Meet 14 startups selected by Axilor’s accelerator programme for its winter 2019 cohort
The current cohort of 14 startups includes 7 each in B2C and B2B models. Axilor said for the first time, the Winter 2019 batch also includes a Global SaaS cohort of six startups
, a Bengaluru-based accelerator and seed fund, has selected 14 startups for its winter 2019 cohort. This is the tenth cohort, which comprises of startups in consumer tech, enterprise, and fintech.
Axilor said in a statement that this time it saw a record number of over 725 applications, 80 percent higher than its last batch. The sectors which saw the most increase in applications include edtech, agritech, Blockchain, and spacetech.
The current cohort of 14 startups includes seven each in B2C and B2B models. For the first time, the winter 2019 batch also includes a Global SaaS cohort of six startups, Axilor added.
Ganapathy Venugopal, Co-founder and CEO, Axilor Ventures, said,
"We have seen a tremendous increase in the number of applications validating Axilor as a programme of choice for ambitious, bootstrapped founders. What stands out this time is that more than 90 percent of the startups have founders with prior startup experience - a positive trend towards growing maturity of the ecosystem."
Below is a detailed description of each startup of this batch.
Enterprise
AiKaan Labs
Founded by Chetan Kumar S, Pronoy Debnath, and Siddharth Munot, is an edge computing platform to orchestrate and manage edge computing applications and devices. Currently, AiKaan is working with global customers in smart mobility (including Ather Energy), industrial IoT, commercial services, and smart cities.
Emitrr
Founded by Pulkit Gambhir and Anmol Oberoi, Emitrr is a platform that enables commerce on voice. The platform provides a plug-in on AI-powered voice assistants like Alexa, Google assistant, and mobile. Emitrr currently serves over 10 customers from ecommerce, laundry, and home cleaning industries based in the US and over 100 users globally.
eShipz.com
Shiva Mahadi, Ajay Kumar Raja Kumar, and Shashi Tripathi founded .com to provide first-mile digitisation and post shipment analytics to enterprises. With direct integration to enterprise ERP, businesses can view and manage shipments across multiple carriers. The solution is deployed across 50+ enterprises and each have benefited by 80 percent reduction in shipment processing time, the company claims. Started in April 2019, the company is on track to achieve monthly volume of one million shipments.
Kloudi.tech
Founded by Sneh Ganjoo and Nitish Mehrotra, Kloudi.tech enables every developer in the engineering team to become a 10x developer by solving for the workflow of faster bug resolution. It unlocks speed through tool aggregation, data enrichment, and workflow automation. Currently, Kloudi.tech is able to help developers save per bug 20-40 minutes of debugging time, and has early traction in global markets, it said.
Mowito
Founded by Puru Rastogi, Mowito, enables robot navigation without the use of markers or beacons. Currently, robot makers have to spend months in developing good navigation software for their robots and even then the software is not robust.
Mowito's plug-n-play product can work with any robot with wheels - be it autonomous mobile robots in factories, service robots in the corporate sector, or floor vacuuming robots. It has early sign-ups for the pilot, from service robotics and industrial robotics sector and Invento Robotics (maker of Mitra robot) is one of its customers.
LightCat
Founded by Utkarsh Apoorva and Ahmed Zain, LightCat helps product owners optimise for growth using data science. It helps growth teams with data analysis using ML algorithms and also in deploying growth experiments quickly with no or little involvement from the engineering team.
Upshotly
Founded by Sithartha Gowtham and Ganesh Ravi Shankar, Upshotly is an employee performance management software. It is helping leaders build high-performance teams through OKRs and Conversations, Feedback and Recognition (CFRs) and by integrating with business tools in the flow of work. The firm currently has early traction in the US, the UK, and India.
Consumer Tech
Bolkar
Founded by Prince Tripathi, Dhruv Kaushal, Saurabh Rai, and Abhishek Tripathi, Bolkar (formerly Pascolan) is an audio-based Q&A platform for the next 500 million native internet users in India. Over the past year, the Bolkar app has seen over two lakh downloads with more than four lakh Q&A already posted on the app.
ChangePay
Founded by Dhyvik GJ and Sanchit Garg, ChangePay is an integrated local commerce solution for college hostels. It integrates disparate services into one simple app tied together with an IoT lockbox to solve the “Gate-to-hand” challenge of delivering in college hostels. ChangePay is currently live in NITK and has over 4,000 users and another 10 communities are expected to go live by March 2020. It is also looking to expand to other gated communities such as apartments and tech parks.
CollegePass
Founded by Aakash Aaron in April 2019, CollegePass is a global college guidance and preparation platform with a mission to help grade 9-12 students and parents access world-class college guidance at the click of a button. CollegePass streams live online college admission sessions, live online masterclasses delivered by International college advisors, and test prep experts. It claims its subscription plans cater to every requirement of a high school family thinking of applying to colleges internationally. India is currently the largest market for English speaking students looking to pursue higher education abroad and CollegePass already has students from 300+ schools and 7 countries on its platform.
Intro
Romil Meghani and Chetan Kantharia started Intro in in late 2019 to allow self-employed professionals to express their personal brand with a DIY page builder, link multiple social profiles, invite testimonials, get a custom domain, and even share it like a digital business card. It is currently in the beta stage and is set to launch by the end of January 2020.
Saarthi
Saarthi is creating live educational tournaments platform for the next billion users in vernacular languages. It was founded by Chiraag Kapil, and is going after the trend of live, social and gamified, incentive-based competitive learning. The startup is currently in beta and set to launch by the end of January 2020.
Founded by Snehanshu Gandhi, Tamanjit Bindra, and Gaurav Shrishrimal in 2019, Sorted AI is a personal assistant that helps individuals declutter their digital footprint. It uses AI to automatically set-up reminders for important things like bill payments, investments, managing household assets like vehicles, appliances, etc., and helps store and find important documents/information when required. It is currently in its beta stage.
Womaniya
Founded by Kanak Waikar, Lakhan Suchdev, Avneesh Kumar, and Siddharth Kothari, is a social woman-only vernacular platform. There are 200 million women on the internet (the number is set to grow to 300 million+ by 2025) who do not speak English. Womaniya is a trusted platform for these women to discuss their interests and issues and get information from the community and experts in their own language. The platform has 25,000+ active users and over the past 6 months, 2.4 lakh queries have been crowdsourced.
(Edited by Megha Reddy)
