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Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Civic Champs

Civic Champs : An App that Helps Nonprofit Organisations to Manage their Volunteers

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In a world, where everyone is delving deeper into the competitiveness seeking powerful jobs in the corporate world, let’s have a look at the story of Civic Champs, a mobile app that is helping the nonprofit organizations manage to volunteer. According to Geng Wang and Ryan Underdahl, the founders of Civic Champs, the nonprofit organizations should focus more on their aim and less on tracking volunteers. So, as an initiative to help organizations like these, with a bigger goal to improve our world, they founded Civic Champs in 2019. It has not even been a month that the company has been established, but it is receiving unexpected appreciation and support.

The Founders

Wang went to Michigan State University and completed his Bachelor’s in Supply Chain Management and International Relations in 2008, after which, he went to Harvard to complete his MBA. Wang has a very versatile career profile as he worked as a summer intern in Shell Oil Company, worked as a content manager in a business centre, business analyst at McKinsey and Company, a summer associate at Cue Ball Capital and not to mention deeply engaged in volunteering.

Wang has also co-founded TeamCartoon.com, Rent Jungle and Community Elf. He also served as a board member at Drizzle, Advisory Board Member at The Bee Corp and Clever Real Estate. Wang is still a part of The Bee Corp even after founding Civic Champs.

Civic Champ founder
Image Source: zimbio.com

After graduating from Boise State University in 2010 with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Underdahl went to Kelly School of Business under Indiana University after seven long years. In these span of seven years, Underdahl served as a District Manager (Gitanjali Gems Ltd), Store Manager (Signet), Intern at LRAP Association and currently as the CEO of Civic Champs.

During Underdahl’s days in LRAP Association, he came across Wang and both of them together along with three other employees decided to open Civic Champs.

What is Civic Champs and how it works?

Wang, along with Underdahl, created Civic Champs to help the nonprofit organizations easily deal with volunteering. The platform is created nearly six months ago as a great initiative for social upliftment. Both the volunteers and the nonprofit organizations can interact with each other in a hassle-free and efficient way, thus, making the work of such organizations even easier.

The first and the only, product of the company till date is a mobile-first platform through which the nonprofit organizations can track volunteering and can engage with them. The mobile-based application of Civic Champs is available for iPhone. Like every other application, Civic Champs also uses GPS technology, and along with that, a geofence. A geofence is a part of modern GPS technology that creates a virtual geographical boundary and based on that, the users are alerted when a volunteer is leaving or entering in a particular zone. Basically, once the data is used from a volunteer’s phone it gets tracked, and hence, the users receive an update.

The volunteers, thereby, receive messages from the organizations, if they are free to volunteer, and the app keeps a record of the volunteer hours, by collecting relevant information. Since the app is created for the nonprofit organizations, Civic Champs also receives a donation from the volunteers working for them.

The question may arise that how can there be so many enthusiastic people in a town who can be interested to volunteer for the nonprofit organizations.

Talking about that, My Sister’s Closet is one of the nonprofit organizations that are registered to Civic Champs. The organization provides professional training to low-income women and especially to those women who are not socially accepted. More than 350 people volunteer in this organization through the website of Civic Champs. With the help of Civic Champs’ database, the organisation keeps the data of the volunteers, and without wasting any time, it reaches to them whenever they require them. The story is the same for many other organizations.

The Team and Funding

Within the period of six months, Civic Champs has raised $312,000 in the pre-seed round. The company’s headquarters are based in Great Lakes, Midwestern U.S., and the team currently comprises of ten members. A great initiative taken by Civic Champs has inspired people to sign up both as a volunteer as well as donors, and it will flourish more in the near future.

snaplogic

SnapLogic : One of the “Coolest” Cloud Platform Companies

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Another software company in the marketplace to deal with data integration is excelling in the field and satisfying millions of customers worldwide. The company provides clients with better and many efficient tools to connect applications and transfer data in a hassle-free way. Gaurav Dhillon’s company, SnapLogic was founded in 2006 and is majorly known for web data integration. After the internet has bathed the world with a new aura of possibilities, companies like SnapLogic had reached cloud eleven. The never-ending demand of cloud data sources, SaaS applications and most importantly, efficient data transfer gives a pictorial representation of the success of SnapLogic.

The Founder

SnapLogic was fully functional and became public from 2006. Before Dhillon created SnapLogic, he was already a founder of 2 more start-ups, including Informatica Corp and jaman.com.

