Startups like Frankly.me, SpotDy make most of Delhi elections and AAP's victory

BENGALURU / NEW DELHI: Much before the votes were counted for the high-profile Delhi election, a few winners had already emerged: Startups that provided the political parties the technology to monitor and analyze poll-related data and trends, raise funds, and connect to voters.

Delhi-based InviteReferrals, with its referrals software, helped the Aam Aadmi Party, itself a startup of sorts, raise Rs 1.8 crore in just a month. Other tech platforms such as SpotDy, DataMineria, ScribbleLive and Frrole helped both politicians and media houses analyze demographics, exit polls, and even public sentiments.

"Aam Aadmi Party approached us in December last year to run a campaign. Within 30 days, through an online program, about 21,000 donors referred each other and raised Rs 1.8 crore for the political party – all online," said Siddharth Gupta, founder and CEO at InviteReferrals, which runs referral program contests for ecommerce clients such as Healthkart, Lenskart, and Shopclues.

The main campaigners of the three main political parties in the running – the AAP's Arvind Kejriwal, the BJP's Kiran Bedi, and the Congress party's Ajay Maken – all used mobile video application Frankly.me to answer citizens' queries by video. "We saw 2,000 queries directed to about 55 politicians this election, whom we started engaging with in January," said co-founder Nikunj Jain, an alumni of IIT-Delhi. The Noida-based startup is funded by Matrix Partners.

Technologists handling party campaigns said they used startup tools to monitor constituencies as well. "We asked startups such as SpotDy to provide us with ‘overall mention analytics.' Using that data we could see whether our candidates were doing well or not, at least in the media, so we could take corrective action," said Arvind Jha, who has been handling technology for the AAP since May. The party engaged various other startups such as Keyhole to monitor its performance on social media. About 52% of Delhi's 25 million people are active online, with most them having a Facebook account.

Instead of aggregating structured data such as the number of ‘likes' on Facebook, SpotDy's algorithm deciphers unstructured, textual data to derive conclusions. "We predicted then that AAP has a more positive sentiment based on social networks and that it is going to win, at a time when everybody was projecting that BJP would win," said co-founder and CTO Ashwin Thunga.

Meanwhile two-year-old social intelligence startup Frrole created live Twitter polls and "sentiment widgets" for news portals and TV channels. "We added sentiment widgets on news stories to display people's sentiments across different cities using visuals - because there are interactive elements on the page, they would spend more time reading the story," said co-founder Nishith Sharma. Frrole, he said, earned $5000 (around Rs3 lakh) from the election.

However political scientists say that the game was not won through technology alone this election. "It was won by (AAP) because the campaigners did a lot of hard work in taking feedback. There is no real substitute for knowing people face to face and making them feel that they really care," said Revathy Ashok, COO of the Bangalore Political Action Committee, a local political incubator.