startup

Afterpay – A Young Australian Fintech Startup To Secure More Than 7 Million Active Customers Internationally.

Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen founded Afterpay in October 2014. It is a very young start-up that has its origin in Australia and eventually expanded to the UK, Canada, the US, and New Zealand. The company changed its name from Afterpay to Afterpay Limited in 2019 and currently Square Inc, an American digital payment company is planning to acquire it. It is a mutual agreement between the two companies the deal is planned to be settled by 2022 for $29 billion.

Afterpay limited is a fintech company and currently, it has over 7 million active customers with the majority of it in the US and Australia. Afterpay went public only after two years of its established and its stock price has increased rapidly in the last five years. In 2016, the company got listed in ASX with an IPO valued at $25 million. The business strategy of Afterpay is what makes it one of the most successful and youngest fintech companies today.

Founding Of Afterpay

Nick and Anthony founded Afterpay back in 2014 as a financial payment for shopping purposes. The product developed by the company allowed customers to pay in an installment-based system and thus approached the audience in a “buy first, pay later” approach. Afterpay offered several plans on how customers can repay the money in installments. With Afterpay, the retailers didn’t have any requirements to track the repayments of customers and in return, the company charged a small fee based on the transaction.

Before rolling out the platform, Compay fully built its digital strategy and also established a partnership with Touchcorp, a payment firm. Touchcorp was also one of the early investors of the company and supported the entire back end of Afterpay’s payment system. In 2017, both the companies were merged and a deal of $500 million was successfully closed with renaming the company Afterpay Touch.

Success And Expansion

Afterpay was able to secure millions of customers in a very short time and the company’s valuation also started escalating. In 2016, the company decided to go public and thus got listed on the Australian Securities Exchange with an IPO of $25 million. By this time, Company established a very strong customer base and an efficient payment system. This brought Afterpay on the radar of investors and 2018 American venture capital firm Matrix Partners showed interest in the company.

Matrix Partners was willing to invest $19.4 million to help the company enter the US market. With this funding, Afterpay successfully entered the US market in mid-May of the same year with retailers like Urban Outfitters, Free People, and Anthropologie. After one year of entering the US market, Company raised a fresh fund of $317.2 million and it was invested exclusively in the company’s international growth. In mid-2019, Afterpay announced that it has crossed two million active customers in the US and has 6,500 merchants using their payment system. The same year, the company also entered into a partnership with Visa Inc and that hugely broadened the customer base of the company. Last year Company reported that from two million customers in 2019 it has crossed more than five million customers last year.

In August 2018, Company acquired a 90% stake in a UK-based company Clearpay. This company also offered the same service as Afterpay and the deal was closed for one million Afterpay shares. With this acquisition, Company entered the UK market and it landed 200,000 customers only in the first fifteen weeks. Last year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone witnessed a rising demand for online shopping. Afterpay, in order to capitalize on the e-commerce surge, showed its interest in expanding to other continents including Asia. Thus, the company is planning to acquire more Asian-based payment companies.

About The Founders

Nick Molnar, born in 1990, is the youngest self-made Australian billionaire. Nick went to the University of Sydney and has a bachelor’s degree in commerce. He is mainly famous as the co-founder of Afterpay and after the company is acquired by Square Inc he along with Anothony is to receive $2.7 billion in Square stock.

Anthony Eisen is the co-founder of Afterpay and also the current CEO of the company. He completed his education at the University of New South Wales. Eisen has more than 20 years of experiencing in leadership and investing in financial services and technology.

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

The Trade Desk – A Jeff Green Founded Successful Start-Up in the Digital Marketing Space.

Advertising in the digital era fuels the branding of each and every business. Jeff Green and Dave Pickles decided to found The Trade Desk when they detected a gap between marketers and the right information they needed to build an ad. If one doesn’t have plenty of accurate data to forecast and analyze the behavior of the target audience, it is not possible to create an ad that will resonate with their needs or pain points. Both Jeff and Dave realized that this unavailability of data is giving a hard time to the marketers as well as content creators to monetize their platforms. And, The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 as a solution to this problem, helping digital ad buyers around the world.

