Pune Startup Pulse

Putting the spotlight on the Pune Startup Ecosystem

A showcase of 12 promising startups

A YourStory.in Initiative 1

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Presenting the “Pune Startup Pulse”- Best from the Pune Ecosystem

The big 3 cities for startup activity are Bangalore, Mumbai and NCR, but a host of other cities are evolving today: Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and others.

Pune is one of the biggest hubs for talent owing to the large number of colleges in the city, a friendly climate and a vibrant outlook. It has the potential to become a startup hotspot in India. The “Pune Startup Pulse” is a YourStory.in initiative to spotlight companies based in Pune, Maharashtra.

The announcement regarding the initiative that intended to focus on the Pune startup ecosystem was made on the 18th of March, 2013 and responses were taken in for a period of 3 weeks. Pune Open Coffee Club and Pune Tech channels enabled the primary engagement and in the timeframe, we got close to 150 responses from startups.

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1. Overview1.1 How old are these startups?

The startup scene in Pune has companies that were started in 2000 to ones started in 2013 (that responded to the survey). A large chunk of the startups were founded in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

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1.2 How many are bootstrapped, how many funded?

Funding is necessary for a fast growing startup ecosystem and it is crucial for startups looking to scale up quickly. Even though closer to Mumbai, home to many investment firms, Pune seems to be facing problems in this aspect. A lack of angels in the city is a big drawback according to many.

In the survey, respondents rated raising money to be 6.56 where 10 means that it is very hard to raise money and 0 means it is very easy.

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And here is the breakup of the respondents:

The funded companies include all those who have raised money via institutional funding, angel investments or bank loans.

Of late, more institutional investors are putting the focus on Pune. Helion has pledged $25 million in Pune based entrepreneurs.

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1.3 How do Puneites hire?

Pune is home to hordes of colleges and universities, many of which churn out engineering talent. Wikipedia lists more than 40 engineering colleges that exist in the region and apart from these, that are many that are in different disciplines. Although this huge talent pool is present, majority of them don’t possess a startup mindset. These colleges haven’t fostered entrepreneurship and graduating students look for traditional comfortable jobs. Culturally, as a whole, an average Puneite would stick to a conventional job.

And this makes hiring a challenge. On a scale of 0 to 10, Puneites gave 5.58 to hiring- 10 being very easy to hire while 0 being very hard.

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1.4 How easy is it to startup in Pune?

India as a whole hasn’t been rated as a very good place to startup in and was placed at a lowly 132nd in the world. Having this at the back of the mind, Puneites rated Pune as 7.11 in terms of ease of starting up which is an encouraging figure.

Relatively cheaper infrastructure costs along with good connectivity, pleasant weather and a growing economy, make the city a good place to startup.

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Here are where the startups in Pune are based:

(An average 3 BHK in an area like Aundh or Baner would set you back by INR 25-30k a month)

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1.5 How vibrant is the Pune Startup Space?

Puneites gave this a rating of 5.65 (10 being very vibrant) which clearly suggests a lack of activity. Two of the biggest proponents in the Pune ecosystem have been the Pune Open Coffee Club and Pune Tech which organize events and keep the Pune flag flying.

There are other efforts which have smaller specialized communities getting together and exchanging ideas too but there are clear signs of a need for more activity. In the recent past, in50hrs has been in Pune and we’ve been to Pune with our Workshops, Mixers and TechSparks RoundTable (2013 campaign begins mid may) and the activity is only picking up now. Many more events at a bigger scale need to happen to create the much needed vibrancy.

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(A snapshot of the most active Pune Startups group on LinkedIn)

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A Snapshot

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12 Pune Startups to Look Out ForUndergoing this exercise, we’ve picked the top 12 startups which we think will go on to achieve much greater things.

The startups have been chosen on the following parameters:

Team and past recordIdea and InnovationMarket SizeCurrent Execution Stage

The 12 companies along with a snapshot have been listed from the next slide (alphabetically).

Note: These are all relatively young companies. A list of 10 companies from Pune who have crossed the series A stage can be found here.

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1) Appacitive: Appacitive makes app development simple. Appacitive provides their client with ascalable backend for their app by ‘white boarding’ the client’s model on their visual designer and publish it to the cloud. With Appacitive, app developers can create integration ready services for data and user management, geo-location, email & push notifications, aggregates and much more. Appacitive has open source SDKs for iPhone, android, JS and .NET.

Founders: Neil Unadkat, Nikhil Prasad and Yetesh Tokas

Team strength: 12

Traction: 500+ signed up customers

Website: http://appacitive.com/

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2) Chauka: Chauka is the cricinfo for local cricket. They aim to score every non-BCCI match and provide amateur and semi-professional players with detailed personal cricket stats.

Founder: Manoj Iragavarapu

Team Strength: 8

Traction: 5000+ Cricketers, 580+ Teams. Marquee clients: Dr. D.Y. Patil Sports Academy, Maharashtra Cricket Association, Pune District Cricket Association, Karnataka Institute of Cricket.

Website: http://chauka.in/

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3) kPoint: kPoint is an online multimedia video creation and collaboration platform. kPoint makes videos easy to create, engaging and discoverable on search engines and kPoint platform.

