In the last two years, the number and quality of startups in India have dramatically increased.
In fact, you may be surprised to learn that India currently has 26 unicorns. You may also be harried to find as many tech-savvy people who are enthusiastic about thinking outside the box, dreaming big, and disrupting the status quo as in India.
India continues to produce an impressive number of highly successful startups. We’ve selected 16 Indian startups across different sectors and in different stages of development and financing, all worth following in 2019.
List of Emerging Startups in India
Cred
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka
Industry: Apps, Communities, Internet, Loyalty Programs
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: $55.5M+
Founder: Kunal Shah
CRED is a mobile app startup that rewards users with vouchers/coupons for paying on-time credit card payments. This is a members-only app that also has options to track your expenses, notify due dates, etc.
Kunal Shah — The founder of Freecharge which was acquired by Snapdeal for about $400 million, created CRED that rewards creditworthy individuals. Any transaction made through CRED earns you cred-coins which can be redeemed on your favorite brands later.
INDwealth
Headquarters: Gurgaon, Haryana, India
Industry: FinTech
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: ₹2.2B+
Founder: Amrita Sirohia, Ashish Kashyap, Pratiksha Dake, Varun Bhatia
INDWealth is a full stack wealth-technology portal that manages personal finance and wealth for high-net-worth individuals (HNIs) leveraging machine learning and AI.
Founder of ibibo Group, Ashish Kashyap created INDwealth to provide a financial future for the family and recommended steps to increase their returns and increase their future wealth. It also offers services like taxation, lending, savings, and management of the investment portfolio.
BharatPe
Headquarters: New Delhi, Delhi
Industry: Apps, FinTech, Payments, QR Codes
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: $92.5M+
Founder: Ashneer Grover, Shashvat Nakrani
BharatPe is a B2B payments company which offers QR Code for offline merchants to accept payments from any UPI and start receiving the funds immediately in their bank account.
Recently, BharatPe has also announced short term credit options for merchants.
Pristyn Care
Headquarters: Gurgaon, Haryana, India
Industry: Health Care, Internet
Founded Year: Jul 2018
Total Funding Amount: $4M+
Founder: Harsimarbir (Harsh) Singh
Pristyn Care is Series A Sequoia funded Health Care Startup that is transforming Day Care Procedures by leveraging technology, and a set of simple yet powerful processes and operations.
Founded by Ex-Consultant Surgeons, Pristyn Care has also been accredited as a Centre for Excellence in the field of Proctology.
Mobile Premier League (MPL)
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Industry: Gaming, Sports
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: $40.5M+
Founder: Sai Srinivas Kiran G, Shubham Malhotra
Mobile Premier League (MPL) is a Sequoia-funded mobile gaming platform for mobile gamers, focused on gaming genres like arcade, skill-based/puzzle, adventure games, sports, and others.
Co-founded by ex-Zynga executive Sai Srinivas Kiran, and Shubh Malhotra, MPL claims to have over 25 million registered signups across both Android and iOS. This is the fastest-growing esport platform having nicked up one crore user in 7-8 months.
Ola Electric
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Industry: Automotive, Electric Vehicle, Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales
Founded Year: May 26, 2017
Total Funding Amount: $306.3M+
Founder: Anand Shah, Ankit Jain
Ola Electric Mobility (OEM), a company backed by Ola, is a company that leases electric cars. It is currently running several pilot programs like charging solutions, battery swapping stations and electric vehicles in two, three and four wheeler segments to make electric mobility convenient, dependable, and affordable.
With new funding from SoftBank, Ola Electric Mobility became a unicorn in two years. In 2018, Ola announced Minh Electric to lift 10 lakh electric vehicles on Indian roads by 2021.
mfine
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Industry: Health Care, Hospital
Founded Year: 2017
Total Funding Amount: $27.4M+
Founder: Ajit Narayanan, Ashutosh Lawania, Prasad Kompalli
mfine is a hospital & health care-startup that brings in instant and continuous connectivity with top doctors of the best hospitals.
They use cutting edge technology and partnerships with the best in class hospitals/clinics to keep track of your health parameters and keep all your health data in your control and easily accessible.
