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ALUMNI IN NEWS 2015

Contents

S.No. Title Page No.

1. Snapdeal appoints Bhuvan Gupta as VP, Engineering 2

2. BITS Pilani alum Manoj Saxena appointed to the Federal Reserve

Bank of Dallas’ San Antonio Board 4

3. BITS-Pilani alumni start FitGo to bring in pre-planned diet meals to working professionals

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4. Turning garbled text into an online advertising platform 7

5. CAT 2014 results: 100 percentile score notched up by Alumnus Neha Manglik

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6. Samay Kohli & Akash Gupta: The masters of robotics 10

7. Recruitment start-up Belong.co to raise Rs 32 crore 12

8. Flipkart ropes in Ravi Garikipati to create high impact projects, scale up ads 13

9. At BITS Pilani, StartUp spark is now a flame 15

10. Warehouse robotics startup GreyOrange raises $30M more from Tiger Global and Blume Ventures

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11. BITS Pilani alumni build fetal monitoring devices to address 3,00,000 annual perinatal deaths in India

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12. Apple told to pay $234 mn for using BITS graduates' technology 20

13. HashLearn wants to be the WhatsApp of IIT tutoring 22

14. Travel app Trip38 raises $1M in seed round from IndiGo owner & Lantern Capital 24

15. Sanjeev Kaushik joins IIFCL as ED 25

16. Someone just created an aggregator app for all the taxi aggregators

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17. Announcing the New Chairman of BITSAA International 27

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Snapdeal appoints Bhuvan Gupta as VP,

engineering January 15, 2015 | Anand Rai

E-commerce major Snapdeal.com, run by Delhi-based Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, has appointed

Bhuvan Gupta as its vice president (VP), engineering. In his new role, Gupta will be

responsible for further strengthening the company’s technology platform.

Commenting on the appointment, Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal said, “Gupta comes

with a rich experience and has been at the heart of key mobile and technology innovations in

his previous organisations. His on boarding is in line with our plan of on boarding over 1,000

of the top computer engineers in the country.”

According to him, the company has been ramping up its engineering team aggressively to

further build and enhance customer and seller experience on its site.

Gupta comes with over 12 years of experience and has earlier held various technology

positions in multinational companies across industries. Prior to Snapdeal, he was the chief

technology officer (CTO) at BSB Portal, a joint-venture between BSB and Yahoo Japan. At

BSB, he built the engineering team that developed Hike messenger, Wynk Music and One

touch internet. He had earlier also worked at companies like Exponential (Tribal Fusion),

Fiorano Software, and Sapient Corporation.

Bhuvan holds an engineering degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS),

Pilani and a MBA degree in strategy, advertising & marketing from Faculty of Management

Studies (FMS), Delhi. “E-commerce is one of the fastest growing sectors in the country

today. I have closely followed

Snapdeal’s growth story and it is great to see how the organisation succeeded in building

technology as one of its core competencies. I look forward to be a part of this company,” said

Gupta.

Founded in 2010, Snapdeal was started as an online deals site, which later pivoted to a full-

fledged horizontal e-commerce company with a marketplace model in September 2011. It

claims to have 5 million-plus products across more than 500 diverse categories from

thousands of regional, national, and international brands and retailers. Snapdeal has now

become one of the fastest growing and among the top three online marketplaces in India, with

more than 30 million registered users and more than 50,000 vendors.

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In October, Japanese telecom and internet firm SoftBank Corp committed $627 million (Rs

3,846 crore) in Snapdeal.com. Its other investors include eBay, Kalaari Capital, Nexus

Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Ratan Tata, BlackRock,

Temasek, Myriad Asset Management, Tybourne Capital, PremjiInvest and Saama Capital.

Earlier this month, Snapdeal had quietly picked a stake in Smartprix Web Pvt Ltd, which runs

online product and price comparison site Smartprix. Sources privy to the development told

Techcircle.in that Snapdeal had initially acquired 10 per cent stake in Smartprix in FY14 with

the understanding to acquire a majority stake eventually. Last month, it had acquired gifting

recommendation venture Wishpicker besides snapping fashion products discovery platform

Doozton around a year ago.

