India has witnessed a spectacular growth in the number of analytics startups over the last few years. In the last one year, we have covered numerous analytics startups that are working in the areas of healthcare, fashion, real estate, agriculture, facilitating lending decisions, emotional intelligence, voice-based solutions, hybrid TV powered by AI and many more. This is also indicative of the fact that India has emerged as a startup nation, with a robust ecosystem enabling startup founders and professionals to come up with innovative solutions in advanced analytics and kick-start their ventures.
While many startups have risen to fame in the last one year, we bring you 10 emerging analytics startups that you could watch out for in the year 2019.
The list is in reverse alphabetical order.
1| Zendrive, Founded 2013
The team: It was founded by Jonathan Matus and Pankaj Risbood who were colleagues at Google, Facebook and Walmart Labs.
Employee strength: 100
Eureka moment: Addressing the fact that the transportation system is evolving with each passing day while working on reducing the number of road traffic deaths globally, Zendrive came up with a state-of-the-art technology platform that leverages mobile sensor data to provide actionable insights and thereby improve safety for all road users worldwide.
About the company and its analytics solutions: The startup uses data and analytics-based solutions to analyse drivers’ behaviour, predict road risks and reduce collisions. The company has analysed 160-billion miles of driving data to save lives and money for fleet management firms, insurance companies, and customers. It has built a first-of-its-kind AI-powered technology platform for fleet businesses, automobile companies, insurance firms and consumers to provide actionable insights about driving behaviour on the road, ensuring a safe and reliable drive.
Zendrive offers a driver behaviour analytics solution to customers. Their mobile-based SDK product detects and analyses driving events like hard braking, rapid acceleration, over-speeding, hard turns and risky phone use. Their algorithms then, use these events to compute a safety score for the driver.
Differentiator factor: With access to over 160 billion miles of driving data, Zendrive’s algorithms predict collision risk six times more accurately than industry leading models. This has been validated by Milliman, one of the largest global independent actuarial and consulting firms. Also, their solution is completely smartphone-based and does not involve any hardware. This saves resources on deployment and maintenance.
Growth story: Over the last few years, Zendrive has been able to add prestigious names such as GasBuddy, HopSkipDrive, BoosterFuels, Fleetio, EverTransit, in their client list.
Funding: Zendrive has raised a total of $20 million USD, most recently completing a Series A funding round of $13 million USD in 2016.
2| vPhrase, Founded 2015
The team: vPhrase was founded by Neerav Parekh who brings extensive experience from technology, marketing and finance into this startup.
Employee strength: 35
Eureka moment: The motivation behind vPhrase was the identification of a growing need for a tool that would help in making report generation efficient and simpler. Parekh worked towards identifying this gap and built a product to plug that gap. He was also strongly motivated to be an employment generator rather than being employment consumer.
About the company and its analytics solutions: The company’s AI platform, Phrazor, analyses data, derive insights and then communicates those insights in words and also in multiple languages. vPhrase automates insight and generates reports using the following products:
- Phrazor is a completely customizable self-service Natural Language Generation platform with functionalities of configuring and generating customisable reports in seconds
- Explorazor is a self-service exploratory tool that helps in analysing uploaded data based on all major analysis frameworks
- Explorazor generates insights, detects outliers and anomalies and provides an in-depth analysis of the data provided
- BI Dashboard Plugin adds management commentary to your dashboards on Tableau, Power BI or Qlik. It helps to make these dashboards easier to understand and act upon.
Differentiator factor: Phrazor’s ability to marry analytics and Natural Language Generation is the key differentiator. With Phrazor, business teams don’t need to invest time in charts and tables, rather they get their actionable insights ready-made in seconds.
Growth story: The startup has been able to generate many use cases from various industries. It has worked with clients such as Kotak Bank, HDFC Securities, ICICI Lombard Insurance, Star India, Abbott Pharma, and more. vPhrase is now expanding internationally where they are now working with the likes of Fidelity International, ABB, and OCBC.
Funding: vPhrase had raised $250,000 Seed Round from Venture Catalyst, Zone Start-ups, and CIIE.
3| Thoucentric, Founded 2015
The team: The core team of Thoucentric includes Archi Bagchi, Neelakshi Kotnis, Pradeep Jadhav, Siddhartha Roy, Manish Garg, Bharat Kumar L, Satyam Tiwari, Karthik S, Ashok Babu R, Sridhar S, Prince Kumar, Elango M, Abha Bhatnagar, Rajan Jindal, Ankit Agarwal, Udit Ranjan, Prashant Bhushan Sharma, Ashish Verma, Ajay Kumar MS.
