Nikhil Wason, Vinamra Agrawal and Aniket Bhatnagar, Founders, Orangut

“Conferencing the Orangut Way”

Nikhil Wason, Vinamra Agrawal and Aniket Bhatnagar were initially tinkering around with a Learning Management system for JIIT (Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University) before they came up with their entrepreneurial scheme. The three Software engineers evolved their idea based on their LMS to make an online conferencing tool named “Orangut”. They explained what “Orangut” does and how it became their entrepreneurial journey saying “Orangut strives to provide organizers of technical and business conferences with an end-to-end online conference management system using which they can seamlessly manage all the activities related to their conferences online. Students, professors and researchers can make submissions in relevant conferences and other submission rooms, showcase their research work to the world and also network with likeminded people.”

“Orangut’s primary target audience is organizers of conferences and researchers and professors who wish to get recognition for their research work through various conferences. However, we plan to unleash several other services which will in due course of time benefit everyone in the academia – in India as well as abroad.”

As far as online conferences go “Orangut” seems to have made all the right tweaks in order to be successful. The trio states their winning features saying “Intuitiveness and a near-zero learning curve for first time users, cost effectiveness and several value added features not present in existing systems is what makes Orangut better than the rest. In fact, at Orangut we aim to revolutionize the way conferences are managed and academic data is made available to concerned people.”

“Today conferences in India are ever increasing. We plan to provide conference management solutions for educational institutions first, which we already have started. Eventually we have plans in place to work with organizations and then corporations too.”

The three engineers realized early on that their aspirations and skills would only be fully utilized if they turned to entrepreneurship. “The idea for Orangut was discussed during one of the usual coffee evenings. We did not take it seriously in the beginning. We were too slow and carefree. But with time we understood that the realization of our dreams and our startup has to be the ‘top’ priority in our lives. Since then we’ve been going pretty steady with our work.”

“Using our skill set for making the society, our country and ourselves better was one of the major factors for making us turn towards entrepreneurship. And of course this will in due course also help us realize our dreams.” Say the trio.

From “Battling the costs” to reaching into “personal savings and borrowings from family” they have tried every avenue to finance their dream. The future however requires some more capital and they are on the look out for investors.

Their present status may be that of a startup but their achievements promise something great in their future which investors should take note of. They states their achievements saying “Bagging the contract to be the technology partner for International Conference for Contemporary Computing 2009 (IC3’09) organized jointly by University of Florida (UFL) & Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University (JIITU).”

“Selected among top 1000 in ‘The ET Power of Ideas’ contest in 2009 for group mentoring process, though Orangut was a little different idea then, which evolved to be what it is today.”

“Selected among top 20 most innovative startups (among top 3 seed startups selected to present) at Headstart Summer 2009 in Mumbai.”

“August 12, 2009, Orangut was featured in Hindustan Times, Mumbai edition as a standalone article ‘Conferencing Online’.”

“Orangut is a startup and is slowly acquiring management of more and more conferences. Currently, we have more educational conferences under our belt but we expect to get business from major organizations and corporations also very soon.”

The coming year is their chosen time period for making “Orangut” popular and successful. The trio of Nikhil Wason, Vinamra Agrawal and Aniket Bhatnagar are undoubtedly well prepared and focused on their vision. Yourstory wishes them success and luck in fulfilling their objectives.

They stated their viewpoint on life and entrepreneurship for the benefit of our readers saying “Dream high, do what your heart says (of course, keeping in mind the urgencies and need of the situation) and stay focused.”