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Yatra.com : How a Local Travel Agency Reached Millions of Indians

Founder, India, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Planning a trip, used to be a very hectic task before any of the online travel portals got launched. Now that, we have online travel agents, hotel and flight booking; checking availability of rooms, flights, and other accommodations, seems like a piece of cake.

One such online portal is Yatra.com, one of the most popular online Indian travel companies, that provide the finest travel services starting from booking hotels of your choice to create your own holiday packages. The company was founded on 1 August 2006 by Dhruv Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra. It is a Haryana-based online travel agency with a wide spectrum of services and a large customer base.

Dhruv Shringi, CEO of Yatra.com

One of the founders of Yatra.com, Dhruv Shringi, as well as the current CEO of the company, holds an MBA degree from INSEAD. He is also a certified Chartered Accountant who gathered a lot of experience before launching Yatra.com. Before Yatra.com, he worked for Ebookers where he was responsible for sales of $850 million that occurred through multiple channels. The other two founding members also worked with Shringi at Ebookers from 2000-2005. And in the period of working together, these three came up with the idea of Yatra.com.

CEO Yatra.com Dhruv Shringi
Image Source: business-standard.com

Shringi had also worked for the London branch of Ford Motor Company and for 6 years he worked with Arthur Anderson in India. He provided business strategies as well as teamed up with the IT sector of the companies he worked for. A man with such calibre and occupational background is likely to bring some lucrative investors in house, and so he did for Yatra.com.

Growth, Acquisitions, and Strategies

The company started in 2006, with only three members, and crossed 1,000 employees by 2016. Yatra.com is a B2B type business providing flight tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals and holiday packages throughout the entire world. The company started growing rapidly in India from the very beginning and with some strategic acquisitions and investors, the company is now growing roots in international lands as well.

In June 2007, Yatra online was nominated for prestigious 14th Annual World Travel Awards. The company came in partnership with Sify.Com in November 2007. In 2010, Yatra.com became the first online travel company to launch India’s first online ticket cancellation service. The company established a contract with IRCTC on 4 January 2010, and the next month, it tied up with Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation.

On 17 February 2010, Yatra.com came in partnership with Tyroo, followed by a partnership with eBay India and Tripadvisor, the world’s largest travel community, in the month of April of the same year.

On 17 May the same year, the company was awarded the ‘Best Domestic Tour Operator’ award by the Ministry of Tourism. In November, Yatra.com came in a joint venture with American Express. This partnership and the acquisition of TSI, helped the company expand its business, especially for the international flight ticketing. At the end of 2010, Sabina Chopra got felicitated at the Second Annual Women Leaders in India Award 2010. A lot of exclusive holiday packages were launched in this year, which attracted different kinds of travellers.

In 2011, Yatra.com, for the first time, introduced holiday packages to Spain. And, to lure more Indian customers, it launched exclusively ‘Love, Breakups and Zindagi’ package. In April 2011, the company raised funding of $2 billion from blue-chip investors, including Valiant Capital Management, Norwest Venture Partners, and Intel Capital. In November 2011, the company was honoured with CNBC Awaaz Travel Awards for Best Online Travel Agency.

In 2012, Yatra.com won the award for ‘Best Travel Website’ in IAMAI’s 2nd Annual India Digital Awards. The company partnered with ZenithOptimedia Media in the month of March of 2012. It also launched a new credit card in association with SBI. By the time, it became the second largest online travel website in India and owned a 30 per cent share of the travel market related online transactions. The company also acquired a 100 per cent stake in Travelguru.com. In December 2012, Yatra.com, in association with Microsoft, released an app on Windows 8 for its customers.

In 2014, the company came in association with McDonald’s, and also, Rajasthan Royals (Official Travel Partner for IPL 2014). By August 2015, the company dominated the online travel market with booking in over 40,000 hotels. In 2016, Yatra.com incorporated Homestays in its mobile and website app. The statistics showed that in November 2016, 67 per cent of the total Indian travellers where booking holiday packages through Yatra.com. In the same year, Yatra merged with Terrapin 3 Acquisition Crop, which made the company worth $218 million.

The Success

In this journey of 19 years, the company has gained immense trust from its more than 31 million customers. Yatra.com books around 50,000 hotels in more than 500 destinations of India and over 430,000 hotels around the world. On an average rate, Yatra.com hosts more than 20,000 domestic flights and 5,000 hotels bookings per day, through online media and call centres.

