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Top 50 Inspiring and Most Read Startup Stories of 2013


Team YS

30th Dec 2013

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1. The billion dollar Mu Sigma story


Mu Sigma is one of the fastest growing companies in the world. It has raised a
gargantuan grand total of 163 million dollars in funding over nine years of its
existence,
Home and holds the unique distinction
Latest of securing theNewsletters
Topics largest funding round ever
Editions

by a business analytics company. For its founder, Dhiraj C Rajaram, it all started
because of three reasons: one, his unending urge to learn; two, to separate noise from
signals – in terms of information that comes to businesses in their day-to-day life.
And three, his belief that innovation in businesses is nothing but chance. Read the
story of his inspiring journey on YourStory..

Read the complete story

2. Phanindra Sama of redBus says best is yet to come, after acquisition


We at YourStory have had a great relationship with redBus and have been associated
with them since the beginning. Having seen the company’s meteoric growth in the
past few years, it was interesting to know what founder Phanidra Sama thought about
the acquisition. He told us in the initial days, their focus was to solve a problem with
technology. "None of us ever thought of how big this would become or where this
company would go Wve years from now. But halfway through, we began to think that
we’re onto something," he said, adding that the best from redBus is yet to come.

Read the complete story

3. An entrepreneur from Aurangabad who deserves applause - Clear Car


Rental
This is the story of Sachin Kate, who hails from Aurangabad in Maharashtra. From
selling newspapers to being a school-going oYce boy at a computer institute, the
road to starting up wasn't smooth sailing for Sachin. Part-time jobs gave him
conWdence to startup. His venture, Clear Car Rental (http://www.clearcarrental.com/)
provides both local and outstation travel solutions. The services grew to 150+ cities
within India and has a home team of 100 who manage the operations. A local hero in
Aurangabad, Sachin was far from the limelight before this article.

Read the complete story

4. Housing.co.in closes second round of funding over dinner!


In what would be a dream for most entrepreneurs in the Indian startup ecosystem,
Housing.co.in (http://housing.com/in) raised a second round of funding in less than a
month of its previous investment. Over a dinner meeting with former Network 18 CEO,
Mr. Haresh Chawla, the team closed on the funding deal. Advitiya Sharma, Co-
Founder Housing.co.in, told us how the investment boosted the team’s conWdence.
“The manner in which the investment happened and more so, the person who’s
behind the investment has really got everyone in the team pumped up. Haresh Ji has
done quite a lot through his career,” he told us.

Read the complete story

5. ideaForge’s UAV comes handy in Uttarakhand


Founded by Wve IIT Bombay alumni, ideaForge
(http://www.ideaforge.co.in/web/home) is in the business of developing alternative
energy charging devices for various consumer electronic products and developing
high-end technologies in the Weld of autonomous aerial vehicles. The Wrst product
from the company is called Netra, a collaborative work with DRDO, deployed to scan
the air space in food-ravaged Uttarakhand in hope of locating missing survivors.
Netra is a completely autonomous hovering Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) ideal for
short range missions and requires very short training time.

Get 'off the GRID'


Just an hour away from Nainital with stunning views
of Nanda Devi and surrounding peaks

Jilling Terraces OPEN

Read the complete story

6. The story of Rootwork’s early success


Six friends from NIT Allahabad, landed on an idea for an app while still in college.
They eventually started Rootwork, (http://rootwork.co/) making apps for any smart
devices that are around you today (smartphones, smart TVs, phablets, tablets, Google
Glass), and everything smart that’s going to arrive tomorrow. "At Rootwork, we
materialize our own ideas by publishing apps through Zitrr Studios. But as an ITeS
company, our mainstream business is to create and deliver bespoke apps to
businesses, startups and individual app publishers," they said.

Read the complete story

7. Rotimatic: Rotis at a click of a button


A machine for almost every Indian, who has spent hours in the kitchen. That's
Rotimatic (http://rotimatic.com/). It will help you make rotis at the click of a button.
Rotimatic comes from Zimplistic, a venture founded by Singapore-based Pranoti
Nagarkar. Zimplistic is one of the 15 Singapore startups which has received a total
grant of $6 million from Spring Singapore. Rotimatic also has an impressive board
which will help scale up the company. The major demand will come from South Asia
and Indian expats living abroad.

