Data, AI, efficiency: test your business creativity with Edition 218 of our weekly quiz!
This insightful feature from YourStory tests and strengthens your business acumen! Here are 5 questions to kick off this 218th quiz. Ready?
Lateral Sparks, the weekly quiz from YourStory, tests your domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking skills (see the previous edition here). In this 218th edition of the quiz, we present issues tackled by real-life entrepreneurs in their startup journeys.
What would you do if you were in their shoes? At the end of the quiz, you will find out what the entrepreneurs and innovators themselves actually did. Would you do things differently?
Check out YourStory’s Book Review section as well, with takeaways from over 355 titles on creativity and entrepreneurship, and our weekend PhotoSparks section on creativity in the arts.
Q1: Trucks and delivery
The market for delivery services via trucks is unorganised and fragmented in many countries. How can this sector be made more efficient?
Q2: Satellite data
Satellites generate lots of raw data. But the challenge is in drawing intelligence from this data in real-time. Where is the entrepreneurial opportunity here?
Q3: CFO decisions
The workflow of finance teams involves dealing with semi-structured documents. A number of automation solutions have emerged here, but challenges still remain at the decision-making stage. How can these be made more efficient at scale?
Q4: Agriculture and efficiency
The agriculture sector employs a large chunk of the workforce, yet the sector remains highly exposed to erratic rainfall, rising temperatures, fragmented markets, and post-harvest losses. How can technology help here?
Q5: Pollution and air quality
Average citizens have little information about the quality of air they are breathing. While government agencies collect such data through monitoring stations, people do not know where or how to access this data. How can this gap be addressed?
Answers!
Congratulations on having come this far! But there’s more to come – answers to these five questions (below), as well as links to articles with more details on the entrepreneurs’ solutions. Happy reading, happy learning – and happy creating!
A1: Trucks and delivery
Founded by Vidhant Monga, Tender Truck operates as an aggregator platform, enabling logistics companies to hire verified, compliance-checked fleet owners directly. It leverages WhatsApp to increase adoption and make communication with customers easier.
The B2B startup now has over 50 customers, including Delhivery, TCI and DHL. Read more here about how it uses AI and ML tools to determine the right price for a particular load and route, monitor truck availability, and identify nearby shipments.
A2: Satellite data
Founded by Krishanu Acharya, Rupesh Kumar and Amit Kumar, Suhora is a deeptech startup that builds geospatial intelligence systems by turning satellite images into real-time insights. It offers four products for applications like defence intelligence, disaster monitoring, and energy infrastructure.
It works with over 300 satellites, and generates revenue from a mix of SaaS offerings, intelligence delivery, and custom deployments. Read more here about its customers like the Haryana government for monitoring agriculture, stubble burning, and illegal construction.
A3: CFO decisions
Founded by Rajeev Pathak, Niyati Chhaya and Ram Jayaraman, Hyperbots offers agentic AI-native co-pilots that automate core finance workflows. This includes procure-to-pay (PTP), order-to-cash (OTC), expense management, and analytics.
It leverages a mixture of AI models for vision, domain reasoning, and forecasting. Read more here about how it goes beyond document extraction to validating, reconciling and posting data autonomously.
A4: Agriculture and efficiency
Founded by Prasanna Rao, Anand Chandra, and Chattanathan Devarajan, Arya.ag operates an integrated grain commerce platform. It spans pre-harvest advisory, post-harvest storage, finance, and market access.
It aims to reduce information asymmetry and trust deficits between farmers, traders and lenders. Read more here about its operations that extend across about 60% of India’s districts through a network of 12,000 warehouses, thus introducing approaches that reward efficiency and sustainability.
A5: Pollution and air quality
Founded by Rohit Bansal, Prana Air builds air-quality monitoring devices that help check AQI (air quality index). It also runs AQI.in, a real-time environmental data platform that allows users to view air quality in their cities and neighbourhoods.
The platform tells users if the air quality is good, moderate, poor, unhealthy, severe, or hazardous. Read more here about its sensors and grid-based modeling systems that power dashboards at city, neighbourhood and national levels.
YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).