This week on Startup Street a less than two-year-old startup showcases its first bike, which runs on a lithium-ion battery. Swiggy has had a busy week expanding its footprint, raising funds and building its technological infrastructure. The government of India is ready to introduce some healthy competition between states by ranking them on the basis of their startup ecosystem. Here’s what went on:
Emflux Showcases Its First Bike At Auto Expo 2018
In case you missed it, last week was big for the auto industry with global and local vehicle makers gathering at the Auto Expo 2018 in the National Capital Region. The event was full of swanky concept cars, futuristic technology and launches. Bengaluru-based startup Emflux was one of them.
Emflux showcased its first prototype — an electric bike called the Emflux One, slated to hit Indian roads in April 2019. The bike is powered by a 9.7 kWh lithium-ion battery and can go up to a maximum speed of 200 kilometer per hour. The bike has been designed, manufactured and assembled in India itself.
The company is aiming at a small scale production of 199 bikes for the Indian market and 300 for export, Emflux Motors Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Varun Mittal told newswire PTI.
Another model, with three performance upgrades, will be available it Rs 11 lakh.
The company is now looking for a $5 million funding to expand operations, and is already in talks with multiple investors. The round of funding is likely to close by June, Mittal said.
Startups Twenty Two Motors and Menza Motors also introduced their bikes at the event.
Busy Week For Swiggy
Online food delivery startup Swiggy ventured into the pink city, Jaipur, partnering with over 300 restaurants. This comes just a month after the startup expanded into Chandigarh with plans for the neighboring towns of Mohali, Panchkula and Zirakpur.
This puts the startup in 10 of India’s largest cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. The company has more than 20,000 restaurant partners across cities in the country.
Days after the expansion, Swiggy raised $100 million from an existing investor, South African media firm Naspers Ltd., it said in a statement.
It will invest in its new supply business line—Swiggy Access— which helps restaurants to set up cloud kitchens in neighbourhoods where they don’t already operate. The new vertical was launched in November last year to collaborate with restaurant partners and plug gaps on the supply side of Swiggy’s marketplace.
With this funding, we will further invest in building differentiated offerings, plugging the white spaces in the ecosystem, and developing our technology while keeping superlative customer experience at the core.Sriharsha Majety, CEO, Swiggy
Swiggy is also upgrading its core technology platform, especially in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence and will build a real-time prediction system to improve customer choice and personalisation, the statement said.
Some Healthy Competition
India's commerce ministry has launched tools to rank states and union territories to encourage states to improve the startup ecosystem and introduce healthy competition.
“These will act as catalysts to help the Startup India initiative to drive India's economic growth,” the ministry said in a statement. The tools will help measure impact of each step taken at the local levels and promote good practices.
According to the statement, India is home to about 20,000 startups, with about 1,400 beginning operations every year.
The ranking, it said, is based on the feedback collected from startup ecosystem stakeholders, which include startups, mentors, investors, accelerators, incubators and the government.
Areas which should be given greater thrust like seed funding support, women entrepreneurship are given more score, the ministry added.
The parameters of this feedback focuses on all the actions and initiatives undertaken by states on or before March 2018.
These include having a startup cell or helpline and a mobile or web portal for queries, the size of the startup mentor network created by the state government and the number of key incubators for incubation support.
It covers 95 good practises across 7 areas of intervention. These are distilled into 38 action points, including incubation support, seed funding, angel and venture funding, startup policy and Implementation, simplified regulations, easing public procurement.Commerce Ministry Statement
With inputs from PTI.
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