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meesho

Meesho : India’s First Facebook-Backed Startup Emerged out of a Failed Business

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The world has already created a rough background framework in the mind of every young entrepreneur out there. If you are a good programmer and a tech guy, you are surely a potential entrepreneur, or that is what everyone thinks. But, there is always this one person who burst our bubbles and brings us back to the real world. Sanjeev Barnwal, the co-founder of Meesho, an online e-commerce platform created for the resellers in 2015, believes that it is always not coding that opens the scope of doing good business. One of the most important criteria for fueling a business is to know your clients. So, meeting the clients in real life, interacting with them contributes to one’s successful business as well. Let us know more about this platform, and its founders, Sanjeev Barnwal and Vidit Aatrey.

Sanjeev Barnwal

Belonging to a middle-class family from Ranchi, Barnwal was always influenced to do well in his academic life. In his 10+2, he opted for computer science only to get rid of biology. Since, he chose to study pure science, like most of the students these days, he also wanted to pursue engineering, and not to mention from the best institution of India, i.e., IIT. After passing his twelfth standard, he went straight to Kota to prepare for the entrance exam, and next year, he made it to IIT Delhi, Department of Electrical Engineering. After getting into college, Barnwal realized the power technology and coding is acquiring in our lives.

During his days in the IIT, he met Vidit Aatrey, his classmate. But these four years were absolutely not the time when they sat together and planned their own start-up. After completing his BTech, Barnwal moved to Tokyo, Japan and started working for Sony Corporation. After working there for a couple of years, Barnwal was really inspired by the start-up community growth in India and wanted to join in. So, he called up Aatrey, his IIT Delhi batch mate, to ask if there is any start-up which he could possibly join. But, Aatrey was very much interested to create a start-up of his own, rather joining one. And this is how it all began.

Meesho founders
Image Source: angel.co

Vidit Aatrey

With an AIR of 182, Aatrey was admitted to the Electrical Engineering department of IIT Delhi in 2008. After graduating, while Barnwal moved to Tokyo, Aatrey joined ITC as Supply Chain Manager and worked there for a couple of years. He switched to InMobi in 2014 and moved to Bangalore. He was doing really well in this company, until one fine day he received a phone call from his old batchmate, Sanjeev from IIT Delhi. Over a single conversation, both of them decided to quit their jobs for something which was as uncertain as an exit poll in India.

Anyway, both of them resigned, and Barnwal returned to India in June 2015 to start his new venture with Aatrey.

And, the End Result was Meesho!

At first, both of them decided to open a fashion-based online marketplace that would remap all the shops for customers, and through the app, the user could actually try the product before buying it. They named their start-up FashNear and launched it in mid-2015, but unfortunately the idea back-fired.

So, they came up with another idea of a start-up and created a platform where offline retailers could take their business online, and sell through different social platforms like Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook etc. After they came up with the idea of this new business, they worked day and night to create this online premise. Their office was their 2-BHK apartment in Bangalore and weekends meant nothing to them except coding more and more. After a long month, they finally set up the company and launched Meesho in December 2015. This is how Meesho was born, from a failed business to the first Indian start-up Facebook invested in. The co-founders performed diligently and made their comeback in the same year.

Where Meesho Stands Today?

Meesho has received a robust response from the customers of India as it has turned the table for many young businessmen/businesswomen of India who basically gave their business a face due to this entire online social media marketing.

Meesho raised good funding in these few years as well as many prestigious awards. After a year of its launch, Meesho was selected by the Y-Combinator and earned $120,000 from there. The latest investment by Facebook was in June 2019, and the last month Meesho raised $125 million from series D funding.

Today, Meesho has over 500 members inspiring every commoner of India with a passion to create something of his or her own.

copia

Copia : Founder Komal Ahmad Solving Hunger with Technology

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Two people sitting inside a restaurant orders the food of four, but can’t finish it. They pay for the food and leave the left-over on the table. What will happen to the left food? Obviously, the restaurant will throw it in the garbage. But is it right to do so? Komal Ahmad, the CEO of Copia, does not agree with that too. Throwing the food away is not the solution when many people out there are homeless and cannot afford a one time meal. But how to reach out to these people? Of course, there are many charitable organisations that partners with restaurants and other firms, to get the food, but these organisations have also rules about the food they accept.

While studying international health and global development at the University of California, Berkeley, Ahmad found it disgusting how the management used to throw the leftovers near the mess. Meanwhile, she met a former army man, who had just come back from Iraq, begging for food on the streets. He was waiting for his finances to come but had no money to buy food. Ahmad took the man for lunch, but a one-time meal could not fix the whole problem of wastage of food and poverty.

