Cumulations is a story of collective ambition and drive. Three lifelong friends came together in pursuit of their entrepreneurial dreams and along the way found their champion supporter in Cognitive who believed in them and supported to kickstart their entrepreneurial journey. After all, it's not everyday that you find young engineers wanting to give up their lucrative jobs at companies like Infosys and instead chase an uncertain future. But that's exactly what the founders did. At Cognitive, we are comfortable with the uncertainty and chaos that reigns early days of a startup, but underneath that chaos usually lies an opportunity of a lifetime. If guided properly, the energy from that chaos can be engineered to create a long standing company and Cumulations, is a great example of how to orchestrate and achieve that.
The founding team of Madhu, Praveen and Pradeep can best be described as people with deep engineering talent and being good at what they do professionally, but more importantly, they want to do everything with 110% honesty, sincerity, and integrity. They don't like to cut corners in order to fulfill ambitions, no matter what the circumstances. For them, there is always a right way to do things and they stick to it with all their heart and minds. The three founders were classmates at VSEC engineering college in India and already pursuing fledgling careers in Information Technology. They were really good at mobile technologies and development skills, but raw on the business and product side. Their jobs were good pay, but the passion was missing and they were hungry to carve a legacy of their own. The best companies usually get created when forces of desire, talent and drive come together in pursuit of excellence. In early 2013, Nilesh found these wannabe entrepreneurs and the four came together as founding team to create a startup they called 'Nukkad'. This was a location based technology application to solve consumers 'discovery' problem. We were very aware of Foursquare, Banjo and plethora of other location based apps that were chasing this market. We believed that if we created a right product, that we could be that India's first location based app that crossed the 1M user mark. In 2013, the smartphone penetration was still quite nascent.
Nukkad launched 6months later and the team was accepted in the prestigious IIM-Ahmedabad's accelerator program. During that time, the team felt that, we were too horizontal and without sufficient capital, we would not be able to scale. We needed to solve specific problems and have a unique value proposition.
That value proposition turned out to be addressing retail problems. The team targeted shopping malls and solved retail discovery problems for consumers. And for shop owners, Nukkad (which was now called Shopzy) would drive customer foot fall into their shops. The business model however was still unclear. With product-market fit success in retail, Shopzy found out that though we have had success penetrating malls in several cities, the market was too fragmented and we usually ended up customizing the mobile app for our customers. This customization could however pose scaling challenges and we needed to find a better way to address growth, and we wanted to grow. This growth started to come in the form of customers interested in creating white-label solutions, and the virality from their networks addressing their mobility and location technology needs. We were already becoming a world-class mobile development team with expertise in certain verticals.
It was time to crank up the growth engine. We quickly gained reputation in building attractive mobile solutions as a team who understood 'business needs', because they had been there, done that themselves during their own journey at Cumulations. This reflected in their product quality and service delivery, and customers worldwide started to flow in. All this achieved with ZERO marketing dollars spent. If you are really good at what you do, your talent eventually surfaces through and the world will discover it. That was Cumulations growth story which started to surpass even our own business expectations. The levelheadedness of Madhu, Praveen and Pradeep however would ensure that the company's growth didn't come at unnecessary cost and they focused on steadying the growth, while reinvesting profits in acquiring new business, hiring the best talent and expanding in other sectors such as Internet of Things, Data & Wireless Technologies.
Cumulations' success is a testament of it's founders' core belief that if you pursue your entrepreneurial dreams with hardwork, perseverance and drive, that you can create success and build a lasting company. Five years on, Cumulations today is a dream story. With more than 25 people strong already and growing list of customers from various countries, it's future shines bright.
ToneTag started as MobileGullak, and was discovered by Nilesh Trivedi in early 2013. MobileGullak was a change saver service started by founders Abhishek Kumar and Vivek Singh who had known each other for many years prior to starting the project. It was a service that could be operated as a SMS/Text based application from non-smartphones. This was a time when smartphones were a luxury, but the feature mobile phone penetration was already on the rise in India and other parts of Asia. We found the service very innovative, taking advantage of the rising trends in mobile penetration and wasn't over-the-top with unnecessary and complex functionality. It was a service meant for mass adoption for 'today's user.
Our interest in MobileGullak triggered around our thesis that India and Asia would see a rapid rise in mobile technologies, and that mobile based payments will have a better adoption curve with India skipping the credit card generation. While it was not clear at that time if MobileGullak would become a wallet service, Abhishek's vision was always clear about one thing; that the payments infrastructure will have to accommodate users of past, present and future i.e smartphone technology. And this led to the transformation of the company from MobileGullak to ToneTag, with the mission to become the go-to provider of contactless payments system. ToneTag's research in areas of sound based technologies, encryption and security translated into the first product introduction in 2015.