Get 'off the GRID'


Just an hour away from Nainital with stunning views
of Nanda Devi and surrounding peaks

Jilling Terraces OPEN

Read the complete story

8. Shared cab service Cubito launches in Bangalore


An ambitious effort by a group of BITS Pilani Goa graduates to change the way
transport works in India, Cubito (http://cubito.in/) offers shared cab services and
started with a six-month pilot run in Goa. Cubito pools people sharing the same route
(as opposed to the regular source –destination pooling solutions) and arranges for a
common cab to transport them. Cubito has introduced their services in Bangalore for
daily commuters initially for weekly and monthly booking and have made the pricing
simple at Rs7.5/Km (introductory offer for people registering in July is Rs. 6/Km).

Read the complete story

9. FBI Arrests ShopClue's CEO - Sandeep Aggarwal


The arrest of Sandeep Aggarwal – who is at the helm of ShopClues,
(http://www.shopclues.com/), a Gurgaon-based marketplace and an earlier Silicon
Valley-based Internet analyst -- shocked many. He was arrested by FBI agents in San
Jose, California (US) alleging insider trading charges. Following the arrest Southern
District of New York administration announced criminal charges against Aggarwal.
ShopClues had raised more than $16 million, including $10 million in March 2013
from Helion Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Netprice.com, a Japanese
business group based in Tokyo.

Business Immigration to U.S.


New EB-5 Regulations Are Pending.
Act Now Before the $500K
Investment More Than Triples.

Read the complete story

10. Meet Oravel's 19-year-old founder Ritesh Agarwal


Ritesh Agarwal got into the thick of the web very early in life, at 13. And by 17, he had
started his Wrst company, Oravel. Oravel started as an Airbnb clone but the model has
undergone a twist. Oravel received a seed round of funding from Venture Nursery.
This story was how Ritesh got selected for the Wnal round of “20 Under 20” Thiel
Fellowship, a prestigious two-year program where fellows receive $100,000 and
mentorship from the foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs, investors and
scientists (like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel).

Read the complete story/

11. How did Myntra ship orders in less than an hour


Bangalore-based eCommerce company, Myntra (http://www.myntra.com/) hogged
media attention when it shipped orders in less than an hour. COO Ganesh
Subramanian told us how he did it. "Optimizing the supply chain is the key. There are
technological improvements involved but the basic problem solved is to reduce the
queue time." He also told us about the supply chain at Myntra, how they decided to
set up their own logistics division in 2012, setting up last-mile operations and so on.
After you’ve hit a certain scale, delivering via your own logistics is cheaper, he said.

Read the complete story

12. Low-cost notebooks from 2 IIT Roorkee grads - Adister story


With Adister, (http://adister.in/) graduates from IIT Rourkee, Shubham Agrawal and
Anubhav Goyal bring print advertising to notebooks, and sell student notebooks at a
very nominal price (40% less than the market price, they claim). While there are large
players like Classmate, which are quite popular among the urban students, a lot of
India’s students still buy from local notebook brands from their local stationary
shops. The low cost of an Adister notebook, like a newspaper, is subsidized by the
ads that it carries.

Read the complete story

13. How Rikant Pitti co-founded EaseMyTrip


Rikant Pitti's father used to travel a lot and always used to book his tickets via his
travel agent. This was in 2005 when OTAs were not that popular. One day, Rikant
checked the price of the tickets online and found that the travel agent was charging
Rs 1500 more. With the number of trips his father took, the loss was over Rs 20000
per month. Rikant started booking tickets for his parents, then relatives, friends of
parents and so on. EaseMyTrip (http://www.easemytrip.com/) has over 275
employees on board and is a multi-crore company. Rikant is looking at a turnover of
at least Rs 1,200 crore in 2014.

Read the complete story

14. The two PhD dropouts behind the social media and analytics startup
- Airwoot
Airwoot (http://www.airwoot.com/) is a New Delhi-based social media listening and
analytics startup founded by Saurabh Arora and Prabhat Saraswat. They met in 2008
at the Technical University of Denmark, pursuing Masters. Prabhat continued his
doctorate in Denmark while Saurabh went on to pursue his doctorate in cloud
computing architectures at Hasso-Plattner Institute in Berlin. Midway, they both
dropped out and returned to India. They did different things before coming together to
start Airwoot — a social customer support helpdesk.

