Cloud-based app testing platform BetaGlide wins $1M Rice Business Plan Competition Prize

IIT Kharagpur student's startup BetaGlide, a cloud-based app testing platform has won $1 million prize at the Rice University Business Plan Competition. The prize money was sponsored by seed-stage venture capital firm Mercury Fund via their Tech Transfer Investment Prize Sponsor, according to a NextBigWhat report.

BetaGlide offers a mobile app testing platform that allows developers to gather information in real-time about the system usage and the behavior of their app- to improve its stability and performance. It enables mobile app developers and marketers to reach out to their users via push notifications, in-app notifications, real-time chat, and push offers. It also allows the developers and marketers to collect feedback from users and prompts them to rate the apps on the respective stores.

With the platform, developers can target users: segment and target users based on their activities, pages they visit, events, location, demographics, engagement, and app's performance; provide in-app feedback and support: enables developers to interact with their users from inbuilt messaging and notification centre; and engage users: send out personalised & targeted push notifications & in-app notifications based on segments and triggers.

The developers can also get insights and analytics by tracking how their various initiatives to communicate with users are faring and how the users are responding to their notifications. In addition, developers can integrate BetaGlide without writing any additional code.

BetaGlide was also one of the nine startups picked by TLabs, an incubator run by Times Internet Ltd (TIL), for it's Fall 2013 Batch.

Here is a video of the startup presenting at the competition.

The Rice Business Plan Competition is a graduate-level student startup competition hosted and organised by the Rice University (Houston). This is the 14th year for the competition, and in that time, it has grown from nine teams competing for $10,000 in prize money in 2001, to 42 teams from around the world competing for more than $1.3 million in cash and prizes.

Mercury Fund is a seed-stage venture capital firm that makes equity investments in compelling and novel software and science-based startup opportunities. The firm has a particular interest in startups associated with seed accelerators, incubators and universities, and frequently invests prior to the formation of a business plan or complete management team.