GSF Accelerator, the startup accelerator launched by former Reliance Entertainment President Rajesh Sawhney has inducted 15 startups in its inaugural batch. The program commenced on Oct 15, 2012 in three cities, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, NCR, simultaneously. Each participant will receive $28,000 in funding and stands a chance at an investment of up to $3 million from GSF Superangels. Moreover, the companies will have the chance to attract the eye of other VCs that attend the demo day at the GSF2012 event next month. GSF Superangels will provide seed funding to 5-6 startups this year.
Sawhney informed that the 7-week-long accelerator program would run simultaneously in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore and startups will go through 25 workshops focusing on different aspects of building business and products, raising finances, technology, and marketing. They will also meet over 100 mentors one-on-one. GSF Accelerator has also inducted 15
Entrepreneurs-in-Residence who will work closely with these startups.
Startups shortlisted from Bangalore:
Little Eye Labs : The company builds mobile app analysis tools for app developers and testers. According to the company, these tools provide detailed insights about the behavior of the app, enabling easy benchmarking and optimization of resources. At the moment, the tool provides insights on power consumption pattern of an app for Android devices.
Zoomdeck: The company offers a web platform allowing users to upload photos and add interactive tags including people (via their social network profiles), things and places, put up notes, add related videos, sounds and other info, enabling conversations around them.
EmployeeSocial is a cloud based social rewards system. It’s integrated with an enterprise social network and a corporate price store, and enables organizations to manage employee loyalty and engagement.
HackerEarth is a platform that claims to put real-world programming problems at the center of tech-hiring process, allowing swifter and more cost effective hiring. The platform allows Engineering Managers to create online programming tests across several programming languages and platforms. The applicant’s code is compiled, tested, and evaluated using a range of metrics to help companies filter candidates quickly and accurately.
Eduflix PowerPrep is a test preparation tool that offers video lessons for students without access to good teachers. PowerPrep claims to create a personalized problem solving experience using an adaptive technology platform.Powerprep also claims to provide real time feedback to students, enabling them to monitor progress and see improvement in their test scores.
From Mumbai, four startups were shortlisted:
Tushky: It is an activity marketplace where businesses/individuals can offer their services to provide fun activities in or around a city. Tushky essentially offers two services — discovering activities and listing activities. Businesses or individual can list their service for free, however, Tushky charges a fee from them, once an order is placed. It had earlier raised Rs 35 lakh as an angel investment from undisclosed investors. Read our coverage.
BucketBolt.com It is an online managed marketplace for used educational books. It claims to provide access to the largest repository of used book, for students. BucketBolt is building inventory by integrating a highly fragmented supplier network of students and bookstores.
Sharedcab.com offers a platform where daily commuters can sign up and its systems efficiently pool them, matching routes in real-time.
Pokkt is a “Transactional Advertising Platform” which rewards customers with exclusive offers from online/offline retailers in return for sharing information to advertisers.
Six shortlisted start-ups from Delhi/NCR:
Zapper: Claims to make television advertisements interactive. Its platform helps brands identify and engage personally with ad-‐viewers in realtime. Through Zapper, users can interact with their favorite brands, discover fresh content via a gamified environment.
Playcez : It is a visual recommendation engine, which helps users in discovering the best places to eat, shop and hang out. It gives suggestions about the best places to go, based on likes and recommendations from people in the users’s social circle. Playcez mines social media data in realtime to provide location specific suggestions based on who is saying what, where. Whether users are looking to eat, play or shop, Playces claims to offer a useful local discovery tool. It is built on a proprietary, soon-to-be-patented technology.
Exit10|GamesInc allows users to trade their electronic goods at their doorstep. It makes new products affordable to its customers by monetizing their existing ones, which are then resold or recycled. Its GamesINC portal is a buying, selling, and certification site for video games in India. Exit10 is currently expanding to new categories with broader appeal.
AadhaarUp offers a mobile payments solution. It offers a secure mobile app, through which users will be able to make payments to individuals and merchants with a single click. It will also offer point of sale terminals to merchants at lower costs compared to existing options, with almost instantaneous activation.
Gingr will offer a mobile service that lets users communicate with businesses. It will offer a mobile chat platform where users will be able to query multiple businesses at once, and receive quick responses. The service is in closed beta.
SilverPush will allow app owners and ad networks to intelligently connect with mobile users. SilverPush claims that its algorithms will analyze multiple sources of data, and identify the most lucrative opportunities to deliver targeted content to users via push notifications, SMS, email and other routes.
By Anupam Saxena & Miguel Werner Egipsy Souza