Founders: Shridhar Shukla, Sunil Gaitonde, Atul Narkhede

Team Strength: 30

Traction: 40 + customers, 30,000+ registered users. Marquee clients: Kirloskar, Thermax, Cognizant, BMC software and Tata Quality.

Website: http://www.kpoint.com/

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4) MangoReader: MangoReader is on a mission to make books interactive, engaging and fun. Trying to reinvent the way people learn, Mangoreader has interactive books, apps and it even lets the user create books.

Founders: Jagdish Repaswal, Ramesh Velusamy, Jaya Dhameja, Pavan Mulik

Team Strength: 12

Traction: MangoReader is being used in over 1000 schools by teachers and students to read, play and interact with ebooks.

Website: http://www.mangoreader.com/

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5) MindTickle: MindTickle is a web-based learning platform that combines the power of “social”, "mobile", “cloud” and “gamification” to make enterprise learning more efficient and effective. MindTickle unlocks the value of existing training content such as PPT, PDFs, videos and e-learning by turning them into engaging and well-structured interactive training suited for the needs of the next generation employee.

Founders: Deepak Diwakar, Krishna Depura, Mohit Garg, Nishant Mungali

Team Strength: 15

Traction: 20+ clients; 20,000+ employees have used the product

Website: http://www.mindtickle.com/

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6) MyOpenCampus: MOC works with a belief that they’ll help India adopt technology quickly via which education can be taken to the masses. The open courseware portal- MyOpenCourses is an interactive channel to access more than 11000 hours of content created by the top Indian universities and academicians including the IIT's and IISC.They also have a product- MyOpenCampus, which is a Free Campus Collaboration tool that brings offline campuses online.

Founders:.Akshat Shrivastava and Arun Prabhudesai

Team strength: 8

Traction: My Open Campus has been implemented in 15 Educational Institution and Colleges and over 40,000 students use it. MOC has tied up with 4 Tablet / Mobile manufacturers to put up My Open Courses on their tablets. Nearly 10,000 My Open Courses Android apps have been downloaded within first month of launch.

Website: http://www.myopencampus.in/home

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7) Qualitia: Qualitia Software is an independent software test automation product company. Qualitia brings the power of simplicity to adopt test automation in the most effective way. It is an innovative script less test automation platform for multiple test automation tools and application technologies.

Founders: Rahul Chaudhari, Sudhir Patil, Ravi Nukala and Rajmeet Chhabda.

Team Strength: 33

Traction: 25+ customers. Marquee clients: Parametric Technology Corporation, Sears, Pitney Bowes, Bombay Stock Exchange, United Nations Organization.

Website: http://www.qualitiasoft.com/

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8) RainingClouds Technologies Pvt. Ltd: The first product from RainingClouds isAppSurfer, a product that lets users try android apps before installing them. Users can try apps on the browsers of all devices(tablets, smartphones, desktops).

Founders: Aniket Awati, Amit Yadav, Akshay Deo and Ratnadeep Deshmane

Team strength: 9

Traction: 150,000 + App Session runs, 3000+ Apps, 5000+ Developers, 6000 AppSurfer Mobile App Downloads

Website: http://www.appsurfer.com/

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9) Rolocule: Rolocule Games is an independent game development and research studio. Rolocule is dedicated to creating high quality console-like interactive entertainment software for next generation platforms like smartphones and tablet.

Founders: Rohit Gupta, Anuj Tandon

Team Strength: 15

Traction: 2 million+ cumulative downloads

Website: http://www.rolocule.com/

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10) SaveTime: Savetime was founded with a vision to bring patient-centric innovation to the masses in a simple manner saving their time and money. As a first step, Savetime is focused on helping migrants in large cities find the "right" doctor based on a simple conversation about their symptoms, problems or needs. Savetime is available on the web, over the phone and for Android smartphones.

Founders: Mitesh Bohra, Siddharth Sethi and Avinash Sethi.

Team strength: 15

Traction: 2600+ doctors practicing in 2800+ locations in Pune listed on the platform, 400+ registered patients in 4 months.

Website: http://www.savetime.com/

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11) ViralMint: ViralMint is a viral marketing platform that helps businesses acquire new customers, increase sales, improve conversion rates and build up engagement.

Founder: Rohan Dighe

Team Strength: 8

Traction: 10+ paying customers with 50 more who have signed up

Website: http://www.viralmint.com/

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12) Volare Technologies Pvt Ltd.: A technology product company, IntouchApp is their first product. IntouchApp keeps the user’s phone contacts automatically backed up, syncs them across devices, and keeps them up-to-date automatically.

Founder: Sarang Lakare

Team Strength: 4

Traction: IntouchApp has been downloaded over 100,000 times across 185 countries. We are currently managing over 25,000,000 contacts.

Website: http://www.theintouchid.com/magic/

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About YourStory Research:

YourStory Research is the research division of YourStory Media Pvt Ltd that focuses on market research, market intelligence and consulting in the startup eco-system in India. YS Research is focused on providing well researched market analytics to clients looking to make decisions and investments in the ecosystem. YS Research specializes in primary market research, surveys and commissioned reports that generate insights into startups, investors, venture capital funds, entrepreneurs, startup employees, incubators, technology and service providers and all other connected players in the Indian startup scene.

You can get in touch with the research team at research@yourstory.in and for this particular report which was spearheaded by Jubin Mehta, you can reach out to jubin@yourstory.in.