3 rising startups in India – June 14, 2016

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Lines suck. Meet the startup that wants to help you beat them, along with an online community built around alternative medicine and a capsule coffee maker that’s been pulling in some nice rounds of funding so far this year. Catch up on the funding news you missed with our selection of startups that are reaching for the stars.

CureJoy

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It seems every time I sneeze, a healthtech startup pops up in India to try to help. Today’s no different, with CureJoy raising US$4.4 million in series A funding to help people find alternatives to traditional medical care. Existing investor Accel Partners India led the round, with participation from other individual angel investors

CureJoy, based in San Francisco and Bangalore, is an online community for people interested in alternative medicine. It focuses on fitness, beauty, and nutrition, and provides curated content dealing with each, particularly on preventative healthcare. It plans to use the funding to create small business units dealing with yoga, pregnancy, and recipes, to name a few. It also wants to improve on video advertising.

CureJoy claims 42 percent of its users hail from the US, while 20-25 percent come from other western countries. 19 percent of its audience comes from India. It plans to launch content catering to Spanish speakers in Europe, North America, and South America.

Sminq

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Waiting in line’s not fun, and waiting in line when you need medical attention? Even worse. Pune-based Sminq is an app that wants to help with queue management at doctors and clinics. It lets you know how long you have to wait and – even better – informs you so you can do your wait online instead of in person. That means if you’re thinking of going to a clinic and the wait’s an hour, you can get yourself in line on the app and show up in an hour, doing whatever you’d like in the meantime. Think online booking combined with a human traffic report.

Sminq, which stands for “see me in no queue,” has secured US$1 million in funding from investors led by Saama Capital and Blume Ventures. Angel investor Vaibhav Domkundwar also participated, and Saama Capital co-founder and managing partner Suresh Shanmugham will join the startup’s board.

Founded in July 2015 by Santhosh Nagarajan, Sheldon D’souza and Shachin Bharadwaj, the company claims to have around 40 doctors paying to use the app for their clinics in Pune. The company plans on building a visibility search engine that will let people book appointments with businesses besides clinics.

Indulge Beverages

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