About The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is a successful company in the digital advertising sector that focuses on data-driven advertising campaigns for digital ad buyers. TTD offers one-of-a-kind SaaS which is also the largest independent demand-side platform (DSP). The company is based in Ventura, California. TTD has three main products to offer advertisers at various companies and agencies. Let’s have a look at the services provided by TTD.

Services of TTD

First, the demand-side platform is all about using data in the smartest possible way. The clients use data to derive accurate information that gives a better idea for strategizing ads. This helps the businesses plan in a way to reach more audiences before pouring heavy amounts of money into creating ads. The demand-side platform helps a client to build a complete planner only by providing information like goals and budgets. With the help of cross-device targeting, your ads reach the right kind of audience for your product or brand. The AI-driven technology of TTD also helps gain recommendations and insights based on the type of data you are looking for or your goals.

Second, the data management platform works with the existing data of a client and provides insights about who could be your potential customers. The data management platform of TTD helps a client to discover new people who they can approach to increase the customer base. There can be many new businesses, where the company hasn’t hired any in-house data researcher or analyst. So, TTD will help to surface the right type of data and create new relevant audience profiles for your company.

Lastly, TTD APIs is also a choice for the company’s clients if one is interested in building customized solutions. This will increase the efficiency of a company as one will create a personalized solution depending on more parameters of the company. It means a company will use more of its data to create a competitive advantage and hence will gain clearer insights about its customers and workflow.

Behind the Scenes

Before co-founding TTD, Jeff Green established an online auction advertising company called AdECN. Microsoft acquired the company in 2007 and Dave started working for the company right after that. This is how the two of them met and founded TTD, a new adventure in 2009. In 2010, the company successfully raised $2.5 million from investors like Founder Collective and IA Ventures. Jerry Neumann and Josh Stylman are two angel investors that backed TTD in the early days.

TTD was established in the sector of digital marketing where the opportunities for growth were unscalable especially in this digital age. The company succeeded very quickly and in 2015 TTD was featured in Forbes as one of the Top 10 America’s Most Promising Companies. The same year both the co-founders were named Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs of the Year. In 2018, the company launched two AI-based tools, namely, Koa (An AI forecast engine) and The Trade Desk Planner. With these two innovative products rolling out in the market, TTD acquired the second position in the list of 100 Best Medium Workplaces by Fortune.

About the Founders

Jeff Green studied marketing communications at the University of Southern California. He started his career in Microsoft and founded AdECN, a demand-side advertising platform in 2003. Two years after Microsoft acquired the company, Jeff built a new start-up focusing on the buy-side platform, which is none other than TTD.

Dave Pickles is the current CTO of TTD and also a board member. Dave studied Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He started working for AdECN after Microsoft acquired it. Before that, he was a senior engineer at CallWave, an internet telephony startup.

Annasha

Story of Jugnoo : The Desi Uber for Autos

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Athulya

Over 5 million auto-rickshaws ply in India, and only 30% of them are properly utilized. This leads to a loss not just for the rickshaw drivers, but also for people looking for some affordable means of transportation. Jugnoo was established as a means to solve this problem by helping customers make use of affordable services for their daily needs all on a single platform. Beginning as an auto-rickshaw aggregator, the company revolutionised the way rickshaw service worked in India, and have now branched out into other fields and sectors by launching services such as Meals, Jugnoo Fresh, Menus and even Jugnoo Delivery. Here’s a look at how Jugnoo grew from being a small idea that two IITian’s had to a thriving business.

The Founders

Jugnoo was founded in November 2014 by two IIT-Delhi alumni, Samar Singla and Chinmay Agarwal. Samar always dreamt of becoming an entrepreneur and had already invested in other companies before founding Jugnoo as he hails from a business family. He tried his hand at entrepreneurship with his first venture Prodigy foods and then sold it to start Click Labs. His second outing, which he founded in 2011, with Chinmay as a partner was a profitable marketing automation software that used SaaS technology. While Samar is a physicist by his education, it is business that excites him, and that is why this serial entrepreneur decided to take a risk again with Jugnoo.

