Two IIM Ahmedabad graduates, Radhakrishna and Raghunandan G decided to come up with their own business and launched an online platform to rent taxis in 2011. Both the founders have estimated to earn a total revenue of about Rs 100 Crores by fiscal 2015. The company initially partnered with around 25 cab operators in Bangalore and around 15 in Delhi. They also partnered with operators like Mega Cabs and Cell Cabs. Taxi For Sure has reached an operational profitability and has branded about 550 cabs with the Taxi For Sure label.

TAXI FOR SURE

‘Red Bus’ a great business venture that was started by a group of three BITS Pilani alumni, Phanindra Sama , Charan Padmaraju and Sudhakar Pasupunuri. They were around the age of 25 when they thought of computerizing the booking of bus tickets. The business venture achieved great heights after a span of three and a half years, redBus introduced a bus ticketing software for the operators that was linked to the redBus portal, simplifying the procedure to book tickets online. Initially redBus was working on the basis of seat quotes from operators. The unsold tickets were returned to the operators within a defined time before the departure of the bus. June 2013, redBus was sold to Ibibo Group for a sum of Rs600- 700 Crores, one of the biggest overseas strategic acquisitions of an Indian internet asset. Currently redBus is selling over a million tickets a month and the gross value of transactions is estimated to be over Rs 600 crores.

REDBUS

Flipkart, co- founded by two IIT Delhi alumni Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in 2007. They share a long history from being college friends to colleagues in Amazon.com and finally co founders of the country’s best known online retail brand. They quit their jobs to start Flipkart which initially focussed on online sale of books and later expanded its horizons to electronic goods and life style products. Sachin and Binny started Flipkart with an initial investment of INR 4,00,000 in a small rented flat in southeast Bangalore. It was only in 2008 that the business was formally incorporated as a company in October 2008 as Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd.Flipkart received US$ 1 million from Accel India (2009), US$10 (2010) and US$20 million (June 2011) from Tiger Global, US$ 140 from MIH (Naspers Group) and ICONIQ Capital (August 2012. The company announced, on 10 July 2013, that it has raised an additional $200 million from existing investors including Tiger Global, Naspers, Accel Partners and Iconiq Capital. In July 2013, Flipkart raised USD 160 million from private equity investors. In October 2013, it was reported that Flipkart had raised an additional $160 million from new investors Dragoneer Investment Group, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, Sofina SA and Vulcan Inc. with participation from existing investor Tiger Global. On 26 May 2014, Flipkart announced that it has raised $210 million from Yuri Milner’s DST Global and its existing investors Tiger Global, Naspers and Iconiq CapitalFlipkart, which currently employs over 4,500 people sells nearly 20 products per minute and is aiming at generating a revenue of 50 billion (US$0.81 billion) by 2015.It has a huge list of acquisitions the most recent being Myntra.com, which has been acquired in an estimated INR 2,000 crore deal.

FLIPKART

Snapdeal a joint effort of Kunal Bahl, a Wharton graduate and his IIT Delhi alumni Rohit Bansal. Bahl quit his secure job with Microsoft job based in Seattle. The two minds started working on this great concept in 2007. After three years of brain storming they launched Snapdeal as a daily online deals site in February, 2010 but expanded only in September, 2011. Over time the model went through a lot of changes and is now one of India’s largest online market place. It has about 20 million registered users that offer an assortment of about 4 million+ products.With three acquisitions (Grabbon.com, esportsbuy.com and shopo.in), Snapdeal emerged as a major player in the online market space. It received 5 rounds of funding $12 million from Nexus Venture Partners( 2011), $45 million from Bessemer Venture Partners (2011), $50 million from eBay, $133 million again from eBay (Feb 2014) and finally $100 million from Blackrock, Temasek Holdings, Premji Invest and a few others (May 2014).

SNAPDEAL

Myntra was started by three IIT alumni Mukesh Bansal, Ashutosh Lawania, in February 2007 Myntra.com was in the business of personalization of products online. The products ranged from T-shirts, mugs, greeting cards, calendars, key chains, diaries etc. It was only in 2010 that the company expanded its catalogue to retail fashion and lifestyle products. Myntra received its first funding from Accel Partners, Sasha Mirchandani from Mumbai Angels and another angel investor in October 2007 to start its venture. Subsequently, Myntra received $5 million from NEW- IdnoUS Ventures, IDG Ventures and Accel Partners. A third funding worth (November 2008), $14 million from Tiger Global and a few existing investors, another $20 million from Tiger Global (2011) finally it was Premji Invest and few other investors that pumped in a total of $50 million.The biggest turning point for Myntra was marked on May 22, 2014 when Flipkart acquired Myntra for a total of $300 million.