Nilesh became an early investor, infact, the first investor in ToneTag. We had never met Abhishek face-to-face, but we developed a strong chemistry together and bonded well over numerous Skype discussions about the company's vision and direction. Our mutual admiration, trust for each other and understanding of mobile technology meant we became comfortable sharing and refining ideas on the project and getting involved on a deeper basis in matters such as company formation, structure, team formulation and product building. We consider ourselves fortunate to lend Abhishek and his team our advice and guidance during the crucial early stages of his new company. We pride ourselves in being active and doing everything we can to support our founders and ToneTag had given us that opportunity to help them build a strong foundation that continues to stand strong and grow stronger each day.
It truly was an investment without borders and in people whom we confided to chart their own course and story of prudent and patient success. 3 years on and ToneTag continues to lead the contactless payments technology market with rising market ownership across SMBs, financial service players, wallet service providers and B2B enterprises.
Like most companies we get involved with, our paths crossed with Chowbotics when the world had not found them yet. Infact, it was during early days of Deepak's foray into Food tech, in 2015 when Deepak met Nilesh at a local Bay Area startup mentor meetup. Our motto at Cognitive is to be involved deeply in the entrepreneurial eco-system and do everything in our power to help the eco-system and entrepreneurs grow. We strongly believe that engaging with the startup community at ground level is worth the time and energy as it allows us to see the seeds of young companies before they germinate and blossom. It is at one such local community we met, where Nilesh had been a mentor and Deepak, a young startup founder with dreams of building a great company came to perfect his pitch for entering an accelerator program.
With alike technical backgrounds, our conversation naturally digressed into the 100+ innovations that Deepak had filed in areas of 3D integrated circuits, microchips and optoelectronic devices. Throughout those six weeks, working with Deepak to perfect his business plan and investment pitch, we saw Deepak blend his passion for hardware, robotics and food into a business oriented message for his food tech company. Later on, Deepak took his company through the Techstars Austin program and raised Venture Capital from leading institutional investors in the hardware and technology industry. Good founders are also good listeners and they surround themselves with extraordinary talent. They compliment themselves by bringing onboard people who can challenge your convictions and help you grow as a leader. Deepak has grown into a fine leader by surrounding himself with a great team of employees, advisors and partners. It has been a great honor and privilege to be associated with Deepak and Chowbotics as a mentor and advisor to his young and growing company from it's very early days and we continue to be proud of how Deepak has taken a nascent team to now becoming a professional food company with operations in US and China.
Chaney Ojinnaka, the founder of VendorMach has always been at the forefront of innovation and finance. Living his corporate life innovating products and partnering with healthcare startups, at Humana and Aetna. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the entrepreneurial bug caught up with him. And that time would soon come after Chaney graduated in MBA, from Chicago Booth School of Business while studying in London and Chicago.
Shuttling between Berlin, London and New York, Chaney had wide exposure to these capitals of financial markets and decided to make the buzzing Europe his entrepreneurial base and shifted to London. It was spring of 2015 when Chaney decided that he was going to start a company and work full-time on his endeavor.
During this time, Chaney and Nilesh used to engage in long Skype conversations about the potential of financial services in these markets and where inefficiencies presented opportunities. One such opportunity was connecting sources of capital to those that needed it, such as Startups and new companies. From day-one, Chaney's vision was that this would be a data-first and data-driven company, with data becoming the central theme of ChalkRow, the company he created to pursue a potential market in financial services combined with technology. I say that on purpose, because FinTech was not that buzzword yet. Chaney knew that for him to build a data-first company, he's going to need to partner with someone who's technical credibility in building scalable, big data architectures would have to surpass the best talent available around him. That partner would be Peter Hartl, his classmate at Booth. Peter had spent significant time of his career building technology architectures and solutions at scale, most notably supporting the SMS infrastructure for the TV show 'American Idol. He had been frequenting Los Angeles during that time and Chaney convinced Peter that this would be bigger than anything imagined. They started putting together a massive database of small-medium and corporate business in Europe. This proprietary dataset would become the pinnacle of the opportunity that followed in creating economic impact relevance.
