Written By: Yashika Sabharwal

India’s top 5 well-known startups and their success story

Supam Maheshwari, FirstCry

Funding amount: US$69 million
Key Official: Supam Maheshwari
Industry: Ecommerce
Products: Baby products

Supam Maheshwari is an Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad graduate and he acquires his further studies from Delhi College of Engineering as well.

He started his venture for FirstCry, baby products online retailer, in Pune in 2010. Nine years ago, when the market choices for baby products in India online and retail both were quite limited. He used to buy a lot of products for his son only on his business trips abroad.

Therefore, he discovered an opportunity for such a platform and established FirstCry.com. As he began researching further in this market, he figured that the baby and kids industry in India had an approximate turnover of about Rs.50, 000 Cr and 95% of these sales were offline by the stores.

Yashish Dahiya, Policybazaar

Funding amount: US$78.3 million
Key Official: Yashish Dahiya
Industry: Fintech
Products: Insurance and Policies

Yashish Dahiya, CEO & Co-Founder, PolicyBazaar.com holds trio in education. A Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering from IIT Delhi, Post Grad Diploma in Management from IIM Ahmedabad, and an MBA from INSEAD. Yashish started his career as a Business Unit Head at Illinois at a position of Tool Works and later moved on to the Bain & Company to work as a Management Consultant.

Before starting his entrepreneurial journey with the most well-known company PolicyBazaar.com, he worked with First Europa,which is a Global Online Insurance Broker company. He worked as their CEO. He is an alumn of two of the country’s top colleges – IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad – Yashish being a CEO of PolicyBazaar likes to call himself a hugely risk-averse person. Yashish states that “Of course he is always excited about insurance because it’s all about risk and risk management is his favorite consultancy.

Kavin Bharti Mittal, Hike

Funding amount: US$86 million
Key Official: Kavin Bharti Mittal
Industry: Social networking
Products: Freeware application

Hike Messenger App by Kavin Bharti Mittal, got launched globally on 12-12-12 and was made available in more than 100 plus countries. The Delhi-based face behind the scion of the huge Bharti Group, son of Sunil Mittal, Bharti Airtel established a peculiar special platform – Hike.

By starting this app every week his personal prepaid account runs out of data due to heavy internet usage. Later on, he purposefully chooses to keep a prepaid number on a low-end smartphone in order to finally identify the data related problems faced by India’s Hike mobile app users. Hence, he founded that there is almost 95 percent of whom are on pay-as-you-go packages. Afterward, they started a co-creation exercise with their users wherein they properly look at the real-time feedbacks from their users for the development of their application.

Abhinay Choudhari, BigBasket

Funding amount: US$95 million
Key Official: Abhinay Choudhari
Industry: Groceries, eCommerce
Products: Wide range of Grocery

Bangalore based CEO of BigBasket, Abhinay Choudhari founded BigBaskate (BB) in 2009 by Abhinay Choudhari, Hari Menon, and Vipul Parekh. Together their trio has scaled up the name BigBasket to be the largest online grocery platform in India.

Long-time before Flipkart tapped into the retail industry for online products, a group of people like Abhinay Choudhary fuelled with passion to create and experience on founded the Big Basket as the country’s first online shopping platform which revolutionized the way of buying groceries to people. This platform establishes a unique mark in every way, the story of how Big Basket came to be is also motivating startups in India.

VSS Mani, JustDial

Funding amount: US$103.2 million
Key Official: VSS Mani
Industry: Search
Products: Market search services

Founded in the year 1996 by VSS Mani, Just Dial is a Mumbai-based company that tends to be biggest search engine for the local market. It generally offers classified listings of small businesses for an annual fee and it can be used to make small businesses well known. People can easily search for local and every business via phone, subscription SMS, the website, or now through the mobile app of Just Dial.

Justdial is India’s Market finding search engine for local search which initially started as a classified website to list your business but as of now it’s transformed into a local search engine. Today, it employs around 9,000 employees in 15 different offices, which are spread across the country. It has also sets record for 12+ million listings in its database that are offering market services in more than 2000 small and big cities of India. The company receives a huge count of over 1.9 million calls on daily basis for the search-related causes. Other than this, number of online searches that were listed over the website was recorded to be 1125.7 million for the year 2012-2013. Hereby, form that phase the company is growing day by day and has seen almost 1.16 million unique visitors on a daily basis contributing to 7.22 million daily page views.

Here are the list of few more successful entrepreneurs that remark with their startup story in the Indian market

• Sanjay Sethi of ShopClues, Gurgaon
• Ritesh Aggarwal of OyoRooms – A formidable hotel industry
• Phanindra Sama of Redbus – A ambiguous transport service provider
• Albinder Dhindsa of Grofers – A wide range of grocery platform
• Deepinder Goyal of Zomato – Best food chain restaurant services provider
• Pranay Chulet of Quikr – Platform for buying and selling old goods
• Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm – The biggest e-commerce payment system and digital wallet.
• Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola Cabs – Tremendous transportation service provider
• Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal – Man Behind everyday eCommerce shopping online
• Sachin Bansal of Flipkart – Cordial leader who forces Ecommerce retail services
• Kunal Shah, of FreeCharge – Financial marketplace for Recharge and Bill-payments
• Sahil Barua of Delhivery – The most renowned logistic service providers
• Ambareesh Murty of PepperFry – Online Furniture Shopping platform
• Amit Jain of CarDekho – Platform for buying and selling Used Cars Online
• Richa Kar of Zivame – A lady behind the biggest nightwear and women’s undergarment provider
• Ashish Goel of UrbanLadder – A High-Quality Furniture products provider