MYNTRA

The history of TravelTriangle.com is one inspirational story of all times. The co- founders, childhood best friends and IIT graduates, team up in a garage, quit their well paid jobs at Adobe and Yahoo to execute their idea which is currently minting crores for the duo. Travel Traingle, an online travel service company was launched by Sankalp Agrawal and Sanchit Garg in 2011, a year later after they quit their jobs. A third person named Prabhat Gupta an IIT graduate was their friend school was added to the team the same year.Their idea was to link customers with travel agents offering the best deals, customized according to the traveller’s requirement. Every enquiry by a customer reached a total of three agents. The best deal was then presented before the customer.

TravelTriangle.Com

Lenskart founder Peyush Bansal has a very interesting and inspiring history. His thirst to become an Entrepreneur made him quit his well paid job at Microsoft and come to India. With seed money of Rs 25 Lakh and the basement of his parent’s house, he started with Vayloo Technologies which is a classifieds website in June, 2008. Meanwhile he felt the need of pursuing an MBA, hence enrolled himself into a one-year post-graduate diploma in entrepreneurship at IIM Bangalore to learn more about managing a business.His course made him realize that a classifieds website would not help him reach his goal and hence launched Flyrr in India in June, 2009. Flyrr received a magnificent response but there were issues regarding the delivery of products. He later introduced the Flyrr model in India of online selling of glasses, sunglasses and contact lenses. Due to the great discount and the 14-day, no-questions-asked return policy, Lenskart became a hit and received a funding of $4 million from IDG Ventures India in 2011. In addition to Lenskart, Bansal is also running a few other websites namely Watchkart, Bagskart, searchmycampus.com. Lenskart has estimated to earn revenue of about Rs 5 Crores this year.

LENSKART

This is a story as to how a classroom project turned into a serious business option Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta. Kohli and Gupta are BITS Pilani alumni and came up with a robot making company after building a robot that waited at tables in the college cafeteria. They later programmed it to act as a tour guide to guests during seminars. Inspired by their college project, Kohli and Gupta started a Grey Orange Robotics in 2009 to help some of India's largest online retailers automate their warehouses. Grey Orange Robotics is the first and only robot making company in the Indian logistics industry. It builds robots that can move shelves stacked with various products to a floor assistant who then scans a bar code to confirm the right items. The robot in turn moves the chosen products to the shipping bay where workers seal the packages for final transport.GOR has received funding from combined investment from BITS Spark Angels, a network run by the alumni of BITS Pilani, and Blume Ventures Advisors.

Grey Orange Robotics

ReportBee was a joint venture by four alumni of IIM Bangalore, Anantharaman Mani, Anan T, Balaganesh S and Vinod Kumar. ReportBee has brought about a digital report card that enables the user to track the progress of a child and make comparisons on various tangents by making use of algorithms.Report Bee is piloting in 64 government schools in Tamil Nadu. It has also revamped the report structure in five Chennai Corporation schools. ReportBee also has three data analysis projects for Tamil Nadu Government Education Department in its agenda. The application, which is available for Rs 4,000-8,000 per month per school, is being used by 18 schools in Tamil Nadu and is in pilot phase in 30 more schools.It was a normal walk in a school corridor that made Anantharaman come up with the idea of ReportBee. He had a meeting for a program to help students in a school and during the walk he saw a huge pile of ‘student progress cards’ dumped as garbage. This coupled with the problems they faced in the compiling results for the previous three years of every student, inspired Anantharam to come up with digital reports for students

ReportBee

Exotel was founded by Shivakumar Ganesan an alumni of BITS Pilani in 2011. After giving five years of his life to Yahoo, he switched to Flipkart, six months into the job he felt the need to start his own business.He started with Roopit, an online C2C marketplace which later motivated him into coming up with Exotel, that provides telephony on the cloud for its clients. He felt that there was a need of one telephone number that would receive voice calls, SMS and ensured that not one call should be missed that would have resulted in a business deal.It provides telephony on the cloud for its clients, mainly small and medium enterprises. Exotel provides a quick and easy way for an SME to purchase a telephone number, by-passing the cumbersome route to get a telephone connection. He found his client base in small and medium enterprises and start ups. Today he has a client base of 350 companies and has crossed Rs 1 crore in revenues. It received a funding of Rs 2.5 crores from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures and is now working towards a second funding.

Exotel