As Chaney met with hundreds of potential users of this dataset, such as Banks and providers of financial services, it started to become clear that there was no straight forward way for them to vet out businesses they would want to lend their money to. Vendor financing had compliance and trust gaps and no solution existed to fill that gap. Enter 'VendorMach'. VendorMach was going to be that company solving problems for the supply chain industry using machine learning and growing influence of artificial intelligence. Today, VendorMach sits in the middle of addressing a $200B+ supply chain financing market where VendorMach's trust index is quickly gaining momentum in how service providers and corporations conduct financing, compliance and operations in this industry with massive potential.
RevOS is an example of founders' experiencing a real life problem, and wanting to do something about it. As bike riders themselves, Jyoti and Mohit had experienced firsthand the perils of driving a bike on the road and trouble navigating using cellphones. Not only is this inconvenient, but life threatening as well if you have to hold the phone in one hand while trying to steer the bike with other. They had encountered a problem many others had as well. But what would be it's solution!!
While still working fulltime, they both started brainstorming ideas on how to make the bike smart. During one of the trips to India in early 2016, Nilesh got connected to Jyoti and this discussion ensued further. One idea was to create a smart helmet.
With helmets becoming mandatory in cities across parts of the world, it sounded cool to do a hi-tech product like it. However, Nilesh had seen many hardware startups struggle to get to that point of being able to build a functioning product. Most hardware startups struggle deeply in prototype phases and without a credible financial and go-to-market path forward, running a hardware company only becomes harder. At Cognitive, we believed that a hardware company should have a software moat, and services to be cherry on top. We wanted to address this problem using hardware as an entry point to what could be a large & lucrative market using software & services. Jyoti and Mohit understood this well and started investigating the market, by talking to potential customers of 'a' product. Our core belief at Cognitive is that great startup founders talk to customers even when they don't have a product to sell. They want to understand the minds of their customers, take their input to their teams, instill the value of customer's success into their product and relentless pursue that day-in and day-out. Over the period of 7-8 months leading to creation of a product, Jyoti spoke to atleast 23 of them. And from each of those conversations, emanated product strategy and customer serving plan.
RevOS, still in stealth mode is creating an end-to-end operating system experience for the bike market. The value of the product lies in it's simplicity to address basic pain points such as entertainment and navigation for riders, and our technology stack starting with the operating system and hardware agnostic software functionalities differentiates us from miles ahead. With focus on enabling connectivity, safety and data smarts, we are excited to launch India's first such product in Summer of 2017.
SmartOrbis is a culmination of decades spent building domain expertise in enterprise software and hardware technologies, building enterprise grade products at fortune-100 scale. The founders, Huseni and Shakib, had both spent several years prior at Cisco architecting and building networking & security products. Huseni led architecture and products in technical engineering roles, and is a well-known author for publishing several Cisco Press books on Networking & Security. Shakib meanwhile spent most of his career outbound, understanding customer requirements and doing product management. To build an enterprise company, you need enterprise experience combined with domain expertise. Security being a highly technical field, both founders' technical depth in the sector would lay a strong foundation for the company.
To build the right product, it was imperative to get in front of potential customers and understand their pain points. And to solve this, the founders brought on Shailesh Shukla, an exemplary product management veteran, General Manager and marketing executive who had built and led business units at Cisco, Juniper and Instart Logic. It was also during this time Nilesh got involved with SmartOrbis in an advisory role to help navigate the company in it's early days of company formation, product building and fund raising efforts. The year 2015/16 saw a rapid rise in adoption of container technologies with momentum led by companies such as Docker and Google's Kubernetes efforts.
Software development agility was the name of the game and several companies in industries ranging from financial services to retail to web scale companies had started to put together new architectures and development operations plans to migrate to microservices architecture. However, a big hole in these undertakings was the problem of security. SmartOrbis, in stealth mode is an exciting company sitting at the junction of Devops, Networking, Security, Big Data & Machine Learning. At SmartOrbis, we have brought together experts from these various technology areas and built a solution that addresses Enterprise security at DevOps speed. We are excited about the revolution we are bringing in enterprise security and so are our customers with whom we are currently piloting our solution.
We are a tiny team that is passionate about solving today’s important problems. Our persistent effort goes into understanding how technology can be leveraged to solve the needs of many. History has shown time and again that people have used data to make complex decisions. To solve a problem, we witnessed that one requires sufficient levels or sources of information, and the effectiveness of the outcome greatly depends on how accurate the obtained source of information, depth and readiness was. Lack of such meaningful data at the right time can cripple communities to enterprises, spells disaster.
