Announcing TECH30 2017: Top 30 promising technology startups from India

Presenting the TECH30 2017: YourStory’s pick of the top 30 technology startups from India

The coveted list of Tech30 startups for this year was announced on the second day of TechSparks on September 23. Starups from Artificial Intelligence (AI), healthtech, cyber security, and cryptocurrency made it to the list.

It was an exhilarating two days which saw the best of the tech and startup world coming together. Like every year, we are proud to announce our pick of India’s most promising technology startups - the TECH30.

Some of the TECH30 alumni include Capillary Technologies, Forus Health, Moonfrog Labs, Loginext, Freshdesk and more.

This year, we received an overwhelming response from startups and more than 2500 startups from a wide range of sectors and all across India applied.

This year’s theme was Make It Matter where we brought honest stories of success, struggle, and failure from doers and thinkers both in India and abroad. And here are this year’s brightest sparks, the companies that made it matter and it to the Tech30 list:

Presenting this year’s brightest sparks, the companies that made it to the Tech30 list:

1. AppSecure India: AppSecure India is a specialised cybersecurity company offering end-to-end information security services to businesses. Anand Prakash, one of India’s top bug bounty hunters, co-founded AppSecure India with his so ware engineer friend, Rohit Raj.

AppSecure India has two key products:

• HackerHive is a crowdsourced vulnerability-coordination and bug-bounty platform that connects businesses to a network of some of the best and trusted security researchers. These researchers help the businesses receive and resolve critical vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
• Vulneye.com works for businesses and their projects by continuously finding vulnerabilities and issues in their dependencies.

2. BigDeals in Business Network Pvt Ltd : Bigdeals is an end-to-end platform for buying real estate online. It offers an on-demand secure neutral ‘escrow’ bank account powered by ICICI Bank for second-sale properties. Bigdeals’ cloud technology brings the property broker and property developer to a customer’s smart device and helps conduct an assisted purchase.

The company is co-founded by Ashwin Chawwla and Manoj Manohar.

3. Coinsecure: Co-founded by Benson Samuel and Mohit Kalra, Coinsecure is India’s first real-time Bitcoin exchange application. It offers open order books and provides the first app that is exclusively targeted at active Bitcoin traders.

The app enables users to buy, sell, send, receive and accept Bitcoin with ease. Users can place their bids and asks, withdraw and deposit funds, and check pending orders. While the app targets traders, it is simple and easy to use for beginners as well.

4. DataGlen Technologies Pvt Ltd: DataGlen provides IoT (Internet of Things) cloud platform solutions to manage distributed energy resources such as solar plants, energy storage, and microgrids. The company has pivoted once, from a horizontal IoT platform and marketplace to a more vertical-specific solution in the energy domain.

DataGlen is co-founded by Deva Seetharam, Tanuja Ganu and Sunil Ghai, who have one-and-a-half decades of combined experience at IBM Research, India. DataGlen offers two solutions currently:

• SunDash is an AI-driven product to manage and improve the performance of solar plants. It provides real-time and actionable business insights to help run operations optimally.
• DERitos is an operating system optimised to manage distributed energy resources (DER): consider it as an iOS for DER. It can enable various demand-side applications such as demand response, distributed generation (also known as distributed energy) and storage management, without impacting the grid reliability and equipment performance while respecting consumers’ preferences for equipment usage and revenue generation. DERitos is in the pilot phase and will be commercially available by the end of this year.

5. EnCloudEn: EnCloudEn is a technology platform to deliver and manage private cloud-based IT infrastructure, helping mid-size organisations attain their IT transformation swiftly at less than half the cost.

EnCloudEn helps with:

• Private, cloud-based IT for organisations looking to set up an internal datacentre
• On-premise private cloud as a better alternative to public cloud (AWS/Azure)
• Consolidation of IT workloads with private cloud
• IT deployments with hybrid cloud possibilities
• Deployment of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
• Delivery of IT for users in a bring your own device (BYOD) model

EnCloudEn is co-founded by Abinash Saikia, Satya Kishore and Vishwa Vijoyendra Narayan.

6. Euler Systems: Euler Systems uses data science and AI to revolutionise businesses that may not be native AI and data businesses. The strong co-founding team behind Euler Systems include Himanshu Nautiyal, Krishna Raghav and Sandeep Kadam. Himanshu is the former head of Data Science at Yahoo. Krishna was a hedge fund analyst at Sequence Capital in his last stint, while Sandeep was vice president (Engineering) at Saavn.