Chinmay Agarwal who serves as the Chief Operations Officer at Jugnoo has a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi. Following his graduation, he won the Erasmus Mundus scholarship, and so went on to do his Joint Masters in Advanced Robotics from Ecole, France and the University of Genoa in Italy. He later switched to business, embarking on his first venture, Click Labs with Samar, where he held the position of Chief Technical Officer. At Jugnoo, he wears multiple hats, helping Samar with both the operations and product side of things.

Founding Jugnoo

Jugnoo founders — Image Source: homebusinessmag.com

In 2014, while at Chandigarh, the duo launched Jugnoo at PECFEST and gave people free rides as a part of their marketing strategy. The idea caught on, and soon the pair realised that there was untapped potential in this sector. Samar and Chinmay then began connecting drivers and customers, and soon enough Jugnoo took shape.

One of the toughest challenges they faced initially was getting the rickshaw drivers familiar with the technology they employed. This introduction wasn’t always smooth, as the drivers came from an environment wherein technology wasn’t so well integrated. Hence, it took a lot of time, effort and dedication to explain the process to them, how the layout works, and how it would help them. Convincing the drivers that such a platform would be beneficial to them wasn’t an easy task, because these weren’t people who liked the idea of change. But, the duo persisted, and soon enough, people started seeing the application as a boon that would help improve their accessibility, and that was when the company started taking off.

Leading the Way

Soon enough, Jugnoo started earning a name for itself, and the first big investment came in the form of seed funding, when the company raised USD 1 million through investors such as Junglee Flywheel, BCG Group, Rapportive, and Kirloskar Bros. It followed this up with a Series A funding and was able to raise another USD 5 million. Furthermore, recently they embarked on a Series B funding round which raked in an additional USD 10 million with their main investors being big players such as Paytm and Snow Leopard ventures.

Within the first seven months, Jugnoo had amassed over 80,000 users and was completing over 1,500 transactions a day. They earned 80% of their total revenue from auto-rickshaw deliveries and bookings and was making more than $1,500 a day.

By 2016, Jugnoo had evolved and had branched into various verticals, growing into an end-to-end solution for their customers. The app has continued to grow at over 20% a month and boasts over 5 million registered users and an auto-rickshaw fleet that is 12,000 drivers strong. Jugnoo recently added the facility of UPI payment on their app as a means to promote a cashless economy that the government is pushing. They have also launched products in the B2B market, including the likes of Tookan and Juggernaut.

Unlike other start-ups that rush towards the metros once established, Jugnoo prefers to stay in Tier-II and Tier-III cities, because 80% of India’s population resides in such cities. Today, the company is rapidly growing and employs over 1000 people, across 35 cities and successfully completes more than 50,000 transactions a day. Jugnoo does more than making money for its founders. Rather, it has a social side to it as well, as it helps people get access to affordable transportation, while also uplifting the lives of millions who depend on menial jobs for their survival.

Athulya

Being a cinephile with a love for all things outdoorsy, Athulya never misses a chance to chase inspiring stories or poke fun at things, even when the subject is herself. Currently pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, she is someone innately interested in technical and scientific research. Music reviews and op-eds define her as they allow her to explore different perspectives. Though sometimes she thinks she makes more sense playing the guitar than she does while writing.

The Smart Taxi : India’s Premium Cab Service; ‘Travel in Style’

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Athulya

There are so many companies and brands out there that businesses are forced to gain a client’s approval to provide them with their services. Since they have a wide variety of options, customers have the freedom to choose a company that best suit their needs and requirements. Gone are the days of absolute brand loyalty wherein a whole household would use one product, and one product alone. The future is about giving the clients what they need and also being courteous and polite while doing so, to improve customer experience. Delivering unique and pleasant customer experiences will help in retaining clients, and none understand this better than the new-age start-up The Smart Taxi. Here’s a look at how an ordinary middle-class man dared to dream and made his dream into a reality.

