E-Cell, RJIT

31/10/2020

In the year 1999 IIM Ahmedabad graduate Mr. Srinivasu met Kushal and Ganpathy after quitting a decade long job in ITC and working for Arthur Andersen consultancy firm. In the days when online transactions represented a negligible percentage in the country, they thought of venturing into financial services such as online share trading platform and online money lending, but that would be going against the existing banks. Then they thought of a payments gateway, an area where almost banks and online services were struggling to achieve success and gain popularity.
With a lot of focus on promoting and giving demo on the merits of online transactions, they started gaining a customer base by connecting banks and merchants and utilities which have to collect payments from customers. It was clear that once someone tries the online payment method, they are sure to return on the same platform. But even with such demos and promotion, it took them 4 years for convincing and signing a deal with state owned telecom company BSNL.
The initial years were hard. But they finally received their initial seed funding of $500,000 from Sidbi Venture Capital and Bank of Baroda. It first 5 years this funds covered Billdesk’s account books. But by the end of fifth year, they started to see a change in transaction trends. More people were ettin comfortable with internet banking and online bill payments and now the billers were willing to pay the fees for the service.
By the end of year 2009, their platform and service evolved so much that their revenues tripled and customers could directly pay at the merchant’s website rather using the bank’s wesite.
BillDesk today has proven as one of the key company in the fintech industry with a slow by steady growth and therefore attracting and retaining investments of over $200 Million and making it a Unicorn in 2015.

26/10/2020

Opportunity is on your social media feed, you just need to expand it !! E-Cell Rustamji Institute of Technology in collaboration with E-Cell IIT Bombay brings to you an interactive workshop, "ILLUMINATE". 🏆 PERKS 🏆 ⭐Get a chance to learn from Puneet Raman • Diverse experience of over 20 years in industries like Automobile, Telecommunications, Consulting, and Platform building. • ⭐ Certificate of Participation certified jointly by E-Cell IIT Bombay and workshop associates to all the participants.✨ So don't miss out 🎯on this amazing experience and MARK NOVEMBER 06-08🐾 Hurry up!!🔥 REGISTER AT: http://bit.ly/illuminateevent 📌 Last date for registration is 5 November 📌 It is a paid Workshop. 📌 Kindly contact the undersigned for payments For more details contact📱: Prajwal- +91-8770264815, Maharsh- +91-8818851980.

24/10/2020

During the oil crisis period, Apple received heavy competition by its arch-rival Microsoft which sells lower-priced ‘Windows’ on Intel PC clones. Due to this competition, they launched a series of products that were a major loss in the recession period.
Apple was near bankruptcy when Jobs returned in the year 1996 as a CEO. After this point, they gave more emphasis on their product designs and performance. In 1998, They introduced a new all-in-one computer named Mac. It sold almost 800,000 units in its first five months.
But in 2001, when it was recovering from its 1990s near-death recession experience they launched PowerMac G4 Cube. It had been premium-priced to cater to the lavish-spending Dotcom market that began to implode just as the new machine became available. It only lasted one year as a commercial product. In spite of these failures, Jobs led a spectacular recovery by introducing iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. This results in a profit of almost $54 billion by 2018.

16/10/2020

Illuminate 2020
Coming Soon!

10/10/2020

From the nation's biggest news source to hyperlocal correspondents, Dailyhunt curates news that people surely love to watch. Almost 90% of the users use the platform in regional languages. Dailyhunt has a user base of more than 150 million. The unique proposition is that users can browse the topics of their interest and also share news over different social media platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook, and other social handles.
Dailyhunt founder and CEO Virendra Gupta is an IIT Bombay graduate. Before launching Dailyhunt, Gupta was a Telecom Director at Trilogy and General Manager at Bharti Cellular Ltd.
In 2007, Dailyhunt owner Virendra started his venture Versé Innovation Pvt Ltd. which was as VAS (Value Added Services) startup that provided SMS alerts on job, matrimony, property, news, and education to subscribers from around the country. Dailyhunt founder Virendra Gupta's VAS startup Versé Innovation Pvt Ltd. was running profitably, but yet he could foresee that soon VAS was about to lose its sheen. This led Virendra and his team to acquire the English and vernacular news aggregator Newshunt. Newshunt was renamed as Dailyhunt in 2015. The company was driven by a very strong mission of being the ideal Indian news platform to empower a billion Indians.
Versé Innovation Pvt Ltd pivoted from being a Value Added Services provider to become Dailyhunt, an Indian app that serves news and content. While Dailyhunt is totally free for the users to read news, there are basically two sources from which the app earns revenue. With a huge user base, the major chunk of the revenue comes from displaying advertising. It also charges its users for reading and downloading books and magazines from the app.
The app has 19 billion page views with more than 2000 publishers and 20000 news contributors.