Euler Systems uses AI and statistical learning to optimise pricing, revenue, and cost. The company augments experts with virtual assistants. Its current work includes trader assistants for asset managers, revenue manager assistants for hotels, and retail merchandising, pricing, stock selection, and pipeline maintenance assistants for retailers.

7. EZkirana: Co-founded by Piyush Priyam and Srinvas Gorur, EZkirana is a one-stop shop for all procurement activities for hotels, restaurants, and caterers (HoReCa).

EZkirana drives its services via:

• An e-commerce website for product selection, delivery slot selection, editing cart, and online payments
• Delivery Boy App for easy order selection, packaging, and editing unavailable items
• Integrated SMS system for order-related updates to customers.

8. farMart: farMart helps farmers get easy access to a wider range of productivity-enhancing machines. The company provides a technology platform for them to rent out their under utilised machinery to fellow farmers. It is co-founded by Alekh Sanghera, Mehtab Hans, and Lokesh Singh.

Farmers can book a wide variety of agriculture machinery via farMart’s mobile app or through its call centre. farMart’s proprietary algorithm routes the order to the nearest machinery owner and the company undertakes the delivery of the machinery. farMart collects the payment from the farmer and credits it to the owner’s bank account. They also collect feedback on the farmer’s work.

9. Flux Auto: Flux Auto is developing modular self-driving technology for trucks. This will optimise business models by ensuring that fleets run on the best routes and are fuel-efficient. It also wants to reduce incident rate by predicting and preventing accidents.

Company’s co-founders Pranav Manpuria and Abhishek Gupta are graduates of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, and RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru

Flux Auto’s technology is built as an a er-market accessory that can be installed on any new or existing truck with ease. The technology also uses vision systems (cameras) and other sensors to achieve a level of accuracy similar to LIDARs (light detection and ranging devices) without incurring the high costs.

10. Gayam Motor Works (GMW): Co- founded by Raja Gayam, Rahul Gayam and Sri Harsha Bavirisetty, Gayam Motor Works (GMW) produces advanced electric bikes and electric passenger and cargo autorickshaws.

The electric vehicles are low maintenance and ensure zero emissions. GMW’s vehicles – SmartAuto and Limitless Electric Bike – are connected to mobile and cloud through IoT (Internet of Things) technology. This technology enables many features such as smart metering, battery health monitoring, real-time vehicle tracking, traffic-based route optimisation, and vehicle unlocking through the mobile phone.

11. HappyEMI / Hyperkonnect Technologies Pvt Ltd: HappyEMI is a peopleless and a paperless consumer finance platform providing shoppers with instant financing at the point-of- sale in stores and online platforms.

HappyEMI analyses a customer’s creditworthiness through alternative data using the scoring engine. This data is extracted from the customer’s digital footprint such as from social

media, text messages, and calls. The user can enter all required information via the HappyEMI app. HappyEMI uses eKYC to verify the users, eSign for the loan agreement and Aadhaar to authenticate users. Settlement is processed to retailers in a two- day timeframe.

HappyEMI is co-founded by Suhas Gopinath and Anmol Vij.

12. Innoflaps Remedy Pvt Ltd: Innoflaps has developed home-based medical devices and provides dedicated services to help children needing cochlear implants, and to those su ering from delayed speech and language development, hearing impairment, Down Syndrome, autism, and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). It also helps people with stammering and tinnitus.

The company is co-founded by Prashant Goyal and Soniya Gupta.

Innoflaps has developed four portable, battery-operated, and easy- to-use medical devices. These include:

• Speakfluent to treat stammering
• Speechifi for children with delayed speech and language development
• TinnitusRelief for people experiencing constant ringing in the ears
• Group Speech Therapy School Solution to collectively conduct speech and language training sessions for children

13. Instasafe: InstaSafe is a cloud web security company that increases business productivity and application presence while keeping them secure.

The InstaSafe Secure Access is a SECaaS (security as a service) solution that provides a self-service style delivery of secure remote access (SSL-VPN) through the cloud. InstaSafe Cloud Web Security is a cost-e ective, cloud-based web security service that protects company websites, web applications, and web services.

