Series D CCPS of INR 100 per share with a premium of INR 6,48,902 per share and 105 equity shares of INR 10 per share with a premium of INR 6,48,992.

The company is offering Series D shares to Falcon Edge India, Matrix Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. This investment was first alerted by data intelligence platform, Paper.vc.

In separate filings over the next days, the company has raised funds from these investors:

• Falcon Edge India picked up 400 Series D CCPS worth INR 25.9 Cr
• Matrix Partners India Investment Holdings picked up 5 equity shares and 22 Series D CCPS worth INR 32.45 Lakh and INR 1.42 Cr, respectively
• Norwest Ventures Partners picked up 100 equity shares and 3,210 Series D CCPS worth INR 6.4 Cr and INR 208.32 Cr, respectively

The company filings further showed that in September, it has issued ESOPs to 13 employees under its ESOP Plan 2016. Prior to this round, the company has raised over $49 Mn from multiple investors such as Matrix, Zodius Capital, Patni Group’s Apoorva Patni, Ola cofounder Bhavish Aggarwal, Quikr cofounder Pranay Chulet and Limeroad cofounder and CTO Prashant Malik among others.

OfBusiness: Profitability And More

OfBusiness was founded in 2015 by Asish Mohapatra, former VC at Matrix Partners; Bhuvan Gupta, ex-vice president of engineering at Snapdeal; and Ruchi Kalra, former McKinsey partner. The company is a SME financing platform which creates additional value with its raw material fulfillment engine and new opportunities platform.

The company website shows that it has supported over 1000 Cr business, has over 1100 clients and more than 100 suppliers. During the last fundraise, the company had said that it has about 30% of the borrowing entities being in the infrastructure business with an annual turnover between $731K- $14.6 Mn (INR 5-100 Cr).

Ashish Mohapatra claimed to have disbursed about 60% of its loans without any collateral. For collaterals, the company relies on bank guarantees or letters of credit from lenders. “Our interest rates hover around 1.5% per month, and because of our value proposition to these enterprises, we have been able to restrict bad loans to around 0.5%,” he added.

The company filings show that on a consolidated level, the company reported a profit of INR 97.12 Lakh in FY18, as compared to INR 1425.6 Cr loss in FY17. This was the result of doubling its revenue as well as expenses between FY18 and FY17.

On a standalone basis, the company reported a revenue of INR 397.77 Cr, with expenses of INR 398.92 Cr, thus reporting a loss of INR 114.3 Lakh.

SME Lending In India

The opportunity in the Indian SME lending market is huge. According to a May 2019 IBEF report, the public deposits of NBFCs increased from $293.78 Mn in FY19 to $4.95 Bn (INR 319.05 Bn) in FY18, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.86%.

As per a survey conducted by BCG and Google in 2018, 23% of consumers in India have availed of retail loans digitally. Another interesting fact presented in this report says SME loans and personal loans have the highest digital influence as well as purchase rate. These insights address an interesting trait of the consumer behaviour of the digital lending landscape in India i.e. the high readiness of people with a digital footprint towards the adoption of digital lending in the country.

DataLabs by Inc42 said that between 2015 and Q1 2019, the total investment in Indian fintech startups was $7.62 Bn with a total deal count of 478. Out of the total funding, 25.49% ($1.94 Bn) investment came in lending tech startups.

Some of the leading lending startups include Indifi, Kissht, StashFin, Ftcash etc.

The post OfBusiness Raises $34 Mn Series D Funding From Norwest, Others appeared first on Inc42 Media.

At the time when the Indian government has been working to digitise various services and the internet industry is picking up the pace to reach more audience, India’s cheap internet plans haven’t helped its global stance much.

According to August analysis of global internet speed by Ookla, internet testing, data and analysis company, the global average of mobile internet downloads is 28.02 Mbps and for fixed broadband it is 66.53 Mbps for downloads.

India has been ranked 131st and 70th, with 10.65 Mbps speed of downloads for mobile internet and 31.59 Mbps for fixed broadband internet downloads respectively.

For mobile internet speed, South Korea topped the list with 111 Mbps followed by Australia, Qatar, Norway and UAE with 66.45 Mbps, 65.62 Mbps, 65.35 Mbps and 64.11 Mbps respectively.

In terms of fixed broadband, Singapore led the list with a speed of 193.90 Mbps, followed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Romania and Taiwan with 161.17 Mbps, 160 Mbps, 131.22 Mbps and 129.43 Mbps respectively.

Ookla’s 2019 Global speed index report further noted that Indian internet speeds lag behind the world despite a 16.3% YOY increase in mobile and a 28.5% increase in fixed broadband.

Interestingly, according to Ookla’s World’s Internet In 2018 report, fixed broadband internet services and mobile data services in India saw some improvement in 2018 when compared with 2017, but there may still be miles to go for the country before it ranks among the best in the world.

The Ookla report emphasised that global internet speeds are improving on average and 5G and gigabit are compounding those advances where available. “However, not all countries are benefitting equally. We’ll be interested to see how 5G continues to push mobile speeds in the next year and also whether 5G Wi-Fi becomes a game-changer for fixed broadband,” the report added.

In India, the government’s continuous impetus for internet penetration through the Digital India programme, private sector initiatives such as Google Wi-Fi at 400 railway stations, Vodafone’s Super Wi-fi coupled with the entry of Reliance Jio 4G services have drastically brought down the cost of internet subscription. This has been instrumental to the growth of internet users in India.

However, when it comes to consumption of internet, speed continues to be a major challenge. As the country increasingly talks about internet use and reliance for the growth, how long does speed index sees a downfall remains to be seen.

The post Cheap Data But Woeful Speeds: The Two Sides of India’s Internet Story appeared first on Inc42 Media.

The Inc42 & AWS series — Scaling From 1 To 10 — continues with a closer look at Delhi-NCR-based healthcare management solutions startup Innovaccer.

For startups, funding and leadership do go a long way in ensuring success and keeping the business going. But more often than not, even despite having a brilliant founding team and the right set of early investors, businesses fail because of the wrong timing or if they choose the wrong market for their products or services.

That’s where you hear about the infamous pivot. A lot of companies might claim to have pivoted from one model to another, or one market to the next in the search for growth, but very few actually manage to achieve that elusive product-market fit, which is so crucial for startups.

