Meet the 8 startups in the first cohort of Flipkart Leap

Ecommerce major Flipkart has selected eight startups across five categories for the maiden cohort of its accelerator programme Flipkart Leap.

The startups, according to a statement from the Walmart-owned company, have been chosen from over 920 applicants across categories of design and make for India; innovations in digital commerce; technologies to empower retail; SCM and logistics; and enabling deep tech applications.

The chosen startups will be offered an equity-free grant of $25,000 along with four months of mentorship, the company said. The goal of the programme, launched in August 2020, is to help the startups grow, scale, navigate challenges and contribute to India’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem, the statement said. 

The two-pronged programme will include one-on-one businesses and technical mentorship, masterclasses, and networking sessions focused on venture development and building a scalable business. The second track will help the startups explore partnerships with relevant business units within Flipkart, the statement said.

Here’s a look at the eight startups in the first cohort:

ANS Commerce: Founded in 2017, this Gurugram-based startup is a full-stack ecommerce enabler, which provides end-to-end solutions including brand store tech platform, performance marketing, marketplace management, and ecommerce warehousing and fulfilment. It was founded by Sushant Puri, Nakul Singh, Amit Monga, and Vibhor Sahare.

Entropik Technologies: Entropik, founded in 2016 by Rajan Kumar and Lava Kumar, offers ‘emotion AI’ to help brands measure the cognitive and emotional response of consumers towards product experiences, media campaigns and brand content. Through this, the Bengaluru-based firm claims to provide businesses consumer behavioural insights, which helps deliver superlative experiences.

Fashinza: Gurugram-based Fashinza is a managed marketplace that aims to democratize the fashion industry by enabling on-demand manufacturing capacity access to local and international brands. It assists brands from design to delivery, with the goal of making them more agile, demand-driven and profitable. The startup, operating under Smartchain Innovation, was founded in 2020 by Abhishek Sharma and Pawan Gupta.

Gully Network: Set up in 2019 by RentoMojo co-founder Ajay Nain and Prateek Chaturvedi, Gully Network Retail provides a retail-tech platform that delivers full-stack benefits of modern retail, including exclusive supply, increased margin, competitive fulfilment rates, automatic and data-driven stock replenishment and access to credit and working capital, to standalone mid-sized stores.

Piggy: Piggy, operating under Valuevest Technologies, offers a digital personal finance hub, which combines payments, credit, investments, insurance, EPF tracking and financial advisory. The startup was founded in 2016 by Kunal Sangwan, Nikhil Mantha, and Ankush Singh, and is based in Mumbai.

TagBox Solutions: Founded in 2016 by Adarsh Kumar, Saumitra Singh, and Sameer Singh, Bengaluru-based TagBox provides supply chain monitoring solutions using IoT, AI, and ML. It solves problems related to product quality, traceability, and operational efficiency, and serves companies in F&B, pharma and hi-tech/industrial sectors.

UnboxRobotics: UnboxRobotics Labs is working on robotic package sorting solution, which deploys artificial intelligence to handle packages in vertical space and improve employee productivity five-fold in less than 50-70% of the area required by existing methods. The Bengaluru-based startup was founded in 2019 by Pramod Ghadge and Shahid Memon, and has already onboarded logistics and ecommerce players in India and abroad.

Wolkus Technology: Founded in 2018, Bengaluru-based Wolkus Technology offers an AI-based intelligence platform, which uses a series of on-farm sensors to capture real-time conditional data on horticulture crops and provides farm-specific, crop-specific and crop-stage-specific actionable recommendations to farmers. The company was co-founded by Ananda Verma, Shailendra Tiwari, and Saurabh Tiwari.