Dragonfly Data builds world's first Software Defined Cloud data facility

Pranbihanga Borpuzari, ET Bureau

The year 2014 marked one of the greatest technological achievements for the country when the premier space agency Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully landed a spacecraft on planet Mars.

Hailed and applauded for doing it at a fraction of a cost and in its first attempt, ISRO's Mars Orbiter has produced a huge fillip to technology in the country. What has remained largely under the radar is that a significant part of the technology has in fact come from our small and medium technology companies from across the country.

As the year draws to a close and we set our sights on 2015, we feature 15 startups that hold great promise. From a startup wanting to land on the moon to a startup providing fully compostable sanitary pads, India's new breed of entrepreneurs aim to reach for the stars and at the same time stay grounded by solving various problems in our society.

Name of Founder (s):Rahul Narayan, Dilip Chabria, Julius Amrit

Industry: Aerospace

What it offers/doing: While not your typical startup, Team Indus makes the list because of its audacious plans. Team Indus is India's only entry for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, the global competition to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon. The team features a former Air Force pilot, a management guru, a branding expert, a serial entrepreneur and an aerospace engineer. Team Indus is building capabilities to provide cost effective, rapid turnaround, full spectrum services for Aerospace applications to global customers. Team Indus is creating technologies to enable a soft landing on the Moon by 2016 and also competing for the Imaging Prize.

How it's doing it/progress made: Team Indus has completed the design, prototyping of flight hardware for its Moon mission, protoflight model to be completed in 2015 in preparation for a launch early 2016.

Investors & Amount raised: Ongoing Pre-SeriesA fundraising

Name of Founder (s):Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani, Harshad Sharma

Headcount - 20

Industry - Ecommerce & Payments

What it offers: Instamojo democratizes payments for individuals, micro-merchants, infopreneurs, freelancers and SMBs with its innovative link-based payments platform where anyone can collect online payments by simply sharing a payment-link through SMS, email, social channels or through simply embedding on websites or blogs.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: Instamojo has grown 22x from last year and expects similar growth next year too. Right now, the company is focused into helping broader consumer market to adopt Instamojo and help create a true cashless economy. Going forward, the company has plans to expand into select markets across the globe.

Investors & Amount raised: Recently the company raised its Series A capital from Kalaari Capital. Previously, it had raised $500,000 from Blume Ventures, US-based 500Startups, Rajan Anandan, Sunil Kalra, Shailesh Rao and other prominent global angel investors. It was also part of 500Startups' fall-2012 Silicon Valley accelerator program.

Fun Facts: Instamojo was started as a side project but now it has taken a life of its own.

Name of Founder (s):Harjaap Singh Mann, Arvinder Mann

Headcount: 15

Industry: Outdoor Advertising

What it offers: PoP is an out of home advertising analytics firm, with an aim to make outdoor advertizing measurable, accountable and transparent. With the help of scientific data, it provides insights to decision makers based on video analytics from the archives of the real world videos. Its services include outdoor media planning, compliance audits and competitive intelligence.

At present, the startup's focus lies primarily on its in-house technology driven auditing service for outdoor media that enables the user to track their asset consumption across 1000+ towns in India. This helps prevent revenue leakage. The firm also helps plan outdoor media campaigns scientifically. Vehicle mounted infrastructure is used to capture high definition videos of 30+ cities in India. Over 50,000+ media sites, 750+ hours of video & 11,000 kilometers are covered in every cycle.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: The startup is now ready to take the big step and expand globally. It has projects coming in from the US and other BRICS nations.

Investors & Amount raised: The startup has raised funds from IIM Ahmedabad's Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), and YourNest with total funding at $ 1 million.

Name of Founder (s): David Back (President), Greg Moran (CEO)

Headcount: 50+

Industry: Personal transportation

What it offers: Zoomcar is a car-rental company focused exclusively on "self-drive", now a rapidly growing segment. Zoom is a membership based service that offers self-drive cars on hire, either by the hour or by the day. It uses technology to create an integrated booking and billing platform that allows members to reserve a car through the website or a mobile application.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: Zoomcar launched in Feb 2013 with 7 vehicles, it now has a fleet of 500+. It has recently launched its third city, Gurgaon in December.

Investors & Amount raised: $11M raised in total. This includes institutional Investors like Sequoia, Empire Angels, FundersClub, Triangle Growth, Basset, Globevestor and individual investors like Larry Summers, Lady Barbara Judge, Mohan Pai, professors from Wharton, Harvard Law School, and the Cambridge University Judge School of Business

Fun Facts: Both founders dropped out of MBA to launch Zoomcar, Moran had a full scholarship at USC, and Back had a full scholarship at Cambridge.