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THE AMERICAN BAZAAR – 18th of January, 2015

BITS Pilani alum Manoj Saxena appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ San Antonio Board

January 18, 2015 By The American Bazaar Staff

WASHINGTON, DC: Manoj Saxena of Austin, Texas has been appointed to the Federal

Reserve Bank of Dallas’ San Antonio Branch board of directors by the Federal Reserve

Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. He will serve a three-year term ending December

31, 2017.Saxena has served on the San Antonio Branch board as a Dallas Fed appointment

since 2012, according to a press release.

Saxena has held leadership positions as a business leader, IT executive and venture capitalist.

He currently serves as chairman of Cognitive Scale and founding managing director of The

Entrepreneur’s Fund IV. He also is a special advisor to IBM senior leadership.

In his role as a board member, Saxena will continue to provide input on regional economic

conditions as part of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy functions.

Prior to joining The Entrepreneur’s Fund IV, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson. He

received the IBM Chairman’s award for Watson commercialization and helped with the

formation of Watson Business Group in January 2014.He holds two U.S. patents for web

services technologies and is an author of several more.

Saxena holds a master’s degree in business administration from Michigan State University

and a master’s in management sciences from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science in

Pilani, India.

The San Antonio Branch board consists of seven members, four appointed by the Dallas Fed

board and three by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C.

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YOUR STORY – 21st of January, 2016

BITS-Pilani alumni start FitGo to bring in pre-planned

diet meals to working professionals SINDHU KASHYAP , 21 JANUARY 2016

Most of us have been involved in some form of physical activity or sport during school and

college years. For some it might have been a serious competitive pursuit, for others it was just

fun in the park. Yet, the minute we get on with our busy work schedules, almost all forms of

physical activities come to a grinding halt.

And this was the exact situation BITS-Pilani alumni Anupam Garg, Ankit Agarwal and

Narendhiran S. found themselves in. Working in corporate setups at Ola, Mywash and

Capgemini, the trio found that they would spend most of their time in front of the computer

screen, work odd hours and eat unhealthy food most times.

They realised that like most other working professionals, they were putting on unhealthy

weight and becoming more disease-prone. Anupam even tried following a diet plan last year

to bring himself back in shape. However, this meant buying a list of items every day and

cooking six meals. The effort was time-consuming and tiring.

Numbers that formed the idea

This is when he came up with the idea of solving the problem of a balanced diet food

requirement for those who need to follow a strict schedule. This gave birth to FitGo that

works towards helping working professionals prevent or control lifestyle disorders by

delivering requirement-tailored meals for different health needs at customers’ doorsteps.

With a bit of research, the trio found that four out of 10 people in Bengaluru are obese, while

close to 70 per cent are overweight. “Over 26 per cent of the city’s population is diabetic

while three in every four residents here suffer the risk of a heart disease. And this all can be

attributed to poor lifestyles especially unhealthy eating habits,” adds 27-year-old Anupam.

The trio started talking to a few doctors and reputed dieticians in the area and realised that

there is a gap in demand and supply of expert-recommended meals. With the help of doctors

and certified dieticians, the team chalked out nutrition plans in a ready-to-consume format.

Anupam adds that the logic behind planned meal packages is using nutrition science to

control and balance the nutrient intake for different health requirements.

Working on different plans

Anupam says that a stress management plan provides comfort foods that calm down the brain

cells and cuts levels of cortisol and adrenaline. Along with an immunity booster plan that

come with vitamin-rich foods that help strengthen the immune system and decrease the

body’s susceptibility to diseases and infections.

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“We have tried to map different sets of customer needs by talking to different ecosystem

participants like gyms, fitness studios, dialectologists, doctors practising at different facilities

and a wide network of working professionals who are the end consumers of the service,” says

Anupam, adding that based on this requirement assessment, the startup has two kinds of

offerings:

1. General plans available for direct subscription: These plans start at a price point of Rs 299 per

day for requirements like muscle building, weight management, stress management,

immunity enhancement and low cholesterol diet for heart disease risk mitigation.