InstaSafe is co-founded by Sandip Panda, Biju George and Prashanth Guruswamy. Together, they have four decades of work experience in companies such as Symantec, Radware, Quantum and Blue Coat System.

14. Lavelle Networks: Lavelle Networks builds and solves enterprise networking challenges for location-hungry markets such as retail, healthcare, logistics, hospitality, and finance. The platform allows any enterprise to order NaaS (networking as a service) for each location.

Lavelle Networks provides COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware- and so ware-defined networking platforms to solve the challenge of connecting enterprises to hybrid cloud applications. Key use cases include centralised cloud-controlled network management, monitoring, and data optimisations for faster and safer access to cloud applications. Its USP is keeping customers’ networks simple, safe, and swift .

Before starting Lavelle Networks, co-founders Shyamal Kumar and Karthik Madhava both worked at Versa Networks.

15. Miklens Bio Pvt Ltd: Miklens Bio manufactures bio-based agri inputs that aid alternative, chemical-free farming. The company is an R&D powerhouse with a bio-technolological edge in the agriculture sector. Founder Santosh Nair is the former CEO of Camson Biotechnologies Ltd, a wholly integrated agriculture biotechnology company.

Entailing rigorous research, its products are developed from microbes and their subsequent secondary metabolites. Unlike broad-spectrum, synthetic chemicals, these products work specifically against particular pests, without harming beneficial organisms. Besides being natural replacements for chemical pesticides, they are cost-effective and assimilate into the ecosystem without leaving toxic residue.

16. Klathrate Trade Platform Pvt Ltd: Co-founded by Prasen Lonikar and Akashkumar Bammrotwar, Klathrate is an end-to-end open-account trade finance platform. It connects banks, buyers, and suppliers across one network, and is designed to streamline and automate settlements, reduce fraud risk and break down costly data silos.

Klathrate is the financial operating network for global trade powered by distributed ledger technology. The Klathrate Network acts as a global “fabric” for trade by providing partners and network participants with a much smarter, more secure, and more e icient way to move value and assets around the world.

The applications and solutions are built on the Klathrate Network including a multi-bank and multi-lender trade asset marketplace. They provide flexible working capital solutions for businesses and APIs that allow easy connection into the network.

17. Morph.ai: Morph.ai is a B2B SaaS (so ware as a service) platform where businesses can create, manage, and evolve chatbots to increase awareness, improve lead quality, and drive sales.

Morph.ai offers the platform to build chatbots for conversational marketing, which helps companies reach out to a business’s potential customers in real-time and pursue high-quality leads. This creates instant engagement, personalised interactions with customers, and a one-on-one follow-up channel.

Morph.ai’s co-founders Pratik Jain, Abhishek Gupta and Niyati Agarwal met as colleagues at Spinklr. They had earlier co-founded Supertext, a conversational commerce platform for consumers to have intelligent and engaging conversations with chatbots.

18. Niramai Health Analytix Pvt Ltd: Niramai has developed a novel, non-contact, and non-invasive breast cancer screening solution. It is safe, privacy-aware, portable, and enables detection of early-stage malignancy.

Before starting Niramai, co-founders Nidhi Mathur and Geetha Manjunath both worked at Xerox Research Center India. While Nidhi was senior product manager, Geetha served as Lab Director (Data Analytics).

Niramai’s solution is built on Thermalytix©, its patented technology. It is an artificial intelligence-led diagnostic-platform that uses thermal image processing and machine learning algorithms for reliable and accurate breast cancer screening to identify potential malignancies. The end-to-end solution includes off-the-shelf hardware, Niramai’s own so ware, training, auto- generation, and certification of reports, support, and maintenance.

19. OCEO Water: OCEO Smart Water Purifier is an intelligent, sustainable, and cost-effective way to dispense drinking water in homes as well as public spaces. With OCEO Smart Sensor innovation, the company measures and monitors drinking water usage, and maintains safe drinking and water hygiene at all times. It’s key offerings include:

• OCEO Smart Purification systems have both RO (reverse osmosis) and non-RO purification systems in one device.
• OCEO Smart Connection remotely detects any increase in contamination of input water and sends necessary alerts for corrective action.
• OCEO Smart Sensor measures and monitors quality of every drop of water in real time for predictive maintenance.
• Its Smart Dispensing system ensures non-stop purification.