Bigbasket : The Success Story of India’s Biggest Online Grocery Store

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The days are long gone, when we had to wait for our turn in the long queues at a grocery store after roaming around and shopping for hours. Since online trading has seized a bigger part of marketing, the grocery stores are also getting modernised. And with this revolutionary change, a lot of online grocery stores came up in the digital market, such as Farm2Kitchen, ZopNow, etc. But only a few of them were able to stand high after multiple business turmoil, especially after the dot-com boom. Bigbasket is one of those successful start-ups that became India’s largest supermarket within a few years. Though the founders of Bigbasket started their start-up journey around the time of the market crash in 2000, they were able to establish as one of the leading online grocery stores.

Founders of Bigbasket

Conventionally, when we hear about recent start-ups, we think of young minds with brimming enthusiasm in the business field. But, it has always been that extraordinary ideas come from experienced minds.

Bigbasket founders
Image Source: thenational.ae

Bigbasket is one such start-up whose five founding members already had enough experience in this industry and were skilled in their fields.

Mr Hari Menon, the current CEO, and one of the founders of Bigbasket, also served as the CEO of IndiaSkills, Co-founder of Fabmall, Country Head at Planetasia and Business Head at Wipro.

The four other founding members of Bigbasket includes Mr V S Sudhakar, Mr Vipul Parekh, Mr Abhinay Choudhari and Mr V S Ramesh.

Each of the founders has a unique vision about the business, and their ideas complement each of them. Sudhakar has got a vast experience in the IT sector, and he is also the founder and CEO of Fabmall. Parekh is the Head of Finance and Marketing at Bigbasket, whereas Choudhari serves as the Head of New Initiatives. With 21 years of experience in the logistics sector of the Indian Navy, Ramesh is currently the Head of Logistics and Supply Chain of the company.

History

The five founders started their first online business, Fabmart.com, in 1999. The online grocery division of this business was launched in 2001, and the company grew exceptionally. They also started a succession of grocery supermarkets called Fabmall in Southern India, which the Aditya Birla group acquired in 2006, rebranding it as More. But the founders were still too adamant about establishing something bigger in the grocery market of India and finally launched Bigbasket in 2011.

The Journey Towards Success

The company raised around $10 million in the first round of funding from Ascent Capital. By 2014, the company was growing massively in three major cities, confirming over 5,000 orders every day. In March 2016, the company raised $150 million from Abraaj Capital in Series D funding. In the same year, the company also crossed targeted 10 million customers orders and also received 1million orders in a single month. By June 2017, the company raised around $290 million in total from 8 rounds of funding and 11 investors. In the same year, the company’s most lucrative investors were Paytm and Alibaba, from whom the company raised $280 million in the Series E funding. Some of the investors who participated in the investment rounds of Bigbasket are Bessemer Ventures, Helion, Zodius, LionRock Capital and Meena Ganesh.

With all the investments it received, Bigbasket decided to expand the business in other cities of India, too. The company also built several warehouses and invested in cold room facilities to enhance the range of fresh products. It also invested in technology to make delivery more efficient and shopping easier, both from the browser and mobile application. But amid the growing competition in the market form other companies, like Grofers and LocalBanya, Bigbasket started focussing more on personalized shopping.

After deep research of 5 years, Bigbasket figured out that the products in demand varied from city to city. This helped the company to put more emphasis on those products and expand the number of brands. For example, for the city with more demand for dairy products, Bigbasket introduced an extended range of brands of the milk products for that particular city. This strategy escalated the profit of the company and helped outdo its rivals.

The Future

The company allows customers hassle-free browsing through the products and relaxed shopping. Today, Bigbasket sells more than 12,000 varieties of products of 1,000 different brands in 25 cities.

According to some estimates from the experts, the company may value over $1.2 trillion by 2020.

Flipboard: An Application that Creates Digitalised Magazine With Curated Contents

Founder, News, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Newspapers and magazines have been the biggest source of information. But the time has gone, when people used to sit on their breakfast table and read the entire newspaper, or the time when they would relax in their couch and flip the pages of their favourite magazine. Everything, today, is moving at a faster pace, and people, too, want everything accessible through the swipe of their finger.

But there comes Flipboard for the rescue, which is an application aggregating the news, especially the top stories from social media, photos and videos from different websites and presents it in the form of the magazine to the users. So, you can flip the pages of your virtual magazine through your phone screen and also create one to contribute to this inspiring innovation. The application was developed by Mike McCue and Evan Doll and was released for the first time, exclusively for the iPads, in 2010.