Employee strength: 170+ Globally
Eureka moment: The idea behind its inception was to create an organisation that focuses on solving complex business problems through process solutions or technology. Build by a group of strong techno-functional consultants, they are highly focused on execution.
About the company and its analytics solutions: The startup covers problems across the entire cycle of analytics including prescriptive, predictive and cognitive. Some of the examples of the value delivered by the analytics team for clients include:
- Improved short-term demand forecast by building a ‘Demand Sensing Platform’ for a Global Personal Care major
- ML Approach to Production Planning; Reduced 60% Man-Hours & improved planning forecast accuracy to 94% for a global CPG player
- ML approach to exception-based planning impacted 50% reduction in the S&OP man hours
- ML approach to ‘right’ thinking on outlet prioritization & BTL spend allocation for a global Alco-Bev player
Differentiator factor: The startup brings strong analytics experience in solving business problems. They believe in handholding the clients right from defining a problem to the last step of ensuring returns on investment are met. It is their collective passion that brings solutions hitherto unheard of and unprecedented, into fruition.
Growth story: Starting with one consultant in 2015 they have grown to a team of 170+ consultants spread across India, UK, Australia and Singapore. They began as a two-man show and are today a team comprising of data scientists, data engineers and cloud architects. Some of their clients are Unilever, Mondelez, Tata Global Beverages Limited, Asian Paints, Nivea, Marico, Trident Group, Garware Group and Diageo and others.
Funding: Thoucentric is bootstrapped and self-funded.
4| Spoonshot, Founded 2015
The team: Spoonshot was founded by Sai Sreenivas Kodur (ex Zomato) and Kishan Vasani (ex Just Eat).
Employee strength: 20+
Eureka moment: The startup was founded to put a stop to stale, rear-view insights developed by out-of-touch companies that employ archaic methodologies when it comes to FMCG sector. Founders believe that over 50 percent of new products fail due to lack of understanding and a lack of testing with consumers and most consumer insight methodologies are not evolving fast enough to capture rapidly changing trends and tastes. Spoonshot was born to address these problems.
About the company and its analytics solutions: Spoonshot (formerly known as dishq) was founded in 2015 with the aim of building a personalised food discovery app for the Indian market. dishq (a combination of dish and ishq), was focused on shifting food ordering away from ratings and reviews, to a more visual and emotionally driven decision. They changed the name to Spoonshot when they decided to pivot to a B2B audience and have an international focus.
The startup uses food science to extrapolate novel and relevant insights, personalised to every user. Their methodology is geared towards uncovering hidden product innovation opportunities by surfacing early signals for novel and emerging ingredient combinations. Their analysis gives decision-makers the quantitative confidence they need to act faster.
Differentiator factor: They leverage long-tail of open, alternative data to build proprietary structured data sets, connecting this data using machine learning, drawing signals and casualty. With these knowledge repositories, their goal is to ultimately replicate human cognition in the domain of food.
Growth story: They have seen good growth in terms of product development and building solutions that actually solve key problems in the food and beverage industry. They have plans for hiring and driving product innovation ahead. They are currently working on Spoonshot Genesis which is in private beta stage and will be launched fully in June. For Genesis’ private beta, they are currently working with 40+ large FMCG and F&B brands, 15 of which are global power-houses of food, doing billions of dollars of business every year.
Funding: Spoonshot has raised $500,000 till date and is looking to raise another round of funding later this year.
5| Pisquare, Founded 2014
The team: Pisquare was founded by Chinmay Pradhan and Rojalin Biswal, who have more than 15 years of experience in management consultant and data analytics.
Employee strength: 35
Eureka moment: With an aim to create a smarter workforce, they are working to create a smarter set of processes with the infusion of AI into the current workflows of enterprises. PiSquare wants to take AI across the layers in a web-based system where intelligence is available on demand.
About the company and its analytics solutions: Initially started as Arima Research in 2014, they operate under the brand name of Pisquare. Pisquare partners with organisations to transform their decision-making ecosystem with the right mix of strategic planning supported by analytical insight. Using a combination of analytics and visualisation they are creating a spring board for businesses to reach the next level of performance. They have been partnering with clients across the globe to optimise their customer engagement, supply chain, marketing & sales, delivery and talent for more aligned and mature performance. Their solutions are broadly structured into the areas of customer analytics, talent analytics and operations in IT/ITES.
