In India it is a great time for startups, and if you have any ideas in mind, maybe you should read about top 5 Indian startups that started as ideas and now are doing really well in 2020.
OYO
You definitely have heard about OYO. OYO is one of the world’s largest hotel network brands. Because of OYO you can easily book a room anywhere at very affordable prices for hours or days.
OYO’s business model is relatively simple’ OYO does not possess properties, but it ties up with certain already built hotels and receives some rooms which are then given to people for some time period using OYO services. OYO renovates the hotels and the rooms according to its own checklist. OYO makes money by charging around 22% commission on monthly bases by owners of the hotels. One of the main reasons for OYO’s success is that it solved the issues related to affordability, cleanliness and availability of hotels. Booking a room with OYO is very simple, OYO has an easy-to-use app for booking, which allows users to book rooms in just a few seconds. OYO has 180 million + users.
OYO is founded by Ritesh Aggarwal. Ritesh’s journey started at an early age. When Ritesh was only 17 he decided to drop out from college and start his first startup by the name of Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd, which was modeled after Airbnb. Ritesh was quick to realize that the budget hospitality sector lacked predictability, because of which Oravel was converted into OYO Rooms in 2013 focusing on affordable and easy to book rooms.
Paytm
During an era where online money transactions have become so normal, Paytm is widely used, Paytm was founded in 2010 by Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Originally Paytm started as a prepaid mobile and DTH recharge platform. Paytm wallet was introduced in 2014, which the Indian Railways and Uber included as payment options. It also started powering payment gateway for Indian Railways. In 2016 movies, events, and amusement park ticketing was launched by Paytm. In this year Paytm QR was also launched.
Paytm crossed over 100 million app downloads which made it India’s first payment app to do so in 2017. By 2018 Paytm expanded so much that it launched ‘Paytm for business’ which allows merchant to track their payments and every day settlements in few seconds, this attracted merchants towards it and made its base grow to over 7 million by March 2017, Paytm for business is now called Business with Paytm app. In 2019 Paytm joined ties with Citibank to launch Paytm’s first credit card.
Paytm has won outstanding Startup of the Year Award at Forbes Leadership Awards 2016.
Journey of Paytm’s founder was not easy, his first company was ‘XS Communications’, it was a college based startup. He learnt coding all by himself and then created a content management system which was being used by many publications, which included The Indian Express also.
Meesho
Meesho is a social commerce platform which was founded by Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal in 2015. It provides a platform to businesses and individuals to start online stores through social networking sites. Meesho’s headquarter is in Bengaluru, India. Meesho is one of the 3 companies to get selected for Y combinator in the year 2016. In 2019, Meesho got investment from Facebook which made it the first startup to do so. This is also the reason because of which it got its place in our list of top 5 Indian startups.
In fall of 2015 Aatrey and Barnwal created FashNear, which was a fashion discovery and commerce app. Later in 2015, they pivoted to Meesho, Meesho is short for ‘meri shop’. It was created to give physical stores a platform to sell their products online. After a while Meesho pivoted again, this time into an online distribution channel which gave opportunity to individual sellers to sell their product via WhatsAPP, Facebook and other social networks.
Vedantu
It was founded by 4 friends Vamsi Krishna, Saurabh Saxena, Pulkit Jain, and Anand Prakash in 2011 but was launched in 2014 for public use. The name Vedantu is derived from Sanskrit word Veda meaning knowledge and Tantu meaning network. However vedantu is not their first startup, their first startup was Lakshya. It provides services to students from class fourth to twelfth for ICSE and CBSE. The main focus is paid on live online classes in STEM, Hindi, English, Sanskrit etc. It provides study material, tests and assignments.
It was named as Best Organization to Develop Technology for Education, in 2016. Vedantu was named as one of the winners of KINSES2016 EduAwards, it was also in the list of top 100 startups to watch, it was also awarded as online education startup of the year in 2015. It is not only providing education through online classes but is also providing job opportunities for teachers.
Zomato
It is a food delivery and restaurant aggregator start-up founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in the year 2008. Recently Zomato has started grocery delivery. Zomato is growing and expanding rapidly. After success was seen in Delhi-NCR the company wasted no time and started expanding in other cities and then in 2012 to other countries. The tech bone was well maintained too by launching its app. Headquarter of zomato is in Gurgaon, Haryana.
One fine day when founders Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, noticed that in their office a lot of people were waiting eagerly just to see the menu card, they got an idea to open their website. They did as they thought, they opened a web site on which they uploaded soft copies of the menu. Soon after everyone in their office started using this, after a while when traffic on their website increased they expanded their website. It was originally named Foodiebay. When Foodiebay started getting good response the founders decided to modify and expand it.
Why Startups?
After reading the story of Top 5 Indian Startups , if you are still thinking why startups? Then here are some points to answer you :
- Power of creating something from nothing
- Job isn’t more secure in the long run
- Money
- Excitement
- Ownership
- Growth multipliers
- Chance to expand skills
- Passion
Top 5 Indian Startups by Muskan Khanna