She thought of taking the leftover food from the mess to such needy people, but the process had many management rules to follow. This way, not even the home-less could have that food nor the charitable organisations would accept it. But Ahmad was too determined to solve this problem and with her college management produced new ways to donate the food to the needy. But this was not it. She knew that the problem is even bigger, and they need to manage all the food in the world. But there is a lot of difference in thinking and doing.

Komal Ahmad Copia
Image Source: generalassemb.ly

After digging deep, Ahmad decided to mix the technology with her food management plan. She was aware that there are many online car rental and food delivery services. So her idea was to get a similar app for picking up the wasted food and deliver it to the person in need.

She has mentioned a few times in her interviews that she finds the food-wastage problem as “literally the world’s dumbest problem.” Since she wanted to expand the idea of saving the food from wasting, she hired a development team, to develop a similar app, like Uber and other delivery services, where the working of the app was a bit different. Through the app, the corporate cafeterias, hospitals, universities, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses would book a pickup for the wasted food, and a delivery guy would pick it up and deliver it at a place where it is needed the most.

Finally, in 2016, Ahamd founded Copia, a non-profit company at the beginning, and an app for accessing the service. She put all her life-savings into the startup and with her team participated in the Y-Combinator accelerator program, where she learnt how to manage a business. Along with that Copia received a $120,000 in exchange for 7% of the company from Y-Combinator.

Since she was not from a business background, Ahmad had to learn a lot. She had devoted all her time to her startup, so she had to make the company a for-profit firm by charging a small fee from the restaurant or others who wanted to donate their food. In fact, the donors get the enhanced tax deduction of up to 15% of its fair market value. So they are also a profit. At the delivery, the donor gets full receipt and pictures as proof. The app includes a testimonial from the receivers like non-profits, as well as data analytics service too.

The delivery guys on Copia are mostly homeless people. There are eight permanent employees at the company, and around 200 people have been delivering the food as a part-time delivery person. The platform is responsible for recovering 900,000 pounds of food and feeding up to 2 million people a year. During the Superbowl event in San Francisco in 2016, the company fed 24000 people in two days.

In 2016, at the Women in the World Salon in Los Angeles, Toyota named Ahamd one of the company’s “Mothers of Invention” and awarded her a $50,000 grant to fuel the startup.

Komal Ahmad is happy how the company has grown in the past three years and want to include clothing, medicine and blanket supply into the service shortly. She also wants to expand the service in major cities of the U.S., and later, to the other parts of the world. According to some reports, the German and Austrian governments also contacted Ahmad in the same regard.

The inspiring startup story of Ahmad gives us hope for humanity and another example of how technology can help one change things in a better way.

rivian

Robert RJ Scaringe : The Founder of Rivian; The Tesla of Trucks

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It has been said tons of times that one must follow their passion to be successful in life. But if the passion has bad effects on the environment, would you still follow it? Maybe not. Or maybe you will figure out another way to pursue your passion. Robert RJ Scaringe had fallen in love with the process of car manufacturing, but when he realised that vehicles are the most responsible for the environmental pollution, he had to look for some other way to follow his dream. And, the electric vehicle was the only answer to it; better and energy-efficient. This way, he founded Rivian, an automaker and automotive technology company.

The idea behind the company is not only to protect the environment but is also to release people from car-ownership. Scaringe wants that nobody should own a car, but must have access to automotive vehicles through the press of a button, and whenever or wherever they need the vehicle, they get it.

RJ Scaringe was a little kid when he was introduced to a Porsche 356. One of his neighbours in Melbourne, Florida, was working on reinventing his Porsche and Scaringe got the chance to look at the process closely. This ignited an interest in mechanics for him. He became so interested in car manufacturing that he decided that he will be starting up a car manufacturing business when he was still in school. This led him to get a graduate and postgraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, followed by a PhD in the same from MIT’s prestigious Sloan Automotive Lab.

rj scaringe
Image Source: bnnbloomberg.ca

This was the same time, when he encountered problems with normal motor vehicles, as these were one of the causes of pollution and other environmental issues. So instead of fuel engine vehicles, he started researching about the environmentally-friendly electric vehicles.

After receiving a PhD from MIT, RJ Scaringe started working in an MNC, where was learning on how to improve the efficiency of the motor vehicles. His jobs at various MNCs gave him enough exposure, and since Scaringe was always aware of his passion for entrepreneurship, he was also ready with a sorted plan.

