From mental health assessment platform to a wearable device for dogs - meet the 8 startups in Axilor’s third batch

The accelerator and incubator programmes across the world seem to have taken startups to ride by being at the helm of mentorship and guidance. India is equally keeping pace given the growing crave for entrepreneurship among youth fraternity. Multinational companies, stalwart entrepreneurs and government bodies are predominantly venturing into the incubation industry to help startups at every stage of their journey.

According to Ganapathy Venugopal, CEO of Axilor Ventures, there are many institutions that provide support in the first 12 months, whereas Axilor helps startups in the first 24 months to reach from idea to pilot stage. The 100-day programme focussed on customer validation, training on raising funds, access to alumni network and a grant of Rs one lakh.

We are focussed on startups that are into E-commerce, healthcare and cleantech sectors,” says Ganapathy.

Founded by S.D. Shibulal, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Srinath Batni, Professor Tarun Khanna and Ganapathy, Axilor Ventures has just concluded its third batch comprising nine startups that are selected out of the 245 applications received. The first batch had five startups and the second batch had seven. They conduct the programme twice a year - summer and winter. For the fourth batch, they are likely to select 12 to 15 startups.

Here are excerpts of eight out of the nine startups, one preferred to be in stealth mode:

Pushchamp

Inception phase

Started in December 2015, Pushchamp is a SaaS platform that helps companies with user engagement over multiple channels. It provides a platform which can be used for all kinds of communication and user engagement at a minimal cost. To integrate, one has to just sign up on the platform, plug in SDKs and start using. Marketers can run campaigns on many channels, while developers can integrate a single API and send messages through SMS, emails, android, iOS, windows or web push.

Who are they?

Prior to starting Pushcamp, Shailesh Kumar and Abhinav Singh have been a part of Ibibo for two years. Abhinav passed out of Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology and Shailesh is an alumnus of IIIT Allahabad.

Revenue model

Pushchamp charges customers based on the number of subscriptions they have, which gives startups the flexibility to pay only based on their size and not on the level of usage.

Xobin

What is the idea?

Started in December 2015, Xobin is a tech hiring platform for assessing and hiring full-stack developers. "Xobin challenges" help recruiters test full-stack developers on real world problems rather than abstract concepts. "Xobin Interact" lets the recruiter interact with the candidate in real time and observe the candidate solve real world problems. Currently, Xobin has over 15 paid customers and 60 signups with 25 percent conversion rate.

Who are they?

Guruprakash Sivabalan (22) and Amrit Acharya (24) completed their BTech from SRM University.

Prior to starting Xobin, Guruprakash had founded SRM Search Engine, which was funded by the Government of India.

Revenue model

Xobin follows a subscription-based model where startups need to pay $149 for creating a challenge. Over 15 candidates can take up the challenge and post that every candidate will be charged $10.

WAGR.in

What is the idea?

Wagr is a unified platform consisting of a dog wearable and a mobile application that make dog parenting easier. The device and the app help the dog owner take care of the health, safety and other needs of their dog. The device helps monitor the dog's location and activity. In addition, the app provides dog-related services like vets and boarding places and a social feed.

Who are they?

An alumnus of IIT Madras, Advaith Mohan was working at Flipkart in Bengaluru when he met Ajith Kochery, an alumnus of the Technical University of Munich, at a concert. When Advaith adopted a street puppy called Jambi, they started discussing the possibility of a solution to make it easier for dog parents, which led to the birth of WAGR.in.

Revenue model

Wagr generates revenue through device sales and subscription of the app. Wagr will be available for pre-order through a crowdfunding campaign on wagr.in soon.

Tacnik

What is the idea?

Founded in November 2015, Tacnik is a platform for rentals and buying of new and pre-owned consoles and games. In the past eight months, they have fulfilled more than 500 rental transactions.

Who are they?

Mayank Banka, Purnank Prakash, Ishant Sahu and Jeevan Choudhary are NIT Trichy alumni. Mayank has one and half years of experience as a customer and web analyst at EXL Service and Souq.com. Purnank has one and half years of experience as a product developer at SAP labs. Ishant was associated with Network Security at CISCO. Jeevan worked in product quality in Reliance Industries Limited.

Revenue model

Tacnik follows a pay per transaction revenue model. The transaction could come from individual customers (B2C) who rent/buy from Tacnik or from our corporate clients (B2B) where Tacnik creates a gaming zone on an event basis.

Survaider

What is the idea?

Started in November 2015, Survaider is a SaaS-based customer experience (CX) management solution for multi-outlet businesses to help them understand the opinions of their customers. It enables businesses to measure CX and act on it in real time by aggregating and analysing reviews/posts/mentions and any other kind of customer interaction on all online and offline channels. Businesses can also run all this data through their artificial intelligent engine to derive key aspects which help improve the CX.

Who are they?

Tushar Mishra and Madhulika Mukherjee are computer science engineering graduates from the University of Delhi. They have worked in other startup companies in machine learning and natural language processing.

Revenue model

Survaider’s clients pay a monthly subscription fee of $100 per month per outlet (a hotel chain with 10 hotels across the country hence pays $1,000 a month). They are currently raising $300,000 to achieve a growth of at least 150 global customers at the end of 18 months.

The Fashion Barn

Started in January this year, The Fashion Barn is a B2B platform that aims to simplify wholesale for Indian fashion brands. It helps brands to connect to the right retailers, reduce the manual work required to close the deal and visibility on sales, product performance and retailer performance.

Who are they?

Namrata Soni did her MBA in California, USA, and worked for organisations such as Wells Fargo and Williams Sonoma.

Revenue model

The Fashion Barn charges brand a transaction fees based on the volumes transacted, whereas retailers can use the platform for free.

nSmiles

The vision of nSmiles is to spread ‘n’ (mathematical representation of many) smiles in people’s lives. nSmiles offers different learning tools, resources and skills on how to handle challenges one faces in different phases of life. It also provides expert recommendations and take 30 minutes to complete the assessment in complete anonymity and provides an automated report. Currently, 800 people are using their assessments. Its Happy Being App has witnessed more than 1.5 lakh downloads.

Appsfly.io

Appsfly.io allows MicroApps to get hosted and streamed into any platform (iOS, Android and Web). Every application on smart devices can be divided to logic, integration and interface. Appsfly.io can separate the components of the application and fly it into multiple contexts of different platforms.

According to Ganapathy, Axilor Ventures does not take stake in the accelerator programme, but going forward they will take eight to nine percent. As a part of early stage funding programme, Axilor has invested in five startups as of April 2016 (which ranges between Rs one to three crores)‑ Murgency, Eventshigh, Petoo, Sellerworx and EasyFix.

However, Ganapathy mentioned that one-fourth of the total Axilor incubated startups shut down because of the lack of understanding of the need of the market, competition and product. Many have gone back to job, whereas few joined the founding team of other ventures.

While talking about the profitability of incubation programme, he said that the return of capital for accelerators and incubators worldwide is very poor. Usually accelerators take six to seven years to breakeven and most of them sometimes ended up losing money.

Axilor has opened out applications for its 100-day accelerator programme (winter batch).To apply, logon to:http://www.axilor.com/programs.html