Last fortnight, HealthifyMe released its campaign with Mandira Bedi, hot on the heels of its campaigns with Farhan Akhtar and Sara Ali Khan as it doubled down on celebrity marketing. Tushar Vashisht is an Ivy League alumnus, and a Wall Street banker. When he got a chance to work with Nandan Nilekani on the UID project, he decided to come back to India. He and his roommate Matthew Cherian wanted to build a business that had a social impact, and made money too! They decided to run an experiment - subsist for a month on what the average Indian does - just 100 rupees ($2.04) a day. The outcome - both of them lost a significant amount of weight. People wanted a copy of the tracking journal they had maintained during this experiment. Tushar and Matthew created a business out of it. HealthifyMe was born in 2012. By 2014, it had 100K users on its app, grew 5X by 2015, and had a Series A round of $6M. It was well poised to gain traction in the $6B Indian wellness industry. By 2017, it had crossed 2M downloads. By 2020, it was making INR 100 Cr in ARR.  How did it leverage conversational AI (even before ChatGPT), and how will it disrupt the $5Tn global wellness market? Read full article here: https://ajuniorvc.com/healthifyme-business-case-study-startup-tech-india-explained-weight-loss/

Join us as we talk to Amrit Acharya, the Co-founder and CEO of Zetwerk about their story.   Meet Amrit Acharya, one of the co-founders of Zetwerk, an India-based online manufacturing platform that connects businesses with manufacturers.  Amrit, along with co-founders Vishal Chaudhary, Srinath Ramakkrushnan, and Rahul Sharma, started Zetwerk in 2018, and it has since become a leading player in the Indian manufacturing industry.  Amrit holds an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and completed his MBA from the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business in 2016.  With a wealth of experience working with companies like McKinsey & Company, Monsanto Growth Ventures, ITC Limited, Avaya, and Robert Bosch, Amrit is dedicated to digitizing the manufacturing sector and making it more efficient, accessible, and transparent for businesses of all sizes.   About Zetwerk:  Zetwerk is a B2B manufacturing platform that connects businesses with suppliers to streamline the manufacturing process. The platform provides tools for businesses to manage their orders, track production progress, and collaborate with suppliers. It also allows suppliers to easily manage their orders, inventory, and production schedules  The goal of Zetwerk is to make manufacturing more efficient and cost-effective for both businesses and suppliers by providing a seamless and transparent platform for communication and collaboration  Today Zetwerk manufactures over 9M parts for 1,800 active customers delivering Indian made customer products to over 20 countries

Last fortnight, Kreditbee raised $80M, getting close to a $700M valuation in a funding market that was suffering from lack of capital.    Read The Article Here: https://ajuniorvc.com/kreditbee-tech-fintech-lending-unicorn-loans-startup-india-case-study/  #ajvc #startups #india

Join us today, as we revisit the conversations with our previous founder guests on - "How They Acquired Their First Customers?" Timestamps 00:00 Intro  00:33 DUNZO  02:10 BukuWarung  04:01 Wakefit  05:54 FamPay  08:15 Ather Energy  10:11 Pratilipi  12:07 NoBroker  13:13 Perpule  14:25 Jupiter  15:45 Bewakoof  17:05 Bizongo  19:17 CoinSwitch

Last fortnight, DMart reported ₹11.3K Cr of quarterly revenue, clocking a 25% YoY growth, putting it on track for ~₹40K Cr of annual revenue.  Radhakishan Damani was a stock trader in Dalal Street. In the 80s, he was head-to-head with Harshad Mehta. Mr D lost big with Apollo Tyres - his first encounter with Harshad. But Damani is not a man to accept defeat easily. Damani learnt the art of trading under Manu Manek - the cobra of D-Street. By the turn of the century, Damani was doing significantly well for himself as a trader.  He had won the battle against Harshad, been a value investor alongside Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, and an early predictor of HDFC Bank's supreme success.  Yet, he felt anxious to start a business that brought value to Indian consumers for every rupee they spent. D-Mart was born, with its first store in Powai. Since then, it took eight years to grow to 10 stores, but only 5 years for the next 50 stores. It IPOed in 2017, and thereafter never touched the offer price again.  With strong unit economics, focus on frugality and high customer satisfaction, will DMart continue being the blue-eyed boy of Dalal Street?   Read full article here: https://ajuniorvc.com/dmart-ipo-story...

