While it seems irrelevant and sometimes sexist to say “women entrepreneurs”, we do so to shed light on the many not-so-heard-of women out there running successful businesses or are great leaders, or both. We also do this to encourage more women with a flair for business leadership to think about joining the startup ecosystem.
Here are two success stories from the
Pitney Bowes’ accelerator program.
Shreyaa Ratra – Cofounder, SponsifymeName: Easyleadz.com
Sector: B2B
Date of launch: 24th August, 2016
1. Product descriptionA crowd-sourced sales prospecting platform that helps users to find professional contacts (emails) of their target customers. As we get data in raw format, we enrich the data through email signatures; parsing, standardization and email validation to provide users with clean and verified contacts.
We plan to solve three major problems for sales people:
a) Finding their prospects via crowd-sourcing and purchase signals.
b) Social recommendation selling. Helping them find "right" connect for an introduction.
c) Sales as a service over cloud that helps them reach out to locations where their sales team can’t reach. This will generate millions of freelancer sales jobs in even rural parts of country.
2. Reason for joining Pitney Bowes’ (PB) accelerator programExpertise and experience of the mentors at PB, quality of startups they have produced in previous batches. These two reasons were enough for me to apply for this accelerator program.
3. What did you gain from this experience?
Through the Pitney Bowes accelerator program, we have been given access to tools and technologies that complement our core product. Their patented software has helped us scale our data enrichment capabilities making our platform robust.
Dr. Shikha Suman – Founder, MedimojoName: Medimojo
Sector: Health tech
Date of launch: December 12th, 2015
1. Product descriptionMedimojo is a health data aggregation and analytics platform. It’s a patient-centric, personalized, participatory cloud based service where users can store, track and manage their health on the Go. It aggregates vast amounts of fragmented health data into digitally organized, structured formats. The data so aggregated is analysed through NLP/ML to provide insights to manage health better and live a healthier, disease free life.
The aggregated anonymised health data is of significance to all 4 Ps of healthcare system - namely, patients, providers, payers (insurance companies) and policy makers.
2. Reason for joining Pitney Bowes’ (PB) accelerator programPitney Bowes is one of the few globally recognized acceleration programs giving thrust to Indian startups to build a scalable product with customer and POC validation. Medimojo’s focus, being in the mobile and big data analytics, Pitney Bowes with its rich experience was an obvious accelerator for us to aspire to be a part of.
3. What did you gain from this experience?The support from Pitney Bowes in building tech for the product has been the most outstanding take away from the acceleration program thus far. Weekly inputs and review of progress has helped made significant progress on the objectives of NLP/ML and AI.
4. Any specific improvements you made to your business plan or startup from what you learned?The improvement has been in the technology that enables the final product. The process of extracting information from image files of reports uploaded by users and building the data architecture to generate analytics has been strengthened a great deal.
“Diversity is one of the great drivers of innovation. We’re especially pleased to host two women-led startups this year into our corporate accelerator program. With more such programs in the industry, we hope to see an increase in women entrepreneurship in India”, said Manish Choudhary, senior vice president and managing director for Pitney Bowes.
Pitney Bowes is an American tech company providing ecommerce solutions in shipping and mailing products and customer information management to clients the world over.
Pitney Bowes’ accelerator program in India has partnered with SonderConnect, a not-for-profit trust focused on helping women entrepreneurs succeed. With this partnership, Pitney Bowes and
SonderConnect will help mentor and nurture women entrepreneurs in Pitney Bowes’ accelerator program through extensive entrepreneurship programs, webinars and networking opportunities.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
