The third-largest startup ecosystem in the world is undergoing a paradigm shift as Indian businesses change their emphasis from seeking growth at any cost to establishing sustainable profitability.
This much-needed adjustment has, unfortunately, occurred at a time when investors are holding off on writing large checks despite having billions of dollars in cash on hand.
What strikes out, though, is that Indian entrepreneurs have started to develop like never before after learning from past failures. As a result, they have matured and are now more attractive bets for both domestic and foreign investors.
Despite this disruption in the startup ecosystem, creativity and the creation of new businesses have persisted. While the pace may not be as rapid as it was two to three years ago, what’s most remarkable is that the majority of the people leading these new businesses had previously held executive positions in major firms and startups.
With the 39th installment of 30 Firms To Watch, we are continuing our tradition of highlighting early-stage firms that have the potential to become tomorrow’s disruptors. The way these entrepreneurs have adopted technology to manage their operations profitably, with a key emphasis on resolving real-world problems, is what makes them intriguing.
The fact that many of these firms actively work to fulfill their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments is even more intriguing.
Up to 20 of the 30 firms that make up the August edition of our search for the best early-stage businesses are in the B2B sector, and none of them have received more than $1.5 Mn in funding since their founding. 17 firms from the B2B sector were recognized in the 30 Firms To Watch edition from last month.
This also reflects the current trend of more Indian founders wanting to address business-level issues, leading to a customer base with lower acquisition costs but greater average revenue per user than their B2C competitors.
Atron Automobiles
The scarcity of vital parts like batteries, motors, and controllers is one of the main challenges facing India’s developing electric vehicle (EV) industry. By offering motors and controllers with cutting-edge features, Attron Automotive, a firm from Pune, hopes to tackle this with an iron fist.
Blend
Vaibhav Prakash, Vishwanath Kollapudi, and Jamsheed Kamardeen have experience in e-commerce and understand the difficulties small e-commerce companies confront in allocating significant expenditures for branding. The trio banded together to create Blend in response to this.
For digital creators, startups, small businesses, online retailers, e-commerce retailers, and online resellers, the company provides an AI photo editor, graphic designer, and poster maker platform. Background Remover, Magic Create, and AI-generated background scenes are the startup’s three main offerings. For instance, Magic Create makes use of generative AI to generate unique designs from a straightforward suggestion.
Coupl
Coupl, a neobank for young couples, was founded in 2022 by Srinivas Sarkar and Kushagra Manglik to streamline their joint financial administration. They offer a shared wallet with two RuPay cards—one for each partner—to make it easier to handle joint expenses. Couples have the option to combine their funds into the Coupl Joint Wallet, make joint payments using separate RuPay virtual cards, and set up auto-deposits.
Covrzy
Covrzy, a Bengaluru-based company founded in 2023 by Ankit Kamra and Veera Thota, promises to help founders protect their enterprises against a range of hazards. Based on their requirements, including personnel and type of work, the business insurance aggregator provides startups and SMEs with the appropriate insurance suggestions.
DailyPe
Shashwat Shrikhande and Saurabh Gupta created DailyPe, a loan digital startup, in 2023 to close this glaring gap and meet the day-to-day cash flow requirements of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises.
The Surat-based startup offers business loans to MSMEs, including among others medical stores, culinary establishments, mobile repair shops, and saloons, whose daily operations depend on daily sales. For such business owners, DailyPe claims to reduce bookkeeping duties by providing daily loans starting at INR 5K.
Devnagri
Himanshu Sharma and Nakul Kundra created the AI-enabled language translation platform Devnagri in 2019 to help Indian internet users realize the full potential of the web. The platform can now translate web content into English and all other important Indian languages. Devnagri not only provides translation for text, but also websites, mobile apps, APIs, graphics, and searches.
AI Expertia
After getting to know each other at the Entrepreneur First (EF) cohort in 2021, Akshay Gugnani, a former IBM researcher, and Kanishk Shukla, cofounder of Koovs.com, decided to work together to address this problem. As a result of their collaboration, Expertia AI, an AI-enabled platform designed to help hiring teams at various companies, was born.