The company is co-founded by Vikram Gulecha and Mahendra Dantewadiya.

20. Oorjan Cleantech Pvt Ltd: Oorjan Cleantech is a roof top solar platform that helps homes and businesses design, finance, and implement their rooftop PV (photovoltaic) systems. It also provides lifetime performance monitoring.

Oorjan offers instant and multiple price options and financing to customers using complex algorithms driven by geospatial info, weather APIs (application program interfaces), solar irradiation data and customer electricity consumption.

• Oorjan app allows customers to keep an eye on their system’s performance and get notifications regarding regular maintenance.
• Its IoT (Internet of Things) platform is powered by an integrated tech stack including battery-efficient hardware, time-series databases, and Oorjan’s iOS and Android front ends. Thissolar data is fed back to its engine, thus improving the solar recommendation algorithms.
• Oorjan enables low-interest EMIs for financing solar products and services.Oorjan is co-founded by Roli Gupta, Gautam Das and Hrishikesh Deshpande.

21. Paratus Knowledge Ventures Pvt Ltd: Co-founded by Bhargavi Risbud and Amol Patkar, Paratus Knowledge Ventures aims to bridge the gap between academics and professional success. It helps students develop a cognitive aptitude and life skills via a series of aptitude tests, olympiads, group discussions and real-life situations on its platform called Fundamentor.

Fundamentor is an adaptive, gamified, time-effective, and fun learning platform. The primary use-case is for students from Classes 3 to 10, helping them develop capabilities in problem solving, decision making, creative thinking, and communication. The secondary use case is among underprivileged children, to learn basic numeracy and literacy skills. Fundamentor’s combination of local language videos and language-agnostic games helps develop these skills.

22. Preksh Innovations Pvt Ltd: Preksh Innovations has developed an AR/VR (augmented reality/ virtual reality) technology platform that allows retailers to create immersive online shopping experiences for their customers.

The proprietary technology enables users to virtually walk through o line stores on the web, pick products, and shop. Within the virtual walk-throughs, the products are ‘tagged’ and linked to

the e-commerce back end of retailers using APIs (application programme interfaces). This provides a seamless and immersive experience to consumers. Preksh Innovations also has the experience available on VR gadgets where the visuals mimic a real-world shopping experience.

Preksh Innovations is co-founded by Sathvik Muralidhar, MA Kodandarama and Sharath Chandrashekar.

23. Qure.ai: Qure.ai helps diagnose disease and recommend personalised treatment plans from healthcare imaging data. With deep learning algorithms classifying X-rays, CT scans or MRIs, Qure.ai helps physicians prioritise cases and enables more accurate diagnosis, leading to better and cheaper outcomes for patients.

Qure.ai is co-founded by Prashant Warier and Pooja Rao. Previously, Prashant co-founded Imagna Analytics, an AI-powered personalised digital marketing firm that was acquired by Fractal Analytics.

Qure.ai uses deep learning algorithms to accurately detect and highlight abnormalities in medical images, reducing chances of misdiagnosis. With the help of multiple artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks such as image processing, visualising neural networks, state-of-the art research papers in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP)-based analysis of case histories, the app integrates the results of processed images with the viewing interface through cloud-based deployment.

24. Spectral Insights: Spectral Insights has built a full vertical integrated solution for pathology labs and hospitals. It converts manual microscopy operations into digital images and provides tools to significantly boost a pathologist’s efficiency in making a diagnosis.

Spectral Insights’s core portfolio comprises of proprietary spectral camera and an image analytics studio. Its fully automated digital microscope has been built for Indian (and the developing world’s) lab conditions. The software modules deal with most of the microscopy workload in a pathology lab or hospital.

Spectral Insights is co-founded by three former IMEC India colleagues - Prashanth Perugupalli, Dr. Sumit Nath and Dr. Dipankar Das. Prashanth was IMEC India’s Managing Director, while Sumit and Dipanakar were Principal Scientists there.