2. Special consultation-based plans: For more critical issues that need closer attention and more

personalisation. Customers can consult with a specialist online or in person and get a diet

plan charted based on their medical history and current health conditions.

The team is still looking at covering different customer bases and becoming a one-stop

solution for all tailored meal requirements. FitGo also serves on-demand executive meals to

help public get a peek into what the startup promises with its meal plans.

The diet plans and meals are prepared by experienced chefs in FitGo’s kitchen. A big

challenge the team faced was setting up a clean and seamless supply chain and getting

different quality checks and balances in place.

Traction and future plans

According to Anupam, FitGo has got over 2,000 customers in the last three months and is

serving over 5,000 executive and diet meals in selected areas of Bengaluru. Their repeat

business rate is at over 50 per cent. He adds that their current revenue run rate is at over a few

lakhs. The team is bootstrapped.

FitGo works on a revenue-sharing marketplace model on supply side. Any certified expert

can register on the website and propose to extend their services. On customer front, their

executive meals are offered on demand, while fixed-duration nutrition plans need to be

subscribed a day in advance.

The current service delivery areas include Koramangala, HSR Layout, BTM Layout,

Bellandur, Sarjapur Road, Yemlur, Bommanahalli and Marathahalli. The team aims to cover

the whole of Bengaluru this year, with a focus on more differentiation when it comes to

customer needs.

Your Story take

The idea of FitGo essentially brings in an amalgamation of the current health and food tech

platforms. While the team shared numbers and figures show decent and steady traction, only

time will tell whether the team will be able to handle the operations with the increase in order

numbers and customer base. Also, as seen in most platforms of food and health, although Tier

I cities like Bengaluru easily bring in the initial traction that a startup needs, sustainability

issues creep in when the startups look at geographic expansion. Food as a business is also

operation-heavy, and the team will need strong expertise to handle the requirements.

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Turning garbled text into an online advertising platform

Tue, Feb 03 2015. 05 03 PM IST

New Delhi: Six years ago at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani

campus, a mecca for technology geeks, two students—web designer Ankit Gupta and coder

Neeraj Agarwal—brainstormed the idea of converting Captcha, a challenge-response test

used online to determine if the user is human, into a viable advertising platform.

Between attending mechanical engineering classes and taking up freelance projects

(designing websites), the duo, who eventually added another co-founder to their team, built a

viable tech product during their college years that had digital agencies and venture capitalists

chasing their start-up, Innovese Technologies.

Innovese was registered as a company in January 2012, although Gupta and Agarwal

informally started the company in 2009. In May 2013, Yo!CAPTCHA—the Captcha

advertising platform of the company—was sold off to digital agency Networkplay Media.

Even though today only one of the three co-founders continues to be associated with the

product, their journey as student entrepreneurs remains eventful.

The idea to start a Captcha advertising product occurred to Gupta after frequent encounters

with the campus website, where 4,000-5,000 students logged in on a regular basis to check

their grades. The login required users to solve a Captcha code, giving the user “an interface of

at least 5-10 seconds on a given web-page”, says Gupta.

Captchas often appear on registration pages of websites asking users to copy jumbled letters

on the screen, in order to help distinguish a user from a potential hacker.

“We realized that we could actually use the space as an advertising tool,” adds Gupta, who

grew up in the city of Jaipur, inspired by stories from Silicon Valley, hoping one day to

launch his own technology company.

In 2009, Gupta and Agarwal’s chance encounter led them to eventually work on projects

together under Innovese—where they developed websites for a few thousand rupees.

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“We soon realized that the scale and money was actually in creating a product than being just

a services provider,” says 27-year-old Gupta, who simultaneously started developing the idea

for Yo!Captcha.

In December 2010, another old friend of Gupta’s, Dhruv Sogani, a mechanical engineering

student at BITS Pilani, was roped into conversations about the product.

While Gupta and Agarwal worked on the product side, Sogani helped with business

development and marketing.