In April 2009, he started Avera Automotive (later renamed Rivian Automotive in 2011), all by himself. Initially, RJ Scaringe hired 20 people as his first employees, holding the position of the CEO. He took things slow and focussed on more research. In 2011, the company shifted its focus from general electric vehicles to autonomous electric vehicles and started working on luxury utility vehicles. His idea also drove the attention of a few major investors, like the Saudi Arabia-based investment group Abdul Latif Jameel, Sumitomo Corp forms Japan and Standard Chartered Bank from London.

With time, the company also hired engineers like Mark Vinnels (as the Rivian’s executive director of engineering) and Jeff Hammoud (as the vice president of design). In 2015, the company opened its research facility in Michigan and set up the company headquarters in Livonia, Michigan. At the same time, the company also started working on ride-sharing vehicles and driverless vehicles.

In 2017, the company acquired the Mitsubishi Motors’ Normal, Illinois plant for $16 million, which became the Rivian’s primary North American manufacturing facility. The company also received a $1 million grant and a five-year tax abatement from Normal contingent as well as $49.5 million in tax credits from the state government, on its strategical money investment over a certain period and for meeting the employment targets.

By the end of 2016, 100 employees were working for Rivian, and Today, over 1000 people are working in Rivian at its different branches, including Michigan, Illinois, California and the United Kingdom. Through the company was growing rapidly, in 7-8 years of its inception, there was no product of its own. It had been working on different parts and technologies for its new car models, which it had planned to assemble at the end.

By December 2017, the company started testing the alpha prototypes of its first vehicle and announced its first two products, i.e., an electric five-seater pickup truck (A1T) as well as an electric seven-seater SUV (A1S). The company took it to the LA Auto Show in November 2018, to launch the two vehicles. Both the cars are semi-autonomous, and the production will start anytime soon in 2020.

With a $200 million in debt financing from Standard Chartered Bank, till 2018, Rivian raised around $450 million. In 2019, the company received a $700 million in a round of funding led by Amazon, and the same year, it also received another $500 million from Ford Motor Company.

Cox Automotive also made a $350 million investment into Rivian. In September 2019, Amazon made an order of 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian.

The potential of RJ Scaringe’s idea behind Rivian can be estimated through the fact that no Rivian cars are currently running on the road. Despite that, the company has raised about 1.5 billion in funds in past ten years. The company is not only planning to contribute to the environment but has also helped America to raise employment and offer better money to people.

eatstreet

EatStreet : One of the Most Successful Startups Not From the Silicon Valley

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We can call it laziness or the extra money we have that we use to pay people to deliver things on our doorsteps. Today, a countless number of startups are providing the delivery services, and we just need to pay a small fee for that. But sometimes, these service providers charge an amount that is not justified, and we are only annoyed. This is the same case happened with the co-founders of EatStreet when they got the idea for their first and the most successful startup. Matt Howard, Eric Martell, and Alex Wyler, the students of the University of Wisconsin–Madison founded the company when they had to pay extra fee for food delivery despite being college students.

Eric Martell and Alex Wyler were computer science students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One day during their internship, Martell felt hungry and ordered food through campusfood.com. As soon he placed the order, he received a call from the delivery guy telling him that it would have been way cheaper if he had simply ordered through the phone call. This made Martell frustrated as even he was a student, he paid extra money for the delivery.

Martell discussed the incident with Wyler and came to the conclusion that they should build a similar website, that would provide free deliveries. This way, there were high chances for their idea to work, and they would also get good points to add in their resume. They could make the website run by themselves, but they needed a marketer to reach out to the restaurants for promotions. So they decided to join Matt Howard in, who was studying economics and political science major at the university. He had also got some experience in selling cars. So he seemed to be the perfect fit for the promotions.

EatStreet Founders
Image Source: wisc.edu

Finally, the three founded EatStreet as BadgerBites on 1 February 2010. Initially, it became difficult for them to convince the restaurants, but slowly the business came on track. In fact, in nine months, the company was making 100-200 deliveries every day, through about 70-80 restaurants in the city. In 2011, BadgerBites won the G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition and got a $10,000 prize as well as free office space in 2011. It also won the third prize in the NEST competition, held at the university. Winning those competitions not only helped the co-founders to get money to support their business but also access to some good entrepreneurs who have been mentoring them to date.