Dhillon created Informatica, a software company in 1993 based in California, the United States with $75,000 provided to him by the National Institute of Health. He didn’t have many facilities then, so with this little amount of capital, he started the company in his garage. Informatica was quite a success, and it was acquired in 2015 for $5.3billion.

Snaplogic founder
Image Source: cbronline.com

Dhillon’s next start-up was Jaman.com, which was founded in 2005 in California as well. The website ceased all its operations in 2017. Jaman was a site that provided movie discovery sites and thus, let users download videos on demand.

SnapLogic

EAI stands for enterprise application integration, and this is what Dhillon’s interest lied upon. After Informatica emerged as one of the most successful start-ups in the world of EAI, Dhillon’s passion triggered to create more in this area. According to him, a lot of areas was unexplored in this field, and he buckled up to roll the stones.

So SnapLogic was created in 2006 after Dhillon himself invested in this business, and in 2009, he became the CEO of the company. The main focus of Dhillon was to reduce the problems the users faced with cloud computing. The company is based in San Mateo, California and serves throughout the world.

Success of SnapLogic

The first big news of SnapLogic was raising $2.3million in Series A funding in 2009. The prime investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Maples Investments, Brian McClendon (Google Engineering Vice President), Naval Ravikant and a few more. After the closing of this funding round, Dhillon was declared the CEO of the company, and he announced that the money will be invested in improving the DataFlow platform. The data integrating solution of SnapLogic turned out to be very useful for SaaS applications and websites, like SalesForce, Twitter, and SugarCRM, etc.

In 8th December 2010, Dhillon announced that the company has raised $10million in Series B funding, and new technologies have been incorporated in the products of SnapLogic, which is both time and cost-efficient. After this funding round, Dhillon planned to expand the business in the European market. One of the biggest success of SnapLogic was that it became the world’s first company to integrate data that existed both on-premise and in the cloud. This was followed by the launch of elastic integration in June 2013, which made application integration in the clouds even simpler. By the end of 2013, SnapLogic provided the users with 150 various data connectors for applications like SAP and Oracle.

On 10th December 2015, SnapLogic raised $37.5 million in the funding round led by Microsoft, Silver Lake Waterman, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Triangle Peak Partners. At the end of this year, the net worth of SnapLogic turned out to be $96.3million. By this time, machine learning and artificial intelligence already started spreading like a wildfire in the tech market. Taking a note, the company made a very smart move by introducing the SnapLogic Integration Assistant, an AI-powered product of the company in May 2017. In this year, the company also raised $136.3 million from the existing investors.

SnapLogic Today

The latest and one of the biggest successes in the history of SnapLogic is Gartner naming the company (SnapLogic) as a leader in the Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years. The fascinating performance of SnapLogic in data integration has driven the world crazy with more time-efficient and better ways to connect applications and integrate data.

omnivis

OmniVis : Medical Science Meets Technology to Make the World Better and Disease Free

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In the bigger picture, the present condition of our world is no less than mayhem. On the one hand, science is creating wonders with technology making our lives easier but on the other hand, millions of people are dying every day due to lack of treatment and development in medical science. Who is to blame for this? Are we way too ignorant to make significant contributions in the medical community? Or the price is so high that we have blatantly stopped trying? There are so many people dying every minute suffering from incurable diseases or due to late detection of infections in their body. Though the renowned and biggest research centres of our world are working together to invent instruments that can easily detect diseases, they are way too costly for common citizens.

With the zeal to alter the future of our world and stop it from destruction, four scholars of Purdue University, Katherine Clayton, Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, Jacqueline Linnes and Steve Wereley, came up with a unique solution to detect infectious and deadly diseases, which are both times efficient and affordable. With the mission to create affordable medical equipment, these four enlightened minds founded OmniVis, a company that will reach out to common people, help them detect disease and make out society better in terms of well-being.

Founders of OmniVis

Currently, Katherine Clayton is the CEO of the company with Ursem, Linnes and Wereley working as the Advisors.

Katherine Clayton Founder OmniVis
Image Source: halcyonhouse.org

Clayton, who is originally from San Francisco, went to Pursue University to complete her PhD in mechanical engineering. When she was an undergraduate student, she had already decided to work with healthcare products and make easy infection and disease detection equipment available to common people. When Clayton was a kid, she lost someone very close to her, due to the absence of better tools in the medical field, and hence, this was the beginning of her dream to do better for the community. She, with other three scholars, co-founded OmniVis in 2017, and since then, it has received worldwide support and funding.

