new & noteworthy piggybank as c for comprehensive … vernacular crowd to chat and share posts...

Cashless India Walks Down the

Online Aisle at Weddings

Varsha.Bansal@timesgroup.com

Hyderabad: Wedding arrange-ments in cashless India are turning out to be a purely on-line affair and estartups are see-ing business return after the November 8-week slump.

Riding on the cashless wed-ding bandwagon are many es-tablished startups, which have recently launched different products to cater to the wedding market. For instance, cab-hail-ing platform Uber has part-nered with WedMeGood to launch UberWEDDINGS, their wedding-specific travel service.

“Customers can buy rides and customised promotion codes through this service and give them to family members and guests to use Uber rides,” said Anand Shahani, the CEO of WedMeGood, whose portal fa-cilitates 40,000 weddings every month.

Similarly, online marketplace Snapdeal has launched a curated market for all wedding-related purchases. Their recent FreeCharge Wallet on Delivery

also helps cashless wed-ding purchases.

“FreeCharge Wallet on Delivery (WOD) allows instant payments. In the first week of activation, 15% of orders were made on WOD,” a Snapdeal spokesperson said.

Gifts, which form a major part weddings, are also being ar-ranged online. Mobile payments and commerce platform Paytm has launched online gift cards, which can be bought online and instantly delivered to the email addresses.

“Digital gifting has emerged as the preferred gifting option this wedding season because of the flexibility it offers,” Renu Satti, vice president, Paytm. “We are looking forward to sell over a lakh gift cards in the coming months.”

OVERALL TREND PROMISING Online marketplace UrbanClap noticed a slump in enquiries during the first four days after demonetisa-tion, but it has picked up. “It will go up further in December and January,” said Varun Khaitan, cofounder of Urban Clap, which usually witnesses a 3x growth during the wedding season.

The marketplace, whose cash payments constituted 70% of

trans-actions re-cently, added an online payment option to tackle the cash crunch. Since its launch, there has been a shift and online payment is being used by hundreds of customers on a daily basis, Khaitan said.

Wedding-planning portal WedMeGood has noticed a simi-lar trend on its marketplace. Cash transactions plummeted from 70-80% to a negligible number over the past two weeks, said CEO Anand Shahani.

Wedding arrangements in cashless India are

turning out to be a purely online

affair

GIFT OF TECH

Digital gifting has emerged as the preferred gifting option this wedding season... We are looking forward to sell over a lakh gift cardsRENU SATTI, Vice President, Paytm

6 �THE ECONOMIC TIMES | BENGALURU | THURSDAY | 24 NOVEMBER 2016Disruption: Startups & Tech

New & Noteworthy Piggybank

Shashwati.Shankar@timesgroup.com

Bengaluru: Social networkingapp Sharechat, which helps thelocal, vernacular crowd to chatand share posts in their regio-nal languages, has raised $4 mil-lion in its latest fund raising ro-und. Much like Facebook andother social networking apps,Sharechat users create contentin their own language and sha-re it with other users, who fol-low, comment like a post or starta chat. And its list of users, mostof whom are over 20 years, is in-creasing.

Funds from the latest round,led by Lightspeed India Part-ners and existing investors SA-IF Partners and India Quotient,would be used to extend theapp’s reach to smaller cities forpeople to communicate in Beng-ali, Tamil, Oriya, Bhojpuri,among other languages. A por-tion of this Series-A fundingwill also be used to recruit deve-lopers. The local-language plat-form which currently has over4,00,000 daily users, comparedto 35,000 it had in March, is stilldabbling with the idea of mone-tisation.

But the platform’s founders,Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, An-kush Sachdeva –– allformerIIT Kanpur stu-dents –– hopeto take the userbase to 25 mil-lion from thecurrent 3.5 mil-lion, before hat-ching monetisa-tion plans. The net-working platformhas received $5.35million as fundingso far.

“In the social networ-king app market it’s ve-ry important to scale, ac-quire users who stick beforeaiming to monetise the plat-form. We invested in Share-chat because they are India’s

answer to Instagram andTumblr,” said Dev Khare, ma-naging director at LightspeedIndia Partners.