Name of Founder (s):Pavan Thatha, Rakesh Thatha, Vasanth Kumar G

Headcount: 15

Industry: Security

What it offers: ShieldSquare offers content protection solution for Online businesses to protect their website content from competitors and fraudsters. ShieldSquare ensures nobody can steal a website's content by using automatic programs like bots etc. By protecting the content, websites gain competitive advantage as well as increase their site traffic and revenues.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: ShieldSquare is already being used by major Internet portals in India like Shaadi.com, Indiaproperty.com. Shieldsquare is planning to expand their reach to other geographies by launching their online subscription platform in early 2015. By signing up with ShieldSquare Scraping Prevention service online, any portal can protect their content in less than an hour.

Investors & Amount raised: Shieldsquare raised Rs. 2 crore in 2014 from a group of angel investors including Founders of Redbus, Bharatmatrimony, Shaadi, Freshdesk, Fusioncharts.

Name of Founder (s):Samay Kohli, Akash Gupta, Wolfgang Hoeltgen

Headcount: 85+

Industry: Warehouse Automation

What it offers: With worker robots and automation solutions, Grey Orange enables warehouses to make faster deliveries in an easy, efficient and flawless way. Grey Orange is a fast-growing hardware start up that is disrupting a deeply unorganized industry - Warehousing. It is building an army of thousands of robots (called Butlers and Sorters) to take over the warehouses and distribution centers.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: Grey Orange is scaling up aggressively with its team growing by 10 people every month. Its business expansion plan is to grow beyond the top e-commerce and courier logistics companies in India and abroad. Grey Orange's R&D heavily invested in developing new technologies and patenting the relevant ones.

Investors & Amount raised: The startup has seen investment from Tiger Global and Blume Ventures

Fun Facts: The startup's office in Gurgaon has meeting rooms named after "Real Steel" movie's robots such as Atom, Zeus, Noisyboy, Ambush, etc.

Name of Founder (s):Vivek Kumar, Deependra Tewari

Revenues: Earned Rs. 10 lakh LTD from previous ad-supported model in about 3 years time. Pivoted and started new SaaS model about 3 months back and has already clocked Rs. 10 lakh annual run rate on this SaaS model.

Headcount: 11 (6 full-time & 5 interns)

Industry: Internet

What it offers: The easiest way to setup, deploy, and manage WiFi networks. Qlicket is a company that looks to provide free WiFi at different establishments. The startup is a wireless service provider that handles every aspect of enterprise WiFi deployments. This encompasses networking, TRAI compliance, and a cloud-based portal for administrators to manage the entire WiFi experience. It also provides a host of monetization and cost saving solutions at an affordable price point with best in class product and customer support.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: Currently expanding to Mumbai after which it plans to expand to Bangalore in early 2015. It is aiming to double the team size within the new few months and do an institutional round in 2015.

Investors & Amount raised: The Company has raised $350,000 from 24 angels, including some who work at or sit on the Board at Google and One97.

Name of Founder (s):Sagar Apte, Deepak Thomas, Vinu Kanakasabhapathy, Rajendrakumar Rajguru

Revenues: Pre-revenue company

Headcount: 24

Industry: Connected Cars / Telematics

What it offers: CarIQ is a connected car platform that connects your car to the cloud allowing services providers push relevant information. CarIQ is a connected car platform connecting cars to their owners, service providers and the infrastructure around them. Based on a patent pending technology, CarIQ is able to collect, collate, analyze, and present the complex engineering data from a car into a useful and simple format for the end consumers.

Car owners now understand how their cars are performing, how they can save fuel and avoid pollution by proper maintenance of their cars. Service workshops can provide a higher level of service by connecting to the car remotely and providing timely help to the owner.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: The startups is focused on the Indian market and eyeing the 1.5 crore modern car market.

Investors & Amount raised: CarIQ has raised seed capital from Pose Ventures and Snow Leopard.

Name of Founder (s):Jaydeep Mandal and Sombodhi Ghosh

Revenues: FY 2014-15 at Rs. 1.5 crore

Headcount: 13

Industry: Social Enterprise, Female Hygiene, Livelihood.

What it offers: Aakar Innovations empowers communities, especially women, with effective and hygienic menstrual protection, while creating livelihood opportunities for them in an environmentally sustainable manner. It is the only company in India which does a fully compostable sanitary pad that is affordable to even the lower income segment. The starup also ensures that the pads it manufactures adhere to the BIS guidelines.

Growth Details & Expansion Plans: The startups is expanding production units across Gujarat and Maharashtra and other states in western India. It plans to expand operations in other low income states of India by mid-2015. It has also started shipments in Africa and looking at expanding operations there with partners.

Investors & Amount raised: CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad, Artha Platform part of Rianta Capital plus several leading angel investors has invested in the company.

Fun Facts: When the founders started off, both had never even seen a sanitary pad before (except in TV commercials). The original idea was to create a social venture which promotes rural livelihoods through micro-enterprise models via commercializing of grassroot innovations but soon realized that menstrual hygiene was a completely neglected area decided to focus on this.

Dragonfly Data builds world's first Software Defined Cloud data facility

Dragonfly Data Factory replaces complexity with simplicity, automatically integrating infrastructure, platform and software technology.

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