Ten Delhi based startups that've shown promising growth in 2014

2014 has been an amazing year for the Indian startup ecosystem. There are some global success stories now emerging. We recently expanded our earlier article about upcoming startups from Mumbai and the response was amazing. It also prompted us to handpick some of the growing companies from other startup hubs and here, we bring to you, Delhi!

When it comes to startups in Delhi we have a slew of success stories - Snapdeal, Zomato, Delhivery, ShopClues, Paytm among others. Founded by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal Snapdeal raised over $1 billion in this year alone and is now valued at over $3 billion

Since its launch in 2010, Snapdeal has come a long way – it now has more than 25 million users with about 50,000 sellers on its website and 40 fulfilment centres across 15 cities in the country.

Zomato has gone on to achieve global success and recently announced $60 million at a post-money valuation of USD ~660 million. At present it employs over 900 people across 100 plus cities in 18 countries. Noida based Paytm recently surpassed the volume of IRCTC and touched $600 million Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) last month. E-commerce dedicated logistics startup Delhivery closed a $35 million round of funding in October this year.

Besides the above startups who have graduated from starting up phase, below goes the list of 10 Delhi based startups who bloomed in 2014.

Kart Rocket

Kart Rocket is your end-to-end e-commerce partner that helps you to build, operate, manage and grow your brand/business online.

Kart Rocket in early 2014?

The startup did a lot of heavy lifting in the beginning of this year helping design software, integrations and processes to solve pain points in building a website, a mobile site, integrating a payment gateway and most importantly powering automated and cost-effective shipping for Indian SMEs. It also raised $2 million Series A round from Nirvana Venture Advisors, 500 Startups and Japan-based Beenos (NetPrice) in October this year.

Where is Kart Rocket right now?

At present, the company is working to solve the next set of problems around cataloging, mobile, traffic generation & discovery. It’s also planning to expand presence pan-India including a heavy focus on tier II and tier III cities as Kart Rocket got an extremely encouraging response from there.

Key learnings: Servicing consumers is more important than acquiring them.

FashionAndYou

Leading flash sales player of India.

FashionAndYou in early 2014

Post fundraise in 2014, the focus was to strengthen the backend operations, launch our new web shop and increase our investments in marketing for better brand visibility. The company opened sourcing & distribution centres operational in Gurgaon, Surat & Mumbai, with Bangalore to be operational by end of this year.

Where is FashionAndYou right now?

FashionAndYou processes 6,000 orders on a daily basis with GMV of $4.5 million every month. The company recently launched our new web shop with improved features and functionalities and are in middle of launching our Android App.

Learning: “Team is the greatest asset – or can be the greatest risk, leading to success stories or failures with execution being the key. The dynamism of the business is such that you have to realise, accept and implement changes on the go. As a leader one needs to take some really quick decisions as nimbleness plays a very important role,” said Aasheesh Mediratta, CEO, FashionAndYou.

Unicommerce

Unicommerce is an online multi channel e-commerce order fulfillment platform.

Unicommerce in early 2014

Unicommerce used to process close to 7 lakh orders on monthly basis in early 2014 through its platform. The Noida based company has been receiving a lot of interest from businesses in South East Asian countries.

Where is Unicommerce right now?

The number of products shipped/processed through Unicommerce has crossed one million per month in November this year. It reportedly raised $10 million from Tiger Global this year (via) and its clientel base includes Snapdeal, Nike, Jabong, Lazada and Groupon among several hundreds others.

Key learnings: Going global is very important.

Tripoto

Tripoto is a global community of travelers where travelers from around the world share their travel itineraries and experiences on Tripoto.

Tripoto in early 2014

Early in 2014 the company was mostly working on building the product and reaching out to its early adopters. “Getting users was one of our biggest concerns as we were stuck on close to 0 traffic for around 2-3 months after launching our product. Travelers - they are among the nicest bunch on the planet - were super delighted with a platform where they could share their experiences. They helped us spread the word of mouth and grow organically,” said Anirudh Gupta, co-founder, Tripoto.

Where is Tripoto right now?

“We have managed to scale up the community to a traction of 350,000 unique pageviews per month and around 800,000 unique pageviews in the past 9 months. We have also started advertising on Tripoto for a number of clients which include large global platforms such as Airbnb to small boutique hotels and resorts,” said Anirudh. It also secured seed funding from OutBox Ventures and Kunal Bahl among others.

Key learnings: One of the key learning has been mobile which is currently contributing more than 50% trafic for the company. Sharing of travel content from mobile is something Tripoto is focusing on.

Holidify

Holidify is a destination discovery website which helps users find holiday options in a personalized way.

Holidify in early 2014

Launched in January 2014 with 290 destinations. “We were doing roughly 200 users a day back. Our focus was to understand user behaviour and their needs to improve the user experience. We made sure to create a good feedback loop coming from users of various demographics,” said Rohit Shroff.