This conundrum is amplified for SaaS platforms and software solutions as these cater to a wide variety of enterprises and use-cases. So finding a niche can often take years — something that healthcare SaaS startup Innovaccer has grappled with in its initial days.

While Innovaccer founders Abhinav Shashank, Kanav Hasija and Sandeep Gupta were clear that their tech startup would use data to empower enterprises and businesses, it was not just about creating a product with fancy-looking UI that would attract investors. For them, it was about creating something that would still matter in the next 10-15 years.

Big Data was coming up in a big way around 2015 and this was the opportunity that the trio wanted to tap into. Hasija, who is the chief technology officer, at Innovaccer recalled, “We knew the key was to identify the macro trend and capitalise on it. And for us, the macro trend was that the cost of digital data storage was going down by 50% year-on-year. But the data management technology market was only increasing by around 14% at that time.”

This mismatch in data storage prices and the potential of the data management market came at a time when the data boom was just starting. Innovaccer was founded in 2014 and at the time India only had around 250 Mn internet users. On a global level, data was unstructured and Big Data technologies had just started to gain traction as businesses looked to organise this data to gain insights and actionable analytics.

As part of Inc42 & AWS’s latest series — Scaling From 1 to 10 — we caught up with Hasija to understand how Innovaccer went about innovating for the healthcare market and solving big problems.

Innovaccer Taps Into Healthcare Big Data 

The slow growth for data management was a gap Hasija and the other cofounders thought would exist for the next 10 years. “So we wanted to keep our focus on that gap. And we asked how do we build upon Big Data technologies to create a data platform and provide enterprises and companies with the insights that we can from unified data.”

At this point, Innovaccer went ahead and tried to find its product-market fit in various sectors in the enterprise world. In enterprise technology, often the key is to identify the product-market fit and fail fast and learn fast. And Innovaccer failed fast and frequently enough before finding its niche.

In the early days, it started exploring the market fit in the business school world and organising data for business school professors which would help them gain insights from different public and private data sets.

“We were the leaders in the space. But we soon realised that the space is too small. So we pivoted towards the corporate world, the Fortune 1000 companies, and work with customers like Disney, NASA, Harley Davidson and more. Here we realised that unlike AWS which is a horizontal tech platform, the data platform cannot sustain in this horizontal and it has to be verticalised,” Hasija emphasised.

That’s where Innovaccer’s growth story actually starts. Hasija said that in the mature markets, healthcare was going through a big change around 2015-16, and Innovaccer was certain that this change would take on an enormous front in the next 10 years, in South Asia and Southeast Asia, the two most populous growth markets.

Simplifying Healthcare Through Data 

But before it can even focus on working with healthcare providers in India, Innovaccer has to play a role in solving one of the big hurdles. In India, data is often unorganised, disparate, in multiple languages and in some cases erroneous.

So in the context of the Indian healthcare or healthtech market, much of the innovation is around improving access to healthcare through the use of technology. This explains why Innovaccer is focussed on the US market for its healthcare data platform. In the US market, the problem is not about data, but about the cost of healthcare, and with data management and processing, Innovaccer is able to reduce the costs for providers and availers.

“At that time, a US citizen had to choose between paying the mortgage for his house or paying for healthcare and insurance premiums. The cost was spiralling up. And the cost can only go down if the right people have the right information at the right time within the healthcare ecosystem, which is where this data platform came in and achieved that.”

Innovaccer’s Big Data SaaS offering focusses on supporting healthcare providers and institutions accelerate delivery of services by making powerful decisions based on data-driven predictions.

Its healthcare data platform has been used by more than 10,000 healthcare providers, touching the lives of over 10 Mn patients in the $3.9 Tn US healthcare market. The repository essentially collects raw data scattered everywhere, integrates it, normalises it and parses it through Innovaccer’s algorithms to provide trends and predictions to hospitals and healthcare providers to take decisions based on structured, consumable and ready-to-use data.

Healthcare Data Rides On The Cloud 

“Everyone’s realising that outsourcing cloud management is the way to go. Because that’s not your core business; it’s not cloud management. And it’s going to be costly in the first year, when you have to really work with platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to reduce those costs over time. And you will eventually get to a good break-even point or profitability on just the cloud cost.”

Innovaccer has been working with Amazon Web Services since late 2015. The first two years, Hasija claimed, were more about understanding how to make the most optimal use of cloud computing, offering the service more efficiently to its customers and in a more automated way.

“AWS is amortising your dev-ops costs, it’s amortising your security infrastructure costs, and absorbing those costs through the service it offers your business,” Hasija said, and added that using features such as reserving instances or through spot or on-demand instances to manage user load depending on the stage the business is in. “These have helped Innovaccer reduce infrastructure costs by roughly 35% over the past year,” Hasija said.

The more advanced services and technologies that AWS offers are geared towards startups or companies in the scale-up phase, which Innovaccer started exploring in 2018, Hasija added. And this partnership helped Innovaccer make optimal use of the cloud, just as its adoption was also growing across healthcare.

With its integrated platform, Innovaccer has created a comprehensive database that includes information such as clinical data, hospital operation processes and insurance claims. Data can help hospitals recognise high-risk patients that need more immediate attention and offer actionable insights at an early stage in the treatment.

Additionally for health insurance, claims processing is another important area where data analytics has reduced turnaround time and patient anxiety. But here data has to be stored securely and confidential patient data has to be treated with utmost care.

Working with AWS allows Innovaccer to build a more secure data platform for its customers, and Hasija hopes that one day India can take a mature stance on data protection. “The key is to first create a regulation on digitising this data in healthcare to start with and put protections in place at that stage. At the end of the day, healthcare is a professional service. And in healthcare there is a lot of human-generated data, which tends to be more varied, personal and a lot more unstructured than in other industries. To really save lives. And to really make people healthy, you need that data in a structured way.”

Creating A Data-Driven Culture

Hasija told us that when it comes to healthcare data — more so than data from other sectors — the need for businesses is to be a customer-obsessed organisation. “Not just solving customer’s problems but making them heroes is our core DNA. So our engineers are not simply thinking about building a platform; they are thinking about how this platform or product will really help our customers become heroes, by solving inefficiencies in healthcare and drawing in more business. So that’s something that was one of the first mantras for Innovaccer and customer obsession is across the company today.”

