Sahvidya – A Dropbox for academics by ex IIT duo
Do you remember the days when you did a project and had to carry it on a CD to different computers along with all the software required to execute it in order to show it to your teacher. Also, the time when you had difficulty searching for a white paper for your seminar presentation but couldn't come up with anything relevant.
Sahvidya is an online application for data storage and networking focused towards educational institutions, where students can store their data both privately and publicly, and share it with their class, college, or even with other colleges. An interesting aspect of this model is that you can access the files which are shared publicly by another university.
Sahvidya was started by two classmates, Bhanu Gupta and Vivek Kumar Singh, who graduated from IIT Delhi. They had also worked together in the ANSYS prior to starting Sahvidya. During their masters at IIT Delhi, both of them felt this pain of limited file sharing and storage. They worked on Sahvidya for over a year and a half and launched it on June 2013. Sahvidya provides online storage space to its users to keep their data both publicly and privately,.
What differentiates Sahvidya from dropbox is their academic networking system, using which students and faculty can share files with different academic entities in a single step. A student can send a file to his entire batch just by selecting entry year and program enrolled for, instead of entering details of each student one by one. In a similar way, files can be shared between faculty, different departments in a college or even between different colleges by a single step process.
The 'networking' feature which allows users to access the files and research papers shared by other universities dulls out features like file storage which are provided by other startups. It also tends to contribute towards the increase in the knowledge-sharing culture, along with interaction between the students different institutions.
Since its launch, Sahvidya has expanded mainly to premier institutions like IIT Bombay, IIM Lucknow, IIM Ahmadabad, National Institute of Fashion Technology, National University of Singapore, and Georgia Tech University. They are also working on adding universities from North America and Europe apart from adding Asian universities on their network.
Currently, Sahvidya uses a freemium model, as registration is free, and user is granted 2GB of personal and 1GB of public space which can be accessed by others. In case a user requires more space, he can buy extra space of 1 GB by paying 0.3$/Month. Apart from selling space, the founders plan to use advertisements as a revenue source.
Right now, Sahvidya is in its early stage, and both founders are running the show. Around 300 users are using Sahvidya across the globe, currently.
We believe there is room for more players in the academic sector, and being in a niche sector it may be a bit challenging for them to be discovered. Entry of more startups into this field over time will be a true validation of the concept.
We wish them a great journey ahead.
Check out Sahvidya on YSPages and visit their website.
McDowell’s No. 1 Platinum respects Leaders like Bhanu and Vivek who had the courage to follow their passion and and also encourages more people to follow their dreams and join them in their unconventional journey.
