Blog

With India witnessing a huge spike in the number of SaaS startups in 2020, it became imperative to support early-stage firms that were working to disrupt different verticals with their diverse offerings. Against this backdrop, in February 2021, LetsVenture and AWS launched a four-week fast-track accelerator program focused on SaaS startups. The program invited applications from post-MVP (minimum viable product) to early-revenue stage startups. From a plethora of applicants, 17 startups were invited to pitch to the jury comprising Rajesh Sawhney of GSF Accelerator, Radhesh Kanumury of Arka Venture Labs, Archana Priyadarshini, an angel Investor, Arun Tadanki of Waveform VC, and Siddhartha Ahluwalia of AISPL. Six of those were shortlisted for the final cohort, where they received intensive guidance and mentorship from industry experts.

The program was designed to provide deep industry insights and engage with experts at a one-on-one level. During these interactions, particularly the speakers series, startups learned about sales and go-to-market plans from Pallav Nadhani of charts.com, target market segmentation from Archana Priyadarshini, pricing strategies from Headstart’s Gautham Sivaramakrishnan, investment and fundraising process from Saurabh Lahoti of Pentathlon Ventures, and Storytelling from Vinod Muthukrishnan of Cisco. AWS cloud experts also interacted with startups to conduct AWS cloud architect review and answered specific queries about deployment.

Here’s a look at the six startups that were a part of the cohort:

1. Corz.io: The company is an automated hybrid cloud cost management and optimisation platform for enterprises. Their product has been used by 15 Indian and international customers. They have identified the niche to target the medium-to-large enterprises to provide their cloud cost management services.
2. Deep Support: DeepSupport employs AI to scale customer service by managing and optimising support processes, people and productivity. They help in providing instant response to customer’s queries in human language 24×7. They also use unique surveys to gauge and Improve NPS (gratitude) to create better customer experience. They are serving two enterprise customers along with two customers in pilot stage.
3. 3RDi: A construction management platform, 3RDi automates construction progress capture and augments project teams with AI-powered actionable solutions for efficient and effective monitoring of physical assets. They are working with leading construction and developers customers such as Worley, Tata Projects, L&T etc.
4. Xplorazzi: Xplorazzi enables and enhances visual merchandising for consumer goods companies using Image Recognition. They are working with B2B customers such as GCPL, Bajaj, Indomie etc.
5. Jan Elaaj: This is an organised, DIY, AI framework for the diagnosis and monitoring of mental health risks using games, audio-visual techniques and sensors. They are doing pilots with multiple medical institutes and exploring diverse applications and use cases of their platform.
6. Evoura: ZVR is a fusion of virtual reality and cloud game streaming. They offer an affordable direct VR cloud game streaming platform, which can be used on mobile phones and laptops/PCs. They are tapping the growing gaming community of developing markets.

To get ready for the showcase after four weeks, startups also received inputs and guidance on pitch deck preparation, presentation and storytelling from the program mentor and LetsVenture team. Startups exhibited their products on LetsIgnite, LetsVenture’s flagship event, in front of 100+ angels and VCs, which generated healthy responses and queries from investors and business communities.

To further support startups, LetsVenture is organising #FoundersFirst on March 20, 2021 bringing hands-on & operator driven conversations to help them grow & scale. In the 2nd edition of #FoundersFirst, the conversation will be around product & design, hiring & ESOPs and exits. The event brings together the speakers such as Balaji Srinivasan (ex-GP of Andreessen Horowitz, & ex-CTO of Coinbase), K Hari (National Stock Exchange), Varun Khaitan (Urban Company), Vineeta Singh (Sugar Cosmetics) among others.

Startups can register here for the event .