Read the complete story

15. From IT to dairy farming - Amrutha Dairy Farm


Santhosh D Singh worked with IT majors like Dell, and America Online before starting
Amrutha Dairy Farms. To make it a success, he leveraged the expertise around
project management, process improvement, business intelligence, analytics, and
resource management he had accumulated over years of professional life. "I decided
to get into dairy farming, as this was a relatively stable and proWtable business in the
unpredictable world that is Indian agriculture sector," he told us. He won the NABARD
awarded Silver Medal for taking initiatives to get into dairy farming.

Read the complete story

16. Ex Goldman Sachs analyst starts Frilp for local service


recommendation through social graph
Chennai-based Frilp (https://www.frilp.com/) is an application focused on connecting
users with local services and businesses through recommendations from friends and
colleagues. From the business owners’ perspective, Frilp helps the 40 million SMEs
and consumer facing businesses to get an online presence when they are
recommended by their happy customers. Ex Goldman Sachs analyst Shyam
Anandaraman was keen to startup and he joined hands with Senthil Kanthaswamy on
Frilp.

Read the complete story

17. From coding to selling pani-puri - Gapagap story


When Prashant Kulkarni was working with Infosys, he ate pani-puri from a roadside
vendor, fell sick and had to stay off his favorite street-food for months. This prompted
him to look for hygenic pani-puri. He found that there were no brands selling this
popular snack. Prashant launched ‘Gapagap’, India’s Wrst pani-puri brand. Today,
under his venture Chatar Patar, Prashant and his team manages Gapagap and other
several products like 80 types of bhel, 27 types of chaats, pohas, etc. Chatar Patar
sells pani-puris in 112 different favors.

Read the complete story

18. Ex Wall Street banker's 335th - the Con^dence Fitwear


Following a successful career as an investment banker with UBS in New York,
Poornima Vardhan returned to India to become an entrepreneur. While she was
planning to make her move, she observed that people generally focussed on looking
good rather than feeling good. “There was a Wt for every kind – slim Wt, petite Wt and
more. But I did not Wnd a conWdence Wt anywhere; clothes and accessories that make
us look and feel conWdent,” says Poornima. Thus began her entrepreneurial journey
with 335th, (http://335th.com/) with a concept of ‘Fitwear’.

Read the complete story

19. Mumbai _oods made an entrepreneur - Rasilant


Shiladitya Mukhopadhayaya was at his friend Sahil Anand's house when incessant
rains led to fooding in Mumbai. Almost marooned, Sahil and he got talking about
RFID (radio frequency identiWcation). Shiladitya had done a RFID project in 2005 for
Texas Instruments. The duo raised money from their families and started Rasilant
Technologies, a global automation solutions and system integration services
company. They have had 35 major projects till date, including Bajaj Auto, Reliance
(multiple companies) and IL&FS.

Read the complete story

20. Tale of Viral Curry


Social media agency Viral Curry was founded by engineering graduates Garima
Juneja and Gaurav Mishra. A team of Wve, Viral Curry works on a simple revenue
model – retainer fees for a minimum three months with a Wxed monthly package.
Garima says, “We basically think about the brand’s present image and what we can
relate it to while keeping the most important thing in mind – Things with which the
audience can relate.” So far, they have had over 15 clients.

Read the complete story

21. A high potential business from IISc Labs - MYMO Wireless


MYMO Wireless Technologies is one of the many innovative companies incubated at
the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In a team of electronics and
communications engineers, many in the top level management are PhD scholars, who
have gone through the pains of having to leave projects because of various
constraints. Tools like MW1000, developed by them, allows researchers to
concentrate on the algorithms without having to worry about the nitty-gritties of
coding for DSPs and by the looks of it, people are willing to shell out a bomb for it.

Read the complete story

22. A tech backbone for cab services - 360 Cabs


An integrated solution brings together cab agencies, cab drivers and travellers,
seamlessly on a single technology platform — a technology backbone for cab
agencies. That is what 360Cabs aims to be. In simple terms, it is a technology
solution for unorganized cab agencies to streamline their business and scale it to the
next level. It equips cab agencies to service their customers better, retaining the
existing customers as well as adding new ones. Lokesh Bevara, who started 360cabs,
told YourStory about his startup.