Mike McCue

Mike McCue is an American entrepreneur, who has a great career graph. He has worked with companies like Netscape and Microsoft. In fact, he worked as the Vice President of Technology at Netscape but left the company to co-found his first startup, Tellme Networks, with Angus Davis, in February 1999. In March 2007, the company came under the acquisition of Microsoft, McCue taking the place of General Manager in the company. But in June 2009, he left Microsoft to co-found Flipboard, the world’s first social magazine, with Evan Doll. Along with Tellme Network and Flipboard, he has also founded Paper Software.

Evan Doll

Before founding Flipboard, he worked with Apple as a software engineer. He primarily worked with the iPhone team, Final Cut Pro and Aperture. He has a BS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University where he also taught the first university-level iPhone application development course.

Founders Flipboard
Image Source: zimbio.com

History of Flipboard

At first, the app was launched only for iPad users, and later, was followed by the release of iPhone and iPod versions in December 2011. The app looked extremely lustrous and allured a good number of users from the very beginning. The wide range of publishers, an arsenal of features, innumerable customization options, glossy advertisements, and most importantly, the touch screen enabled swiping feature made it popular in the digital world in no time. It became a source of amusement for every magazine lover. Since the readers were also able to create their own magazines, there were approximately 8 million customized magazines, soon after a year of its launch.

The Android version of the app was released on 5th May 2012. After modifying and releasing updated versions for a couple of years, after its launch finally, a stable version of Flipboard for Android was released on 22nd June 2012. Since then, it has been available on Google Play.

In 2013, the company raised a fund of $161 million, after completing a series C funding round, escalating the value of Flipboard to reported $800 million. Later, the Windows 8 version of the app was demonstrated at the ‘Microsoft 2013 Build Conference’,.

In 2014, four years after the launch of Flipboard in Apple’s App Store, the company witnessed more than 100 million active users with more than 300,000 readers per day. By this time, the company already established a direct partnership with around 8,000 publishers, thus providing brand new stories to the readers every day. In March 2014, Zite’s (a magazine-style reading app from CNN television network) acquisition by Google enhanced the styling of Flipboard’s page, and it also agreed upon publishing global contents of CNN. But, Zite was shut down after a year. In October 2014, Flipboard unveiled the Windows 8 version for Windows phones and other devices.

In 2015, the company received a funding of $200 million from investors, like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers, Index Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, and Rizvi Traverse Management. In the same year, the company also raised an additional $50 million from JPMorgan Chase. Previously, Flipboard was only available as an app for the smartphone and tablet users, but from February 2015, Flipboard was up in the web, thus enabling users to use it even from the desktops.

New updated versions of the mobile app for both iOS and Android were released in 2017, implementing many new and smart features. In 29th May 2019, Flipboard announced a security breach which allowed the flow of private information of the users to the unauthorized third party. It was taken care of at the earliest, and the company reset all the passwords and authentication tokens.

Future of Flipboard

McCue, in one of the interview, said that this is his last startup, and he will stick to it till the end. This tech-obsessed American native keeps on improving the user interface of the app. He is also looking into building a stronger algorithm for the entire system and better contents for the next generation of the readers.

Sean Rad : The Founding Memeber and Former CEO of Tinder

Founder, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Digitalization has made every activity so convenient for us that we can literally do anything with a swipe of our fingers. Moreover, the younger generation prefers doing everything through the internet, starting from shopping, payment, booking shows, and even, finding a perfect date unless they happen to meet under the mistletoe. Now, how great it would be to use a mobile app where you can find a perfect match only by swiping left or right? Tinder is one such mobile dating app, using which you can chat with other users and find a ‘good match’ for yourself.

The app provides the option to swipe right if you like someone’s profile and the other way around if you don’t like any. The app was launched in 2012, and in less than a couple of months, it grew to a million users. Tinder was founded by Sean Rad, along with Justin Mateen, Jonathan Badeen and many other executive members. Rad was also the former CEO of the company. One of the founding members, Whitney Wolfe, left Tinder after some time to work on another dating app, Bumble.

Early Life

Born into an Iranian family, Rad moved to Los Angeles with his parents in 1970s and settled in Beverly Hills. His parents worked in the technology industry, which might be one reason why he knew tech very well. Since his childhood, Rad was passionate about doing something big in life and making his life worthy.

Sean Rad
Image Source: businessinsider.in

When Rad was in high school, he did an internship as an entertainment manager, and that’s how he realized that he can make money even from the things he enjoyed doing. Though Rad and Mateen went to different schools, they knew each other since they were fourteen.

Higher Education and Career

Rad started pioneering in the world of technology since he was just eighteen and launched Orgoo, his first startup that was envisioned to build a webmail service. Both Rad and Mateen went to the University of Southern California, but Rad dropped out after a couple of years, to explore the entrepreneurial world and developed a platform called Adly, in the mid-2000s.