Fundamento
The automation platform Fundamento markets itself as serving consumer contact centers. A multimodal, multilingual, API-centric stack makes up the platform, which serves as the main support structure for customer contact centers.
GoldPe
While working in the personal finance industry, Parth Shah and Yaagni Raolji recognized the need for “fun” investment alternatives and created GoldPe, a digital savings platform that enables users to begin investing in gold with as little as INR 10.
GroClub
GroClub is a bicycle membership service that was founded in 2021 by Roopesh Shah and Hrishikesh Halekote Shivanna and is committed to offering environmentally friendly bicycles. The start-up provides bicycle subscriptions to anyone four years of age and older.
Guardians
Dr. Karan Raj Jaggi has spent more than 10,000 hours in emergency departments in India and the UK and has firsthand knowledge of the issue. His encounters with this issue inspired Vedant and Shubham Jain to return to India in 2022 and found Guardians.
Humanify
User research is a crucial stage for every business that sells products since it can help businesses find the ideal product-market fit more quickly than their competitors. User research is frequently slow, time-consuming, and difficult to scale, which can cause issues in the future.
Geetika and Jashish Kambli, second-time cofounders, founded Humanify in 2022 after realizing this. ExploraStory, a remote research platform provided by the startup, enables companies to perform user research without ever leaving their offices.
humble
According to a survey by IBEF, India’s housekeeping industry had a value of $6 Bn in 2022, and between 2023 and 2028, it is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 5%. However, a large portion of this sector is disorganized and fragmented, which makes it challenging for companies to engage housekeepers.
Humblx gives some sense to the crazy. The startup, which was established in 2018 by Samir Dayal Singh, Ujjwal Kumar, and Yadev Jayachandran, assists businesses in managing housekeeping and cleaning workers efficiently with its SaaS solution.
Instaminutes
In the current sales stack, AI automation technologies are becoming increasingly important because of their capacity to boost and drive revenue growth in addition to streamlining productivity and processes. IIT alums Shivam Gupta and Akshat Anand developed a summarization tool that makes taking notes during meetings easier by utilizing their skills with natural language processing (NLP).
This concept served as the inspiration for Instaminutes, an AI assistant created specifically for sales teams in 2021 that promises to increase their productivity by over 2X. It automates useless tasks using InstaGPT, a specific ChatGPT framework. Its ability to continuously improve through training and optimization is what makes it unique.
On2Cook
On2Cook, based in Ahmedabad, joined the cookware industry in 2022 to make cooking hassle-free for home cooks and professional chefs, with a primary focus on healthy meals.
Ossus Renewable Energy
By 2040, the hydrogen market is expected to reach $35 billion, with demand expected to increase to 15–25 Mn metric tonnes annually. The myriad practical uses of this extremely combustible gas in sectors including steel production, fuel cells, fertilizers, and refineries are to blame for this rise.
Ossus Biorenewables, a green hydrogen business, is taking advantage of this potential by specializing in providing process industries with on-site, on-demand green hydrogen from the waste carbon present in on-site effluents. This method does not require hydrogen to be stored, compressed, or transported.
Pikndel
Although consumers are becoming more interested in direct-to-consumer products, they ultimately choose larger marketplaces like Amazon or Flipkart because of the more convenient delivery options, particularly same-day delivery.
Pikndel, a logistics business, has a network of shared dark stores that address the issue of last-mile delivery to provide same-day delivery for all e-commerce startups.
Recipeat
According to a survey, India’s food services sector is expected to add 10 million jobs by 2025, and thousands of businesses are actively recruiting qualified candidates. However, given the very disorganized character of the industry, hiring is a significant difficulty.
Ram Vaibhav Kumaran and Adrien Jasserand founded Recipeat, a job marketplace for the hospitality sector, in 2022 to address this issue. The website links job searchers in the hospitality sector with businesses looking for staff in a variety of positions, including waiters, cleaners, baristas, receptionists, and stewards, among others.
Roopa
After spending almost two decades working in the financial and banking sectors, Raman Vig and Sudipta Ghosh founded Roopya in 2022 to give fintech entrepreneurs the tools they need to launch their digital lending businesses in under five minutes with the Roopya Money product suite.