Read the complete story

23. For the love of dog - Dogspot.in


Rana Atheya, Vizal Atheya and Shalesh Visen, passionate dog-lovers, started
Dogspot.in in 2007, as a place for dog lovers to connect. Their site grew in popularity
and the trio got fulltime into it in 2009. They introduced technology to the dog shows
across the country by automating their processes and had their foot in the doors of
everything related to dogs in India. In 2011, they decided to enter eCommerce and
there hasn’t been any looking back. DogSpot has about 3500 products listed on the
site (not only dog products) and does close to a 100 deliveries a day with an average
ticket size of INR 1300.

Read the complete story

24. How to ^nd the right product online - BuyHatke


BuyHatke, an online product and price discovery service, started out of frustration
with online shopping portals. Now BuyHatke has an inventory of over 4 crore
products on the net and claims to receive over 500,000 unique page views monthly
(traYc stats on Alexa). They also recently launched their Chrome extension and a
separate mobile comparison platform. Envisioning to become the single starting
point of every purchase made online in India, this ambitious site strives to keep
improving their product.

Read the complete story

25. Alma Mater lets you doodle and play with your tee designs
Alma Mater is an online store providing apparel and memorabilia to alumni students
from schools and colleges across India. Founded by Varun Agarwal and Rohn
Malhotra in 2009, the company has shipped 3,00,000 units till dates and is
continuously innovating to push this number. They give an option called Play, which
lets you doodle on tees. It has over 2000 art vectors and over 800 fonts to choose
from. You can upload your school/college or company logo. They have worked with
over 2500 school/colleges, 600 corporates, 400 private groups, 100 start-ups in 180
Indian cities and six countries.

Read the complete story

26. How Tune Patrol made an exit


Tune Patrol is a social music discovery platform that works towards developing and
connecting a thriving community of independent musicians and their fans in India.
The product was launched in March 2012, hosting content from close to 150 bands.
Tune Patrol is one of the star companies from the new breed of startups coming from
BITS Pilani and it had also managed to raise angel funding to the tune of Rs 10 lakh.
Brijesh Bhardwaj, Saurabh Gupta, Karthik G, and Pronoot Barkakati, the co-founders at
Tune Patrol, told YS how they won an exit.

Read the complete story

27. The ShopClues story


Sandeep Aggarwal was a stock market analyst, who provided research coverage on
global Internet giants like Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Expedia. In
2010, Sandeep wrote a sector deWning report for the India Internet and also launched
research coverage on MakeMyTrip. When he came to India for this, Sandeep
identiWed room for eCommerce. He built on the technology front while in Valley and
came to India by September 2011 and subsequently launched ShopClues in
November along with his core team.

Read the complete story

28. Harvard Business School duo quit to startup Handybook


Handybook, the brainchild of Umang Dua and Oisin Hanrahan, enables online booking
of ‘handy’ services from cleaning to plumbing to painting. It is expanding base in New
York, Boston and San Francisco. Umang told YourStory what motivated the duo to
quit Harvard Business School to pursue this dream. The duo had launched
Handybook while still at B-school and when the business started to get traction, and
they saw the potential to build something big, they decided it deserved their
unwavering attention. "The fascination of being able to take something from an idea
to a real business that people can actually use," spurred them on.

Read the complete story

29. Helping people ^nd a new house with a click - CommonFloor


Sumit Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani wanted to develop a platform that could
bring together people who live in gated communities and came up with
CommonFloor.com in November 2007. CommonFloor is now in 120 cities across the
country. Around 60,000 communities are listed with them today, constituting more
than 50 lakh homes. "We have more than 60,000 projects listed on our portal and this
is the largest compared to any property portal in India. The number of property
listings has grown by more than 500% in the past Wnancial year," Sumit told us.

Read the complete story

30. Starting up out of college - WebandCrafts


Webandcrafts, a web solutions company, provides companies with web designing,
web development, graphic designing and internet marketing services. The Wrm
started in Chennai in 2009, then shifted base to Thrissur, Kerala, in May 2012. Today,
the startup has successfully hosted over 2,500-plus websites. The startup has a
client list of over 500 clients, including Australian construction company Strong
Force, Thomson and SMR, which Webandcrafts founder Abin Jose Tom counts as
their most prestigious clients.