25. StomatoBot Technologies Pvt Ltd: StomatoBot Technologies is developing a computer vision product, WatchMan, an automated CCTV surveillance system providing proactive mobile alerts in near-real time, way beyond the capabilities of ordinary CCTVs. WatchMan functions in three steps:

• Fetches the stream of images from CCTV camera footage live and online
• Processes these images using di erent algorithms
• Sends the relevant images and text logs as alerts over email or mobile app to the customer for further review and actions to be taken

The software identifies potentially undesirable incidents using computer vision, machine learning and deep learning models. Its cutting-edge technology uses face detection and reports instances of perimeter breach, insu icient lighting, blurring, motion and obstruction in the field of view (FoV), as well as loss of power and network to the camera. WatchMan also does vehicle counting and classification.

Anand Muglikar co-founded StomatoBot Technologies with his wife Rajashri and his father Anil, who’s in his sixties. Anand has been working in the field of computer vision for almost half a decade.

26. ThreatLandscape: ThreatLandscape is a cybersecurity firm providing advanced threat intelligence to security operations teams, cyber threat analysts, and incident responders with real-time insight on existing and emerging threats.

ThreatLandscape is co-founded by Abhishek Bhuyan, Navtej Singh and Praveen Hebbagodi. Abhishek and Navtej have more than two decades’ combined experience in security and vulnerability research. Praveen is a former director of engineering at Akamai Technologies.

ThreatLandscape offers one-click contexts with historical and real- time linkages between threats, campaigns, actors, and exploits. This helps prioritise alerts to reduce response time and increase the productivity of Security Operations Centres (SOCs) by 10X. ThreatLandscape also identifies trending vulnerabilities and offers first-hand information about misuse across any application to allow patch management teams prevent hacks.

27. Unocoin Technologies Pvt Ltd: Co-founded by Sathvik Vishwanath, Harish BV, and Abhinand Kaseti. Unocoin is India’s leading Bitcoin and blockchain company where users of its wallet can securely buy, sell, store, use, and accept Bitcoins.

• Systematic Buying Plan, Unocoin’s unique feature, enables a customer to buy Bitcoins in a periodic manner for an amount as little as INR 50, with zero transaction fees. This feature encourages a ordability and helps mitigate the volatility risk associated with Bitcoin.
• Unocoin’s Merchant PoS app helps brick-and-mortar traders accept payments in Bitcoins.
• Similarly, its Autosell feature allows the merchant to automatically sell his/her Bitcoin in a lock-in period of 30 minutes, thereby mitigating the volatility risk.

28. Vicara: Vicara is a human augmentation startup developing a wearable technology that can help people work with their real and digital surroundings. Its product Kai is a minimalist wearable device that recognises hand gestures to interact with the digital world intuitively. It enables professionals to seamlessly interact and enhance productivity by creating a gesture-based computer experience.

Vicara is co-founded by Adarsh Warrier and Abhishek Satish, both engineering graduates from VIT University, Vellore.

29. Vitacloud Digital Health Pvt Ltd: VitaCloud adopts a data-driven approach to manage chronic health conditions. Its IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) platform helps care providers and patients to collaboratively manage chronic diseases by combining connected technologies, data, and the human touch.

VitaCloud is co-founded by Vinod Shankar, Rahul Upputuri and Rohin Bhargava, all previously working at Capgemini. There, Vinod was director and India/APAC head, Rahul a big-data researcher, and Rohin a data management and governance practice lead.

VitaCloud’s IoMT platform pulls data, in real time, from di erent health sources like wearables, in-home medical devices, laboratory reports, nutrition databases and population health studies to create a comprehensive health profile. It provides:

• Continuous patient monitoring service
• Type 2 diabetes management
• Fitness and weight-loss coaching

Caregivers and businesses can integrate VitaCloud’s services through a comprehensive API (application programming interface) or deploy a full-stack solution.

30. WareNow Services Pvt Ltd: Delhi-based Ware offers flexible, affordable, tailor-made, and on- demand warehouse solutions to connect businesses to available warehousing space across the country. It aims to systematise the highly unorganised warehousing sector in the Indian market.

Ware’s dynamic model is a viable way of purchasing warehousing services on demand – paying for only what is used – instead of owning distribution centres or signing contracts with third-party logistic providers.

Its system seamlessly integrates with the business functions and is easy to operate. Ware puts all the information in one place so that communication between the customer and the warehouses is efficient, relevant, and transparent.

Ware is co-founded by Aditya Goel and Rahul Raj, both IIT- BHU graduates.

Stay tuned to read the individual profiles of TECH30 2017.