Mumbai: Four startups Pillpouch Healthtech Pvt Ltd, Doubt Buddy Education Technology Pvt Ltd, Pocketly Infotech Pvt Ltd and Swipe received funding of INR 2 Cr through Nidhi Seed Support System, an umbrella programme conceived and developed by the Innovation & Entrepreneurship division, Department of Science & Technology, Government of India. The startups are incubated by Research Innovation Incubation Design Laboratories (riidl), a not-for-profit organization under Somaiya Trust, supported by the National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, Maharashtra State Innovation Society, Government of Maharashtra. Nidhi SSS provides seed funding to promising and innovative startups. Its objective is to bridge the financial gap in the initial phases that are faced by technologically driven startups.
From edtech to fintech, these startups shine a torch on how riidl is helping accelerate & support the startups amidst this pandemic.
MicroDegree (Pillpouch Healthtech Pvt. Ltd.) aims empowering local technology talent from non-metro with on-demand IT skills in Vernacular languages thereby connecting them with right job opportunities at pocket friendly prices. Founded in 2019, they have 10k+ active users on their platform.
Doubt Buddy app (Doubt Buddy Education Technology Pvt. Ltd.) is the 24 x 7 doubt resolution platform, where students from different classes and subjects can instantly solve doubts in a personalized way. It also caters to all subjects, including the ones covered by JEE and NCERT and provides guidelines and strategies for competitive examinations such as IIT, NIT, IIIT, DTU, DU, AIIMS. They serve the students with a hybrid model so the students have an option to solve the doubt the way they want for example getting the solution instantly or chat with the best tutors via chat, audio etc.
Their traction includes solving over 60k+ doubts to date with a monthly active users of 7k. They have picked 90% of doubts within 2 minutes.
Pocketly Infotech Pvt. Ltd. is a micro-lending platform for college students. It provides a credit line to its users from Rs 500-10,000 and builds up the credit score of students to ensure they have access to credit in college. Their traction to date consists of 400k+ downloads, 5000+ colleges in India, loans worth Rs 40 Cr+ disbursed and 75% month over month user retention.
Swipe is a simple billing and accounting app for small businesses in India. They make it easy for local businesses to invoice their customers over WhatsApp. With Swipe, businesses can send a WhatsApp message with a link that allows their customers to pay instantly with a variety of payment methods. Most of the ~75M SMEs in India still rely on manual processes to track sales, purchases & payments. This is a highly inaccurate and inefficient process.
Additionally, business owners in India need to file monthly tax returns. Currently, they manually consolidate all their sales for the month on a spreadsheet and send it to their accountant for filing. With Swipe it takes less than 10 seconds to send sales reports to the accountant. Today, more than 1000 businesses use Swipe for their daily transactions, and they’re growing 100% MoM. They launched in February and are now recording $1M monthly in transactional volume.
Gaurang Shetty, Chief Innovation Catalyst, riidl said, “Most entrepreneurs struggle to raise angel or seed funding during the early stage and this fund from NIDHI SSS is like a boon for entrepreneurs in the ecosystem.
We, at riidl, supported 4 startups with NIDHI Seed Support grant of Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, additionally providing access to business mentoring, technical mentoring, early customer access support, virtual incubation, networking & outreach opportunities, and many more. We are proud of all the startups achieving new heights and receiving funding to take their startups even higher.
Dr. Anita Gupta, Scientist G / Adviser & Head (Innovation & Entrepreneurship), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt of India has been instrumental in supporting our incubator riidl to build various programs including the NIDHI Seed Support System program.”
riidl is a technology business incubator that supports the creation and incubation of early-stage companies from ideation to commercialization by providing them with resources, labs, government grants, investor connections, funding and mentorship.
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