The success of the service encouraged the three to expand it to other cities as well. They built different websites for different cities, expanding the service to the cities that had more colleges or had universities. After running around 15 different websites for BadgerBites, the three co-founders launched a single website with the name EatStreet, and combined the services of the fifteen into one, on 21 January 2013. This way, they started to expand the service nationwide. By now, all three had to focus entirely on the service leaving other works behind. Matt Howard became the CEO of the company, Eric Martell held the position of COO, and Alex Wyler was appointed as the CTO of EatStreet.

The same year, in February, EatStreet hosted a series A funding led by and raised a sum of $2.45 million. The company was also named as #2 “Food Delivery Startup to Watch” in the U.S. by StrategyEye. The next year, the company became a part of the National Restaurant Association, in order to promote the digitalisation in the food industry. The company even partnered with Yelp, such that users could make orders through Yelp directly.

In April 2014, EatStreet raised another $8.4 million in a Series B investment round, Cornerstone Opportunity Partners LLC, Independence Equity, Great Oaks VC, CSA Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, being the major investors.

The three co-founders won the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in the Midwest in 2015. By the C round of the funding, they were sure that the business is going to get real big, and they need to work on their data game.

In 2017, Howard and Wyler got featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology list. Martell stepped down from the post of COO to focus on his passion to help people build businesses in the same year. By the series C funding, the company had raised a sum of around $26 million. And at the same time, 200 corporate employees, as well as 800 delivery guys, had joined the company. The company processed around orders from 1.7 million customers in the year of 2017.

Today, the company has expanded to over 15,000 restaurants in over 150 cities in the U.S. The company, today, operates the orders and deliveries through its app, website, Facebook page as well as through the restaurants’ custom websites. EatStreet intends to reach around 350 to 400 cities across the U.S. by 2020.

vianai

Vishal Sikka : Ex-CEO of Infosys and the Founder of AI-based Startup Vianai System

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Speaking of artificial intelligence, it is quite important to mention machine learning too, because both of these go hand in hand. Today, most of the huge software companies use the concept of ML and AI to build their software and products. In a nutshell, artificial intelligence is becoming the building block for the new tomorrow, with its past rooted to the core of science. It is kind of mandatory to learn about ML and AI for most of the programmers today. Because it opens a window of vast opportunities for one’s career as well as a scientific development.

A lot of companies have started adopting the concept of AI and ML to enhance their products and the approach of development. And, one of the most recent start-ups based on AI has been launched in this very year by Dr Vishal Sikka, Ex CEO of Infosys. After leaving Infosys in 2017, Dr Sikka decided to start his own business, and hence, launched it on 12th September 2019. With a sky-limit scope in the area of AI, Dr Sikka’s main motive is to harness its power and make every industry adopt this concept and implement it in every product.

Early life and education

Born into a Punjabi family in Madhya Pradesh, India, Vishal Sikka’s father was an officer in the Indian Railway and his mother was a teacher. At the age of six, the family moved to Vadodara, Gujarat from Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh. Since his father was an engineer and his mother a teacher, academics turned out to be his strength and engineering his love.

Vishal Sikka founder Vianai
Image Source: thehindu.com

He went to Kendriya Vidyalaya, Rajkot and completed his schooling from Rosary High School. Following his father’s foot trails, Sikka pursued his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Though he was admitted to one of the renowned colleges in India, Vishal Sikka wasn’t satisfied with it. He left the college immediately after he got admission to Syracuse University, New York. He pursued a B.S degree in Computer Science and later, went to Stanford University to complete his PhD.

Early Career

After completing his PhD, he started working with Xerox’s research lab, and after working there for some time, he realized his dream, i.e., launching a start-up. He founded iBrain, his first start-up which was acquired by PatternRX, and his second start-up was Bodha.com, which was acquired by Peregrine Systems. At this time, Sikka joined Peregrine as the Vice-President for Platform Technologies. His main area of work was application development and technical designing.

One of the advantages in Vishal Sikka’s career was the time when he just started accelerating in his professional world. He came very close to Hasso Plattner, founder of SAP. This helped him a lot in landing a job in SAP. He joined SAP in 2002 as the head of strategic innovative projects. Eventually, he was promoted to Senior Vice President and ultimately, to the position of first-ever CTO in April 2007. After working for more than a decade in SAP, Sikka finally resigned from the company on 4th May 2014.

Once you reach a certain point in a career, you don’t have to turn back twice to question your decisions. And, this happened to Sikka the moment he joined SAP. Sikka decided to leave SAP for some personal reasons, and undoubtedly, a person of his calibre was on-demand in the tech market.