Satyukt Analytics
Nearly 55% of the population of India directly depends on agriculture and allied sectors for a living, making it the largest industry in the nation. The Indian agritech market is expected to reach $24 billion in revenue by 2025, demonstrating the country’s urgent need for agricultural modernization.
Sat Kumar Tomer and Yukti Gill created Satyukt in 2018 in response to this demand. Satyukt is a SaaS company that uses satellite technology to offer consulting services to clients. Farmers can now evaluate soil quality using their mobile devices without having to physically visit the site thanks to the company’s created patented technology that quickly measures soil nutrient concentration. The four main products offered by Satyukt are Sat2Farm, Sat4Agri, Sat4Risk, and Sat2Credit.
Seekho
The trio of Rohit Choudhary, Keertay Agarwal, and Yash Banwani discovered that there was a significant demand for instructional content in regional Indian languages while working with Kuku FM. As a result, they began creating Seekho, an educational entertainment platform that offers classes for skill improvement.
SellerGeni
One of the biggest online retailers in the nation, according to a recent Amazon India report, had more than 10 lakh active merchants on its e-commerce platform. Only a select few sellers can fully utilize Amazon’s advertising capabilities, even though the company offers these services to help merchants become more competitive.
Athmajith Colote, Yogendra R., and Andrew Jervis founded SellerGeni in 2020 after personally experiencing the issue. The company’s suite of solutions on Amazon aims to assist brands and sellers in accelerating growth and automating ads.
Skippi
Almost no child in our world will refuse to have one or maybe even two ice pops. In the extremely fragmented Indian market, several manufacturers produce ice pops, but very few of them provide healthier popsicles that are primarily sugar- and artificial flavor-free.
Ravi and Anuja Kabra decided to open Skippi Ice Pops in Hyderabad in 2020 to change this. While the husband-and-wife team first experienced serious teething problems, the business started to take off in 2021.
StarAndDaisy
Akshay and Anshul Arya founded StarAndDaisy, a company situated in Delhi, NCR, that offers a variety of babycare products, including strollers, cribs and cradles, baby walkers, study tables for youngsters, and toys.
tan90
Drs. Soumalya Mukherjee, Shiv Sharma, and Rajani Kant Rai were researching phase change materials (PCMs), a substance that releases or absorbs enough energy during a phase transition to generate usable heat or cooling, in 2015. They were able to produce PCM for supply chain heat management because of their research. Tan90 was created as a result in 2019.
The Marketplace on Main Street
One of the largest subcultures in the fashion business is the shoe scene, and India is no exception. The Indian trainer market, which Allied Market Research estimates to have reached $3 Bn in value in 2023, is projected to expand at a CAGR of 6.18% from 2023 to 2028.
Some of the most sought-after trainers, meanwhile, are out of many people’s price ranges. The Mainstreet Marketplace was established in 2017 by Vedant Lamba when he saw the lack of quality trainers. The project first began as a YouTube channel before evolving into a marketplace for reselling.
Transitry
ESG reports are now required to detail how businesses’ operations affect the environment. Despite efforts to establish a consistent framework, many businesses use internal measurements to demonstrate their environmental effect, which may not be precise and objective.
When working with farmers to create and implement climate-friendly land management practices, Navarun Gupta and Vishan Nathan saw the issue firsthand and decided to create Transitry, a climate tech firm, in 2021.
WorkHack
Like WorkHack, a company created by Akshat Tyagi in early 2023 first investigated certain use cases in HR and marketing before focusing on data collection via generative AI.
AI Xylem
A low-code platform is being developed by Bengaluru-based Xylem, which bills itself as a provider of AI infrastructure that enables software development teams to create, maintain, and integrate production-ready AI models into their products.
Xylem, a company founded in 2023 by Arko Chattopadhyay, Enrique Ferrao, and Pranav Reddy, provides many developer-friendly use cases. Developers can easily connect their data source to Xylem, pick the appropriate LLM model from its embedded models, specify resources, and more.
Zoplar
Amit Sah and Umesh Sharma launched Zoplar to streamline medical supply procurement with a one-stop platform for all healthcare needs after realizing that the fragmented nature of supply chains makes the procurement process difficult and degrades the quality of products.
