Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

iCreate Software, a Bangalore-based Business Intelligence company focused on Banking products & solutions, today announced the successful completion of a Series A round of financing of Rs. 15 crores. The investment was made by IDG Ventures India, an early-stage technology venture capital firm investing in technology and technology- enabled companies. This funding will be used to fuel iCreate’s growth strategy which includes building a global sales platform, increasing marketing efforts, and continuing investment in product development.  Mr. T.C. Meenakshisundaram and Mr. Ranjith Menon of IDG ventures will join
the company’s board of directors.

Founded in 2006, iCreate develops products and provides solutions and services enabling effective and profitable utilization of data in Core Banking systems. iCreate has pioneered the “Banking Intellisense” philosophy, its radical new approach to business intelligence and improvement in Banking Systems. iCreate intends to become a market leader in the BI for Banking space with multiple offerings covering areas such as BI and Reporting, Collections, Compliance, Risk Management and Fraud detection. iCreate is currently focused on the emerging markets with clients in the Africa, Middle East, APAC and Europe regions and is
looking to expand its focus to include mature markets.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

OTA firm Via, formerly Flightraja has raised close to $10M USD from Sequoia Capital. Earlier Via has raised around $5M USD from NEA-Indo US Venture. This investment is a good sign for resurgent OTA industry and investment has come in after a long gap in this indusrty. Via provides services like bookings for flights, railways, buses and holidays.

OTA’s still remain favorite among VC’s and OTA’s like Cleartrip, MMT, Travelguru have earlier raised huge investment from prominent Indian VC’s.

Via main business comes from traditional travel agents who are provided with Via booking terminal to book tickets for customers. B2B model is paying good results for Via, not significant of revenue is generating from their B2C model though.

Via started in 2006 is founded by Vinay Gupta, Amit Aggarwal, Rohit Gaddi, Harsh Azad.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Learn18 is an online mock test platform where students can easily take up test at their own convenience. They work in scratch and learn model which means students need to buy a Educard available easily at stores and they need to enter the usernname/password before taking up the test.

Learn18 certainly wants students to explore more questions instead of regular CET coaching classes where emphasis is given on certain set of questions. Learn18 serves more than two lakh questions pertaining to CET, Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and other competitive tests.

Question pattern architecture is designed quite intelligently , the difficulty of the next question will depend upon your previous answer. If the previous answer was right, then the following question will be tough. Student is prompted with right answer if he answers it wrongly.

Let me clarify it’s not part of Network/Web18 group, its an independent company.

vcBytes Review -: Quite an innovative idea to reach students through Edu card, realizing students generally don’t have credit cards, Question bank is quite vast and of good quality. They should  try to develop certification platform above the online test platform.

-Hitesh, vcbytes.com

Desired Candidate Profile

1. Comprehensive knowledge & exposure in working on php, mysql, ajax, jquery
2. Add on knowledge of Joomla will be preferable
3. Knowledge of third party integration like payment gateways and shipping gateways

Job Description

Minimum 3 year experience on PHP, MySql

Startup in a stealth mode in education/ecommerce domain.

Compensation:

6-8L

Have you analysed how many features of your product are effectively used, in most of the products 10% of product features are mainly used and 60% of the feature are good to have features and rest 20% are very rarely used and 10% are never been used. So why not concentrate on 10% of the features and evolve into product instead of running behind in accumulating features mainly to counter competition.

Most of the VC’s reject you stating “its a damn feature not a product”, they don’t see any value proposition in it and raises concern in its adoption. Before adopting by millions of users worldwide Isn’t twitter just a status message feature, now its most reputed company. Paypal is one of the best example i can cite in this context, it has become a big company/product in itself. They realized early and understood what users need and understood users are not liking the complex cryptography based solution. Besides this one has to abandon the extra features which will make new users confuse about the solution, in short they should KISS (Keep it simple stupid)

How to determine feature can be turned into product -

There is no straight away answer for it, check for user adoption and make a call.

What’s your take on it, do share.

-Hitesh, vcbytes.com

iYogi raises $15M in series C round funding led by DFJ, existing investors SAP Ventures, Canaan Partners and SVB India Capital Partners also participated in this funding process.iYogi provides online technical support for personal computers to small business and individuals across the world. iYogi headquartered in Gurgaon is founded by serial entrepreneurs Challu and Vishal Dhar.

iYogi’s Award winning Global Delivery Platform, iMantra,  documents every problem, solution and relevant hardware and software specs, while capturing each customer’s demographic information and creates a behavioral profile. All of this information is at the fingertips of iYogi’s Global Tech Experts, combining a powerful knowledge base with a comprehensive set of tools, and technology expertise, that can be accessed on demand to deliver great tech support.

iYogi’s prominent clients include Amazon.com and Walmart.

-Hitesh, vcbytes.com