SLOW INVESTOR INTERESTWhile social-networking appsare a rage globally, investor in-terest is picking up only slowlyin India. In India, Hike Mes-senger, the latest to join the Uni-corn pack, claims to have over100 million registered users.Around 10 years ago, social-net-working apps ‘SMS Gupshup’and ‘RockeTalk’, didn’t quite ta-ke off as investors felt that themarket wasn’t ready for it. Whi-le RockeTalk still exists, SMSGupshup evolved into a B2BSMS platform. In the last few ye-ars, regional-language apps ca-tering to publishing and newscontent like Dailyhunt and Pra-tilipi have raised investor inter-est and acquired users.

Globally, US-based Facebookhas over 1 billion active userswhile Snapchat has over 150 mil-lion daily active users. China’sWeChat has reported over 700million monthly active users.

CONTENT REGULATIONRegulation of content on socialmedia platforms is a thorny is-sue for most global players. Sha-rechat says it uses algorithmswhich identify pornographiccontent/hate speeches and ta-kes them down. However, this isa work in progress.

“We have algorithms thatidentify content like pornog-raphic images that needs to betaken down,” says cofounderAhsan.

Sharechat Secures$4m to Talk in YourMother Tongue

Our Bureau

Bengaluru: InfiSecure, a real-time bot detection and protec-tion platform, has raised$600,000 in seed funding fromIDG Ventures and Axilor Ventu-res, the startup said on Wednes-day. Launched in March, InfiSe-cure sanitises a website’s trafficand improves business metricsusing a software-as-a-service(SaaS) solution.

“There cannot be a more rele-vant time for InfiSecure’s botprotection platform than now,when bots constitute more thanhalf of the global internet traf-fic,” said Abhilash Pandey, fo-under of InfiSecure.

With the funds raised, the com-pany plans to invest more in re-search and global business de-velopment and focus on techno-logy innovation to cover moreaspects of website protection.

“Bot protection is an emergingspace and we believe (it) has alarge global market potential,”said Venkatesh Peddi, executi-ve director, IDG Ventures India.

The startup offers businessesinsights on bot traffic and elimi-nates unwanted or suspiciousbehaviour in real-time, usingmachine-learning and big datatechnology. Its SaaS solution of-

fers a range of services, inclu-ding scraping, bot abuse, faketraffic fraud, content theft,form spam and other onlinefrauds caused by bots.

$600,000 for Botsto InfiSecure Data

widespread proliferation ofsmartphones,” Infosys said in a

statement.“Stellaris aims to backentrepreneurs building

applications for globalbusinesses,SMBs andconsumers in verticalssuch as financial servi-ces, retail, healthcare

Madhav.Chanchani@timesgroup.com

Bengaluru: Infosys said it isinvesting ̀̀ 31.6 crore in the maidenfund of Stellaris VenturePartners, an early-stage venturecapital fund focussed on backingtechnology startups in thecountry.

The deal is the first investment byInfosys in a local venture capitalfund, and will help Stellaris reacha first close for its fund. ET was the first to report, that

Infosys was in talks to invest in

Stellaris. The investment has beenmade through Infosys’ $500 mil-lion Innovation Fund, whichhas previously backedSilicon Valley-basedearly-stage venturecapital firm VertexVentures.

“India’s startupecosystem is witnes-sing rapid growth ledby areas such as cloudcomputing, Internet ofThings (IoT), artifi-cial intelligenceand big data, aswell as the

and education.” Stellaris has beenset up by Alok Goyal, Rahul

Chowdhri andRitesh Banglani,former partners atHelion VenturePartners. Theyquit in December2015 to start Stella-ris, and were onthe road to raise afund of about $100million.

“India has avibrant tech-

nology startup ecosystem todaythat has the potential to create

breakthrough companies on aglobal scale. We are very excited topartner with Infosys, whose deeptechnology expertise, under-standing of global enterprises,and worldwide footprint can beimmensely valuable to the invest-ment team as well as Stellaris’portfolio companies,” said Goyal,an SAP veteran who quit as chiefoperating officer of the Germansoftware maker’s Indian unit in2013 to join Helion.

Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka was anexecutive board member at SAP,where he worked for over a decadebefore joining Infosys in 2014.

Infy Votes for Startups, Puts `̀32 crore in Stellaris

Surabhi.Agarwal@timesgroup.com

New Delhi: The demonetisa-tion exercise is expected tobring a significant number ofpeople into the formal econo-my due to their forced usageof electronic modes of trans-action, which will create anew user base for many servi-ces. According to experts, on-ce people start using electro-nic transactions, the data ge-nerated on them can be usedto offer goods and services onEMIs, insurance products oreven soft loans. This in thelong run will help several sec-tions of companies in tap-ping new users.