Differentiator factor: They offer a combination of advanced analytics with advanced visualisation served on a web-based platform. They focus not only on the accuracy of predictions but equally on factors and inputs that are causing the effect
Growth story: Within a year of inception they have worked with companies such as Dell, Capita Plc, Mahindra Finance, Tata Capital, Sunlife, Powerschool, Department of Transport and State Government departments, major banks and insurance organisations.
Funding: They competed for a seed funding round last year
6| Pentation Analytics, Founded 2015
The team: It was co-founded by Anirban Roy (Founder Director & Chief Executive Officer), Kamal K Das (Co-Founder &Chief Operating Officer) and Pardeep K Shah (Director and mentor).
Employee strength: 23
Eureka moment: The company targets core insurance use-cases, with an objective to deliver in the areas of soliciting & customer acquisition, risk assessment & policy development, claim assessment & customer service, fraud analytics, customer retention & cross-Sell. Using technologies such as predictive algorithms, AI, NLP, deep learning, gradient boosting trees and more, it analyses structural and unstructured data residing at various sources.
About the company and its analytics solutions: Pentation analytics, as an InsurTech and Big Data Analytics company, provides analytical services to the BFSI industry, with its core product Insurance Analytics Suite ®. The analytics products by Pentation Analytics are IAS (Insurance Analytics Suite), Pentation Insurance Scores and Quote machine. These products bring use cases such as advanced analytics across the value chain, machine learning based scores at an individual policy level, acquisition via Self-quote generation and more.
Differentiator factor: The product by Pentation Analytics is an all-in-one self-service platform, covering business intelligence & insights, planning & monitoring, policy-level scorings through ‘Ensemble scoring algorithms’, automated allocation of policy through ‘Operational optimization algorithms’, role-wise access, connection to 3rd party API and technology platforms and more.
Growth story: Pentation Analytics has been recognized at multiple international as well as national industry platforms. The Insurance Analytics Suite® by the company has already been implemented with some major insurance companies, where they have been able to increase the retention through their predictive modelling and operational optimisation. Some of their major clients are NPCI, DCB Bank, Bharti AXA etc.
Funding: They are at the early stage of funding.
7| Impact Analytics, Founded 2015
The team: The primary founder of Impact Analytics is Prashant Agrawal who has more than two decades of cross industry experience.
Employee strength: 200+ across global geographies
Eureka moment: Impact Analytics came into existence to fill a gap where clients were looking for solutions that combined best practices of management consulting along with analytic based products.
About the company and its analytics solutions: Impact Analytics is the US-headquartered, rapidly growing analytics firm dedicated to serving clients through a synthesis of business consulting, analytics services and products. Impact Analytics offers a set of advanced analytics products and services for data-driven decision making in consumer-facing sectors such as CPG, retail, hospitality, banking, sports and gaming. Specific solutions centre around providing deep actionable insights for margin improvements, merchandising optimization, marketing analytics, customer analytics, operational excellence and AI-based automation solutions.
Differentiator factor: Impact Analytics prides itself on being first in the market on several of the solutions which are driven by a core set of values deriving substantial savings in costs and maximising profitability for clients.
Growth story: Growth has doubled every year since its inception. Some of their major clients include at least 12 of the top 500 companies in the United States.
Funding: Impact Analytics secured $750,000 in a funding round led by early-stage VC firm Aarin Capital which is a tie-up between TV Mohandas Pai and Dr Ranjan Pai. Other investors who participated in this round include Michael Herzig, serial entrepreneur and Ashish Lakhanpal (CEO Kismet Capital).
8| Dataweave, Founded 2011
The team: The company was founded by Karthik Bettadapura and Vikranth Ramanolla.
Employee strength: 140+ employees
Eureka moment: During Bettadupura’s previous role as the lead programmer of the data team at Web18, he recognised the market potential of providing a solution that harnesses publicly available data and analyses the external factors that impact businesses. This thought process led to the formation of DataWeave in 2011 along with Ramanolla, who shared Karthik’s vision and passion.
About the company and its analytics solutions: DataWeave provides competitive intelligence to e-commerce businesses and digital shelf analytics to consumer brands by aggregating and analysing data from the web at a massive scale. The company’s AI-powered technology platform enables e-commerce businesses to make smarter pricing and merchandising decisions to drive profitable growth, and consumer brands to govern their online brand presence, optimise their Share of Voice, and improve their e-commerce shelf velocity.
DataWeave offers SaaS-based product suites called Retail Intelligence and Brand Analytics that helps companies protect their brand equity online and optimise the experience delivered to shoppers on e-commerce websites. Popular use cases include monitoring and resolving minimum advertised price (MAP) violations, detecting counterfeit product listings, tracking and improving the share of voice of online promotions, optimising their digital shelf velocity, and more.
