Brace up all Product Entrepreneurs; InTech50 is back…

InTech50, iSPIRT ’s flagship event is back. The first two editions have been very successful and InTech50 has become the ‘must-go-to’ platform for enterprise CXO’s and product entrepreneurs. Over the past two years, we have hosted CXO’s and business leaders from global companies like AllState, Citibank, HCC Insurance, Standard Chartered, Colgate Palmolive, Time, AirTel, Yes Bank, Exide Life, Mother Diary and the likes. Here are some quick high points from the last two years of InTech50:

  • 18 enterprise deals that got originated and closed from conversations at InTech50
  • 42 enterprise PoC’s offered to InTech50 companies
  • 120+ innovation leaders (read: buyers & influencers) exposed to Indian product entrepreneurs

We have already managed to showcase over a 100 companies, and we have made 50 global investors and CIO’s travel to India to interact and associate with these companies, and happily so.

Here are a few portfolio companies from our past events – Capillary, Uniken, Seclore, Freshdesk, Reverie, Sapience, NowFloats, ToneTag to name a few.

Just to share the impact that we have created, and how these 50 companies have benefitted from this initiative, hear hear what some of them had to say –

“Intech50 is a phenomenal event. It is probably the highest RoI initiative we have ever participated in. With 50+ Global CIOs turning up, it is a great platform to validate your product. Met some of the largest enterprises, found use cases we weren’t aware of and closed marquee deals. Highly recommended!” Yamini Bhat, Vymo.in

“Intech50 was extremely useful in 3 ways. First, making a presentation of just 5 minutes to an extremely discerning audience helped us make our value proposition very crisp. Second, demoing our product to several heads of technology helped validate our product and use cases, and resulted in actual business deals getting signed. And most importantly, we were able to bag a large client with whom we’ve been able to co-create 2 completely new products. I wholeheartedly and highly recommend Intech50 to all B2B startups who have demonstrable products that are ready for large enterprises” – Ranjit Nair, Germin8

“Being a part of InTech50 2015 was a great opportunity for ToneTag. It was exhilarating when ToneTag was selected in the first batch as one of the top 10 products. The event gave us the exposure, guidance and support we needed. InTech50 enabled us to pitch our product to a global panel of curators and the media coverage we received was also been beneficiary to the company. Since winning InTech50, ToneTag has been expanding rapidly. We acquired many leads through the event that led us to PoC’s and commercial deals in the making. The resources we received through InTech50 have been invaluable as it has helped us build exciting partnerships with many in India and around the world” – Kumar Abhishek, ToneTag

If you are a product entrepreneur and your product is solving a problem for the enterprise CXO, InTech50 is your chance to showcase your product to the who’s who in the enterprise buyer community.

Apply before Feb 22nd 2016 and experience a bigger and better InTech50 in 2016.

To know more, click here.

Second 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products from India

InTech50, a joint initiative by iSPIRT and Terrene Global Leadership Network, that recognizes most promising software products by India’s entrepreneurs, is pleased to confirm the Second set of 10 selected products from over 200 nominations. Check out the First 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products.

InTech50 logoThe elected products that represent inspirational and pioneering concepts in software will be showcased at InTech50 , a two-day event to be held at Bangalore from April 9 -10, 2014, where global CIOs and transformation leaders will be present. 

How we picked out the Top 10 showcase products:

It is quite an honor to be in the InTech50  considering there was an overwhelming response for product nominations.

An esteemed panel of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), venture capitalists, and product leaders from previous successes have evaluated the nominated products.

The products have been selected based on their capabilities and uniqueness, while having the potential to transform the world around us.

