Activating a bank account in rural India used to take months. This newly-funded startup makes it instant

AdStringO, a Mumbai-based software startup, today announced it raised US$350,000 in seed funding from Indian Angel Network. The investors in the round include Arihant Patni, Vishal Khare, and Viswanath Ramachandran.

AdStringO is an endpoint compression software for enterprises like banks and insurance companies to on-board and service customers from rural areas. It has a team of field representatives who are mobile equipped to scan documents and upload images, audio, and video. The software can compress the files to one-tenth the size and works in low bandwidth areas.

With AdStringO, the time taken to activate a bank account or pass a loan document can be reduced to merely four hours, where before it took anywhere from one week to one month.

Being inclusive

The software comes at a time when Indian corporates are going digital and tapping unexplored rural markets. India’s telecom infrastructure isn’t yet robust enough to provide 3G and LTE services. The hinterland is increasingly getting on the internet with 1G and 2G networks. This is where AdStringO’s technology could play an important role.

The fresh funding will be used to strengthen the research and development team in order to discover other new use cases and further build its technology solutions. It will also expand to other emerging countries where connectivity is a challenge for managing data.

“Homegrown companies and global enterprises are facing challenges to find in-roads in India. We plan to quickly scale up and create a global proposition that can address this issue across levels,” says Mohan Chandrasekaran, co-founder and CEO of AdStringO.

Indian Angel Network has 350 business angels investing in 64 early stage ventures with a total outlay of US$38 million.