Tuk Tuk meter creator MindHelix joins third batch of Alchemist Accelerator

MindHelix Technosol Pvt Ltd, a Kochi-based mobile applications startup, has found a place in the third batch of the Alchemist Accelerator programme starting on January 3, 2013. MindHelix, founded by Christin George, Kallidil Kalidasan and Thomas Antony, is the company that created the once popular Tuk Tuk Meter app, which is basically a virtual autorickshaw meter. The company has been incubated at Startup Village, Kochi.

Although MindHelix has developed three apps including an updated version of the original Tuk Tuk with dynamic GPS based auto-fare calculator, it has now pivoted to being a developer of enterprise customer interaction tool.

Kalidasan, COO MindHelix said, "We pitched our product, which is a customer interaction tool for enterprise built on the cloud. They liked the product and were excited about the fact that we already have paying customers in India and that we were already planning to get the product to the US market."

The Alchemist Accelerator based in Menlo Park, San Francisco runs a programme for six months incubating 12 enterprise-centric startups. The programme allocates $30,000 in seed funding to each company and also provides these startups the opportunity to showcase their products to Fortune 100 companies in a session called Customer Summits, which happens five times during the programme.

Moreover mentors and guest lecturers like Sean Ellis from Dropbox, Peter Levine, CEO Xensource and Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan will educate these startups on fundraising, sales  and marketing and even on understanding user metrics.

Accordingly, the six-month programme is broken into two parts, with the first round focussing on customer development and the next on product development. The accelerator's first batch began on July 5 and the second on September 27, 2012.

The accelerator is an initiative started in July 2012 by Stanford lecturer Ravi Belani, who worked as an associate at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) until May 2010. The USP of the Alchemist accelerator programme is that it is backed by the big venture capital names like SAP Ventures, DFJ, Khosla Ventures, USVP & Cisco in the seed funding programme.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)