Ursem is associated with Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor which is under Purdue University. Her main area of research involves molecular biology, computational biology and neuroscience.

Linnes is also an assistant professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as well. The Linnes Lab basically works to create technologies that can detect pathogens in a time-efficient way and stop them from propagating. She also has her own start-up, PotaVida founded in April 2010. The company’s goal is to develop pocket-friendly water purifiers and reach to the rural areas of the entire world.

Currently, Wereley is a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. His specialised fields are fluid mechanics and optics. He is also the founder of a company called Microfluidics Innovations.

The Idea

Since all of them belonged to a strong research background, OmniVis emerged out as a successful idea. More than a business, it is really an idea that inspired every company, research institutes throughout the world. OmniVis has created products that can detect Cholera with less than an hour with its concepts and techniques.

Currently, OmniVis works with iPhone but soon it will incorporate the software in Android and start testing the beta version. OmniVis works in a simple process with few steps, collect the sample, detect pathogen and map location. OmniVis detects and shows the location on the map from where the sample was taken to alert the authorities. And all of these are getting done within 30 minutes with the technology of OmniVis.

The Achievements

In 2017, OmniVis acquired the first place in Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project funded by Vodafone Foundation. In 2018, OmniVis was nominated for World Changing Idea Finalist. In June 2018, the company received Phase I SBIR Grant from National Science Foundation. In the same year, OmniVis won the 2018 AMPLIFY Pitch Competition where participants from 46 different countries participated. After winning the Biological Innovation Award in February 2019, OmniVis took a step ahead and expanded out of Indiana. In May 2019, the team reached out to Bangladesh and shared the benefits of OmniVis products with them.

Some of the major investors at OmniVis are Vodafone Foundation, Deloitte, Fast Company, Purdue University, halcyon and many more.

Gett

Gett : Online Taxi Service, Making the Lives of Israeli People Easier

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Have you ever noticed that the majority of the successful start-ups have emerged out during the time of crisis? Bored with the monotonous life, saying no to 9to5 jobs, addicted to gaming, and in this case, a 30 long minutes waiting for a taxi resulted in a successful story of getting a Taxi. We all have heard about the famous online cab hiring companies, like Grab, Uber, Lyft, which are majorly dominating in the United States. But, Gett is an Israel based start-up, launched in 2010, not only used for customer’s transportation but also couriers.

Shahar Waiser and Roi More are the two entrepreneurs, who created the Gett app for people of Israel and expanded it to Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It was in the year 2009 when Waiser decided to open his own company when he became tired of waiting for a taxi for more than 30 minutes. Since Waiser was already good at doing business; the journey wasn’t that hard for him at all.

Shahar Waiser

Before further confusion arises, Shahar Waiser and Dave Waiser are the names of a single person, that is, founder of Gett. He completed his education in Computer Science from The Academic College of Tel-Aviv, Yaffo. Waiser mainly focused on learning Java, and Gett was not his first startup. Before Gett, he founded Infoauto, an online service that provided information about used cars and real estate. He created Infoauto while studying in college, and it became the first and largest company for classifieds informational system. Later, it was acquired by MARAM Group.

Shahar-Waiser Gett
Image Source: sk.ru

In April 2001, Waiser became the first CEO of Comverse, a company dealing with mobile data, telecommunication and related things. He then moved to Moscow and worked there for the Russian Federation and also received the “President Annual Sales Award”.

After leaving Comverse in March 2005, he founded Loyalize. Waiser designed a Social TV solution that dealt with real-time management that can be used by millions at a time. This product was used during the times of Oscars, Grammys, and many such prestigious awards, and even, got featured in Forbes as one of the topmost entertaining technologies. Later, it was acquired by Function(x).

Before launching GetTaxi, Waiser already became famous due to his smart inventions and entrepreneurial skills. Gett success emerged out as the brightest solution to the poor transportation condition of Israel, followed by becoming a very profitable company.

Roi More

More completed his graduation from Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and passed out in 2002 with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. Apart from co-founding Gett, More also founded Kamay Holdings (later acquired by 888.com) and MyLotto.com.