Until recently, data collection and dissemination has been limited to large organizations or GIS consultants, and have proven to be time consuming, highly limiting & expensive because manned aircraft were used for the said purposes traditionally. However, as technology has been constantly evolving & maturing fast over the last few years, drones are increasingly being adopted and are replacing manned aircraft for majority of tasks.
We, firmly believe in the positive future of robotics and transformative power of drones for good. Thus, we conceived Skyware, a technology + data startup that designs UAV and software suite for commercial drones with an aim to make data collection and visualization easy, fast and as affordable as possible. We are excited about the idea of tapping into the possibilities of leveraging unmanned vehicles for above surface & underwater data acquisition. Currently narrowed down to Precision agriculture, Urban mapping and Earth works, we are building end-to-end solution for each of these explorable sectors that could benefit from our products.
Farming is in an all time decline in India & rest of the world is barely managing to keep its head above waters. The agricultural practices in the world today is not producing enough to keep up with the consumption habits of 7 billion people. Fast forward by 30 years there will be another 2 billion more mouth to feed. Unless yesterday’s agricultural practices are adapted to meet today’s demands, i.e we evolve it into more of a science rather than field work, we will starve our future generations. Our founder was lucky to have first hand experience in precision agriculture during his 2 year stay in UK. Farmers were using drones extensively for crop scouting, irrigation management, livestock grazing patterns & vegetation indices. However, in India, its a different ball game. Unlike the western & much advanced eastern counterpart, Indian farm area holding is getting smaller, farmers are moving away from agriculture, and there is not enough science & tech behind farming.
With Skyware’s R&D towards precision agriculture, we hope to find a fix to cure India’s low productivity (China produces 9 tons corn per hectare and India manages 300 Kgs) and modernize farming to increase yield and harvest times. Skyware is developing “Paper drone project” with an aim to get low cost cardboard drones with cheap yet effective sensors in the hands of Indian farmers. The software we are building forms an end to end solution that can process sensor data sets into useful maps that pave the way to scientific approach to farming. Majority of our effort is in understanding its feasibility of operation, adoption, repeatability and collaboration possibilities. Farmers from India and other developing nations will soon have access to low cost drones, low cost software that can be leveraged to create meaningful deductions on how much manure to use, where to use them, how effective is the irrigation or moisture retention in soil and so on. This translates to lesser cost per yield and a modernized farming experience.
Our drones and applications for Enterprise segment is built with business class users in mind. We aim to be second to none in terms of usability, reliability and consistency of data produced.
Over the last 2 years, we’ve seen our fair share of ups and downs due to the sector we work in being capital intensive. People have come and people have left, yet Nilesh supported us whenever possible by investing in us. We believe that he believes in what we believe and that made him fund us despite all odds, despite not having a product at hand then.
Protomake (formerly Pixel2desk) began as India’s first web based 3D Printing as a Service (3D-PaaS) in 2016 with an aim to organize & connect the distributed rapid prototyping space in India. It is a well known problem that there exists a gap between conceptualization and production. We saw that there was a need for prototyping lab which provided hardware hackers, inventors & enthusiasts a way to get their product design on paper to a tangible prototype, allow multiple iterations fast & cost effectively, and, take it forward to low volume manufacturers that allow testing the market with least risk.
The USP for our web platform was that it allowed users to generate cost estimates near instantaneously for their 3D models, send the print job to a vendor of their liking (or based on proximity) and get the 3D printed part delivered to door step. Today, the platform has matured into connecting 15+ of 3D print vendors across the country and at least 5 pre-vetted low volume manufacturers and primarily serves B2B clients across south India.
After Co-founder & CTO, Vinodh took charge, Pixel2desk has been rebranded to Protomake and the founder duo put the 3D-PaaS in auto pilot mode to focus solving a very common problem plaguing people worldwide. The startup actively researches material and form fit for 3D printed orthotics to correct foot posture of men & women without a need for surgery. The common problems are foot pronation and supination, which affects 3 out of 5 people in India. We are pioneering automation to deliver corrective wearables to users at the comfort of the home.
We got funded by DST in March 2017 and plan to launch our wearables the new year. Today, we provide access to variety of industrial grade prototyping machines at fractional costs to people to unleash their inventors inside.
Protomake is positioning itself as a technology company that cares for people. We are constantly working to find low cost medical wearables, faster & better prototyping methods or machines, and offer consultancy to product design firms.
Nilesh has been instrumental in providing for the company during the early stages of the development. He was like the lovely relative from US who would send funds, hardware to play with & sponsor a 3D printer or two when requested! We are still away from product::market fit but we are getting there. Stay posted!