But this hard-nosed approach is tempered with empathy, which Hasija said is a “very important core value” for Innovaccer. Even as the team has grown to beyond 300 employees, the attempt has been to bring in empathy to problems, whether they are for customers or internally. “In big companies, there is a lot of friction between teams — the engineering team might blame product management over the right requirements. The sales team might say the customer success team is not helping retain customers. So it’s really important to have empathy and compassionate leadership to figure these things out.”

The empathy goes hand in hand with transparency. The Innovaccer HQ in Noida has flexible seating space, open layout and plenty of light flowing through the bays and cubicles. The expectation of transparency goes both ways for employees as well as the founders and the management. Hasija said there are no work timings — teams set their own schedules — and the overarching philosophy is that as long as the work gets done, there is complete flexibility for people.

“Just be in the shoes of the other person to see how to do things; what’s happening with them, and how we can help them. That’s one of the core values we believe in.”

Taking Stock Of Indian Healthcare

For Innovaccer, the US market and the revenue growth from the clients there has been a crucial ingredient in success. But what about the Indian market and where does Hasija see Innovaccer’s data-first approach fitting in the Indian context?

“The United States has solved the issue of access to care. And by access to care, I mean, even if you go to rural parts of the country, citizens have critical access care next door to them. If we’re talking from a government point of view, the first one [problem] to solve is access itself,” he stressed.

Secondly, he added, the access to care is also skewed for those who have access as it’s usually the people with a steady income, living in cities and paying taxes. That’s a small subset of the market. “So in the most rural parts of India and small towns, access to healthcare is a big issue that has to be solved first.”

Measures to make the public healthcare system in India more affordable and accessible are being taken by the Indian government in the past few years. The launch of Ayushman Bharat — the government’s flagship public healthcare program which aims to provide insurance coverage up to INR 5 lakh (or $ 7,290) per family.

As per DataLabs by Inc42 estimates, the total market size of the healthcare industry in India is projected to be $202 Bn this year. This is a growth of 84% from the $110 Bn market size in the year 2016. But the Indian public welfare and healthcare schemes have seen poor implementation on the ground, and this is the biggest gap in the Indian market, despite the large market size.

Shaped by these market conditions, and on the back of India’s prowess in software and IT services, healthcare startups such as Innovaccer are using Indian innovation and technology IP to create solutions for the global health market.

Hasija does not think India is in a unique position, as “every nation is struggling with healthcare” and trying to solve the issues through various approaches and the newest ones involve a lot of data processing and cloud-based computing. “It’s a diverse environment within itself — each vertical within healthcare is bigger than the verticals outside of healthcare.”

The driving force behind the phenomenal growth of the healthcare industry can be linked to the emergence of these verticals — especially the rise in medical tourism in India, lifestyle management, preventive care, wellness, mental wellbeing and more.

“I think Indian healthcare will go through two different routes. The first route is there will be more institution build-up to provide access to care, which is when costs will start to rise and healthcare spending will also rise. And that’s when India will be able to tap into the power of what data can do.”

The post Innovaccer Taps The Power Of Data To Bring Actionable Insights To Inefficient Healthcare Systems appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Ahead of the government’s plans to begin trials for 5G technology, Chinese electronics giant Huawei has raised concerns on investing in the country’s telecom infrastructure.

Jay Chen, CEO of Huawei in India, said his company was looking to invest more in export manufacturing in India. “We are open to manufacture 5G equipment, and even look at exports… but if I am not allowed to participate in 5G here, then why would I have manufacturing here?” Chen reportedly told TOI. Huawei has already faced restrictions from the US and Australia due to its trouble over network security concerns.

It is to be noted that Huawei has reportedly invested over $3.5 Bn in India till date. Chen has claimed that they have made several presentations to various wings of the government on their 5G plans, including on issues related to compliance, data protection and privacy, but there has been no response so far. “I guess they are taking time to address their concerns. But you cannot always think, think and think, but make no decision,” the Huawei chief added.

Notably, Huawei’s business spans across research and development (R&D), manufacturing and services in India. With an employee base of over 6000, the company also has a R&D centre in Bengaluru. However, in the light of data security concerns globally about Huawei, the Indian government has been reportedly skeptical about allowing Huawei permission for 5G trials in the country.

In June, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told Parliament that the government has received six proposals for 5G technology trials in India which includes proposals from China’s ZTE and Huawei. However, until now, only three equipment vendors—Samsung, Nokia and Ericsson— have got the green signal from the committee under Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA).

Huawei was earlier reported saying that India can potentially become the second-largest 5G market in the next 10 years, it was anticipated that the company would work with Indian telecommunication companies to setup 5G field trials that are expected to take place in the second half of 2019.

Over the past, concerns have been raised on how Huawei equipment could be used by China for surveillance—allegations the company has vehemently denied. It has been argued that the Chinese company, also the world’s largest telecoms equipment maker and the second biggest smartphone maker, poses a security risk. India, however, is yet to take a call on allowing Huawei to conduct 5G trials in India, but the DoT might soon have a say in this matter.

Telecom companies are awaiting the Indian government’s approval on spectrum allotment. Spectrum allocation in India is being done through auction process and the government is yet to auction the spectrum 3.3K – 3.6K MHz bands. The spectrum band (3.5 GHz spectrum) is expected to be the first band to be globally accepted for 5G deployment.

According to 5G HLF report, 5G is expected to be launched in India by 2020. It is predicted that the 5G technology will create a cumulative economic impact of  $1 Tn in India by 2035. According to Global System for Mobile Communications(GSMA), India will have 88 Mn 5G connections by 2025, which is around 7% of the country’s total telecom connections.

The post Huawei Asks Govt Why It Should Invest In India If Barred From 5G Infrastructure appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Flipkart Group’s CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy reportedly said that the economic slowdown did not have any effect on the ecommerce company’s sales.

According to a media report, Krishnamurthy added that the Flipkart gets a majority(70%) of its business come from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, which is said to be growing at about 90%. On the contrary, the business from Tier 1 metro cities is growing at about 45%, which is half of the smaller town sales’ growth.  