The Second 10 finalists for InTech50 2014 Most Innovative Products (in alphabetical order) are:

  1. Contify is a Web Intelligence application for enterprise and teams. The product mines virtually all relevant online sources for information and converts it into easily accessible qualitative and quantitative insights on customers, competitors, and markets.
  2. i7 Networks is a 100% Agentless-way (ZERO-Touch) of detecting all personal devices, secure quadrupled fingerprinting (US patent-pending) of devices and apps etc. and provides network behavioural analysis. It then denies access to infected and compromised personal devices connecting to the network.
  3. KiSSFLOW is business process automation software that is deeply integrated with Google Apps environment. KiSSFLOW is the #1 app in the Google Marketplace in its category and has more than 5000 organizations and active users spread across 120 countries.
  4. Kreeo is a “Collective Intelligence & Unification Platform” for Companies which addresses three important aspects of effective information/knowledge management – Expression, Organization and Discovery (EOD). It provides a unified platform where information is shared/aggregated in various contexts and is intelligently organized around various concepts of relevance.
  5. MindTickle is a cloud based learning platform which enables businesses to create, deliver, manage and track online courses. It is easy to create courses on MindTickle by uploading or embedding existing content (videos, PPTs, PDFs, quizzes, etc.).
  6. RazorFlow Dashboard Framework helps you build interactive dashboards in HTML5 that work well on all modern devices. You can configure components of the dashboard using an intuitive API, which will intelligently render the dashboard according to the capabilities and form-factor of your user’s device.
  7. RippleHire is a technology product that gamifies employee referrals and enables social recruiting. By empowering the most effective way you hire (Employee Referrals), it reduces your hiring cost and effort and unlocks the multiplier in your employee social networks.
  8. Sapience is an innovative, patent-pending software solution that delivers over 20% increase in Work Output, from the existing team. Sapience achieves this through Automated Work Visibility, without requiring any change in process or extra management effort.
  9. SignEasy is a simple and convenient app for businesses and professionals to sign and fill documents from smart phones and tablets. You do not need a printer, scanner or fax machine. SignEasy is currently available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry.
  10. Seclore FileSecure is an Information Rights Management (IRM) solution which allows unstructured information (documents, emails, drawings, images,) to be remote controlled. It is possible to share information but have control: WHO can access the information, WHAT can each person do and WHEN does each person use the information.

Check out the First 10 of the 50 Finalists: #InTech50 Most Innovative Products. Stay tuned for the remaining 30 companies which we plan to announce in the next few days.

 

Yes! We invested in Little Eye Labs! Lots of interest in Healthcare too! – Ventureast #ThinkInvestor

ThinkInvestor is iSPIRT and ProductNation’s new initiative to serve as a catalyst between Venture Capital firms, Angels, Angel Networks and Entrepreneurs. It is to go beyond brochure ware and dig deeper into the whole life cycle of a typical investment; from introductions, funding, styles of on-going engagement, to exits. And in the process, capture their views on global and local trends, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India.

ThinkInvestor-VentureEastVentureast is an Indian VC fund manager with close to $300 million under management. They have a history of investing in innovative businesses across multiple sectors, and multiple stages of a business – from seed and early to growth stages.

Guided by the singular credo “We Differentiate, You Win”, Ventureast has enabled over 60 businesses in Technology, Life Sciences and emerging sectors to become leaders in their individual spaces. The company has a proven track record of investments and exits, aided by a strong founding team which has been with Ventureast for over 15 years and who understand the entrepreneurial ecosystem well.

The Ventureast Proactive Fund, Ventureast Life Fund and Ventureast Tenet Fund II feature a wide investor base (Limited Partners) consisting of institutional investors from across the world.

They were in the papers recently when their investment, Little Eye Labs, was acquired by facebook.

ProductNation sat down with Sateesh Andra, Managing Partner, and Dr. Ramesh Byrapaneni, Venture Partner of Ventureast Tenet Fund, for this interview. Here’s what we heard:

 

What kinds of start-ups are you interested in? What’s your stage of investment and typical investment size?

