6 rising startups in India

Photo credit: Rene Schwietzke

An Indian cashback site made news again today by finding an investor in Ratan Tata. But several other startups also bagged funding, including one that helps regional Indian language speakers and another that promises to make you look good.

Here are six startups that made it to our list today.

CashKaro

CashKaro, India’s leading cashback and coupons site, has raised an undisclosed amount from industrialist Ratan Tata, the company said today. The news comes days after Singapore cashback site ShopBack entered India.

The Gurgaon-based startup was founded by entrepreneur couple Swati and Rohan Bhargava in mid-2013. It works with over 1,000 online retailers, including Amazon, Paytm, Jabong, and ShopClues. The site claims to have over 1 million registered users and gets 5 million page views every month.

“The funding from Ratan Tata marks another milestone in CashKaro’s three-year journey. His expertise and insight will be immensely helpful as CashKaro expands to newer markets and pursues an aggressive customer acquisition strategy,” Swati and Rohan said in a statement.

CashKaro receives a commission from retailers from which it partially returns to customers. It has already credited INR 300 million (US$4.4 million) in real cash to to its members.

The fresh funding comes just two months after the Gurgaon-based startup raised INR 250 million in series A funding led by Kalaari Capital.

Stylofie

Stylofie, a Gurgaon-based beauty and wellness startup, today said it had acquired personal care app Hyve. The acquisition is a part-cash and part-equity deal, the company said in a statement.

Prateek Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Stylofie, said, “We needed a more scalable technology platform to cater to the ever growing needs of our tech-savvy customers.”

The company is planning to expand to Delhi and Noida soon.  But since there was no time to redo the whole technology stack, it chose to acquire Hyve, which it saw as a fundamentally strong application.

The business team of Bangalore-based Hyve will be retained by Stylofie, the company said in a statement.

“This acquisition will help Stylofie in revamping its technology stack and also provide us with a launch pad in Bangalore.  The business team of Hyve will help Stylofie expand more rapidly in the southern parts of the country,” Prateek said.

Stylofie was started last year by MDI Gurgaon graduates Prateek Agarwal, Saurav Dey, and Balaji Srinivasan to fill the online gap in information on spas and salons. It provides a platform for discovery, comparison, reviews, payment, and booking through a website and mobile app.

 Indus OS

TinyStep

Gamezop

KartRocket