Soon after he left SAP, Vishal Sikka joined Infosys on 12th June 2014. The ex-CEO of SAP was named the new CEO and Managing Director of the second-largest IT industry of India. He was declared as the whole-time director of the board of Infosys on 14th June 2014. After serving in this company for three long years, Sikka stepped down from his position and set off his course towards establishing his own start-up.

Vianai Systems

In 12th September 2019, Sikka finally launched his own AI-based start-up Vianai systems with the dream that AI and ML have the full potential to change every industry. Sikka’s start-up received a seed funding of $50 million which is going to increase with rocket-speed shortly.

go-jek

Go-Jek : The Popular Ride-hailing Service and One of the First Unicorns of Indonesia

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Two decades ago, there were a few companies like eBay and Amazon that dreamt about the home-delivery and online shopping service. Later, people went to start ride-hailing through apps making our lives even easier. And today, we have got hundreds of such services, some really successful and some are still struggling for survival. One such service or we say platform, providing multiple such services, is Go-Jek. A company, despite running in only five countries, is a Unicorn, and in fact, is the first Unicorn company from Indonesia. The company is dedicated to providing three services in three categories, i.e., Go-Ride, Go-Send and Go-Mart, offering 18 app-based on-demand services.

Go-Jek was founded by Nadiem Makarim in 2010, as motorbike hailing service with a fleet of 20 motorcycles. The company ran a call centre to receive bookings for the motorbike rides and would send a notification to the drivers nearby for the pickup.

The Founder

Nadiem Makarim, a native Indonesian, was born on 4 April 1984 35 in Singapore to a lawyer father. Makarim completed his high school education from Jakarta, and later, joined the Brown University, from where he received a graduate degree in BA. He then went to Harvard University and pursued an MBA degree.

go-jek founder
Image Source: vulcanpost.com

After completing his education, he came back to Jakarta and started working at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant. He then left his job to start his entrepreneur journey, and to co-found an online fashion shop, named Zalora. But later, he had to leave the company and joined Kartuku a payments service provider, as the Chief Innovation Officer.

Founding Go-Jek

Makarim mostly used motorcycle taxis for transport. This was the cheapest and convenient method for daily travel. With time, he realised that there is a great opportunity in the business. So he went to co-found Go-Jek in 2010. The name was inspired by word Ojek that means motorcycle in Indonesia.

In the beginning, there was a lot of wait time for the drivers as there was no effective method to connect the driver and the passenger, such that the passenger took a lot of time to find the driver. This was a big issue, and Makarim wanted to solve it. Despite that, the company had joined in about 200 drivers by 2014. The next year, finally Makarim launched an app for the platform, such that it became really easy for the drivers and the passengers to track each other in time.

Becoming the Unicorn

The company raised a $1.5 billion in fundraising in 2014, becoming a unicorn within four years of its inception. In another round of funding, the company raised a $550 million in August 2016, and companies like, Google and Tencent, being among the prime investors. It also received a sum of investment from Indonesia’s biggest companies, Astra International and Blibli.com, the same year. The company was the most popular ride-hailing service provider in the country.

The same year, Go-Jek partnered with the renown Indonesian taxi company Blue Bird and expanded its service to taxis with the name Go-Car. It also launched an auto service, named Go-Auto, the same year. It also went to acquire two Indian companies, C42 Engineering and CodeIgnition. Other than that, Go-Jek also acquired India-based app development company named Leftshift and a healthcare startup Pianta. It also took over another Indonesian company that provided online ticket booking and event management service, named Loket.com.

In 2017, Go-Jek expanded its services into the fin-tech field through its Go-Pay virtual wallet and acquired companies named Kartuku, Midtrans, and Mapan. The users can use the wallet to pay in any retail shop, both online and offline. They can also withdraw money at the partner banks’ ATMs. The company also added the payments through QR scanning after getting a license from the central bank in the same year. Go-Jek has also partnered with Google for its GPS service and soon will be partnering with Amazon for its retail services.

The Expansion

In 2018, the company valued at $5 billion, exceeding the total market cap of all transportation companies in Indonesia Stock Exchange. Today, the company has its international offices in Singapore, India, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.

Through its food delivery services, Go-Jek has partnered with about 250,000 merchants in Indonesia. The company has also established a food and beverage selling service through its Go-Food merchants. The company is hosting a fleet of 1,000,000 vehicles for its ride-hailing service alone in Indonesia. Along with that, the Go-Jek branches include Go-Ride, Go-Shop, Go-Mart, Go-Box, Go-Tix, Go-Clean, Go-Plus, Go-Bills, Go-Massage, Go-Play, Go-Studio, and more.

As of February 2019, the estimated value of the company is about US$10 billion.