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THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS – 25th of February, 2015

CAT 2014 results: 100 percentile score notched up by 15 boys and one girl, Neha Manglik

Wednesday, Feb 25, 2015 The CAT 2014 (Common Admission Test) results were declared

on Saturday. The CAT 2014 test decides who gets admission to

19 Indian Institute of Managements (IIMs), which also includes

six new ones, plus other business schools for next academic year.

The CAT 2014 results spelled great news for all those who

scored well to get into the premier educational institutes, but for

some it brought an incredible tide of joy as they had scored 100

percentile.

The number of students who achieved that amazing feat are 16,

with 15 boys and one girl – Neha Manglik. The only girl among the 16 CAT 2014 toppers,

Neha is a Chemical Engineer from BITS Pilani who had previously made her mark as the 5th

ranker at CMAT September 2014. Neha is also the first female CAT topper securing 100

percentile since 2009.

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FORBES INDIA – 16th of February, 2015

Samay Kohli & Akash Gupta: The masters of robotics By Debojyoti Ghosh| Feb 16, 2015

Ecommerce poses new challenges for the warehouse

automation space. Samay Kohli, 28, and Akash Gupta,

25, are stepping in with a solution.

Sometimes it pays to not have a plan. This is, of course,

a jarring notion in the Indian start-up and venture capital

space where most successes come with a plan A, and a

plan B as well.

But for Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta, the lack of a plan

has worked out just fine. The engineering duo, which

even dabbled in teaching, are now co-founders of one of

India’s hottest ventures in the warehouse automation space, Grey Orange. The Gurgaon-based

company has funds from investors including US-based Tiger Global Management, one of the

world’s largest hedge funds. “We could manage to do all this in a short span because while we

were studying, we had varied global exposure. And, in life, any experience never goes waste,”

says Kohli, 28, “including building an automated haunted house for someone’s Halloween

celebrations.”

The duo was tasked with creating a playhouse spread over 400 sq ft during their internship

with surveying and mapping company C&C Technologies Inc. in the US in 2009. “It’s like a

Disney park where everything is automated with special effects,” recalls Kohli, a mechanical

engineering graduate from BITS Pilani. This, he says, was an exercise in building a product

of scale and, till date, such experiences hold them in good stead as they make robots and

assisting systems that help workers in logistics and distribution of goods in warehouses.

Though they didn’t plan to set up shop in this field, Kohli’s proclivity for product

development was evident in college. As part of the humanoid programme at the Centre for

Robotics & Intelligent Systems at BITS, he created AcYut in 2007, one of the first

indigenously created humanoid robots in India. He was later joined by Gupta, 25, who was

also studying mechanical engineering. They represented India in robotics competitions across

13 countries; they won the gold medal at the RoboGames (formerly ROBOlympics) in San

Francisco in 2009. Kohli feels global competitions and exposure through start-up platforms

such as the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at BITS has had a strong influence on their

lives.

Instead of opting for corporate careers and foreign postings, they launched Grey Orange

initially in the robotics education space in February 2011. They invested an initial capital of ₹

5 lakh sourced from their personal savings from internships in the US. “We were teaching in

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colleges and institutions,” says Gupta. “But we are not the kind of people who could manage

teachers, motivate them and build curriculum. That’s not our expertise.”

After a few months, they moved out of education and, in December 2011, ventured into the

robotics product space. “We were researching different industries where we could add value

and where there is enough growth,” says Kohli.

The last disruption in warehousing took place almost 60 years ago with the introduction of

automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS), he says. The industry, then, was built to

cater to long lead times with clear market visions. Today, it’s the polar opposite, he points

out. With enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in almost every retail enterprise, and

ecommerce players relaying stock counts of single units, logistics have to move in double,

even triple, quick time to maintain a constant, optimum supply to meet consumer demand.

Grey Orange tries to build products to cater to this new demand, not just for India but for

global markets too.

The company started building robots that would help workers in warehouses move items

faster and efficiently. In sectors such as retail, logistics and ecommerce, where a quick

turnaround in terms of delivery timelines is critical, Grey Orange has helped clients become

up to 40 times more efficient through replacement of manual labour and minimisation of

error.