Success of Gett

Waiser started his work in 2009 and released the beta version of the app in Hebrew, which only operated in the area of Tel-Aviv. The company was officially launched on 1 November 2010 and eventually, expanded to London in 2011. In 2012, GetTaxi expanded to Moscow as well and opened their first United States office in the city of New York. The company raised $30 million in the funding round held in June 2012, in addition to which, an American Billionaire offered $9 million to help Gett enter the U.S market. The company operates as Juno in New York.

In 11th April 2016, Gett launched the new feature of splitting the payment among six people at the max. This definitely increased the number of booking, as it was more affordable. The biggest news of Gett, in 2016, was its partnership with Volkswagen Group, which helped Gett raise $300 million only from this partnership.

In June 2018, the company raised more than $80 million from its existing investors, Volkswagen Group, private firm Baring Vostok Capital Partner, and the American billionaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries. By 2018, the company raised $700 million in total and sales rides worth more than $1 billion. Among all the markets, Gett doing business in the New York market is expanding exponentially with approximately 45,000 drivers. This was closely followed by the London market, where most of the black cabs available were doing business with Gett.

Today, Gett is available in more than 120 cities, used by 20,000 companies worldwide to transport goods and couriers. The last round of funding helped Gett achieve the status of Unicorn, which is really a great success for any company.

The company is also focused on making rides more eco-friendly, hence reducing the dead mileage. Gett also invests in R&D significantly to use more recycled products.

grab

Grab : One of the Biggest Startups in South-east Asia

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“The youth of today is the future of tomorrow”, probably one of the famous quotes, you will find written almost everywhere. It is expected of the young generation to build a better tomorrow by eradicating today’s problem, be it a social, or an economical cause. The success of Grab narrates the story of a start-up based in Malaysia, which improved both the social environment of the city and made taxi booking much economical plus convenient.

The community of taxi drivers in Malaysia didn’t have a good reputation, as at times the customers were overcharged, the security of women was a big question, and the economic condition of the drivers was unsatisfactory. Anthony took the crisis of his city into a note and together, with Hooi Ling, started a business plan to launch a ride service.

Both the founders of Grab, Anthony Tan and Hooi Ling Tan graduated from Harvard Business School, and that is how they met each other. Grab was founded as GrabTaxi in June 2012, and after a couple of years, the headquarters shifted from Malaysia to Singapore. Today, Grab provides more than just a taxi service and has customers around eight countries.

Anthony Tan

Grab founders
Image Source: yourstory.com

Anthony pursued his Bachelor’s degree in economics followed by completing his MBA from Harvard Business School. Anthony belonged to a financially dominant family of Malaysia. His father ran a family an automobile business named Tan Chang Motors. After coming back from Harvard, Anthony joined his family business as head of marketing. But, after being a spectator of the degrading condition of transportation companies in Malaysia, he came up with the idea of opening his own start-up like the ones dominating in the U.S. Especially, when he found his friends and family complaining about it, he decided that he had to do something. He contacted Hooi Ling Tan, his classmate from Harvard, who chalked down a business plan.

Hooi Ling Tan

Unlike Anthony, who after Harvard joined his family business straightway, Hooi Ling had a better taste of the corporate world. Since she was a mechanical engineer graduate, she worked as an equipment engineer in Eli Lilly before going to Harvard. She was also a business analyst at McKinsey and Company and worked there for a couple of years.

After graduating from Harvard, Hooi Ling again joined McKinsey and Company as an associate and later, switched to salesforce.com as a senior director of pricing intelligence and monetization. She worked there till 2015, a couple of years even after co-founding Grab.

The Hurdles

Initially, when both Anthony and Hooi Ling stepped into the outer world and started pursuing the taxi companies, they received several rejections. The concept was new to them, and nobody was really that enthusiastic. So, they needed to approach drivers, and the common crowd, individually, to make them understand how they could be benefited. Both of them also took feedback from the citizens of Malaysia if they would like to bring a change to networking.

Finally, after several rejections, one taxi company with thirty taxis was willing to give it a shot. They even received a sum of $25,000 from Harvard Business School to start the business and the mobile app. Finally, the company was launched in 2012, and in the first couple of years, Anthony learned a lot from his mistakes and implemented better strategies.

The Flaws

In the beginning, the capital for Grab was funded by the Tan family, and it continued for quite a long time until chaos was created. After the funding round in April 2014, the company was confused about the total fundraised, which created a lot of fuss followed by some unnecessary expenditure. Things turned upside down, resulting in no salary for the drivers for one month.

