Action-packed Day 5 of TechSparks 2021 ahead with Thyrocare’s Velumani, actor Kunal Kapoor, and Licious founders

Good Morning,

Day 4 of TechSparks 2021 kicked off with a fireside chat featuring Unacademy's Gaurav Munjal, who envisions revolutionising education in India.

The democratisation of creation and distribution channels will drive the growth of the creator economy in India in the coming years, he said, adding that Unacademy wants to ride to become the largest consumer brand in India by 2025.

As a distributed ledger technology for executing and recording transactions transparently and securely, blockchain is making the case for building a decentralised future.

Diving deep into this topic at TechSparks 2021 were Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder and COO, Polygon; Ganesh Swami, CEO, Covalent; Aniket Jindal, Co-founder, Biconomy; Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder, NEAR Protocol; and Neeraj Khandelwal, Co-founder and CTO, CoinDCX. The panel discussion was hosted by Raghu Mohan, CEO and Co-founder, Lumos Labs.

Talking about surviving the COVID-19 storm, BookMyShow Co-founder and CEO Ashish Hemrajani explained how the pandemic brought out the operator in him after 20 years, pushing him to take charge of business metrics and drive some hard decisions.

On Day 5 of TechSparks, we have Thyrocare's Founder and Chairman, Dr Arokiaswamy Velumani, who will discuss building one of India’s largest medical diagnostics chains, recently acquired by healthtech unicorn Pharmeasy.

Actor-entrepreneur Kunal Kapoor will take the stage to talk about how Ketto is making an impact on society today and what it has achieved over the last year, helping thousands of COVID-19-hit Indians.

Also making an appearance are Licious’ energetic co-founders, Vivek Gupta and Abhay Hanjura, who will talk about building India’s first D2C unicorn —  a feat the entire startup ecosystem has been lauding.

The Interview

Entrepreneurship often starts with an idea, a laptop, and a dream. Your hard work, productivity, collaboration, consistency, choices you make, and the lengths you go to protect it, can be the secret sauce to making the dream a reality. 

In a conversation, Deepak Jayaraman, the creator and curator of the Play To Potential Podcast, and an Executive Coach and Transition Advisor, shared his insights on making the right choices for long-lasting personal and professional impact.

Editor’s Pick: What’s next for Unacademy? 

The democratisation of creation and distribution channels will drive the growth of the creator economy in India in the coming years, said Gaurav Munjal, Co-founder and CEO of edtech unicorn Unacademy. 

This is the wave Unacademy wants to ride to become the largest consumer brand in India by 2025, Gaurav told Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, at TechSparks 2021. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

Starting up in apparels

In India, the men’s innerwear market stood at Rs 165 billion (Rs 16,500 crore) in 2020 compared to Rs 85 billion (Rs 8,500 crore) in 2015, according to Statista.

Seeing the trend, in 2017, entrepreneur Yogesh Kabra started XYXX Apparels in Surat. Today, the startup sells three lakh units of its product every month. Read more.

News & Updates

• Insurtech startup ACKO Insurance is the latest to join the unicorn club after raising $255 million in Series D round, which has valued the company at $1.1 billion. ACKO Insurance is now the 34th startup to enter India's growing list of unicorns.

• Paytm IPO will open for subscription from November 8 to November 10 and it has been priced in the range of Rs 2,080 and Rs 2,150. The issue size of the IPO of One97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm, has now risen to Rs 18,300 crore from the earlier Rs 16,600 crore.

• Flipkart has announced a collaboration with short video platform Moj to enable video and live commerce experiences at scale. According to Flipkart, this will help them scale video commerce in the country and engage the next 200 million ecommerce customers.

• The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has joined hands with Truecaller to provide passengers with greater trust in communication. This means that the integrated National Railways Helpline 139 is now verified by Truecaller Business Identity solutions.

• The latest report by Square Yards titled ‘India Residential Overview: Jul-Sep 2021’ suggests a whopping growth of close to 70 percent was recorded in the number of residential projects launched in the top six cities as compared to the previous quarter.

Before you go, stay inspired with… 

“We have a great product in test prep, and by 2025, we would have cracked at least two or three more market segments and would have built a world-class product.” 

— Gaurav Munjal, Co-founder and CEO, Unacademy

Now get the Daily Capsule in your inbox. Subscribe to our newsletter today!