Sateesh AndhraOur fund invests exclusively in IP-enabled companies. We are interested in Internet and Mobility related plays. We are very interested in enterprise focused start-ups among these. We are very interested in Healthcare and Healthcare related Information Technology plays also. We are interested in companies that address inefficiencies in areas such as Education and Finance with technology solutions. The filter that we use is that these companies address global opportunities in South East Asia, Europe and the US. We found a gap in the Indian VC market between what Angels can provide start-up companies with and Series A venture investors. In our current fund, we invest up to $1M a company. In our next fund we are planning to increase this to $1.5M to $2.0M per company.Most of our investments happen at the concept level; they understand the concept well, there is a prototype, and some early revenue validation.

How does an entrepreneur get your attention?  How does an entrepreneur get in touch with you? What’s the initial process like?

Dr. Ramesh ByrapaneniEntrepreneurs get in touch with us in a variety of ways. We are panel sessions in conferences and some get in touch with us there. We also get introduced to entrepreneurs and start-ups are demo days at accelerators. Sometimes investors in incubatees at these places introduce companies to us. Introductions through our professional links and references are always welcome. Look us up in social media like LinkedIn and Twitter. See who we follow there.  We have  also engaged with entrepreneurs and start-ups that have come in with a nice relevant email. They are all good people to introduce you to us. Our big expectation is for you to know us as an investor before you pitch us! Out initial process is quick. After an initial meeting we would let you know in an upfront and candid way, whether we would invest or not. We provide candid feedback on why we are not investing. Entrepreneurs may not like it but these are only the reasons why it does not make sense for us.

Let’s say you are interested in exploring a company further? What happens next? What are your typical due diligence efforts? How long does it take for an investment?

We have a very strong team on our side that can evaluate the Product Market fit for the start-up we are looking at collectively. It is fairly important to us. In early stage start-ups creating the product is easy. Achieving Product-Market fit is tough. From a Product Management/Product Marketing perspective, we look at the value proposition and how they address customer requirements. At an early stage, start-ups may not have a crystal ball but we still need to see 12 month metrics; Profit & Loss and Cash Flow projections. They need to have a decent idea about these. We also dive deeper into distribution channels, feet on the street. The initial team is also critical. The timeline for investment decisions vary. Some take only 2 to 3 weeks if they already have a lot of traction. Some take 6 weeks and some take 8 weeks if there is a lot of financial due diligence to be done. Companies are doing pivots take longer. If there are regulatory frameworks involved as it happens sometimes with healthcare investments, it may take much longer.

How hands-on or hands-off are you with your portfolio company? What’s your style of engagement with a portfolio company?

This is a tricky question! We are not the kind of investor that drives from the back seat. We don’t dictate that this is the way it needs to be. We ensure alignment. In one of our healthcare start-up companies, post-operative care after a stay in the hospital was important. We got involved in that case and helped arrange things.  We do monitor a simple set of metrics depending upon the company. We monitor the number of product releases, beta customers, etc,.We also monitor how our portfolio companies incorporate feedback they receive.  We don’t give the portfolio companies all of the money upfront. They are done in stages and closely track progress they are making. We make introductions, go on cold calls with the portfolio companies once a month. There are quite a few informal meetings along with the formal ones. We engage with quite a few CIOs and do introductions as appropriate. Our style and approaches are different for different companies. There is no single formula.

Let’s talk about your interest in Healthcare and Healthcare IT Companies. Tell us about some recent investments. What kinds of things are you looking for in this area? What excites you in this area?

SmartRX is an investment of ours that serves post-operative care of patients. Usually after operations in hospitals, when patients are leaving for home, prescriptions are gone over and that’s where it ends. It becomes very difficult to make sure that the patients are taking their drugs properly. Doctors find it difficult to communicate after that with patients and vice-versa. SmartRx ensures that periodic messages are sent to the patient; common do’s and don’ts. Patients can also have small consultations back with their doctors through SmartRX. This is focused on the US Healthcare Market and is related to Meaningful Use Stage 1 and 2 of the Healthcare Reform effort going on currently in the US. The founders for this company were with Microsoft in the US, came back and started this company. To us, domain expertise is key, as in Healthcare and Healthcare IT start-ups..