About the Founder

Dhruvam Thaker was born in Jamnagar, and shortly after his birth, his family shifted to Ahmedabad. While growing up, Dhruvam was a quiet, and an introvert boy who had a knack for mechanics and solving riddles. Being shy and apprehensive, he preferred the company of his cars and toys over other people. It was cricket that finally helped the shy Dhruvam make friends and get over his fear of interacting with people. His father is a retired government bank employee, while his mother is a housewife. He has two siblings, a brother and a sister, who have hearing and speaking disabilities.

Due to financial constraints on the home front, Dhruvam studied in a Gujarathi medium school till class 9. His interest in science led him to take up science in his 11th, and he aspired to become an engineer. The first setback he faced in life was failing his 12th-grade exams. He, therefore, used his 10th-grade results to join a diploma course in Nirma University, determined to get his life back on track.

The Smart Taxi Founder — Image Source: startupidols.com

As his love for automobiles and machines grew, so did his grades, to an extent where he came in second in his University exams. While in college, Dhruvam worked part-time jobs and did several odd jobs to make ends meet and to ease the financial strain on his family. Soon after, he got placed and joined an MNC in Bengaluru in 2008 and worked in process improvements and production engineering. In 2013, he came back to Ahemdabad and joined a job near his home. Apart from his job, Dhruvam started feeling the need to do something of his own. While this thought was always in the back of his mind, pressure from society and financial constraints prevented him from taking the leap of faith. But one day, he made his mind and quit his job without letting anyone know about it.

Founding The Smart Taxi

While working in Bengaluru, it required him to travel using taxis, and he often found taxi services to be lacking, when it came to customer experience. He realised that issues such as poor car maintenance, rude staff behaviour and late pickups plagued the taxi service industry, while he found the airline and hotel industry to be the opposite.

That is when he came up with the idea for a taxi service that provided the same hospitality extended by airlines and hotels all over the country. The idea stayed with him all the while as he moved to Ahmedabad and started his new job there. Finally, after four years of running the idea through his head, he decided to quit his job and make his idea a reality. Dhruvam chose Ahmedabad to be his company’s headquarters as he had a local advantage and knew the market there well. So, in September 2016, Dhruvam finally gave life to his long-standing idea of a luxury taxi service, and The Smart Taxi was born. He, and his brother, who is a graphic designer, quickly got to work, and created over 22 test logos, before finally choosing on their present logo.

Speeding Forward

The Smart Taxi now has a fleet of well-maintained cabs, which have all the state of the art features and installations. The taxis themselves are driven by courteous, experienced, polite and well-trained professionals. There is an elite group of people in India who don’t mind paying extra for premium service, and that is exactly what The Smart Taxi provides; exemplary service and outstanding customer experience. The Smart Taxi has several plans and offers, and rents cabs for both hourly trips and longer outstation journeys. Their cabs welcome clients with crafty speeches, play soothing music in the taxi to create a positive ambience, and even offer customers everything from water bottles to chocolates and snacks! Some of their taxis even have WiFi, cold drinks, a plethora of magazines and an Amazon Kindle to help the customer relax and enjoy their favourite book or novel.

The Smart Taxi began its journey with just one cab that Dhruvam used to drive. Since then, the company has grown and now owns a fleet of over 60 cars, including comfortable Sedans and powerful MUVs. The company has now expanded and functions in seven cities; namely, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot, Jaipur, Pune, Indore, and Bhopal, with plans to expand even further. As the company is a bootstrapped startup, they make use of online platforms, like Google and Whatsapp to run their operations. The company also has a centralized booking centre from where they delegate bookings to local taxi companies or fleet owners. At present, the booking happens only online, but Dhruvam has plans to extend this functionality to other platforms in the near future.