“It is no longer about the top 10-20% (income group), it is heavily about the mid 40-50% and what their needs are,” Krishnamurthy reportedly said in an interview with ET. 

Last month, Amazon India head Amit Agarwal has also said that the online retailer has not seen any slowdown in terms of its services. “We will be focussing on long-term goals instead of getting distracted by the short term situation such as the current economic condition of the country,” he added. 

The latest official data has noted India’s GDP growth to have slipped to an over six-year low of 5% in the April-June quarter of 2019-20.  A sharp decline in manufacturing output and subdued farm sector activity were cited as the main reason for this slump, along with some industry watchers cited regulatory uncertainty as another contributing factor. 

India is estimated to have 400 Mn active internet users and 350 Mn connected smartphone users. On average, India is said to add 40 Mn internet users on a Y-o-Y basis, which is among the fastest in the world. Also, an Indian subscriber now has an average 8GB per month mobile data usage which is at par with developed countries.

This growth in internet users has spurred a trend among multiple technology startups to try and adapt their services with the needs of Tier 2 and Tier 3 city audience. Flipkart too had launched a ‘The Reach Project’ in February this year to bring Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities on its service-delivery map. 

With this initiative, the ecommerce company had aimed to bring thousands of new sellers, MSMEs, domestic manufacturers and artisans into the ecommerce fold.

Another new entrant in the sector, Reliance Jio too has been focusing on Tier 2 and Tier 3 market of India. Reliance Retail was earlier reported to use 5.1K Jio point stores in the expansion of its ecommerce venture to rural areas including Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns. 

A Deloitte India and Retailers Association of India (RAI) report has valued India’s ecommerce marketplace at $200 Bn and predicted its growth to $1.2 Tn by 2021.

The post Despite Economic Slowdown Flipkart Sales Continue To Grow: CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Amidst the preparation for their festive season sales, which starts by the end of this month, ecommerce platforms have been rolling out one scheme after another to expand their delivery network. The two biggest players, Flipkart and Amazon, have announced jobs across their supply chain, logistics and customer service arms.

Flipkart said it has hired 50K people and expects indirect jobs to rise by 30% compared to last year before September 29, when the six-day festive season sale commences.

Amazon India, on the other hand, has claimed to have created more than 90K direct temporary employment opportunities in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Pune and many other cities across the country.

Additionally, the company has also created over 10K indirect jobs through its fulfilment partner networks — delivery vehicles partners, packaging vendors, and small mom-and-pop stores under its ‘I Have Space’ hyper local programme along with housekeeping agencies.

These new associates will join the existing team across the fulfilment centres to manage the spurt in delivery demands. The period sees peak sales volumes for many companies, especially the fast-moving ecommerce and retail businesses. Sales during the festive season account for about 60% of their annual sales.

With the announcement of ‘I Have Space’ initiative, that allows local entrepreneurs to act as delivery agents, Amazon claims to have expanded its services in 100% pin codes across India. In addition, the Seattle-based company has also bought homemakers, retired people and students on board as delivery agents under its Amazon Flex programme.

Meanwhile, Flipkart had launched its ‘The Reach Project’ earlier in February. This month, the company updated that its services have reached to an additional 40% pin codes under the programme, which enabled the company to get 60K sellers from small cities and towns.

The company had also claimed to have expanded its services to over 50% of Tier 3 and beyond pin codes. In total, the company had expanded its services to over 800 small towns and cities.

Amazon, on the other hand, has claimed to have doubled the presence of its Delivery Service Partner network with more than 1400 delivery stations present across 750 cities. The company also adds that it has developed its “Line Haul” network, and has close to 10,000 trucks on the road each day.

The post Amazon, Flipkart Festive Season Sales To Create Over 1.5 Lakh Jobs appeared first on Inc42 Media.

In a Supreme Court of India (SC) hearing on Tuesday (September 24), the court asked the central government to submit a timeframe for formulating the guidelines to curb social media misuse within three weeks.

The bench of justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose reportedly observed that technology has taken a “dangerous turn”. The bench expressed concerns that some social media platforms are not being able to trace the originator of a message or an online content and said the government needs to step in at this time.

The bench added that the issue around traceability on social media and instant messaging apps need to be dealt with keeping in mind the sovereignty of India, the privacy of an individual, and prevention of illegal activities.

Justices Gupta and Bose were of the opinion that neither the apex court nor the high court is competent to decide this issue which needs views from computer science and internet experts. So it has tasked the central government to come up with appropriate guidelines to deal with these issues by October 22, the date of the next hearing.

The move comes after the SC had sought the Narendra Modi government’s view on the matter last month, and warned against repercussions.  The hearing was in reference to Facebook’s transfer petition on public interest litigations (PILs) against WhatsApp’s traceability pending at the Madras HC, Bombay HC and in Madhya Pradesh HC.

Attorney General KK Venugopal, the central government’s top law officer, had recommended that linking Aadhaar to social media accounts would help stamp out cybercrime, terrorism and fake news. It is the government’s argument that such issues can be resolved if the anti-social elements behind fake news and rumour-mongering were identified.

The original petitions filed in Chennai in July last year demanded linking of social media handles with the Aadhaar database. The Madras HC had expanded the petition to include issues like ensuring message traceability to ‘curbing cybercrimes and intermediary liability’.

In its case, Facebook and WhatsApp had strongly objected to Aadhaar linking, saying it would affect the privacy of its users. It said a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court had upheld privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the constitution.

The Tamil Nadu government said that Facebook’s concerns on user privacy go against its own “primary business model” of commercialising user data through targetted ads. Earlier this month, Facebook representatives met with the home minister Amit Shah, national security advisor Ajit Doval and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to discuss the social media company’s stance on the traceability issue.

The post SC Pushes Centre To Frame Guidelines On Social Media Abuse appeared first on Inc42 Media.

In another attempt to support easier solutions for income tax-related grievances of startups, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) told the income tax officers to handle such issues with “utmost care”.

The direction in an order, accessed by PTI, has been sent to all regional chiefs of the I-T Department. CBDT has told the taxmen to sensitise its officers on how to handle startup issues. The order also asked the regional heads of the Income Tax Department to constitute a startup cell at their offices.

The CBDT order, issued on Monday, has given fresh directions for handling grievances of startups.