We recently invested in OneBreath, a medical device company. OneBreath makes portable ventilators that have the same functions as  expensive high-end ones but at a tenth of the cost. One of the founders is on the West Coast of the US and this is targeted towards the global market. We help portfolio companies get the CE Marking so that they can target Europe and other markets if we think FDA approval for the US market may take long.

We invested in Seclore, an Information Rights Management company incubated at IIT Mumbai.  Their solution enables organizations to manage information access policies through the cloud. It enables their clients to manage access to documents across computers and tablets. 50% of their customers are in Europe or the US. It is one of the cool companies to watch for.

HealthHero created a device that resided with the patients, monitored vitals such as Glucose, BP levels etc. Patients can input the readings into these devices, doctors and nurses can analyze this data remotely and get back to the patient if necessary. This is now part of Bosch Telehealth.

We are very excited about the use of Smartphones in healthcare – they are the last mile to patients!  They represent a humongous opportunity! The computing power within Android and iOS devices make possible some radical disruptions.

 Now, let’s talk about Exits. What do you see coming in this area?

The Nest Acquisition by Google shows how much they value vision. Our belief is that you need to create value for exits. With a little bit of luck and timing this will happen! Exit multiples are very important to accelerate exits in general.  The macro trends are very positive! We have seen some exciting exits; Portal Player acquisition by NVIDIA, Qontex, a spin-out from Pramati Technologies was acquired by Adobe , Yasu Technologies, a Business Rules Management System company was acquired by SAP. Healthcare, Pharma and Biotech companies are all seeing momentum right now. We are seeing a lot of investments in cloud based Value Added Services companies; distributed applications and globally relevant!

What about some parting thoughts for entrepreneurs?

Just wanted to reiterate what we are looking for in start-up companies; a strong product management team with strong technical skills, ability to look at things from a customer angle, sales and marketing knowledge, excellent people management skills. We are looking primarily for deep understanding of technology, clear understanding of the customer landscape and excellent program /people management skills!

How does an Ecosystem need to help itself? The Zensar way of doing it!!

As part of the iSPIRT ProductNation initiative, we work together helping product startups to connect to the enterprises to find, build and utilize the synergies and in the process helping the product startups as well as the enterprises have a inclusive growth. As part of this initiative we are very proud to bring in such a TechShowcase organized by Zensar Technologies from Pune.

When we approached Ganesh Natarajan of Zensar, he was more than happy to make this happen. Later we worked with many other heads at Zensar and we were astonished really at their eagerness and the hurriedness and for a second we were confused at the speed of execution. We have so far never seen this sense of urgency from a large enterprise. Anyways we got around 73 applications for this coveted TechShowcase and Zensar as promised chose the top 10, which makes a lot of synergy for their offerings and for their customers.


Last Saturday (Sept 8 2013) they flew us all the ten companies to Pune and the startups had to do a double presentation – one in front of the executive council and the other in front of the tech council. To be frank we were amazed at the preparations at Zensar with the kind of welcome we got, the setup, the welcome boards, the executive & the technology council being ready and on time considering it was a Saturday and it was a long weekend, and of course the goodies we got. Just amazing!! I think if Zensar is anything to go by the discipline and sense of urgency and the diligence they showed they have a great future for sure!!

Thank You ZENSAR – we appreciate all your efforts and your hospitality – from iSPIRT as well as all the participating companies.

Here is the list of 10 companies that Demo’d @ Zensar (& in the order they presented)

    1. Germin8 – Mumbai based company, which works on big data analytics on social media mainly that is text based. They started in 2007 and they mainly target Marketing and Corporate Communications team in an organization.

 

  • TriggerO – Delhi based; working mainly in the Rewards & Recognition space and employee engagement via Social. Their tag line is “Recognition is Social”. They provide smart analytics about employee engagement as well as ROI.

 

 

  • GoDB – Chennai based; started on 1999; Creates vertical focused mobile apps, which come with scalability and security, and is based of their platform and their main focus is on FMCG, BFSI and Retail verticals.