GlowRoad
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Industry: E-Commerce, Retail, Social Shopping
Founded Year: Jun 2017
Total Funding Amount: $24.3M+
Founder: Kunal Sinha, Nilesh Padariya, Nitesh Pant, Shekhar Sahu, Sonal Verma
GlowRoad is a social selling platform for women, especially housewives. It operates an e-commerce marketplace that connects resellers directly with raw material suppliers while facilitating business from the ease of their own homes and networks.
In essence, GlowRoad also facilitates trade for individual sellers and small businesses with customers.
Acko General Insurance
Headquarters: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Industry: Financial Services, Insurance, Private Social Networking
Founded Year: 2017
Total Funding Amount: $107M+
Founder: Varun Dua
New-age digital insurance company, Acko General Insurance, redefines insurance for consumers. This platform also provides personalized products after measuring customer behavior using data analytics.
Having raised $65M in Series C, Acko aims to transform insurance through technology and data based underwriting and a unique customer-centric approach.
OKCredit
Headquarters: Faridabad, Haryana, India
Industry: Finance, Financial Exchanges, Financial Services, FinTech, Personal Finance
Founded Year: Apr 2017
Total Funding Amount: $17.2M+
Founder: Aditya Prasad, Gaurav Kumar, Harsh Pokharna
OkCredit is a cloud-based digital application provider that simplifies credit account management for micro-merchants and their customers. This platform connects small business owners, suppliers, and customers and enables them to record credit and payment transactions.
After raising Series A, OkCredit aims to help India’s business-to-consumer and business-to-business micro merchants to get organized and be efficient.
Bolo App
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Industry: Apps, Video
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: ₹30M
Founder: Nishant Chandra, Siddharth Maheshwari
Bengaluru-based Indian language knowledge-sharing community and video-based Q&A platform, Bolo App, allows users to ask and answer questions in Hindi. Additionally, users can directly video call with specialists on the portal for a small fee to get extremely personalized solutions to their queries.
Bolo App is currently available in the Hindi language. It aims to enable knowledge sharing among Indians to come online for the first time in a format they prefer and the language that they’re comfortable with.
Fresho
Headquarters: Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
Industry: Agriculture, Food and Beverage, Travel
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: $3M
Founder: Ankit Nigam, HUW BIRRELL, James Andronis
Fresho’s cloud-based software platform allows food distributors, wholesalers and processors to automate their ordering, invoicing and warehouse management to improve efficiency. This platform allows cooks to use their mobile or desktop devices to choose exact quantities for their needs, much like an online shopping experience.
It offers a simple one-touch solution to ordering, invoicing, payments, reporting, warehouse management, and product pricing.
OPEN
Headquarters: Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Industry: Banking, Billing, Finance, Financial Services, Payments
Founded Year: 2017
Total Funding Amount: $37.4M
Founder: Anish Achuthan
Open is an online platform for banking and intercompany settlement. It offers digital banking services for startups and small and medium enterprises that offer nearly all the features of the bank with extra tools to serve the needs of a business.
Their programming interface portal lets financial institutions integrate banking and payments into their applications and accounting systems.
FreshVnF
Headquarters: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Industry: Agriculture and AgTech
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: ₹140M
Founder: Aashish Krishnatre, Sumit Rai, Vikas Dosala
FreshVnF is an online agriculture machine learning (ML) driven technology platform that uses data to pick the finest produce from the best partners. It helps in optimizing the supply chain for hotels, restaurants, cafes, and retail with a data-driven inventory and replenishment platform
It creates market linkages for farmers by streamlining the supply chain and bringing efficiency and transparency to the entire value chain.
Finwego
Headquarters: Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Industry: Credit, Education, FinTech
Founded Year: 2018
Total Funding Amount: $1.7M
Founder: Pavee Ramanisankar, Shiv Vadivelalagan
Education lender, Finwego offers personal loans to school teachers and education loans to parents/students. It specializes in lending across the school ecosystem
Currently operational in Tamil Nadu, Finwego also plans to apply for an NBFC license and will soon expand to other parts of the country.
Beaconstac
Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka
Industry: Internet, Mobile.
Founded Year: 2009
Total Funding Amount: $2M
Founders: Ravi Pratap, Sharat Potharaju
Beaconstac is an end-to-end comprehensive proximity marketing solution including Beacons, NFC and a QR code generator. This includes Beacon and NFC hardware, a platform to create and manage the campaigns, and a powerful analytics engine. From allowing consumers to navigate to your store to asking them to leave feedback, QR codes can be used for a number of campaigns without an app.
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