“If you look at any businessright now, they are focusedon the top 45-50 million hou-seholds. There are another100 million more householdswith 500-million people whoare expected to spend aroundtrillion dollars in the nextfew years, but they are notpart of the formal economy,”said Sharad Sharma, cofoun-der of iSPIRT, a think tankand a lobby group for star-tups. He added that out of the-se 100-million households, ve-ry few of them have insuran-ce or some formal credit.

“It is likely that new con-sumption patterns will emer-ge since now companies willhave data on these peoplewhich can help them to getcredit or insurance or otherservices.” Sharma addedthat the current demonetisa-tion will accelerate financialinclusion further.

After the government anno-unced the demonetisationmove on November 8, resi-

dents of the country have be-en pushed to opt for digitalmeans of transactions.

While existing users haveincreased their transactionsthrough debit/credit cardsor wallets, companies are re-

porting an across-the-boardsurge in new sign-up both interms of users as well as busi-nesses accepting digitalpayments.

Neel Ratan, executive direc-tor at audit and consultancyfirm PwC said that while go-vernment had worked hardto open bank accounts of eve-

ryone, the number of trans-actions happening was stillless. “The long term benefitof demonetisation will be ofgetting more people into thedigital payment mode. There-fore, over a period of time itwill be easier for both busi-nesses and governments toidentify and target more cor-rectly what services they co-uld get, to me this is the lar-gest benefit.” He added thatthe move will speed up finan-cial inclusion along with hel-ping both the private sectoras well as governments.

Digital payments firm Pa-ytm, which claims to haveover 158-million customers inIndia, said on Wednesdaythat close to 40,000 merchantsare signing up on its platformevery day and they expect thenumber to further go up to70,000 per day after thelaunch of a new featurewhich enables people to paythrough their debit or creditcard to a merchant acceptingPaytm.

Note Ban has Opened Upa Data Mine for Services

Paytm

Payment VenuesMobiKwik

150%Jump in mer-chants base since the an-nouncement of demonetisation

158 mCustomers it claims to have in India

40,000Merchants signing up every day

Expects the num-ber to go up to 70,000 per day af-ter the launch of a new feature

MobiKwik has seen an addition of new 1,50,000 mer-chants post demo-nitisation and now has a net-work of over 2,50,000

EXPERTS SAY...

Once people startusing electronictransactions, datagenerated on themcan be used to offergoods & services

Mugdha Variyar & Pratik Bhakta

Bengaluru | Mumbai: In a further boost todigital payments in the era of demonetisa-tion, the government has suspended servicecharges on debit card and smartphone pay-ments while the Central bank has increasedthe monthly transaction limit for mobile-wallet users.

Digital wallet providers and financial in-dustry experts lauded the decisions saying,these measures, even if temporary, would en-courage greater adoption of electronic pay-ments, especially among small merchants. Aprimary objective of the government’s deci-sion to recall ̀̀ 500 and ̀̀ 1,000 currency bills is

to encourage cashless transac-tions as a way to curb counter-feiting and corruption.

For digital wallet users mee-ting minimum know-your-customer norms, ReserveBank of India has increasedthe monthly transaction limitto `̀20,000 from `̀10,000 till De-cember 30. The suspension ofservice charges on debit cardand smartphone payments al-so ends at the turn of the year.

“When the demonetisationled to a cash crunch, a lot ofmerchants started taking pay-

ments through digital wallets but could notaccept beyond ̀̀ 10,000. (Paytm founder) VijayShekhar Sharma along with others from theindustry had approached the regulator toask for an increase in the limit,” said NitinMisra, senior vice president at Paytm.

On the short timeframe of the relaxations,Misra said: “The regulator will need more ti-me and consideration of data points to makea permanent change, which is perhaps whythey have increased the limit only for a certa-in period.”

Paytm introduced a mobile application-ba-sed point-of-sale feature on Wednesday to al-low merchants to accept card payments thro-ugh its platform.