With over 8 lakh users till date Holidify has so far mapped 559 destinations in India and another 200 would be added soon. “We are now also helping people in booking customized packages across India,” added Rohit.

Key learnings: “The key for us has always lied in focusing on what users need and working on them. We had made few small and few big mistakes which we could only realize because of the feedbacks that kept coming in. We have a dedicated mobile website now, a dedicated portal for weekend getaways. Our content is now in a much better shape with a proficient editorial team,” said Rohit.

91mobiles

91mobiles is the largest gadget research site in India, and provides information & interactive tools to help users research which mobile phone or gadget best suits their needs.

91Mobiles in early 2014

In early 2014 the company was focused on closing its seed round and gear up for the next phase of growth. “Team building was a key priority, and we were hiring across levels for multiple functions. 91mobiles' desktop site was being revamped, and we were also working on a new mobile strategy,” said Nitin Mathur.

Where is 91mobiles right now?

The company recently raised a round of funding lead by India Quotient fund and has doubled its team to over 40 people. “Traffic has grown by ~50% this year, to over 200,000 visitors / day,” added Nitin. The Delhi based startup also raised around a million USD from India Quotient among others.

Key learnings: Team building and generating faith among users.

MobiKwik

MobiKwik is India’s leading Mobile Wallet with 10 million users.

Where was MobiKwik in early in 2014?

Initiated several product improvements and launched new features such as money transfer and building more robust payment solutions for our business partners. “In early 2014, we were also busy recruiting new teams (marketing, design, etc), increased our focus on consumer outreach efforts, and tied up with some major e-commerce merchants where MobiKwik wallet was made live as a payment option, said MobiKwik.

Where is MobiKwik right now?

The company signs up 30,000 users everyday and witnesses 15% growth on monthly basis. Currently, it does 2, 50,000 transactions per day, most of them comes via mobile. its wallet at present live as a payment option across 5,000 e-commerce merchants.

Key learning: Mobile is changing the way India used to shop.

Airwoot

Airwoot is an enterprise social media helpdesk platform delivering customer service & real-time engagement.

Where was Airwoot in early 2014?

With fresh funding from last year and great advisors on board, including Rajan Anandan, Rishi Srivastava etc. The company came out of closed beta earlier this year making its product accessible to the larger set of bands who had been waiting to get access.

“Back then, we also started investing in processes such as our proactive customer support to our brands, streamlining payment collection, product management & automation. The process automation efforts started back then reaped greater benefits for us and we were easily able to scale serving large enterprises with a very small yet efficient core team,” Sarthak Dev.

Where is Airwoot right now?

Airwoot is at an interesting inflection point in its trajectory of growth. The company is witnessing humungous traction from existing & new customers across e-commerce, retail, travel & financial services for our product. Airwoot Internationally, starting with the US & APAC market.It’s also a cashflow positive company and investing back into engineering & sourcing brightest technical talent.

Key learnings: Mentoring brings a lot of values to a growth chasing startup.

Grofers

Grofers is a hyperlocal deliveries platform from local merchants to consumers.

Where was Grofers in early 2014?

The company was busy in tying up with merchants in Gurgaon and South Delhi and taking over deliveries for them. In early this year its team size was 30 and was doing around 500 hyperlocal deliveries everyday.

Where is Grofers right now?

“We now operate a delivery system with over 150 motorcycle deliverers and 6 vans across Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore. We deliver over 1300 orders everyday across different categories and have 18 micro-warehouses that serve as stations across the three cities,” said Albinder.

The startup also raised seed funding from Sequoia Capital in August this year. It also gears to launch mobile apps for Android and iOS platforms this month.

Key learnings: Keep going and be persistent.

Ecom Express

Brainchild of TA Krishnan Ecom Express is an e-commerce dedicated logistics startup which delivered nearly 5 million packages last year and has 3,000 employees at present on board.

Ecom Express in early 2014

The Gurgaon based company was doing little over one million shipments on a monthly basis and has close to 2,200 employees across the country.

Where is Ecom Express right now?

The Delhi based company expects to deliver about 20 million packages by the end of this year. Earlier in September this year it had raised over Rs.100 Crore from Peepul Capital.

Buyt

Buyt is a price comparison sites that offers information across categories

Launched in 2012 by Yogesh Tomar, Biswanath Patel, Simran J singh and Sunil Jain – Buyt has over 100 e-commerce portals on board. It had turned profitable and clocks an average of 1,500 transactions on daily basis in February/March this year.

Where is Buyt right now?

The startup will hit revenues of seven figure US dollars by the end of this year, while the total worth of products they sell in 2014 is more than $10 million.

Key learnings: Partnership are of immense importance when you are eyeing for scale.

Related read: 10 promising startups from Mumbai that have bloomed in 2014