 

 

  • Kreeo – Bangalore based; Started in 2007; Helps share knowledge within an enterprise like what you do in the social outside. They call it a Collective intelligence and a unification platform for enterprises.

 

 

  • Seclore – Mumbai based; Started in 2007; they work in the space of information security policy based. Their tag line is security not at the cost of collaboration.

 

 

  • i7 Networks – Bangalore based; Started in June 2012; they work on the space of BYOD security; Their sweet spot is 100% Agentless device discovery, fingerprinting and health-check and then denying infected/malicious devices from connecting to corporate network.

 

 

  • Teritree – Bangalore based; Provides social commerce platform

 

 

  • Knowledge Foundry – Bangalore based; Advanced segmentation and profiling to target Ads and helps run smart campaigns and helps ecommerce with tools with Amazon-like recommendations.

 

 

  • Vondasoft – Mumbai and Bangalore based; Scans multiple social media for your relevant brand, filters data based on many attributes and provides the true social image metrics for your brand.

 

 

  • MeshLabs – Bangalore based firm; has a text analytics platform. Listens to all stake holders and unlocks the hidden value via text analytics.

 

As next steps, Zensar will shortlist those companies that they and their customers will find value to take them to their customers. We are sure this will be a huge value to the selected startups and ofcourse for the whole ecosystem. Can we have some more bigger companies doing the Zensar way?

We would like to thank Kumar Gaurav, Vice President at Zensar to lead this initiative with the support of Ajay Bhandari, Chief Corporate Development Officer, Sanjay Marathe – Head, Strategic Services Unit and CTO, Krishna Ramaswami – Senior Vice President, Healthcare Vertical & Global Infrastructure Management Business, Lavanya Jayaram – Head – Marketing and Sales Enablement & Vivek R Sarnobat – Marketing, for their support.

We also feel that these kind of events can be a huge boost to the whole ecosystem as well as a win-win proposition for both service comapnies which now can innovate and provide services that make a difference to their customer while the product companies can benefit hugely as their biggest problem today is not the product development itself but taking them to market. These kind of partnerships and differentiated solutions will help both and in the end help customers to get better, innovative and faster solutions.

Q&A with Seclore CEO on Information Rights Management Software

Often, enterprise goals of security and collaboration are mutually exclusive. Seclore, with customers in Asia, Europe and North America, resolves that dilemma. Seclore’s CEO, Vishal Gupta, discusses Information Rights Management trends as well as development of the company’s IRM product. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.

SandHill.com: Please describe your company’s software product and your market.

Vishal Gupta: Seclore is an information security software product company. Our core technology enables information to be “remote controlled.” So you can send me a document, image or email and then, after 10 days, if the relationship changes, you can press a button on your computer and the information will effectively vanish from my computer! Sounds Mission Impossible? It is definitely doable.

During the 10 days you also can control whether I can edit, print, forward or copy-paste from the document, image or email. You can also monitor who is doing what (tried to print the document) with the information, when (on Sunday morning) and from where (from his home computer).

The mission of the company is to help enterprises achieve the mutually conflicting goals of security and collaboration together. We currently have customers in the financial services, engineering services, manufacturing and defense sectors across three continents.

SandHill.com: How does your product differ from other security products?

Vishal Gupta: Seclore’s technology is different because it allows information usage to be controlled without the prerequisite of everyone installing a local agent. It is the most integration-friendly Information Rights Management (IRM) system in the world. Any person or system within the enterprise that is creating documents or emails can use Seclore’s technology for securing the information.

SandHill.com: How did your company originate?

Vishal Gupta: Seclore came out of the IIT Bombay incubator. The company was initially a campus project, which became a company. The company was launched with the specific mandate of providing a secure outsourcing solution to enterprises looking to outsource business processes. Over a period of time we realized that what we had created as a solution to a specific problem was in fact applicable in a much wider context.

The formal operations of the company were started in June 2006. The name Seclore comes from “Sec” (for “secure”) and “Lore” (for “knowledge,” as in folklore). So Seclore stands for Secure Knowledge.

Read the complete interview at Sandhill.com