Digital WalletsHear the Soundof Money as RBIRelaxes Norms

Suspensionof servicecharges ondebit card &smartphonepaymentsalso ends atthe turn ofthe year

Mugdha.Variyar@timesgroup.com

Bengaluru: The Securities and theExchange board of India (Sebi) onWednesday brought out significantchanges to the structure and opera-tions of angel funds that invest inearly-stage companies, which is ex-pected to lead to faster capital flowto startups in the country.

Angel investor groups such as theIndian Angel Network, the largestin the country, welcomed the newguidelines that could encourageformation of more such funds. Outof the 235 funds registered underSebi’s alternative investment fund(AIF) norms, only three have cho-

sen to be under the ‘Angel Fund’ tag— Contrarian Vriddhi Fund, An-kur Capital and Indovate Innova-tion Fund. The regulator has nowraised the upper limit for numberof angel investors in a scheme from49 to 200. “This is a significantchange and will have a huge impacton angel funding in startups,” saidSaurabh Srivastava, cofounder ofthe Indian Angel Network.

“Let’s say a company needs ̀̀ 3 cro-re, and 30 people want to invest, theyinvest 10 lakh each. But if anothercompany wants ̀̀ 10 crore, 100 inves-tors should be allowed to invest,” heexplained. Sebi has also aligned thedefinition of startup with that speltout in the union government’s Star-

has also been reduced from three ye-ars to one year.

This will allow startups, which ha-ve received angel investments, to se-ek more capital after 12 monthsfrom venture capital funds, whichusually want to buy out angels andbecome sole investors.

tup Policy. Angel Funds will now beallowed to invest in startups incor-porated within five years, whichwas earlier capped at three years.

The requirements of minimum in-vestment amount by an Angel Fundin any venture capital undertakingwas reduced from `̀50 lakh to `̀25lakh. The lock-in requirements ofinvestment made by Angel Funds inthe venture capital undertaking

MORE ANGELS CAN PITCH IN NOW

The regulator has now raised the upper limit for number of angel investors in a scheme from 49 to 200

Sebi’s Angel Norms will Help Capital Flow

Bot TalkPlatform -

60,000

FARID AHSAN,Cofounder, Sharechat

It gives poets, comedians and people in small towns, who are likely to have a fan following, to develop a digital presence. Around 80-85% of our users come from outside the metros

NEW DELHI | 12 PAGES | .̀ 10 ONLY SATURDAY, 29 MARCH 2014BENNETT, COLEMAN & CO. LTD.THEECONOMIC TIMES

WWW.ECONOMICTIMES.COM

First in

ET was the first to report on Aug 3 about Infosys’ talks with Stellaris Venture Partners

As cash runs dry in wallets, startups are rising to the occasion A roundup of topfunding deals For comprehensive and

insightful stories about all things startups and technology, log on to www.ettech.com

The term is used as a slang which describes someone who embraces technology and style trends. The term is an amalgamation of tech-nology and fashionista.

TechanistaJargon Buster

a

Entrepreneurs are right-brainers, they often dream better than they write business plans.

BARBARA CORCORAN@BARBARACORCORAN

Tweet OF THE DAY

Microsoft is reportedly working on a project, to be finished by late 2017, that would let full ver-sions of Windows soft-ware run on an ARM pro-cessor — the same processor used in the vast majority of smart-phones. This report just adds fuel to the idea that Microsoft is still secretly hard at work on the Sur-face Phone. —BI

Tech Buzz

$9.4 billionProfits of mobile industry in Q3 of 2016, with Apple accounting for 91%, says Strategy Analytics

Google Glass Tech Fatal for Drivers: Study

Head-up display tech-nology — think Google Glass — offers lots of in-formation to users in seconds, but using it while driving may not be safe, , according to the study published in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications jour-nal. The multitasking needed to process the information that such technology makes read-ily available may slow down the brain’s re-sponse time, posing is-sues for people driving, the study said. A delay of a few seconds could mean the difference be-tween life and death while driving. —IANS

Quick Byte ANIRBAN BORA

Microsoft May Take its Last Shot at iPhone

The deal is the firstinvestmentby Infy in alocal VC fund,and will helpStellarisreach a first close for its fund

JOH

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R, Faithful Guardian

SAFE BET

businesses insights on bot traffic

eliminates unwanted or suspicious behaviour in real-time, using machine-learning and big data technology

funds to focus on tech innovation to cover more aspects of website protectionSebi Tightens Governance Rules on

Profit Sharing ��11