In case of any grievance, the preliminary action taken report is to be submitted to the office (CBDT) by the next day, that is within one working day of calling of the report by CBDT. The final ATR (action taken report) in this regard is to be submitted within three working days of calling of the report by CBDT.

In August, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that Section 56(2)(viib) of the Income Tax Act 1961 would not be applicable to the startups registered under DPIIT. Section 56 (2) (vii)(b) of the Income Tax Act said that if a privately held company issues its shares at a price more than its fair market value, the amount received in excess of the fair market value will be taxed as income from other sources.

Further, the minister said that the government will set up a dedicated cell under a member of CBDT for addressing problems of startups. Any startup with any income tax issues can approach the cell for quick resolution.

CBDT had then issued a consolidated circular consisting of all the clarifications on the tax issues hurting the Indian startups, including the angel tax. These guidelines were issued to ensure that the startups recognised by the departments for the promotion of industry and internal trade (DPIIT) will not face any action.

The department has done so to simplify the assessment process for the startups. In addition, the cases against startups registered with DPIIT will be dropped and the review officer will do a follow-up. The circular was issued to ensure that the startups are benefiting from the angel tax relaxation and exemption.

However, if any startup fails to comply with rules, it could be risking a severe angel tax penalty. The recent addition to the rules includes a 200% penalty if the startups don’t comply with the angel tax rules.

The minister of commerce and industry Piyush Goyal recently informed the parliament that the Central Board of Direct Taxes has exempted 702 startups under Section 56 (2) (vii) of Income Tax Act, 1961 till June 21. The government had been trying to ensure that only genuine benefiting from the relaxation of angel tax rules.

The post “Handle With Care” Tax Watchdog Issues New Directions For Startup Grievances appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Twitter India head Manish Maheshwari said that the company has addressed the concerns of fintech giants such as Paytm, PhonePe, Cred, Google Pay regarding online financial scams.

Maheshwari said in a tweet on Tuesday (September 24) that the company has come out with financial scam policy as “the majority of Indians move to transact digitally”. The policy says that using scam tactics on Twitter to obtain money or private financial information is prohibited.

The new Twitter policy says users “may not use Twitter’s services to deceive others into sending you money or personal financial information via scam tactics, phishing, or otherwise fraudulent or deceptive methods.”

The scams being referred here include: relationship/trust-building scams, money-flipping schemes, for example, guaranteeing to send someone a large amount of money in return for a smaller initial payment via a wire transfer or prepaid debit card etc. The new rules also apply for fraudulent discounts and phishing scams.

On seeing a violation, users can report accounts or Tweets through a dedicated reporting mechanism. “These reports are used in aggregate to help refine our enforcement systems and identify new and emerging trends and patterns of behavior, and you may not receive an individual response to your report,” the policy reads.

Twitter’s Actions Against Violators

The social media giant has emphasised that if a user is found in violation of the financial scam policy, consequences will depend on the type and severity of the violation as well as any previous history of violations.

The actions Twitter may take include anti-spam challenges where for suspicious activity, accounts may be locked and affected users could be prompted to provide additional information (e.g., a phone number) or to solve a reCAPTCHA challenge.

The company could also blacklist URLs or provide warnings about them if it finds them unsafe during its checks. If the violation is an isolated incident or first offence, Twitter may require users to delete one or more Tweets and could temporarily lock accounts. Any subsequent attempts to engage in scam, phishing or other fraud tactics will result in permanent suspension.

Cybersecurity And Fintech Fraud Cases

In May, India was reported as the second most cyber attacks affected country between 2016 to 2018. The average cost for a data breach in India has risen 7.9% since 2017, with the average cost per breached record mounting to INR 4,552 ($64). The Reserve Bank of India too recorded a total of 2,059 cases of cyber fraud in 2017-18 as compared to 1,372 cyber fraud cases in 2016-17.

The constant concerns around the misuse of personal data have brought up big questions about frauds in the fintech and digital payments space.

In May, reports surfaced that the user database of Truecaller is being sold on internet forums on the dark web. The alleged leaked database included names, phone numbers and email addresses of some Truecaller users, which the poster claimed to have acquired through a data breach.

In August, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said it will create a central registry to monitor digital payments related frauds. This tracking would enable the central bank to keep an eye on such frauds on a real-time basis to improve consumer confidence in the digital channel. This registry will improve monitoring standards and analysis of the fraud and help RBI collate periodic data for customer awareness.

In a move to make the internet a safer place for businesses and citizens, the Indian government will unveil an official cybersecurity strategy policy in January next year.

The post Twitter India Introduces Financial Scam Policy: Here’s What It Says appeared first on Inc42 Media.

For the last few decades, Bollywood has been India’s global identity. However, in the last few years, the India startup ecosystem has also become a well-regarded export pulling in investments from around the world. Startup innovations, entrepreneurs and the booming investor ecosystem have drawn the attention of global economic powerhouses. And there is a new breed of investors emerging too, with the rise of Bollywood investments.

Investors from the glamorous world of Bollywood are doing their bit for the startup ecosystems. However, beyond being brand ambassadors, Bollywood celebrities have also taken turns in betting on startups in various sectors. While some have taken turns to be investors, some others have started up their own businesses as well.

The trend is not a surprise. Over the last few years, Hollywood celebrities including the likes of Ashton Kutcher, Snoop Dogg, Nas, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, among others, have shown off their penchant for tech by backing various startups.

In India, the trend of startup investments began quite some time back. From Amitabh Bachchan to Rani Mukherjee, the next generation of celebrity-turned-investor has names such as Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone and more.

Here’s a brief of the recent celebrities who have donned their tech interest with investor cap:

Deepika Padukone

Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone began her investor journey with a multi-crore strategic partnership with Mumbai-based FMCG health-food brand Epigamia. The investment by Padukone comes as an extension of the recently closed Series C round of funding led by Verlinvest, Danone Manifesto Ventures, and DSG Consumer Partners.

Epigamia was launched in 2015 by Rohan Mirchandani, Uday Thakker, Ganesh Krishnamoorthy, and Rahul Jain as a Greek yoghurt brand and expanded its portfolio to include artisanal curd, snack packs, Indian sweets, and smoothies.