These two young entrepreneurs, along with other members, launched Tinder in 2012 and promoted the app heavily in various college campuses. They knew very well, where they could grab the most attention, and thus, gained a billion swipes per day, within a couple of years of Tinder.

Success of Tinder

A year after the release of Tinder, the app received TechCrunch’s Crunchie Award for ‘Best New Startup of 2013’. In March 2013, the company realised the application was used only in a few localities, and hence, Alexa Mateen, social media director, promoted it in other college campuses as well. And by May 2013, Tinder became one of the top twenty-five social networking apps on the basis of users. The frequency of users kept rising, which made Tinder the first online dating app as one of the top five online utilized applications.

In 2014 Webby Awards, the company was named as ‘breakout of the year’, and by October 2014, the application finally incorporated swiping motion and processed more than a billion swipes per day. It made around twelve million matches per day, which is appreciable for a company, which is only two years old. In 2015, the company launched a new feature to let the user access the profiles they rejected earlier, but chatting of two users was only possible when both of them swiped right. Apart from this, a lot of new features were added and deleted from the app in 2015. Tinder’s main complementing site was Facebook, as the user needed to connect their Facebook account with the app for profile verification.

In September 2016, Tinder came in partnership with Vina, a social networking app, and tested ‘Tinder Boost’ in Australia. In October 2016, it went live around the world, which basically, allowed your profile to be on top in your area for 30 minutes. In the same month, Tinder announced the opening of their first office in Silicon Valley, such that to enhance the quality of the employees. In November 2016, the app introduced more freedom on the grounds of choosing gender, breaking the typical mindset of society. This feature raised the number of users by a hefty amount, and by 2018, Tinder had over 3.7 million paid subscribers. The company is now deciding to launch a lighter version of the app, called Tinder Lite, which will take relatively less storage space and consume lesser data.

Majority of the Tinder, today, is under the acquisition of IAC and its subsidiary, Match Group. Till 2018, Rad changed positions quite a number of times, stepping down from the position of CEO and getting back in the helm again. But, in August 2018 a lawsuit was filed against IAC by a group of Tinder employees including Rad. They are suing IAC of alleged stock information and seeking at least $2billion in damages.

Threema : Small Step to Enhanced Security in Conversations

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

What if we told you that there exists an application which completely secures your data privacy? Amid the data breaches taking place, you probably might not believe us. However, it is true, and the app we are talking about is Threema; an instant messaging application, similar to our favourite Whatsapp. The app has been the one-time ‘Android App of the Year(2015)’ and two-time ‘Best Selling iOS App (2014, 2015)’ winner.

Manuel Kasper founder threema
Image Source: 20min.ch

Threema was founded by Manuel Kasper, an entrepreneur from Switzerland, in 2012. The country is known for its pro-data privacy laws, so do the app. The app is also subject to strict European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It, basically, functions on unique identification, unlike other apps which function on Private information such as a mobile number.

In 2013, Threema expanded its user base on an exponential scale. This sudden rise in users came from Europe, particularly from Germany. This was a primary result of the infamous Snowden’s revelations. These revelations had a two-fold effect. Firstly, it exposed the American surveillance network and its outreach. Secondly, there was an outbreak of public awareness of the importance of data privacy. Suddenly, the topic of Data Privacy became of broad and current interest. People started paying closer review to it.

Since then, many people have commented on data privacy issues. In a recent interview, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, said, “Lately, it seems this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation – the belief you can claim the credit without accepting responsibility”. Cook also blasted corporations on data privacy issues, breaches, violations. Facebook’s recent scandal, where the people’s information was harvested without their permission. It shook the world. However, Mark Zuckerberg dodged punishment in a seemingly unconvincing way.

Threema aims to securely protect user data and exhibits some characteristic features, which distinguish it from the competition. It promises the security of the user’s data by way of end-to-end encryption technology, which is not limited only to a ‘person to person’ conversation, but also to group chats, voice messages and media files. The technology ensures the singular ability of the recipient to decrypt the messages. Neither any service provider nor any person can decrypt them.

We all know that technology giant ‘Whatsapp‘ has been creating data profiles of users for its parent organisation ‘Facebook’. However, Threema does not fiddle around with “Metadata”, meaning that the app collects the particular data which is “sine qua non” for the conversation between people. Such an approach has appealed to the people. However, every coin has two sides. Threema’s enhanced security has been misused by terrorist modules such as ISIS and Hizbul to converse freely in a secure environment.