Here’s how it works: Typically in a warehouse, workers pick about 100-120 items in eight

hours. But, by using robots (butlers), this number can go up to 400-600 items per hour. There

is minimal need for human movement and, consequently, a huge reduction in human error

and wasted labour.

Today, Grey Orange boasts an impressive client list that includes India’s leading ecommerce

retailers such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Myntra, Jabong, courier-services companies DTDC and

Dubai-based Aramax. Kohli, however, did not divulge the details of its international clients

which include third-party logistics providers, retail and cosmetics majors.

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HRKATHA – 25th of June, 2015

Recruitment start-up Belong.co to raise Rs 32 crore

HRK News Bureau | Mumbai | Thursday, 25 June 2015

The company’s one of a kind search and recommendation solution helps organisations

hire the right candidates.

Bangalore-based recruitment startup, Belong.co, will raise over Rs 32 crore to build its team

and enhance its technology, with the help of venture capital firm, Matrix Partners and the co-

founders of SnapDeal. The funds will also be utilised to accelerate growth and customer

success.

The company was established in 2014 by BITS Pilani alumni, Vijay Sharma and Sudheendra

Chilappagari. Today, it helps enterprises hire people through data science and predictive

analytics.

Belong uses a unique search and recommendation technology to analyse profiles across

social, Internet and public sources. This helps companies discover the right candidates, who

fit their culture and skill requirements. It also helps them gain insights into whether the

candidates are passively open to new opportunities. The solution assists companies in

kickstarting engagement with candidates, through personalised interactions, backed by social

insights.

Currently, the company focusses only on product and engineering talent, but it has plans to

include data sciences and design talent on its portal soon.

The startup was running in stealth mode for a few months when the product was put to test by

a number of companies that are using the platform to recruit for product and engineering

positions. It was launched publicly this month. Some of its earlier clients include SnapDeal,

Zivame, Ola and Practo.

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Flipkart ropes in Ravi Garikipati to create

high impact projects, scale up ads June 11, 2015 | Priyanka Sahay

India’s largest e-commerce venture Flipkart has appointed IT industry veteran Ravi

Garikipati in a newly created position – entrepreneur in residence.

In this role, Garikipati will be working closely with co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny

Bansal besides chief of operations Mukesh Bansal (all unrelated to each other) on new and

high impact business projects. His first assignment will be to help Flipkart scale up its new

ads initiative, the company said.

Garikipati, who holds a masters in software engineering and management from the BITS,

Pilani, , comes with over 25 years of hands-on experience in building and leading global

products and businesses.

Before joining Flipkart, he was president of innovation labs at US-based customer

engagement and sales analytics firm [24]7 Customer Inc. Before joining [24]7 in 2009, he

was senior vice president & managing director of Vendio, a large third party e-commerce

service provider for small businesses. Under him, Vendio grew to have more than 2 million

online sellers. Prior to that, he held various senior engineering leadership positions at IBM

and Oracle where he led technology initiatives in building scalable enterprise software

architectures and services.

“Ravi’s experience in leading 24X7 innovation labs and Vendio makes him a valuable

addition to Flipkart. This is the first time such a role is being created in the organization and

the possibilities that open up for the future as a result of this are immense,” Sachin Bansal,

CEO and co-founder, Flipkart, said.

The company has been aggressively expanding its top team of late.

In March, it roped in Saikiran Krishnamurthy from McKinsey as the COO of its commerce

division, which in effect, makes him the number two man looking after day to day activities

of the e-commerce firm under Mukesh Bansal.

In April, it roped in Hari Vasudev (Yahoo), Anand KV (Hathway) and Manish Maheshwari

(txtWeb), to spearhead supply chain, customer experience and seller ecosystem verticals,

respectively.

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The organisation also re-jigged its top team with Sachin Bansal now looking after new

initiatives and strategy, Binny Bansal is heading supply chain and logistics while Mukesh

Bansal has been heading the day-to-day operations of the firm.