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31. How a VC turned entrepreneur to startup Craftsvilla


Manoj Gupta is Founder/CEO of Craftsvilla.com, (http://www.craftsvilla.com/) an
online marketplace for Indian products. Earlier, he was Principal at Nexus Venture
Partners, an India focused $600 million Fund, and the board member of multiple
companies, including Yebhi.com and Sohanlal Commodities in India. He told us the
story of how he downsized from 80 to a lean and mean 8-member team. "The ’lazy’
ones were the Wrst to go, ’talkative’ species the next one, ’political’ crap the third lot
and ’less skilled’ ones were the last. Only those who were hard working, passionate,
remained and are now shaping next journey of Craftsvilla,” he told YS

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32. A Makemytrip in cab aggregation space - TaxiForSure


TaxiForSure idea materialised over many conversations between Raghunandan G and
Aprameya Radhakrishna on cab availability in India. Over those, they stumbled across
the idea to be an aggregator for radio taxi industry in India. Founded in late 2011,
Taxiforsure’s Wrst set of unknown customers came from intranet posts in companies
by employees who had used its service. Later, Facebook ads and radio campaigns
widened its reach. The venture does extensive online and ovine marketing
campaigns, facilitates over 2,000 bookings per day across two cities Bangalore and
Delhi (NCR).

Read the complete story

33. Zomato’s India business breaks even


This article written on July 26, 2013, was an interview with Zomato founder, Pankaj
Chaddah just as their India business hit even. He spoke extensively on their present
and future expansion. Calling the break-even milestone "a great validation of our
business model", Pankaj told us: "Honestly, it only encourages us to grow faster. It
gives us great conWdence in our business model, both B2B and B2C, and now it is a
question of replicating it in enough places. We haven’t had the time to sit back and
think about the past and journey so far, and I hope that we don’t get that time either."

Read the complete story

34. Bringing travellers around the world together through Tripoto


Anirudh and Michael, who had met at Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, started
Tripoto (http://www.tripoto.com/) to bring together travellers from around the world,
share and discover real, and actionable crowd-sourced travel stories. The startup
maps every single destination in the story, along with the associated content and
pictures. A travel itinerary tied to a traveller proWle provides additional information,
such as the nature and interest of the traveller. It adds to the authenticity of the
content. Further, people can connect with these travellers and ask questions related
to their trips.

Read the complete story

35. Urban Ladder in Indian homes


From McKinsey, to Amar Chitra Katha and to starting up at Urban Ladder, Ashish
Goel’s professional progression bears no sign of being conventional. Every stint,
however, was as successful as the other one. Ashish explained his choices by
blaming them on his unquenchable thirst to learn. Ashish spoke at length about
starting Urban Ladder. Their secret to success is marketing, he said: “Marketing is our
trade secret. Our target market is an online shopper who has made a purchase of a
lifestyle product at least twice a month. At least, that is our ideal customer.”

Read the complete story

36. Applying gesture-based technology - The Fluid Motion


Agrawal brothers, Abhinav and Raghav, started with Trutech Webs, a cloud computing
solutions company based in Mumbai. They built a testing platform iLiftOff, and soon
branched out into a totally different product called 'The Fluid Motion'.
(http://www.thefuidmotion.com/) using gesture-based technology. The Fluid Motion
team believes that gesture technology shall surpass the touch based technology
primarily because it can be used with huge sized screens, with the user standing up
to 15 feet away. Their product has information application, retail application,
computer control boardroom application and 3-D application.

Read the complete story

37. Catering to carnal desires - Kaamastra


Kaamastra is an online store for adult products started by Rahber and Maqsood
Nazir. The site sells bedroom lingerie, role play costumes, intimate massage and bath
products, lubricants and erotic body jewelry. Their customers are not just the urbane
individuals of metros, but enthusiasts from Tier 2 & 3 cities like Patiala, Lucknow, and
Chandigarh as well. The products are delivered in a black cardboard box with no
distinguishing names or logos. If you pay online, you are billed under a completely
different name (not Kaamastra) to maintain your privacy.

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38. DJ turns entrepreneur to sell 'farsan' online - Farsankart


Darshan Dhruv joined his family business of packaging after four years with an MNC
abroad, but wasn't satisWed doing “the regular stuff”. People around him were
surprised when he spoke of his plans to sell 'farsan' (Gujarati snacks) online. Today,
FarsanKart sells farsans from Vadodara’s leading farsan stores like Payal, Sukhadia,
Jagdish, and mukhwas from Vadodara’s famous JK Mukhwas. He is tapping the large
population of Gujaratis abroad with www.global.farsankart.com, which caters to the

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