View of IIT Bombay from Sameer Hill in Mumbai. Photo credit: Wikimedia.
IIT Bombay is among the top engineering colleges in India. Ola founders Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, along with founders of Housing, MadRat Games, Webaroo, and several other startups have their roots there.
The entrepreneurial cell at IIT Bombay holds an annual summit, which includes a pitch-fest of curated startups. This weekend, four startups got approved and funded on the spot by a large panel of angel investors, including Ajeet Khurana, VC Karthic, Sanjay Mehta, Miten Mehta, and Anirudh Damani. Here are the startups they picked:
Intuit Things
Intuit Things is an IoT startup for home automation. From controlling temperature and light to scheduling appliances and detecting an unwanted presence, it claims to have a “sixth sense” to anticipate your needs. It aims to do all this at more affordable price points than similar imported products in the market.
The Mumbai-based startup’s founder, Neil Savant, has a master’s degree in engineering from Ohio State University and worked in the US for a few years before returning home to be an entrepreneur. Angel investor Sanjay Mehta led the funding commitment of US$100,000 into this startup.
See: This IoT startup gets Deutsche Telecom backing for disrupting GPS
Cloudrino
Cloudrino provides companies with virtual servers on the cloud. Its APIs (application programming interfaces) enable developers to integrate their apps with Cloudrino. It claims to have a scalable architecture enabling quick upgrading or downgrading of services according to requirements. Cloudrino has nodes in data centers in India, Australia, and the US. The Delhi-based startup got a commitment of US$22,000 in funding from the angels at IIT Bombay.
See: How this pioneer built a SaaS hub in Chennai without VC money
FabX
FabX is a marketplace for refurbished furniture. Along with the listing of each product, details of the refurbishing are given. There are also buyback options. Currently, it operates only in Mumbai. The founders – Kunal Mehta, Prasanjeet Suradkar, Abhijeet Pawar, and Piyush Chauhan – are IIT Bombay graduates. The startup got a commitment of US$66,000 in angel funding at the e-summit.
See: Zefo bags $6 million to take the distrust out of used goods trading
MapTags
MapTags takes the pain out of filling out addresses. Instead, users can choose an available word or phrase to map to an address. For example, if ‘Nandini’ is your tag, entering Mapta.gs/Nandini will pull up the address on a user’s phone, along with pictures that make it easy to find the location. This is useful both for guests coming over, as well as food or ecommerce delivery people.
An interesting twist is to book cool tags which could later be resold, such as the resale of internet domain names. The Bangalore-based startup got a commitment of US$18,000 from the angels at the IIT Bombay e-summit.
See: Dot com to dot love: How to use the web’s new domains to get noticed
Converted from Indian rupees. Rate: US$1 = INR 68.13.
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