DataWeave also provides investment firms and hedge funds with Retail Alternative Data, which enable them to take data-driven buy or sell positions in the market.
Differentiator factor: DataWeave stands apart from its competitors in several ways. Their human-aided machine intelligence based technology platform leverages proprietary NLP and Computer Vision technologies to enable accurate and rapid data processing and insights generation. Their technology platform is also language agnostic, currently supporting over 25 international languages. They support diverse delivery mode options including API, CSV, PPT, FTP for easy and speedy consumption.
Growth story: DataWeave is one of very few SaaS startups of Indian origin that has replicated its domestic success internationally, particularly in the US. They have a strong presence in India, the Middle East, and SouthEast Asia and the US.
Funding: Following a seed funding round in 2011, they announced Series-A round of financing in April 2017, which was led by FreakOut Group, Herb Madan – a Silicon Valley investor, and a diverse group of institutional investors from US, India, and Singapore. Other investors include Blume Ventures, M&S Partners, Rajan Anandan, Times Internet, and WaterBridge Ventures.
9| Crediwatch, Founded 2016
The team: It was founded by Meghna Suryakumar and Sandeep Anandampilla.
Employee strength: 36 employees across two locations
Eureka moment: The founders state that India has over 50 million unregistered businesses and over 1.13 million active registered companies but only 7000 of these are listed offering detailed while the rest exist in the ‘Dark Space’. There is an estimated $1000bn annual business entered with these ‘dark space‘ companies as a combination of credit, trading and other agency related activities. Crediwatch was created as a cost-effective and scalable solution to provide transparency and information about these businesses.
About the company and its analytics solutions: Crediwatch is an insights-as-a-service platform that deploys scalable deep learning tools across disparate digital footprints left by private entities (big and small) to provide dynamic credit management as a service to financial institutions. It uses advanced computational techniques such as AI, ML and NLP to derive near-real-time insights from structured and unstructured datasets.
Crediwatch has created an Early Warning System (EWS) that banks and NBFCs can use to monitor their loan portfolios in near real-time using a combination of public and private data. This system uses globally-used models trained on Indian corporate datasets and predicts delinquencies and defaults 12 to 18 months before they occur.
Differentiator factor: Their proprietary predictive algorithm has been developed and tested on over 9000 Indian companies. Crediwatch provides singularity of insights by tapping into 2500 data sources and tying the results into a singular truth hence allowing for a verified and accurate delivery of insights. Other differentiating factors are zero human touches, platform agnostic solutions, scalability and more.
Growth story: Since 2016, Crediwatch has provided credit analytics for a portfolio of over INR 50,000 crores across 20+ BFSI clients analysing over 1.2 million data tokens along the way. Some of Crediwatch’s clients are Barclays Bank, Capital Float, RBL Bank, SBI, Trilegal etc.
10| BDB, Founded 2015
The team: Avin Jain (Founder, CEO), Anoop VP (CTO), Vishal Venugopal (VP AI) and several others founded BDB with a focus on end-to-end data, analytics, AI platform.
Employee strength: 120+
Eureka moment: Being in BI consulting for the initial four years the founding team realised the pain points of the analytics industry and that many existing analytics tools were unable to fulfil the analytics demands of customers. There was no single platform which could address end to end analytics requirement and therefor BDB platform was founded as a single end-to-end analytics platform to address these challenges.
About the company and its analytics solutions: The BDB Decision Platform brings analytics within the reach of every individual by enabling seamless workflows for all user groups including CXO, business user, citizen data scientists and more. With customers in 10 different verticals, BDB platform has been deployed in education, retail, healthcare, life science, BFSU and other domains. BDB has a cloud-based SaaS Analytics Platform for SMEs – Yujaa which internally uses a set of business intelligence tools that gives a 360° view of data. Yujaa provides role-based solutions to various industries that are affordable and accessible by any user across the globe.
Differentiator factor: BDB platform provides a comprehensive experience of data analytics offering plugins such as data pipeline and data wrangling all tacked together in a simple drag and drop manner. BDB can be deployed on-premise or accessed as a cloud-based application. The product is built on microservices architecture and contains all the features of a modern, highly scalable, secure, multi-tenant analytics platform.
Growth story: BDB has been growing significantly with its solutions available on cloud and on-premise. It has earned more than $8 million through its platform in the last four years and has worked with a few fortune 500 companies in different verticals such as enterprise customers, SMEs and more.
Funding: Currently BDB is looking for Series A funding.
