Which are some of the successful start-ups by youngsters in India in the last 10 years?
India is a breeding ground for cultural, grassroots and frugal innovation. Add a population of over one billion to the mix—it becomes an exciting geography for startups to create scalable and repeatable business models.
1. Oyo Rooms
OYO started with 1 city and 1 hotel (OYO Rooms Huda City Centre) in Gurgaon in May 2013 and has seen a tremendous growth. The company as of November 2015 has 10,000+ hotels (more than 100,000 rooms) in 250 + cities of India. OYO has been named India’s largest budget hotel chain. Recently, OYO launched in Malaysia.
Ritesh Aggarwal : He is one of the India’s youngest Entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of OYO Rooms, one of the most successful start-ups in India. He started his business career at age 17. He is the first resident Indian to win the Thiel Fellowship. More recently, he was named by Forbes in its “30 Under 30” list in the consumer tech sector.He first started Oravel Stays at the age of 18, and then catapulted it into OYO Rooms.
2. Chaayos
Founders – Nitin Saluja and Raghav Verma. Chaayos was born in November 2012 out of this premise – a contemporary interpretation of the chai adda, serving freshly made chai. Their highest grossing outlet turned in an annual revenue of INR 1 crore. Chaayos has also been able to raise an angel round from the likes of Zishaan Hayath.
Over the last two and a half years, they have opened seven more outlets with a core team of eight people and a staff of 50 as the ground staff.
The plan for Chaayos is to setup 60 more outlets in 2015 and scale up rapidly. Apart from outlets, they already have tie ups with corporate for deliveries. Their app is coming out soon which will be opening a B2C subscription channel as well.
3. Snapdeal
Snapdeal is an online marketplace, based in New Delhi, India. The company was started by Kunal Bahl, a Wharton graduate as part of the dual degree M&T Engineering and Business program at Penn, and Rohit Bansal, an alumnus of IIT Delhi in February 2010. Snapdeal currently has 275,000 sellers, 30 million-plus products and a reach of 6,000 towns and cities across the country.
4. Flipkart
Flipkart (Company) was founded in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. They worked for Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more, and left to create their new company incorporated in October 2007 as Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd.
In May 2014, Flipkart received $210 million from DST Global, in July 2014 it raised $1 billion led by existing investors Tiger Global and South Africa’s media group Naspers and in May 2015 it raised $550 million from some of its existing investors. Flipkart’s last fundraising round in May 2015 had pegged its valuation at $15 billion. In February 2016, Morgan Stanley, marked down its investment value to $11 billion.
5. RedBus
RedBus is an Indian maker of bus ticket booking through its website, Windows Phone, iOS and Android mobile apps. Phanindra Reddy Sama and Charan Padmaraju, the engineers from BITS Pilani created the pioneering bus ticketing service redBus in August 2006, but they have sold their stake in the venture to the Ibibo Group, a joint venture of South Africa’s Naspers and China’s Tencent in June 2013. RedBus is estimated to have a market share of 65 percent.
6. Micromax
Micromax is an Indian consumer electronics company headquartered in Gurgaon, Haryana. The company was established as an IT software company operating in the embedded devices domain; it later entered the mobile handset business. By 2010, it was one of the largest domestic companies making handsets in the low-cost feature phone segment in India. As of Q3 2014, Micromax is the tenth largest smartphone vendor in the world.
Rahul Sharma co-founded Micromax Informatics Limited, served as its managing director starting in March 2000, and currently serves as its Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Product Strategy and Channel Sales since April 1, 2007.
7. Housing.com
A group of twelve students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombayfounded Housing..com in June 2012, currently having nine founders. The company purchased Housing..com from San Francisco-based internet entrepreneur, Peter Headington, and the telephone number 03-333-333-333 in September 2013 for a total of $1m.
Housing..com has raised four rounds of funding since its founding in 2012. The company raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners in June 2013. The company raised another $19M in venture funding, led by Helion Venture Partners, in April 2014.
8. Hike Messenger
Hike was launched on 12 December 2012 and raised its first round of funding of $7 million from Bharti SoftBank in April 2013. Hike is a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Softbank. Hike’s founder is Kavin Bharti Mittal (the son of Bharti Mittal, the founder of Airtel).
9. Urbanclap
The company founded by the trio, UrbanClap, is claimed to be one of the largest mobile services marketplace in India today. They have raised Rs 10 crores in funding from SAIF Partners, Accel Partners and the founders of Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
10. Ola Cabs
Ola, is an Indian online transportation company. Ola was founded as an online cab aggregator in Mumbai, but is now based out of Bangalore.It was founded on 3 December 2010 by Bhavish Aggarwal(currently CEO) and Ankit Bhati. As of 2014, the company had expanded to a network of more than 200,000 cars across 85 cities. In November 2014, Ola expanded to incorporate autos on-trial basis in Bangalore.
Post the trial phase, Ola Auto expanded to other cities like Delhi, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata.. In December 2015, Ola expanded its auto services in Chandigarh, Indore Guwahati and Visakhapatam. Ola is valued at $5 billion as of September 2015.
11. BYJU’S – The Learning App
BYJU’S – The Learning App is the popular brand name for Think and Learn Private Ltd., a Bangalore-based educational technology (edtech) and online tutoring firm.
It was founded in 2011 by Byju Raveendran (Malayali) at Bangalore, Karnataka. BYJU’S was the first investment in Asia from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It is considered to be one among the only few Indian consumer startups that has gone global, particularly with the 2017 acquisition of TutorVista.
As of April 2018, the company has raised around $244 million. As per the company filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, BYJU’S became a unicorn and is valued at US$1 billion (INR 6,505 Crore) in March 2018. BYJU’s has raised $540 million venture funds from Naspers and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in December 2018.
Writen By – Nikhil Sharma.