Rohan Mirchandani, cofounder, Epigamia said the actress’s massive appeal aligns with the health-conscious youth of India that the brand is hoping to reach. “Our shared set of core values and beliefs is what drew us together and this bonding principle, along with Deepika’s involvement in our products and brand, will be extremely valuable for us,” he said.

Deepika Padukone has also donned her entrepreneurial hat with a fashion label, All About You and an NGO, Live Life Foundation. In September, Padukone through her family office has invested in Delhi-based Blu Smart. She participated in $3 Mn angel round of funding through her family office Ka Entreprises, along with JITO Angel Network, Kalpavriksh Trust, Survam Partners, cofounder of Micromax Rajesh Agarwal, and the MD of Bajaj Capital Sanjiv Bajaj among other investors.

Blu Smart was initially launched in January 2019 as an electric cab-hailing platform. Later in June, the Delhi-based company has pivoted to offer subscription-based car rentals, ride-sharing on both electric cars and bikes, and shared the electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure across Delhi NCR region.  

Akshay Kumar

Popularly known for his athletic and simple lifestyle, Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar stuck with his health and wellness interests. Kumar invested an undisclosed amount in Mumbai-based wearable tech startup, GOQii.

Founded in 2014 by Vishal Gondal, GOQii is a smart wearable that helps people track their steps, sleep, and other physical activities, and then does more. Its smart health ecosystem integrates tools for real-time personalised coaching, an explosive high-growth health ecommerce store, scheduling health checkups, a health locker.

Akshay Kumar joined the company’s board as an investor and strategic advisor. As part of this association, Akshay Kumar will host one of GOQii’s health education initiatives called the ‘India Health Quiz’ on GOQii Play. Kumar will be conducting live coaching sessions on GOQii Play.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

Former Miss World and Bollywood actor Aishwarya Rai Bachchan recently turned angel investor in an investment with her mother, Vrinda KR. The duo invested INR 50 Lakh each in Bengaluru-based environmental intelligence startup Ambee.

Founded in 2017 by Akshay Joshi, Jaideep Singh and Madhusudan Anand, Ambee provides data about hyperlocal air quality which is accessible to developers, consumers, health researchers and media companies. The platform uses proprietary data and analytics to help customers make informed decisions or take preventive measures in a situation of severe environmental distress.

Arjun Kapoor

Bollywood actor Arjun Kapoor announced his investment in home food delivery company Foodcloud.in to empower women.

“My aim at investing in Foodcloud.in is to contribute towards a larger societal purpose of empowering the homemakers to contribute towards their family income,” Kapoor has said. Led by Vedant Kanoi and Sanjhi Rajgarhia, the food delivery platform runs on the premise of home cooks delivering hygienic and home-cooked food to customers from their kitchens.

For Kanoi, having a “socially conscious youth icon” like Kapoor’s support is a dream come true. “He has enjoyed the homemade food by our talented home chefs in Delhi and we’re excited to have his support to grow our initiative to new cities,” he said.

Priyanka Chopra

Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra, who shifted base to Los Angeles after making inroads into Hollywood with Quantico and Baywatch, has been all over the headlines for after her high-profile engagement with American singer-actor Nick Jonas. Beyond making couple headlines, she also made a buzz with her investments in alternate college education startup Holberton School and dating app Bumble.

San Francisco-based Holberton School was founded in 2015 by Julien Barbier, Rudy Rigot and Sylvain Kalache as a project-based alternative to college for the next generation of software engineers. Bumble was founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in ‎December 2011 as a “feminist dating app”.

Chopra said that she is honoured to join the two companies that are striving to expand gender diversity in the tech space and make a social impact for the greater good of society. After her investment, Bumble launched its operations in India.

Sukhbir Singh

Popular singer Sukhbir Singh began his investments journey with LQI in August. Singh participated in the $200K funding round of Gurugram-based beverage startup, LQI. The funds will be deployed to increase the production capacity and the geographical expansion to newer markets.

Founded in 2016 by Shubham Khanna, Palak Kapoor and Kapil Kumar, LQI uses their proprietary technology to manufacture Smoothie, Milkshake and Fruit Water frozen packs made with 100% raw fresh fruit with a increased shelf life of 2.5 months without use of any colors, flavors, purees or preservatives.

Singh soon announced his second investment in electric vehicle startup eBikeGo. Amritsar-based electric bike rental company eBikeGo was founded in 2017 by Dr Irfan Khan. The company procures its electric bikes from the Indian EV manufacturer Okinawa Autotech. The startup is currently present in Delhi, Amritsar, Jaipur, Jalandhar, and Agra.

The company generates revenue through tourist and customer bike rentals along with partnerships with logistic delivery providers. eBikeGo is aiming to capture 2% of the Indian electric two-wheeler market share in the near future, and plans to build a fleet of 200K bikes in 100 Indian cities.

The post The Bollywood Stars Bringing Glamour And Investments To The Indian Startup Ecosystem appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Mumbai-based robotics startup emotix has raised yet another funding round from a clutch of investors.

According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings accessed by Inc42, the company on September 21 has allotted 2,403 Seed 1 CCPS to 10 angel investors at a nominal value of INR 100 and a premium of INR 66,419 per share.

The round has brought in INR 15.98 Cr for emotix from investors such as WNS group CEO and NASSCOM’s chairman Keshav Rurugesh, Inderjit Kaur Arora, Suresh Subramani, Giridhar Sanjeevi and a few others.

The infusion comes more than a month after the company said it is raising $7.5 Mn in Series A funding led by Chiratae Ventures. YourNest Venture Capital, investor Bruno Raschle and a group of angel investors also participated in the round. The first tranche of this came in July worth $2.69 Mn (INR 18.58 Cr).

Emotix was founded in 2015 by Sneh Vaswani, Prashant Iyengar and Chintan Raikar, and currently has 120 employees in the US and India. Their vision was to create emotionally intelligent solutions to solve unmet needs using artificial intelligence, robotics and Internet of Things (IoT).

The funds were to be used for international expansion to North America, UK and the Middle East. A portion of the funds was also to be allocated for developing new products and R&D in the areas of emotional and artificial intelligence, which form a crucial component of the Miko emotive robot toy.

As per emotix, priced at $285 (INR 19,000), Miko has the capability to keep improving its knowledge graph over time by capturing new information. It said 22 pilots were conducted prior to its launch. The company had recently launched the second-gen Miko 2. The company is also expanding its operations in the US.