Anthony realized it was high time to buckle up and manage the finance. He brought some discipline to the company by bringing some professional investors in the house and not relying fully on the Tan family.

The Right Decisions

Since Anthony focused on the betterment of social relations between a driver and the customer, especially, on the security of the women, every driver was interviewed personally. He said that though this process was time-consuming, he couldn’t compromise with it.

Today, Grab serves customers in more than 168 cities, across 8 countries. Apart from GrabTaxi, services, like GrabFood, GrabPay, GrabBike, has also been released. By 2017, the company completed one billion rides and 68 million downloads.

The company also started investing in R&D, as he is focused more on hiring smart people who can contribute more to the business than spending millions on advertising. Anthony truly is a person to admire with great passion to ameliorate the condition of our society.

inDriver

inDriver : Saying No to the Dictatorship of the Centralised Taxi Service

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How many times the petrol or diesel price hiked, and your cab driver charged you twice the money? How many times were you forced to pay almost triple the money to a taxi driver due to an unstoppable rain? At these moments, we don’t really feel like living in a free world anymore, do we? Drivers manipulating us in the situations when our hands are tied up, and we possibly cannot do anything but pay, as we cannot pause our daily lives because prices are hiked.

But, what if anyone creates an entirely new system for us, through which we would pay the optimal price to the driver? Well, to be frank, that needs a lot of thinking and desk work. But, can you imagine a start-up based on this idea coming out from one of the coldest parts of the world, which is often considered as a drawback and not an advantage?

inDriver, a private company for transportation emerged out from Siberia, one of the coldest parts of the world seven years ago. The start-up was created as the need of the hour, which now serves 32 million customers over 26 different countries.

inDriver
Image Source: mashable.com

How inDriver started?

Yakutsk is one of the coldest city of Eastern Siberia, having records for unimaginable low temperature during the winter season. And, in 2012’s New Year’s Eve, the temperature in Yakutsk dropped to -45 degrees. Taking advantage of the situation, the local taxi drivers started charging double the price to go anywhere around the city. But we all know desperate time calls for desperate measures.

In response to this acute crisis, the people of Yakutsk made a group of social networks, called “independent drivers”. The customers were supposed to post where they wanted to go, along with the fare they are willing to give, and they were contacted by the drivers. This received a huge response, and in just six months, 50,000 customers joined the group.

After a year, inDriver application was founded by Arsen Tomsky based on the group’s free peer-to-peer model. It was launched on 24th June 2013, with establishing the headquarters in Siberia, which now has been shifted to New York. Tomsky studied programming (Riga Aviation Institute) and applied mathematics (Yakutsk State University) and founded three more start-ups other than inDriver. Undoubtedly, Tomsky’s programming skill led to the development of this application, but had it not been for the people of Yakutsk, inDriver wouldn’t have even existed.

Why inDriver is better?

The unique strategy of inDriver is that there is no fixed rate for a fixed tour. Unlike other driver apps around the world, inDriver doesn’t fix the rate for your tour. Isn’t that phenomenal? I mean, how many apps do you find that let you suggest a price for yourself. The commission rate for the drivers of inDriver is also comparatively lower to Uber and Lyft. One might think the app is not quite beneficial for the service providers, which is absolutely a wrong idea, because the price isn’t forced on any local drivers. Once the customer suggests a price, it is shared with the nearby drivers, and it is up to them to accept or deny it.

Since the business is based on a P2P model, decentralization plays a very important part of its success. The popularity of inDriver has spread in huge cities as well as small towns.

Growth of the company

Only after a year of inDriver’s launch, it made its first entry on the foreign lands of Astana, Kazakhstan in December 2014. Initially, when the app started functioning, it only dealt with intracity tours. But from July 2014, intercity tours were also available on the same application itself.

In February 2017, the app completed its 100 million rides while the number of registered users hiked to 5 million. The funding of $5 million that inDriver received in 2017 from LETA Capital followed by $10 million from the same in 2018 was invested to expand the business USA and Canada. In the financial year of 2017-2018, the total turnover of the company exceeded $300 million followed by the launch of the application in the markets of Central and South America.

Recently, inDriver expanded its service to South Africa, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Bolivia and even India. Currently, there are 32 million registered users of the app that have crossed 300 million rides so far.