Dhruvam remembers how during the initial days, he ran the entire company, doing everything from driving cabs to attending calls. But throughout his struggle, he never gave up, but rather kept pushing forward hoping that things will work out eventually. And work out it did, as within two years, the company has grown in every way with two out of every three customers coming back to them and 3 out of 4 even providing them with referrals. While a long road lies ahead for Dhruvam, it is safe to say that this shy, introverted mechanical engineer will surely leave his mark in the field of taxi service!

Athulya

Pebble : The Biggest Kickstarter success story

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

Smartwatches are a new trend in today’s time, and above the trend, it is the most useful tool anyone can get. Apple smartwatch being the leader in the game is not alone, and the competition is tough with its rivals and tech giants like Samsung, Fitbit, etc. working on similar products. But before Apple or Samsung, it was Pebbles, that developed the idea of smartwatch and ruled like a boss. But getting on the top, and maintaining the position, are two different things. Despite, Pebbles is no more the leader of smartwatches, it, still, will be always be known as the pioneer in the field of smartwatch development.

Eric Migicovsky is the founder of Pebbles from the Netherlands. While studying engineering at the Delft University of Technology, he got the chance to migrate to the University of Waterloo as an exchange student. Migicovsky loved cycling but was annoyed how he had to stop for taking calls or to see the messages on his smartphone. Eventually, he came up with the idea of connecting smartphones with smartwatches and created the first model of such a smartwatch named InPulse with his friends.

Later, Migicovsky entered the Y Combinator business incubator program with his idea and was able to raise US$375,000 from angel investors including Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Though the amount was quite big, Migicovsky successfully sold watches to Blackberry with the name Pebble Technology. But after its first successful business deal, the company was not able to attract more investors.

Pebble Founder — Image Source: uwaterloo.ca

To raise more money, Migicovsky put the product on the Kickstarter website with a target to raise $100,000. The idea behind the Kickstarter was to offer a huge discount on the $150 watches on first 200 pre-orders. The target was indeed achieved, and that too, just in 2 hours, and eventually, the Kickstarter was closed at $10,266,845, the project becoming the most funded project at Kickstarter to that point. The fundraiser also got a world record for the company of the most money raised for a Kickstarter project.

In January 2013, the company partnered with Foxlink Grou and produced 85,000 watches to be shipped to the people who had ordered through the Kickstarter. The watches were connected with both Android and iOS devices through Bluetooth and could show the incoming call, a text message, notification from Facebook and Twitter as well as events on the calendar. By the end of the year, the company had shipped around 300,000 watches. In the next three months, it shipped another 100,000 units of watches. And by the end of 2014, the company had sold a total of 1 million watches successfully.

In February 2015, the company released its $199 second-generation Pebble smartwatch named Pebble Time at Kickstarter campaign. Here too, the company made another record of raising $500,000 in 17 minutes and a $1 million in 49 minutes. In 48 hours the company had already raised a $10 million, and by the closing, it raised a $20 million breaking its own previous record of raising the biggest amount of money in a Kickstarter. The same year, an 86-year-old Japanese watchmaker Citizen offered Migicovsky a $740 million for buying the company, but he turned down the offer, as he was certain of the success of Pebbles.

Despite the company was able to raise a huge amount of money, it had started to struggle financially. New rivals came up for the business, Apple being the prime threat to the success of Pebble. Migicovsky played with the design of the smartwatch and brought new technologies like tracking the health through the watch. But the software used in the watches was not that powerful and the smartwatches failed to put the impact.

The Pebble, Pebble 2, Time, Time 2, and Pebble Core are some of the smartwatch models from Pebbles. In December 2016, the Pebble’s rival company, Fitbit, acquired the company’s assets, employees, and Pebble’s intellectual property, in a total amount of $40 million.