09/10/2020

Illuminate 2020.
Coming Soon!

08/10/2020

In times like these, you can't change the direction of wing, but you can adjust your sails to reach your destination

Start by doing what is necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible

Illuminate 2020

Coming Soon.

03/10/2020

CureFit was founded in 2016 by Mukesh Bansal, co-founder of fashion retailer Myntra, and Ankit Nagori ex-chief business officer at Flipkart. Bansal and Nagori worked closely at Flipkart after the company bought Myntra in 2014.
Being the first of its kind, there were many struggles the founders faced in deciding the direction of the app. With both Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori not known for their endeavours in fitness, they had to take each step meticulously and carefully to reach their audience. The struggles that come with being a first of its kind also involves convincing investors in trusting the venture. Since fitness hasn’t gained much momentum in India until recently, it was a real uphill battle to initially get the investors on board. They also had struggles with setting up Eat.Fit as any food delivery on a daily basis to hundreds of customers requires a close-knit network with reliable servicing. They had to partner with many small firms in order to bring their dream to reality.
In the past two and half years, the startup has raised $294 million in eight funding rounds, and recently, has also opened its centre in Jammu and Kashmir. It is present in Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR region, Hyderabad, Chennai, Jaipur, and recently, it launched in Dubai. Cure.fit’s services are used by over 500,000 active subscribers.

Amid the covid-19 pandemic cure.fit closed all its fitness centres at the start of the lockdown. Struggling with the ongoing coronavirus crisis, the company has also downsized its employee base across markets.
The Bengaluru-based fitness startup launched a grocery delivery service in cities like Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai. The company launched its MovementForMovement campaign where via cult.live the user has to accept the challenge. For every challenge, a contribution of Rs 100 was to be made to the PM CARES Fund to help COVID-19 relief efforts.

.fit # ecellrjit

26/09/2020

Dream11 was co-founded by Jain, who did engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and Bhavith Sheth, a graduate from Mumbai’s DJ Sanghvi, back in 2008, when both were around 22. Dream11 started as a personal project, as both Jain and Sheth were big fans of English football fantasy leagues. They wanted to do something similar for IPL, which had just started, and thought there will be others like them.
At the same time, the duo dabbled in other ventures, including a digital and social media agency called Red Digital in 2010 which they sold to Gozoop for about Rs 7 crore in 2013. Meanwhile, Jain and Sheth also got their MBAs from the US.
Initially, Dream11 ran as an ad-based model with a season-long format, which did not find many takers. By 2012 the company decided to stop this model and instead focus on daily matches and allow users to put money on the teams.
Dream11 allows you to choose a team before a match starts, and pick which players will perform the best. Based on their performance during the actual match, you accumulate points and get a rank at the end of the game. If you participate in a game with money, it goes into a common pool, and you get winnings based on the ranks after being charged a service fee.
Things started to take off from the end of 2014 when the company raised its first round of funding from Kalaari Capital. Jain was introduced to the VC firm by Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl, who was with him at the University of Pennsylvania.From just 300,000 users in January 2015, the company reached 1.3 million by the end of the year. This number jumped to 5.7 million by the end of 2016, then to 17 million in 2017, and to over 50 million now.
The company has had its share of legal wrangles. In 2017, one of its users took Dream11 to the Punjab and Haryana high court after losing money. But the courts ruled in favour of Dream11, saying that it is not gambling but a game of skill as users have to build a team based on current form and past performance of athletes.
The use of cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni as brand ambassador has helped them build credibility.
They focused on a mass market game which is high entertainment value for people with low disposable income, but which won’t hurt the pocket if people lose. The average transaction size on the platform was Rs 35 in 2019.
Dream11 has a 80% share in the fantasy gaming space right now, according to a recent KPMG and IFSG report. It also became the first billion dollar valuation gaming company from India.
Dream11’s success is attracting more players. The fantasy sports gaming market is expected to reach $5 billion in the next two years in India, said Halaplay co-founder Prateek Anand. Halaplay was founded in 2017 by four BITS Pilani alumni and has got backing from players like Nazara, maker of Chhota Bheem games, and Delta Corp, which runs casinos in Goa and Sikkim, where gambling is legal.