Mukesh Bansal got into the firm after Flipkart acquired Myntra, a venture co-founded by

him, last year.

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TIMES OF INDIA July 4, 2015

At BITS Pilani, StartUp spark is now a flame Rajagopalan Venkataraman | TNN | Jul 4, 2015, 12.28 PM IST

Among educational institutions, the IITs have tended to grab most of the attention around

startups.

But another premier technological institution, BITS Pilani, has seen a good number of

successful entrepreneurs emerge -- Sabeer Bhatia, who founded Hotmail, Phanindra Sama of

redBus, Raju Reddy of Sierra Atlantic, Preetish Nijhawan of Akamai and Richa Kar of

Zivame.

Over the past four years, many of these alumni have banded together to make the institution

an even more fertile ground for entrepreneurs. Under what it calls the BITS Spark

programme, it promotes entrepreneurship courses and workshops, offers mentorship, and

provides angel funds.

BITS Spark recently called for its fifth round of startup selection for investments ranging

between $50,000 and $500,000, and received 40 applications. One criterion for applicants is

that one of the co-founders must be a BITSian.

"At least 3-4 startups get selected in every round of investment," says Rohan Manchanda, co-

ordinator with BITS Spark. For selection, startups need to demonstrate sufficient traction.

Manchanda says traction is estimated with metrics such as user adoption, customer base, key

partnerships and existing revenues.

Some of the startups funded through this initiative have gone on to achieve significantly

greater success. This includes Framebench, which offers cloud-based communication and

feedback tools that are being used by, among others, the Republican Party in the US

Presidential election campaign; robotics solutions provider Grey Orange Robotics, which

went on to receive funding from Tiger Global and has customers like e-commerce major

Flipkart; and Tabtor, an online education startup that provides maths tutoring, and which was

written about in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Founded in 2012, BITS Spark has in its network 23 on-campus startups, 9 pre-seed funded

startups, 18 mentored startups and 4 angel-funded startups, according to the organization's

website.

BITS Spark also has the objective of making BITS Pilani among the top three institutes for

entrepreneurship in Asia. Abhinav Khushraj, BITSian and co-founder at PetaSense, an

industrial IoT (internet-of-things) startup, says more and more BITS alumni are setting up

shop in India due to its dynamic startup culture, and the strict visa regime in US.

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Warehouse robotics startup GreyOrange

raises $30M more from Tiger Global and

Blume Ventures August 10, 2015 | Binu Paul

Warehousing automation venture Grey Orange Robotics Pvt Ltd has raised $30 million in a

fresh round of funding from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Blume

Ventures.

GreyOrange will use the money to invest in R&D for new products, expand its executive

team and accelerate international expansion into Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.

“The GreyOrange team is helping transform the logistics industry with its high-tech,

automated solutions and is well positioned to leverage its technology globally,” said Lee

Fixel, partner at Tiger Global.

The Gurgaon and Singapore-based GreyOrange was founded in 2009 by BITS Pilani alumni

Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta (CTO). The duo had earlier built AcYut, an indigenously

developed series of humanoid robots. A warehousing automation company, GreyOrange

makes products for materials handling. The company’s flagship product is Butler System, a

fleet of mobile robots that can manage order fulfilment inside a warehouse.

It claims that this helps companies increase efficiency and reduce operational costs. The team

built the Butler System after noticing that most industrial automation products are rigid, non-

flexible and take a long time to install and to achieve their full capacity. GreyOrange’s

system works via proprietary machine learning and swarm intelligence algorithms. The firm

claims to be serving some of the largest companies in e-commerce, third-party logistics and

retail.

“We are excited to have the opportunity to work closely with some of the world’s best

companies, and are delighted with our investors’ overwhelming support. We are doubling our

team size globally as we steer the company and our products beyond India and into

international markets,” said co-founder and CEO Kohli.

Grey Orange had last raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Tiger Global

Management and Blume Ventures in April last year. The round also saw participation from

Alok Rawat, president of FG Wilson FZE; Dileep Nath, co-founder of Kanbay which was

acquired by CapGemini and others.

