Leaf Wearables, a tech startup founded by Delhi students, that makes smart jewellery products for women’s safety has raised $250,000 (Rs.1.6 crore) from a group of angel investors.
Founded by students from IIT Delhi and Delhi Technological University, Leaf Wearables will use the funds to expand its product offering of smart safety wearable devices.
Ajeet Khurana, a member of Mumbai Angels, Jinesh Shah, founding partner at Omnivore Ventures and Vikram Chachra, co-founder of Eight Capital participated in this funding round. Aniruddha Malpani, Director at Solidarity Investment Advisors and Vijay Talreja co-founder at tech firm Adapty are other investors.
“We hope to reach to the masses and contribute towards the safety of women with ‘Safer’,” Manik Mehta, co-founder of Leaf Wearables said in a statement.” It has been developed to let women feel safer every time with a practical solution at an affordable cost.”
Leaf Wearables developed the smart safety device under project ‘Guardian,’ which won an Ericsson innovation award this year. This resulted in a full-fledged product and led to the start of the firm in February by Mr. Mehta and other students; Avinash Bansal, Ayush Banka, Chiraag Kapil and Paras Batra.
Their product, now known as ‘Safer’, is a smart safety device, which can be used to trigger alarms and send signals to pre-identified phone numbers in case of emergency.
The device can be used as smart jewellery in the form of a necklace and is available in different colours.
One of its applications enables users to enter their start point and destination, in case they feel the route is unsafe. Through the app, guardians of the user can track her location in real time till she reaches the destination.
Since its inception in February, Leaf Wearables has been functioning on the founder's money and the amount that they have won at various innovation and business plan competitions amounting to $80,000 (Rs.53 lakh).
Leaf Wearables was chosen amongst the top 10 innovative startups in India by Department of Science and Technology. These firms accompanied Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his visit to Silicon Valley to participate in first India-U.S. Startup Konnect in September.
Experts say the innovation is important at a time when the number of cases of rape in India increased to 37,413 in 2014 from 33,707 in 2013, according to National Crime Records Bureau. Crime data released by NCRB revealed an increase in the number of rape cases against women in Delhi.
