Driven by passion and armed with novel ideas, the young founders of two city start-ups managed to grab an investment of Rs.10 lakh in return for a five-minute show.
At the ‘SmashUp’ event organised by TiE, Hyderabad on Saturday, nine start-ups were allowed to pitch their respective business models on stage with a chance of funding from the participating eight investors. In the end, two early stage companies, >VioletStreet.com and Zify, managed to walkout with cheques.
Talking about his two-month-old start-up based on women fashion, engineering graduate Ankur Gupta of ‘ >Violetstreet.com ’ said, “Our social commerce portal helps women shoppers to pick and match different clothing items available in various e-commerce sites. Based on the occasion, we also suggest the shoppers. There is a controlled chat option where the shoppers can also send the pictures to their near and dear ones and ask their opinion on their choices.” Mr. Ankur portal was visited by 4,500 users in April.
The other start-up to get funded, ‘Zify’, is a mobile-cum-web application aimed at addressing the everyday problem of commuting through ride sharing.
Some of the other start-ups too evoked interest. While the mobile app ‘Newsdeck120’ compresses news stories to a smaller size and also converts it to audio format in various accents then there is a chat app called ‘Everchat’ which helps in creating location-based chat rooms. Another start-up ‘Science Pandits’ is about aiding scientists in updating their knowledge on various topics.
The day-long event also had various panel sessions for young entrepreneurs and participated by well-known personalities from the IT industry.
Srini Koppolu, chairman, Hyderabad Angels and former Managing Director of Microsoft India Development Centre provided some valuable advises to the stakeholders of the start-up companies.
“Don’t start a company just for the sake of doing it or because your friends are in to it. If you are passionate and ready to go deep down with your start-up, then only go for it.”
Murali Bukkapatnam, President, TiE-Hyderabad said that the idea behind organising the event was to bring together all stakeholders and play an active part in creating an inclusive ecosystem to promote entrepreneurship.