Welcome to 2023 with our first podcast. Join us as we speak to our first guest from the United States, who is expanding his startup to India. Amjad was born in Jordan, where he grew up with a computer long before others had it. Like any emerging market, his parents wanted him to get a good education. Instead, he became a hacker who built Replit as a side project while working at Yahoo. In 6 years, Replit went from a side project to a company. Today it supports 17M+ developers and is on its way to being a developer unicorn Replit is a browser-based integrated development environment for cross-platform collaborative coding available worldwide. Replit raised from YC after failing thrice to get there. Replit has raised $100M from investors such as Coatue, a16z and YCombinator.

What a year!   We started with our predictions a few years ago. Now we can't stop waiting for the year to turn and see how we fared against our predictions.   Last year we made six predictions on IPO and unicorn counts, D2C, Creator ecosystems, deep tech and fintech.   During a year when people saw crazy overnight changes in the status quo (Ukraine invasion, interest rate hikes), we scored a mad 9.5/10 on our predictions.   This gets us pumped to crystal gaze into the next 12 months.     Read our recap of 2022, and the predictions for 2023 here: https://ajuniorvc.com/2022-predictions-2021-recap-ipo-d2c-fintech-indian-startup/

Join us as we talk to Jani Pasha, the Co founder and CEO of Lokal about their story.   Jani Pasha completed his B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur in 2013. Later, he worked with companies, including Tata Steel and Zoomo India. He founded businesses including Halfteaspoon and TheSoup before starting Lokal in 2018. He was also a participant in Ycombinator S19 and was featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2020 list.   About Lokal: Lokal is on a mission to strengthen hyperlocal communities by enabling its mostly non-English users to share, interact, and transact in their regional language. Lokal users gain access to hyperlocal information such as daily commodity prices, local jobs, real estate, matrimonial, local business advertorials, and classifieds that would otherwise be scattered across local newspapers. The app is available in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Marathi and has 10 million downloads with a presence in more than 100 districts across South India. Lokal has been supported by marquee investors, namely 3One4 Capital, India Quotient, and Y Combinator.

Join us as we talk to Aprameya Radhakrishna, the Co-founder and CEO of Koo about their story.   Aparmeya started his career as a software engineer at Infosys and then moved to other corporate roles before deciding to quit to start his first company Taxi for sure. The idea for Koo, occurred to them while building thier second company, Vokal. Koo then took off growing rapidly as it was promoted by the Indian government who found themselves frustrated with Western social media platform   About Koo: Koo founded in 2020 has been downloaded 50M times and currently functions in over 100 countries. It is available in 11 languages, and recently added 1M new users in Brazil in 48hrs after the launched in Portuguese   For more visit - https://ajuniorvc.com/podcast/

Join us as we talk to Srikanth Velamakanni, the Co-founder, Group Chief Executive & Vice-Chairman of Fractal Analytics about their story.   Srikanth Velamakanni completed his engineering bachelor's degree from IIT Delhi and later pursued an MBA at IIM Ahemdabad. He held positions at ANZ Investment Bank as an associate and ICICI Bank as an assistant manager. He was also a member of the AI Task Force for Defense in India and the co-chair of the NASSCOM BPM Council. Additionally, he served as the chairman of the board for companies like Qure.ai, Crux Intelligence, and FinalMile Consulting, as well as an independent board member for Metro Brands Limited. He co-founded Plaksha University in March 2018 and Fractal Analytics in February 2000, respectively. About Fractal Analytics: Fractal is one of the most prominent players in the artificial intelligence space. Fractal's products include Qure.ai to assist radiologists in making better diagnostic decisions; Crux Intelligence to assist CEOs and senior executives in making better tactical and strategic decisions; Theremin.ai to improve investment decisions; Eugenie.ai to find anomalies in high-velocity data; and Samya.ai to drive next-generation enterprise revenue growth management. Fractal has more than 3,000 employees across 16 global locations, including the United States, UK, Ukraine, India, Singapore, and Australia.   For more visit - https://ajuniorvc.com/podcast/