19/09/2020

In 2011, 18 year old Ritesh Agarwal started his first startup Oravel, which was a listing website for budget rooms. This later was turned into OYO rooms. Later in 2013 Agarwal was selected for Thiel Fellowship, where he received $100,000 funding to pursue the idea for his startup. In 2014, OYO received its Series A funding of $24 million from Lightspeed Venture and Sequoia Capital. With this he expanded his startup in Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore, Goa and in April 2015, the mobile app was launched.

The mobile app was a catalyst in OYO’s story. With a blast in popularity, It had already come up to 2000 hotels, 20,000 rooms in 100 cities of India
In July that year, OYO bagged a $100 million Series C funding from SoftBank. With the backing of the world's largest investor and financially fulfilling year, their pace was hardly to slow down.
In the first month of 2016, OYO hit a mark of 1 million check-ins and expanded itself in Asia-Pacific market by entering Malaysia.

Continuing their expansion in 2017 in Malaysia and Nepal they entered the big markets in 2018 such as the UK, UAE, Dubai, China, Singapore and Indonesia.
OYO launched a short term home rental service like AirBNB in its leisure destinations in India like Goa , Shimla, Puducherry, Kerala.
Later in 2018 OYO became a unicorn when SoftBank alone injected $800M followed by $200M capital from LightSpeed, Sequoia Capital , DiDi and others.
As of today, OYO has about 1.2 million listings in 800 cities all over the world.

15/09/2020

"Instead of one-way interruption, Digital marketing is about delivering useful content at just the right moment that a buyer needs it."

E-Cell RJIT is going to organise 2-Day online workshop on Digital Marketing.
Register at: http://bit.ly/ecellrjit

12/09/2020

Digital payments company Freecharge has had an eventful journey in the seven years since its inception. From capturing the Indian market through mobile recharges to securing the largest acquisition ever in the country's startup ecosystem, Freecharge's journey has been interspersed by golden periods, cash crunches and fluctuating leadership. In the latest turn of events, Axis Bank acquired Freecharge from its parent company Snapdeal for $60 million in 2017 — a drop in the bucket compared to the $400 to $450 million that the e-commerce company paid for it five years back. Here we recount the Freecharge story, from its disruptive beginning to its current ambivalent situation.

In 2010 Freecharge co-founders Sandeep Tandon and Kunal Shah first teamed up to start a cashback and promotional discounts company for organized retailers called Paisaback. They come upon the idea of starting Freecharge after discovering that one of their clients, a mobile phone store, is earning nearly all its revenue from prepaid mobile recharging.
Freecharge website was launched on August 15, 2010. Initially, it allowed users to recharge their prepaid phones but soon it expanded its services to other payments. The Mumbai-headquartered company then received an undisclosed amount in seed funding from Sequoia Capital and Tandon Group.

Freecharge started providing discount coupons in 2012 equivalent to the recharge value at popular food and retail outlets. With partners like McDonald's, Cafe Coffee Day, Puma, Domino's and several e-commerce platforms, the site accrues a 1.5 million-strong customer base that generated 10,000 transactions a day. The company then raised $3.9 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital in January 2012 and expands out of Mumbai, setting up offices in Bengaluru and Guruguram. In November 2012, Kunal Shah labels Freecharge a "marketing company that uses recharge as a medium" to differentiate it from rivals Rechargeitnow and Paytm. Freecharge launches its Android app and was named one of the most promising Indian tech startups by angel funding platform Pluggd.in

By 2014 Freecharge became India's leading platform for online platform for recharges, utility payments, promotions and couponing and gained rapid popularity in the Indian startup ecosystem. Over 80 per cent of transactions on Freecharge took place on mobile. Freecharge held its Series C funding round in February where it raised $80 million from Hong Kong-based Tybourne Capital Management and San Francisco-based Valiant Capital Management. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, RuNet, and Sofina also participated in the round. Snapdeal acquired Freecharge for $400 to $450 million in April 2015 in what was touted as the biggest M&A deal in the history of India's startup ecosystem. Alok Goel stepped down as CEO to focus on fostering new business opportunities for the combined Snapdeal-FreeCharge entity.. Freecharge launched its mobile wallet in October 2015 to capitalise on the growing digital payments sector in India. It allows customers to make transactions across all major online platforms and offline stores along with peer-to-peer payments.

