Starting Up with Shradha Sharma: Meet this week’s startups that are taking center stage and owning it

Building startups can be challenging.

As such, YourStory has started Starting Up with Shradha Sharma—a weekly live show which offers a platform for early and mid-stage startups to showcase their products and ideas. No retakes or pitch tweaks here – these entrepreneurs showcase their products and ideas with raw passion and authenticity.

After hearing the journeys of VECROS, 3rditech, CodeMate, and Trestle Labs in the sixth episode, we are back with four new names that took centre stage this week.

SpaceFields

Founded by Apurwa Masook, Sudarshan Samal, and Rounak Agrawal in September 2021, SpaceFields is a space tech company based in Bengaluru. The idea was to develop and deploy Dual-use technologies to solve critical challenges in national security and commercial spaceflight. SpaceFields is funded by Govt of India, Govt of Karnataka, Govt of Odisha and incubated at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

All founders possess extensive expertise in the space industry, as they were members of the exclusive student body in India that successfully constructed and launched seven sounding rocket missions. Their exceptional accomplishments garnered recognition from the Hon'ble Prime Minister on his Maan ki Baat program, as well as commendations from esteemed organizations such as ISRO, DRDO, and various government ministries.

Recently they also secured a place in the second edition of the Boeing University Innovation Leadership Development (BUILD) programme 2022-23.

What started as an idea from the hostel rooms, planted a drive among the three Co-founders which eventually led to the birth of SpaceFields. The brand is planning to make more prototypes, run tests and produce defence applications in the coming time.

“People disregard college projects but they play an important role in nurturing us at a very young age. I believe disruption happens if you take a significant amount of risk,” Apurwa Masook, Founder and CEO of SpaceFields told Shradha Sharma.

Tweek labs

Tweek Labs is a sports tech company that makes clothes with sensors that captures the full body motion of an athlete which can provide actionable insights to help them manage their performance and training.

Its Tweek Motion Analysis Sportswear is a kit consisting of Tweek Bits, the Tweek Wear and the Tweek App all of which work together to provide people with detailed, actionable reports on an athlete’s performance.

Tweek Labs believe in the scientific approach to sports coaching and want to create products that make these methods more accessible and eventually give every aspiring athlete an equal chance to improve themselves.

The startup is working in the B2C (business-to-consumer) segment with the local cricket academies. It deploys its products in these academies and provides them with monthly analytics. Tweek Labs’teams visits these academies to interpret and explain the data collected to the coaches along with providing solutions to athletes to better their performance. The startup is also exploring the B2B (business-to-business) space.

At the moment, its products are not available on the company website, however, the startup plans to build that in the next six months and also venture into other sports.

“We are creating the whole product here in India and we want that whatever we give out should be good,” Anant Sharma, the Co-founder and CEO of Tweek Labs said during the show.

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Starting up with Shradha: Meet this week’s startups solving across sectors, one idea at a time

XO Curls

Frustrated being called out names and not being unable to find the right products for her curly hair led Tanya Eldred Bhat, to establish XO Curls in 2022.

While searching for the right products she realised that most of the products were not available in India and it was then she decided to bridge the market gap.

The brand launched with the XO Curls Shower Detangling Comb – a patented comb, which has wavy teeth of alternating lengths to allow gentle combing of wet curls. Now, the startup offers a range of products including–shampoos, conditioners, hair gels and more. Their products are available on Amazon, Nykaa, and Myntra, along with its website.

She believes that people in India have limited knowledge about wavy or curly hair products and hence Bhat plans to enter the offline market as well to build a close connection with the customers.

“Straight and shiny hair is liked by society but it is time that we embrace what is natural and meant to be and enjoy how it looks too,” she said.

Study At Home

Raj K Agrawal recalls that when he was working as a teacher he noticed that most of the students were from well-off families and hence they were able to afford education in such institutes. However, those who are underprivileged lack this facility.

This Banaras-based startup founded by CA Raj K Agrawal and Tripti Verma, offers skill development and academic online courses at affordable prices.

With the aim of taking education to the masses, he started Study At Home. The startup received the National Startup Awards in 2021 from PM Narendra Modi. So far, it has more than 80,000 paid users.

The courses on the platform range between Rs 400-500. The startup offers online classes which are provided by subject experts in HingLish (Hindi plus English). The startup offers skill development courses which are designed in an interesting manner.

It has been reaching out to students via schools and colleges however it plans to spend more on digital marketing to reach a wider audience.

“We aim to focus more on the education aspect as we feel that in Edtech education part is the main focus which is complemented with technology,” Agawaral said.