5 rising startups in India – April 4, 2017

Photo credit: Pixabay.

In 2015, we would have a handful of startups announcing funding from VCs and angel investors almost everyday. This year, it’s been quiet compared to then. Now investors seem to have become more cautious and that shows in the quality of the startups who bag any funding.

Today you can meet a SaaS product for businesses, a test-prep company, a doctor-consulting app, and more – five startups that got investor backing.

Whatfix

Whatfix helps businesses with user onboarding, training, and support with real-time interactive guidance. It creates visual, contextual, step-by-step how-to guides to handhold clients or employees through a task at hand. This SaaS product will help companies adopt new software tools without spending too much time, effort, and money on training and support.

Whatfix raised US$3.5 million in series A funding led by Stellaris Venture Partners. Its existing investors Helion Venture Partners and Powerhouse Ventures participated in the round. Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham, Capillary founder Aneesh Reddy, product engineering lead at Square Gokul Rajaram, and angel investor Vispi Daver also participated.

Founded by Khadim Batti and Vara Kumar, Whatfix had earlier raised US$881,000 from Helion, Powerhouse, GSF, and angels in Silicon Valley. Last year alone, Whatfix added 15 Fortune 500 enterprises as its clients. HP, AAA, Booking.com, NASA, CNA Financial, and Wyndham Worldwide are among those who have adopted Whatfix. “Sixty percent of our clients are in the US,” co-founder and CEO Khadim told Tech in Asia without disclosing the number of clients on the Whatfix roster. His co-founder and CTO Vara have moved base to the US as Whatfix plans to scale up faster this year.

See: Whatfix makes it easy to create interactive how-to guides. I made one in minutes

Testbook

In India, the safest job you could have is with the government. There’s steady income, perks like subsidized housing, insurance, and allowances for children’s education, and you have pension – so you’re covered for life. Even clerical jobs with the government come with a bit of power and society looks up to them. That’s why over 40 million Indians appear for competitive exams the government holds every year for a few thousand jobs. Testbook helps these students prepare for the recruitment tests.

Testbook acts like a guide for students, offering answers to probable questions, as well as personal training for applicants. It also provides mock tests for jobs in the government, such as Indian Railways, State Bank of India, and India Post. It has a website, Android app, and offline test centers.

Matrix Partners has announced a series A round of investment into Testbook. The amount of funding was not disclosed.

Testbook was founded by a group of IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi alumni – Ashutosh Kumar, Narendra Agrawal, Yadvendar Champawat, Abhishek Sagar, Manoj Munna, and Praveen Agrawal – in early 2014. It raised funding from publishers S Chand & Co, LetsVenture, and Ah! Ventures last year.

Bangalore-based MockBank backed by Blume Ventures, is a competitor. It too helps you prepare for recruitment exams for various government job positions, from stenographers to banking jobs.

See: This test prep startup got US$75 million in India’s largest edtech round yet

SmartCoin

Micro-lending app SmartCoin which raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Unicorn India Ventures, offers customers personalized loan products to consumers. The Bangalore-based startup runs a credit-underwriting algorithm which puts together “thousands of data points on a customer’s smartphone, including financial transactions, device usage and app behavior” to build the risk profile of a prospective borrower in real-time and offer loan products that match.

Eruditus

Konsult