Bangalore Based Startup Tapchief Raises Funding from Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm's Founder & CEO
MindBatteries – the India’s first Edutainment venture hosted the IDEATHON #ChaseYourDreams Contest Grand Finale of their new Startupreneur series on 15 April 2016 at Delhi Technological Univeristy(DTU). DTU happens to be Alma mater of Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder & CEO PayTm, where 15 years ago he was mocked at for not knowing English. Vijay awarded INR 1 Crore investment & mentoring to the grand prize winner of the contest. The finale was attended by investors, VCs,students as well as startups. People had come from all across India to witness this grand event.
Bangalore based startup ‘Tapchief’ won the grand prize of INR 1 Crore out of 1200+ entries in the contest pan India. TapChief is a platform where anyone can seek advice from industry experts via phone calls. TapChief was founded in early January 2016 by BITS Pilani students Shashank Murali, Binay Krishna & Arjun Krishna who graduate in May 2016. The platform leverages technology to make the process of discovery seamless and provide end to end service in terms of scheduling and executing the phone calls. It has experts from 1500+ organisations with 6000+ skill sets ranging from verticals such as HR, Banking, Finance, Technology, Design, Marketing etc.
The contest was opened after the candid interview with Vijay by Chief Edutainment Officer of Mindbatteries, Simarpreet Singh. The Series, called Startupreneur Series, will cover 15 entrepreneurs across globe in a candid manner and will provide people with opportunities to connect with these entrepreneurs.
The first opportunity came in form of Ideathon where ideas were invited from people across India. More than 1200 ideas were submitted for the contest. Ideathon had a jury of 70+ people from India and abroad. Jury consisted of diverse people who are mentors, investors, VCs, entrepreneurs etc. And represented various organizations like TiE,NASSCOM, ah! Ventures,IAN, Letsventure etc.
After a rigorous process, each idea was scanned by multiple jury members and Top 100 list was released. It was followed by all 100 ideas going through intense scrutiny once and jury coming up with Top 20 ideas. MindBatteries organised Bootcamp for the Top 20 with Inc42 on 14 April 2016 at Innov8 New Delhi to help startups get clarity on pitching and business modelling.
On April 15,top 5 startups chosen by Vijay’s Team pitched live. These were the startups :
Apeirogon
The startup wants to make dynamic & connected news pages with contextual layers, behavioural profiling to enhance reader engagement. Delhi-based edtech startup Civilsdaily was founded in 2015 by Shikhar Sachan and Rohit Pande.
Gramophone
GramOphone is aimed at sourcing raw material from players in inputs and chemical industry and would sell them via its toll free number.
Proelp
The startup’s mission is to bring the healthcare sector online by creating a user friendly and intelligent mobile platform. They have built an easy-to-use app that allows users to : 1. Ask queries to over 50+ doctors covering 10 specialities. ProElp was founded in 2015 by Varun Jindal, Saumya Sharma and Raghubansh Mani.
Partiko
Delhi-based Partiko App is a last minute events discovery and booking marketplace for the spontaneous buying users in the metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore etc. Partiko was founded in 2014 by Amanjot Malhotra.
Tapchief
Bangalore-based Tapchief offers a cohesive platform to discover and schedule calls with experts to get advice across domains. It was founded in 2016 by Shashank Murali.
The event kickstarted with a fireside chat between Vijay Shekhar Sharma moderated by Jyoti Kamal (Senior Editor,CNN-IBN). The 40 minute fireside was followed by Q-A Round from Vijay moderated by Simarpreet Singh. Vijay candidly answered questions of the audience for more than 40 minutes.
Vijay talked about his experiences with Ratan Tata, Jack Ma, Elon Musk among others. Vijay’s humour and wit ensured everyone had a gala time. The QA round was followed by pitching round where Vijay was accompanied by Dhruv Sharma(Paytm) and Munish Jauhar (TiE Chandigarh). The participants were thrown bouncers by Vijay and other judges. After a 5 minute pitch time, each top entrant received live questions from jury. The event ended with Vijay handing out cheque to winner and prize distribution to all top participants. Along with money, the top 5 walked away with free coworking space, cloud credits, fundraising opportunity and other gifts brought together by Mindbatteries.
The event was followed by lunch of Vijay with jury members who had flown from all across India. Everyone was in praise of such a high level event being organized for startups in India. Mindbatteries is committed to providing such opportunities to startups and entrepreneurs in upcoming videos of Startupreneur Series too.
