[Startup Bharat] These 5 startups from Indore prove why the city is an entrepreneur’s delight

Indore, known as the commercial capital of Madhya Pradesh and a centre for manufacturing, is now emerging as a startup hub.

The State government has also taken many initiatives to boost the startup ecosystem. In 2016, it formulated the Madhya Pradesh Incubation and Startup Policy to align the State with the Centre’s ‘Startup India’ initiative. It intends to offer incentives to the State’s startups and incubators in addition to those provided by the Central government.

This has led to the surge in the number of startups in Madhya Pradesh, especially in Indore. According to market research platform Tracxn, Indore has nearly 461 tech startups.

Many other factors have also propelled the Tier-II city’s startup activity. Considered an education hub, Indore has campuses of both the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Low operation costs, high infrastructure growth, economical cost of living, and being geographically located centrally is also giving a fillip to the ecosystem in the State.

Indore also hosts the Global Investor’s Summit, attracting domestic and foreign investment for the development of the State.

From tech-based startups to ecommerce platforms, YourStory lists five startups from Indore to watch out for:

ShopKirana

Indore-based ShopKirana is a B2B ecommerce platform, which connects retailers and brands/ factories using a mobile app. It helps retailers to generate better sales and keep less inventory by buying in real time, and by keeping track of the data on their mobile phone.

Founded in 2015 by Tanutejas Saraswat, Sumit Ghorawat, and Deepak Dhanotiya, ShopKirana currently has more than 12,000 retailers on its platform. In early 2019, the startup expanded to Jaipur and Bhopal. It has also launched regional content in Hindi and Gujarati to target a wider audience.

The startup’s latest fund raise was in December 2018 where it raised $2 million from Info Edge, AET Fund, Better Capital, Incubate Fund, and Akatsuki.

Batooni

Batooni is an adtech startup that focusses on your dialler. The Batooni app doubles up as a phone dialler, and every time you use it to dial a number, an ad of 10-15 second crops up. If you watch the whole ad, you get compensated on a real-time basis with real money that can be used to recharge both prepaid and post-paid connections.

The startup was founded in 2017 by two-time entrepreneurs and classmates Jitendra Chaturvedi (44) and Johnney Paul (44), and is bootstrapped at present. The founders say that the app has over 750,000 downloads as of now.

Batooni works on a revenue-share model and claims to be working with 11 clients including large advertising agencies like GroupM, Lodestar Lintas, and Madison.

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Securitybulls

Geet Vaishnav and Prateek Sharma founded Securitybulls - a penetration testing and infrastructure security service provider - in 2016 on realising a lack of understanding in terms of security in organisations.

The platform analyses a company’s digital assets from a hacker's point of view to provide a blueprint for remediation to help build or enhance a protection strategy. 

Depending on client needs, the company charges $200-$1,500 per day, per engineer. At present, the team works with different engineers and hackers on a part-time basis. 

The team claims to have a monthly revenue of around Rs 5 lakh. Some of its prominent clients include Angel Broking, Arihant Capital, US-based Agfirst Farm Cred, Amar Ujjala in Noida, and Zerodha in Bengaluru. 

Clothing Innovation

Founded in 2017 by Shreshtha and Mayur Malpani, Clothing Innovation offers Armour technology, a patent-pending formula, that ‘factory treats’ fabric to ensure it repels insects like mosquitoes, flies, ticks, chiggers, ants, etc.

The bootstrapped startup from Indore provides treatment on all kinds of fabrics (except silk and velvet), and also sells its own range of insect-repellent, anti-microbial, and anti-bacterial fabrics and apparel for children and adults.

At present, Clothing Innovation has a capacity to manufacture 50,000 units of children’s apparel per month, and can treat 100,000 metres of fabric per month. It has sold 50,000 shirts and baby apparel along with 6,800 bed linen products so far.

UmojaPay

Founded by Manan Dixit in 2015, UmojaPay promotes financial inclusion and sets up kiosks in villages to enable digital payments. The startup aims to reach out to the unbanked segment through its retailer and Point of Sale (PoS) network. UmojaPay enables digital transactions like bill payments, remittance facilities and mobile wallet, and value-added services (VAS) like recharges, and ticket bookings. 

Having a footprint in over 50 villages in Madhya Pradesh, the payments wallet today has over 80,000 users.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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