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YOUR STORY – 26th of August, 2015

BITS Pilani alumni build fetal monitoring devices to

address 3,00,000 annual perinatal deaths in India SINDHU KASHYAP, 26 AUGUST 2015

The estimated healthcare expenditure in India in 2013 was USD 96.3 billion, which

constituted almost five per cent of the GDP. With a growth rate of approximately 12 per cent,

this number is expected to cross USD 195 billion in the next three years. However, according

to records, India as a nation has only 0.6 doctors per 1000 people. Many believe that

technology is yet to hit the medical devices segment.

The genesis

In order to bridge this gap, Vibhav Joshi and Sumedh Kaulgud, along with other

alumni of BITS Pilani, founded Sattva MedTech in 2014. The duo had met in campus

and began working on the concept in late 2013. The idea came to Vibhav, when he had

gone home for a Diwali break in 2013. His mother, a gynaecologist, had recently

purchased an NST-CTG (Fetal Non-Stress Test-cardiotocography) machine. However,

she wasn’t happy with the device and had qualms about its reliability.

Vibhav sensed an opportunity and started digging deep into the clinical need for fetal

monitoring, history of the NST technology and literature available on advances in fetal

monitoring and labor management. Many issues related to the usability and high skill

requirement of the NST-CTG were obvious. When he went back to campus, he got

together a group of people interested in medical instrumentation and they started

brainstorming on how to build a highly reliable, low-cost fetal monitoring device.

Team @ Sattva Medtech

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What does the device do?

This is how Sattva MedTech was born. “We’re developing a next-generation fetal health

monitoring device which leverages advanced sensors and algorithms. This device, called the

Sattva Fetal Lite, has been designed and engineered for use in India and other low-and-mid-

income countries,” says Vibhav.

The team has also received the BITS 75 Charitable trust grant and has completed its first

clinical study with St. John’s Medical College, Bengaluru. It won the title ‘Top 10

Innovator’ in the India Innovation Growth Programme run by Stanford GSB, Lockheed

Martin, IC squared – University of Texas at Austin, FICCI & DST – Government of India.

Problems and challenges

However, the team hasn’t had it easy, especially due to the lack of cheap and fast

prototyping facilities. “The learning curve is really steep and a startup is under a lot of

pressure to execute without mistakes; since we have limited resources, any error can set

us back by weeks. Turn-around time for hardware is a lot longer than a software

product,” says Vibhav.

The team intends to target all healthcare settings where antenatal checkups and deliveries are

done. They are also looking at midwives, obstetricians, nurses and health volunteers who can

operate this device to detect fetal distress and take the necessary action. “We are looking at

60,000 institutions conducting such procedures by 2018 in India. This is a market of USD

300 million. The ex-India market is USD 800 million,” says Vibhav.

Funding and future plans

The team has currently raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from InnAccel.

The funding, Vibhav says, will be used to increase the depth of their team and build

some of the most advanced hardware and algorithms to analyse biophysical data.

He adds that they aim to leverage technology to equalise access to quality healthcare for

everyone. “Our differentiator is a very strong tech team and absolute focus on user

experience and designing for the Indian healthcare scenario,” he says.

Speaking about the investment, Siraj Dhanani of InnAccel says that the team is building a

device that they believe can save lakhs of lives. This, he adds, can be done by enabling

monitoring of the 10 million high-risk pregnancies in India annually. They aim to bring the

Sattva Fetal Lite to the market by late 2016. There are several other products in the pipeline

as well.

The perinatal death problem As of 2012, there were 5.9 million perinatal deaths worldwide. The WHO global estimates

stated that a third of the still births occurred during delivery. Vibhav says India has a reported

30 million pregnancies every year, of which 10 million mothers require extra monitoring

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during labor to detect complications. He adds that 3,00,000 perinatal deaths are recorded

every year due to undetected fetal distress and related conditions.

“The technology available today for fetal distress monitoring is variable, highly skill-

dependent, bulky and expensive. This technology is neither viable nor available for close to

80 per cent of the care-settings in India,” he says.