As a robotics-focused company, emotix has high tech and talent costs. The company’s filings for FY 2017-18 showed that it incurred expenses of INR 2.34 Cr to generate revenues of INR 1.48 Cr. In FY19-20 the company aims to be profitable with a Y-o-Y growth of 354%.

According to a report on the “Educational Robot Market by Component (Hardware and Software), Type (Humanoid and Non-Humanoid), Education Level (Elementary and High School Education, Higher Education, and Special Education), and Geography – Global Forecast to 2023”, the educational robot market is valued at $778.6 Mn in 2018 and is expected to reach $1,689.2 Mn by 2023, at a CAGR of 16.8% between 2018 and 2023.

Emotix competes with the likes of Bengaluru-based gaming company Playshifu, which recently raised $7 Mn in Series A funding led by Chiratae, Inventus Capital and Bharat Innovation Fund (BIF).

The post Angel Investors Back Robotics Startup Emotix With Fresh Funding appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Bengaluru-based accelerator The CoWrks Foundry has announced the conclusion of its third cohort with eight startups.

Out of over 450 startup applications, the accelerator programme shortlisted 15 for review by the investment committee. After the conclusion of the review process, 8 startups were finalised to be a part of the accelerator programme, the accelerator announced on Tuesday (September 24).

The Cohort 3.0 consists of tech and enterprise businesses which offer disruptive business solutions which are futuristic and potential growth drivers. The CoWrks Foundry offers accelerator services to early-stage businesses in the fields of urban tech, enterprise tech and social enterprise.

The accelerator said that during the 24-week stint, the cohort achieved a combined 20x growth in business. Over the course of the programme, the eight startups raised a seed capital of up to $50K and were provided with a diverse range of resources including industry experts providing targeted world-class mentorship to each startup.

Nruthya Madappa, managing partner, The CoWrks Foundry said, “We are proud to introduce Cohort 3.0. Since the inception of The CoWrks Foundry in 2017, we have mentored and worked with 24 start-ups. Cohort 3.0 brings together eight passionate and innovative startups which could potentially be the growth drivers for the Indian Economy.”

CoWrks Foundry’s Selected Startups

And here are the eight startups selected by CoWrks Foundry for its third cohort.

• Instoried: Bengaluru-based deeptech startup Instoried is an AI-driven deep tech content startup. Founded in 2018 by Sharmin Ali and Sutanshu Raj, Instoried provides end-to-end solutions to content marketers, helping them target particular emotions based on the identification of the brand’s emotional quotient. Instoried received seed funding from Venture Catalysts.
• Botspace: Founded in 2017 by Bilal Chaglani and Mayur More, BotSpace helps businesses build chatbots in 5 minutes without training, coding or bot deployment knowledge. BotSpace works with both big and small businesses.
• Happy Locate: Ajay Tiwari founded Happy Locate in 2017. HappyLocate offers Relosys, an AI-based relocation management tool that can help corporates manage employee relocations by just uploading basic details of their relocating employees.
• Yogya: Founded in 2019 by Agam and Sugam Malviya, Yogya is a talent capability enhancer which acts as an assistant to leaders to identify the skill gaps in their organisations and empower them to close gaps faster powered by AI. For employees, Yogya is a real-time performance support system that claims to make them more productive and future-ready.
• Lockn:  Lockn transforms the way people access and interact with their environment. Lockn builds a world where every object around us can securely recognise our physical presence with our permission to provide us with a frictionless experience, personalized to our individual needs and preferences.
• Huviair: Founded in 2016 by Arjun P Janananda and Vikshut Mundkur, Huviair is an enterprise drone technology Startup. Using geo-information systems and deep learning techniques, the Huviair Software analyses on-site drone data to accurately monitor and measure the progress and deviations of projects in the real estate, infrastructure and mining sectors.
• Bhorzvan Motors: Nishant Kalbhor founded Bhorzvan Motors in 2017. It is a power-train designer and Manufacturer for Electric Vehicles right from Scooters up to Trucks. It has developed powerful yet efficient motors and controls for EVs combined with an active liquid-cooled battery pack.
• Refresh: Refresh recycles and up-cycles old and unusable textile waste into handmade rugs, and furnishings by training and skilling women communities across India. Refresh uses waste fabric to make home furnishing through up-cycling and recycling methods.

The post Here Are The 8 Selected Startups In Third Cohort Of CoWrks Foundry appeared first on Inc42 Media.

Chennai-based Aquaconnect has raised a seed round of $1.1 Mn from agritech focussed VC Omnivore, and company’s existing investor HATCH. As a part of this investment, Omnivore’s Chennai office lead Reihem Roy will be joining Aquaconnect’s board to support the company’s growth strategy.

Aquaconnect has built a big data and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled mobile application — FarmMOJO — to advise farmers on their pond operations based on constant monitoring of the pond and other data capture by IoT platforms. 

With this new funding, the company plans to introduce image recognition feature in the FarmMOJO app in order to speed up the data input process for the farmers.

Aquaconnect’s cofounder Rajmanohar Somasundaram told Inc42 that these fresh funds will be used in developing an image recognition feature in FarmMOJO app. “This new feature will allow farmers to write down the pond’s stats on a paper and upload them on the app by just taking a picture of that sheet.”

Further, the company also plans to invest in setting up 10 Aquaconnect stores around the shrimp farm regions of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. These stores will serve both as a marketplace for farm-related products such as seeds, probiotics etc, along with becoming a customer touchpoints for the farmers.

“We aim to reach 15K shrimp and fish farmers across India and Indonesia by December 2020. In Indonesia, we are initially targeting Sulawesi and Surabaya regions in Java,” he added. 

Shanmugha Sundara Raj, Sanjai Kumar and Somasundaram have founded Aquaconnect in 2017. The company had earlier raised pre-seed funding from HATCH accelerator in 2018. 

FarmMOJO claims to help shrimp farmers in the daily management of their culture growth, which determines the quality of the final product. This includes optimisation of feeding, disease prediction and control, and water management.

For instance, it is important to ensure effective feed usage and biomass conversation in shrimp farming. So, at any point, if FarmMOJO observes poor feed conversion ratio (FCR), it recommends actions and relevant products the farmer can use to normalise the pond environment.