Despite the company has been acquired by Fitbit, Pebbles will always be known as the first, and the fastest funded project in Kickstarter history.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

www.xornor.co

Waze : The Israeli Build, Play, Monetize Mapping App that Acquired the Attention of Google

Leave a Comment / Founder, Google, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Yashica Vashishtha

Though in the past, the paper maps were the most innovative inventions of its time and helped people with their long trips to new places, it was quite difficult to read those maps when they drove their cars. But since the technology has taken everything in its hands, now people can easily find their ways to new places using the GPS systems and via the digital maps, Google Maps being one of the favourites of all. But there is another map app named Waze which came all the way from Israel, which even attracted Google and made it buy the technology behind the app.

Ehud Shabtai is the founder of Waze, who was born and brought up in Israel. He completed his graduate degree in Philosophy from Tel-Aviv University, followed by a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the same university.

Shabtai founded Waze when he encountered a problem in finding the right routes and less traffic on them, as to reach different places in lesser time. For this, one of his friends gifted him a GPS. Though GPS was good for finding the direction, it was not able to give the information about the traffic on the roads.

Waze Founder — Image Source: complex.com

Being a software engineer, he decided to develop a new application, that would help people find the direction to various places, and the information about the traffic or any blockage on the roads due to any reason. Finally, in 2006, he developed and launched a new map app, named FreeMap Israel. The app included a database for the Israeli map and crowdsourced the information of the Speed Cameras. The application used maps from Mapa Ltd. But with the instant growth of the app, Shabtai also received a copyright claim from Mapa Ltd.

Mapa Ltd, at the same time, also offered to buy the app, but Shabtai denied the offer and removed all the Mapa maps from the platform. In 2008, along with Uri Levine and Amir Shinar, to commercialise the app, Shabtai launched the Waze app. The app was like a clean slate, that would collect data from different users, such that directions to a new place, which would get stored in the app’s database, and would help other people for their trips. The app promoted a new strategy of building, playing and monetizing for the app.

Waze encouraged people to enter the route they were travelling a 10th time or the first time, and the data would get stored into its database, such that other users could follow the most appropriate path to the same destination. The users would get points for drawing roads on the app, and earn points for that. Around 1,500 volunteers helped the app in mapping the geographical area of Israel, and Amir Shinar was one of those volunteers. Later, the company got the licensing for its data. In 2009, the Shabtai renamed the company as Waze Mobile Ltd.

In a round of funding in 2010, the company raised a $25 million, followed by another $30 million in financing in the next year. The same year, Waze was upgraded with new features that would help people report local events going on the streets and roads so that the users could take other routes.

After Israel, the company opened its next office in California, employing 10 people. In 2012, the app was incorporated with options for advertising businesses based on location.

Waze received a free promotion when Interstate 405 in California was to shut due to heavy traffic. For that, a local TV show invited the Waze team in order to help people find their way. This was a great help in advertising the service. Leading to that, the company even built a web interface for TV news stations, and over 25 TV stations in the U.S. only were using the same interface to broadcast the traffic information live on TV by 2013. In the same year, the app received the Best Overall Mobile App award from the GSM Association.

Though the company had denied for selling the technology to Mapa Ltd in 2006, it was sold to Google for $966 million in June 2013. At that time, Waze had 100 employees, and Google paid them around $1.2 million during the acquisition. Since then, Google has been adding up the Waze features to Google map. In 2017, with a partnership with Spotify, Waze offered the option to play the Spotify music, and likewise, users could now get the Waze directions on Spotify directly. The next year, the company even introduced support for Apple CarPlay. Waze even updated the iOS platform with Siri Shortcuts support in 2019.

Pandora, Deezer, iHeart Radio, NPR One, Scribd, Stitcher, and TuneIn are Waze’s partners for Audio Player. With Google partnership, Waze offered the Google Assistant integration as well as YouTube Music integration on the platform.

Today, the app is used to report and track the traffic, any other incidents, like the crashes, road blockage, events on the roads, etc. People can also modify the app data by registering to it, and even record voice over for the directions on the app. The success of Waze had made it regular with around 130 million users every month.