Threema also ensures safe and anonymous data recovery through its platform. Threema Safe is an automated self-hosted platform for the purpose of data recovery. The backup is processed by ‘scrypt’ algorithm, which creates a near-impenetrable cryptographic key. Such an algorithm leaves brute-force attacks useless.

Threema has based its success purely on its exceptional security protocol. If you look at data privacy as one of the major concerns, you don’t need to look beyond. It has been widely praised as one of the most secure messaging apps. And if that is not enough, the app has also scored perfectly well on several tests and studies. While this has happened, the app has treaded on the lines of secure communication diverting from the apathetic chaos created by certain organizations, making our life little more secure.

Cleartrip : The Success Story of Travel Aggregator Website of India

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

There will rarely be any person who doesn’t want to travel. Travelling is fun, exciting and connects you to a new world. Thanks to the various portals for ticket and hotel bookings, travelling has become easier and relaxing. But if we go over 15 years ago, the case was not the same. There were no online portals for bookings, and people relied upon the traditional inconvenient methods of travelling. This was the same time when not everyone had got access to the internet.

In the mid-2000s, Facebook was making the buzz and no one, at least in India, was thinking of making train and hotel bookings over the Internet. But then, Hrush Bhatt came with the idea of establishing an online website, where people could easily book hotels, trains and even flights.

Cleartrip founder Hrush Bhatt
Image Source: vervemagazine.in

Bhatt is an Indian entrepreneur, who used to travel across India, with his maternal family, a lot. He loved travelling and had been to the U.S. quite sometimes. Bhatt was an alumnus at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin, where he studied economics and history. While studying, he wrote for the college newspaper, and even, received an Apple Macintosh for his work, upon which he started learning to design.

Bhatt completed his graduation in 1998 and came back to India, where he started working at Plexus Technologies as the lead designer. Here he worked for a year and got to learn a lot about eCommerce. During his job at Plexus Technologies, he became the part of the launch team of Indiatimes.com, as the lead consultant.

After leaving the job at Plexus Technologies, Bhatt launched a startup named Paper Plane, a consulting firm and a digital agency. But like every other startup, this one also could not do very well.

With the failure of Paper Plane, Bhatt was quite discouraged and frustrated. But this frustration led him to found Cleartrip, India’s biggest travel booking portal. Bhatt, along with his co-founders Stuart Crighton and Mathew Spacie, started building a website for his new startup, i.e. a travel booking agency. Stuart Crighton has the experience in the field of hospitality as he was the former COO at Cox n’ Kings.

It just took nine months for the co-founders to build a good website and invite investors to invest in their idea. In 2006, they officially launched Cleartrip. Since it was quite an unusual idea for the investor of India, the company had to struggle to convince them. Despite the uniqueness of the startup idea, Cleartrip took no time to reach people and become popular, as soon as it was launched. Interestingly, the company did not offer any discounts to the users, but its quality service drew most of its customers. The company mainly focused on travellers who travel a lot, instead of the ones who made trip plans once in a year.

In 2011, Cleartrip launched Express Way, a one-click method, to help the users to store their travel and payment details securely on the platform. The company introduced its first mobile app in 2012, both for iOS and Android, providing its users with an intuitive interface and seamless booking processes. The company was dealing in booking for flights, trains and hotels in all parts of India.

In 2016, Cleartrip introduced a new feature to its users, PriceLock that, as the name suggests, allows the users to lock the prices of flights. In the same year, it also launched Cleartrip Local, another feature that enables the users to find out activities they can do in the nearby area.

In 2017, the company offered the users to pay through Apple Pay and also introduced new features named Cleartrip Stories and Instant Search. Cleartrip Stories allowed users to share their experiences with their friends and family over their Cleartrip profile. Instant Search helped the users to search and make bookings even faster. In the same year, Google partnered with Cleartrip for its flight search application, Google Flights.

In 2018, the company expanded its services to the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region, and in July month of the same year, Cleartrip acquired Flyin, a Saudi Arabia-based online travel aggregating company.

After acquiring Flyin, Cleartrip started working in Arabic countries more actively. So to make the processes more convenient, the company launched the Arabic version of the website in 2018.

The maximum average revenue that the company makes is worth $110 million, selling over seven million flight tickets and 1.5 million hotel room nights a year. Cleartrip, currently, is serving in 48 European and 18 Southeast Asian countries. The company has also established separate services for corporate users named Cleartrip Business. It has also introduced a travel tool, Agent Box, for the agents.

Cleartrip has won many awards for its service in India and abroad, including ‘Most Innovative Companies in Asia’, ‘India’s Best Travel Website’, ‘Product of the Year – Travel Category’, ‘Best Mobile App for Travel’, etc.