In the two years since inception, Aquaconnect claims to have brought 3K farmers on board and has generated a revenue of INR 2.4 Cr in FY18. Aquaconnect primarily depends on a subscription model for monetisation, where farmers pay to use its app every month. Farmers can subscribe to a basic plan in FarmMOJO at the INR 500 per pond they manage. The subscription plan allows farmers to record data, access FarmMOJO’s web module and connect to the marketplace.

Commenting on the investment, managing partner of Omnivore, Mark Kahn said, “The Government of India is ramping up support for the aquaculture sector, carving out a separate Ministry of Fisheries, animal husbandry, and dairying as well as launching the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY). We believe Raj (Rajmanohar) and his team are building one of the most promising agritech startups globally.” 

Shrimp Farming In India

Shrimps, also commonly known as prawns, contribute around 70% of the total seafood export from India, which is worth about INR 45K Cr. The International Market Analysis Research and Consulting (IMARC) Group has predicted that the Indian shrimp farming market would reach a volume of 1.13 Mn tonnes by 2024, undergoing a CAGR of around 9% between 2019-2024.

In 2018, India’s Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture (CIBA), had also launched a shrimp farmers focused mobile application, Vanami Shrimpapp. The app allows farmers to access best pond management practices, carry out input and sampling calculations, predict disease outbreak, on-farm risk assessment along with accessing government guidelines and regulations.

Globally, Aquaconnect competes with the likes of San Francisco-based AI company Aquabyte, Australian machine learning platform sense-t, Indonesian AI and IoT enabled company efishery, and Norwegian Seafood Innovation Cluster’s AquaCloud.

The global aquaculture market was valued at $169 Bn in 2015 and is expected to grow at 5.3% CAGR to touch $242 Bn by 2022. Besides India, Aquaconnect is also targeting the other large shrimp production markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. 

The post Omnivore Invests In $1.1 Mn Seed Round Of Aquaculture Startup Aquaconnect appeared first on Inc42 Media.

It is a well-known fact that the timing and manner of raising seed funding are highly important for a startup. However, many don’t realise the significance of choosing the right investor for raising funds, which creates a problem at a later stage. But, before we delve deeper into the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, let’s first discuss who exactly seed investors are and why exactly they are important.

Importance Of Seed Investors

In the initial phases, startups and founders can resort to bootstrapping or ask friends/family to invest money. However, there comes a point when every startup has to explore external avenues for arranging funds in order to grow and survive in the competitive world. This is when seed-stage investors come into the picture! The investors offer adequate capital, which helps the startup take off from the ground. Besides, they also contribute their skills and knowledge for the successful growth of the business.

Since investors’ money is at stake and they are quite profit-oriented, they make sure that the capital is invested in an appropriate manner. Another significant benefit of having an investor on board is that seed investors have a goal of reaping long-term benefits, and thus, they make efforts to build the company’s goodwill in the market. This attracts more and more investors to fund the business, increasing the overall capital inflow. They are also experts in their fields, which is why they have proper knowledge of maximising profits and minimising risks. So, all these factors boil down to the fact that seed investors play an essential role in the growth of a startup.

Tips For Finding The Right Investor

Let’s proceed to the next aspect, which is how to find that ‘right’ investor. When a business is in the startup phase, entrepreneurs tend to say yes to anyone who offers funds they need. This step can prove to be a big mistake because not every investor is the right fit for their startup. It is natural to get apprehensive about getting adequate funds, but falling in the hands of a wrong seed money investor might result in the rapid downfall of the business. This is why choosing the right investor is of utmost importance.

Mentioned below are some tips that will help first-time founders and startups find the appropriate seed capital investors.

1. The Business Type:
   The first step before choosing an investor is understanding the business model or type of business that the startup wants to undertake. Many seed fund investors in India and across the globe have specialisations in particular industries, which is why they can offer expert advice in the corresponding segments. Hence, approaching the investors whose interests match the business proposition is important. This way, apart from the capital, investors will also be able to offer guidance and support.
2. Trustworthiness:
   It is important to have those investors by the side of the startup founder and get them to trust and believe in the idea. It is a well-known fact that during the initial stages, a business goes through many ups and downs; hence, finding seed capital investors who won’t leave the startup by the wayside during tough times is of utmost importance.
3. Problem-solving:
   When a business is in the nascent stage, apart from adequate funding, it also requires proper feedback and advice from someone who is experienced in the field. While many seed-stage investors in India might be willing to invest in startups, only some will be able to offer priceless advice for solving current problems. Startups and founders need to find those investors who are experienced and have a strong network, as this will prove valuable in the long run.
4. Capital Needs:
   During the process of finding seed investors for a startup, founders cannot have any doubts about the capital requirements. Different investors can bring varying amounts of funds to the table, which is why it is important to consider the business requisites. For instance, angel investors can typically invest a lesser amount as compared to angel groups or venture capital firms.
5. Ability To Fund:
   Finally, in the Indian context, it is important to know whether an investor has adequate funds to invest in the idea or not. Recent taxation changes have put a lot of pressure on angel investors from this point of view. If the financial health of the investor is not good, they will be under tremendous pressure, which in turn will flow down to the startups they invest in as well. It is best to choose an investor that is capable of conducting different rounds of funding.

Mistakes To Avoid While Choosing Seed Investors

Any investment is crucial for a startup, but seed investors set the tone for the rest of the business life cycle. However, while vetting potential investors, startups and founders need to avoid overvaluation or undervaluation of the business. Before looking and researching the investor ecosystem, it is best to calculate the amount that will be sufficient for facilitating a smooth runway of the business. Another thing to remember is not to rush while selecting seed investors. It is best to be patient and select those who have adequate funding and are willing to assist in the future rounds of fundraising. Start with a low target and increase the same if and when possible.

There is no doubt about the fact that seed investors are important for every startup. With the presence of a host of seed investors in India these days, it is becoming all the more difficult to choose the right one. This is why founders and startups need to carry out thorough research and consider all the above pointers before approaching anyone with a concrete plan and business pitch. Always remember that a good relationship with investors can significantly improve the growth and success of a startup.

The post How Startups Can Choose The Right Seed Investor appeared first on Inc42 Media.