Tuesday, 15 April 2014

India’s 11 fastest-growing IT product startups

Indian IT services companies have been a recognized force in the global tech arena for over one and half decade. But past few years have seen the rise of Indian product startups providing cutting-edge technology solutions to global as well as domestic companies.

Next week, industry association iSpirt and Terrene Global Leadership Network will host an event in Bangalore, where founders of some of the top tech startups will rub shoulders with CIOs of global giants.

There will be as many as 50 IT product startups taking part in the event. We present to you 11 of these fastest-growing startups…


Capillary Technologies
Capillary Technologies helps retailers understand customer purchase behaviour through artificial intelligence. The five-year-old company — founded by IIT-Kharagpur graduates Aneesh Reddy, Krishna Mehra and Ajay Modani — sells its solutions to retailers such as Benetton, Nike, Puma and Pizza Hut.


Bizosys
The four-year-old startup has built a customized search engine that can decode technical information and return search queries within milliseconds. This is driving global acceptance for the engine built by three engineers — Sunil Guttula, Abinasha Karana and Sridhar Dhulipala.

Ezetap
Payment device maker Ezetap converts any mobile device into a point of sale through its software and hardware. The Ezetap device consists of a lightweight card reader that can be plugged into any smart device or feature phone used by a retailer.

The company was founded by Abhijit Bose — a former executive at mobile commerce platform NGPay — in 2011, along with Bhaktha Keshavachar, a former engineer at Intel and AngelPrime.


Flutura
Provides Big Data analytics technology to mine hidden insights from huge chunks of machine generated data for global oil and gas majors to bring in efficiency and safety. Flutura was launched in February 2012 by Krishnan Raman, Derick Jose and Srikanth Muralidhara, who earlier worked at IT services firm Mindtree. Several energy, oil and gas majors use Flutura’s patent pending platform, Cerebra.


Freshdesk
Chennai-based Freshdesk provides a platform that integrates traditional support channels such as phone and email with social channels like Twitter and Facebook.

Freshdesk was founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. In three years, the company has won over 18,000 clients, including Toshiba, Stanford School of Medicine and education company Pearson.


iViZ Security
iViZ is taking ethical hacking to the cloud. It has built a unique artificial intelligence-based technology to simulate a human hacker, showing all the permutations and combinations of possible attacks and defences. iViZ, which is backed by investors such as IDG Ventures, was founded by IIT Kharagpur engineers Bikash Barai and Nilanjan De.


Pawaa
Founded by serial entrepreneur Prakash Baskaran, Pawaa has built a technology platform that secures files and documents persistently for customers such as Indian Army, Central Bank of Kenya and Sterlite. The technology helps solve security, privacy, compliance and data leaks problems.

Qubole
Qubole provides a software platform that helps users run data warehouse jobs on the cloud. This startup has been founded by a pair of former Facebook Big Data engineers, Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma.


Seclore
Incubated and promoted by IIT Bombay, Seclore provides information security to customers such as pharmaceutical company IPCA Labs, gas and engineering firm The Linde Group and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. The firm was founded by IIT engineers Vishal Gupta and Abhijit Tannu.


Uniken
Uniken provides digital security technology to customers like Bank of India and Axis Bank. The startup, which competes with bigger rivals like RSA (a division of EMC), Symantec and Vasco was founded by Sanjay Deshpande, along with his Infosys colleagues Nanjundeshwar Ganapathy and Nilesh Dhande and friend Prakash Salve.

Unmetric
The startup uses artificial intelligence to help companies understand their competitors’ moves and strategy by collating data from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It provides these insights to brands such as Subway, Campbell’s, Toyota and Chevrolet.

Unmetric was founded by IIT Madras alumni Lakshmanan Narayan, Joseph Varghese and Kumar Krishnasami.