In 2016 the company claimed to have an estimated 10-seconds payment time and a 99% success rate. It boasted of a 70% loyalty rate and a usage rate of more than five times a month, per user. Freecharge partnered with Axis Bank in September and launched Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to allow instant bank transactions using a virtual payment address (VPA).
In 2017 Jasper Infotech, Snapdeal's parent company invested $60.8 million into Freecharge in January but the company continued to struggle for cash.
A few weeks later, Govind Rajan resigned as the company's CEO and Jason Kothari, former Housing.com CEO and Snapdeal's chief strategy and investment officer, was announced as his replacement. Freecharge received $4.5 million in funds from Jasper Infotech in March followed by another $3.4 million capital infusion from the company in May. Freecharge's parent company Snapdeal continued to struggle financially and was reportedly in talks for a sell out to Flipkart. Later Axis Bank acquired Freecharge for $60 million on July 27. The deal gave the private sector lender access to Freecharge’s claimed 52 million mobile wallet holders and provided impetus to its digital journey.

However Freecharge has been able to overcome most of its problems. They tied up with various production houses like Sony Pictures, YRF, UTV and in August 2019, Freecharge launched Digital Credit Cards that empowers these digital natives with easy access to credit, that comes with an instant and seamless experience, while also being flexible and secure.

08/09/2020

Have you ever wondered how Entrepreneurship Cells of colleges are helpful?

They help you learn 'Money' that isn't covered in your engineering/ pharmacy syllabus.

Share with your friends who you wish to grow together with.

08/09/2020

OYO Hotels and Homes, the Hospitality unicorn has widened the lay-off of its OYO-preneures till the end of February 2020 and has also offered them to leave company voluntarily.

In April, due to COVID-19 pandemic, the travel industry was miserably affected. OYO India had decided to cut salaries and lay off staff to save cash. OYO-preneures in India were laid off with limited benefits(LwLB) till 31 August 2020.

SOURCE: Livemint

05/09/2020

The birth of Rupeek in 2015 has a story of rejection attached to it. In 2012, a large non-banking lender rejected Sumit Maniyar’s application for a loan against property. It was a shock for Maniyar—an IIT-Bombay graduate and Chartered Financial Analyst.

Maniyar worked as an equity research analyst at JP Morgan, followed by Religare, from 2008-12. Lending was still in his mind. As an analyst, he oversaw fundraisings (QIPs) by Muthoot and Manappuram, who were then shaking up the gold loan industry.The economics of it amazed him. They have a return on equity of 50 percent, growing fast, and barely need capital.

That still did not convince him to jump into the wagon. After his stints as an analyst, he ran an education startup, Functionspace.org, a learning network for Math and Physics students. He and his co-founders tried it a year, failed, and returned the $300,000 they raised from Nexus Venture Partners.

Having to choose between his family business - vegetable seeds production, and a fintech stint, he went about exploring what area of digital lending is broken (the answer is all of them, to varying degrees). The data on gold, after speaking to companies, investors, and customers, drove him to the space.

The organized gold loan disbursal in India was estimated at $90 billion per year. India currently holds 27,000 tonnes of gold worth more than $1 trillion, out of which only 6-7% is monetized through the organised market. Sumit envisioned if he could monetize even a third of the gold stash, this could add 2% to the GDP growth rate.
Finally launching in 2015 as an asset-backed lending marketplace, Rupeek leverages technology to operate with a branchless model. Offering a 30 minutes doorstep service for gold loans, Rupeek’s platform offers on-demand pickup and return of the valuables.

Tanglin Venture Partners, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal’s BTB Ventures and Korea’s KB Investment Co. were among those that joined its latest financing round. The funding valued the Bangalore-based startup at more than $300 million

The company has partnered banks such as ICICI Bank, Karur Vysya Bank and Federal Bank to provide loans where customers can get their gold valued at home and receive the loan amount directly into their bank accounts.
Today Sixty-five percent of Rupeek’s customers are first-time borrowers, who, on an annual income of about Rs 5 lakh, borrow Rs 1.5 lakh on an average. This gives Rupeek Rs 7-10 crore in revenue a month- not much for a startup valued at $300 million. But Maniyar isn’t worried about that.

05/09/2020