Adding to this, Dr. Jagdish Chaturvedi, Director of Clinical Innovations at InnAccel, says

that fetal heart rate monitoring through Fetal ECG acquisition is an accurate way to assess

heart rate and determine fetal distress. With Sattva, the team aims to address the 3,00,000

annual perinatal deaths in India.

The market space

Expected to touch USD 79 billion in 2012, the healthcare sector is now expected to reach

USD 160 billion by 2017, and USD 280 billion by 2020. Today, it is considered one of the

largest sectors in India, in terms of both revenue and employment.

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ZEE BUSINESS Oct 17, 2015

Apple told to pay $234 mn for using BITS graduates'

technology Oct 17, 2015, 11.50 PM IST

Washington: Tech giant Apple has been told to pay $234 million to the intellectual property

arm of Wisconsin University, Madison, for using without permission patented technology

developed by its team, including two Indian-American engineers. The award amount a

federal jury in Madison asked to Apple to pay Friday was about $165 million less than what

Wisconsin University Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) had sought, according to

Wisconsin State Journal. The case centres on technology that became a component of

processors that run widely popular Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Gurindar Sohi

and Terani Vijaykumar, both electrical and electronics engineering graduates of Birla

Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, were part of the four-member WARF

team which developed the technology.

US District Judge William Conley, who presided over the trial, complimented the lawyers on

their professionalism and spoke to Wisconsin University-Madison computer sciences'

Professor Sohi, who led the WARF technology team, seated in the courtroom.

"For Dr. Sohi, I hope you felt that your invention was vindicated," Conley was quoted as

saying.

"This is a case where the hard work of our university researchers and the integrity of

patenting and licensing discoveries has prevailed," said Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director

of WARF.

"The jury recognized the seminal computer processing work that took place on our campus.

This decision is great news for the inventors, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and for

WARF."

Apple attorneys declined to comment, referring questions to the California company's public

relations office, the Journal said.

Spokesperson Rachel Tulley said only that Apple plans to appeal. The jury also ruled that a

subset of processing chips produced in Texas by Samsung under contract for Apple, then

exported to Korea, still infringed on WARF's patent.

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The jury also ruled that although those chips were produced by Samsung, Apple controlled

their production.

WARF sued Apple in January 2014, claiming that Apple infringed on one of WARF's patents

in creating a processor for its popular mobile devices, starting with the iPhone 5S in 2012. On

Tuesday, the jury agreed that Apple's use of the technology was an infringement of WARF's

patent.

The technology, first incorporated into Apple's A7 processor and used now in the A8 and

A8X processors, makes the processors work faster and more efficiently, and extend battery

life by as much as two hours.

According to WARF complaints, the patent titled "Table-Based Data Speculation Circuit for

Parallel Processing Computer" was issued to Andreas Moshovos, Scott Breach, Terani

Vijaykumar, and Gurindar Sohi in 1998 as a result of their "labour and ingenuity".

"The invention disclosed and claimed in the patent has been recognized by those in the art as

a major milestone in the field of computer microprocessing," the complaints stated.

"This work has been recognized as a major milestone in the field of computer microprocessor

architecture/design," lawyers for WARF wrote in the compalint.

"Indeed, Dr. (Gurindar) Sohi, the leader of the lab that developed the '752 patent, has been

elected to the National Academy of Engineering based on his work in the field of computer

architecture," they added.

WARF had also asserted that Apple wilfully infringed on its patent, a claim that withstood a

summary judgment motion in August.

But on Thursday night, after hearing testimony from Apple's witnesses during the trial's

damages phase, Conley reconsidered and dismissed the wilfulness claim.

22

HashLearn wants to be the WhatsApp of

IIT tutoring October 27, 2015 | Disha Sharma

An IIT aspirant’s study room is like the Chamber of Secrets. At every turn, you are faced

with a dozen books scribbled with doubts to be cleared at a later time, which, in most cases,

never comes.

With the HashLearn Now app, aspirants can have their doubts cleared at any hour of the day

by banking on students from top institutions. “Getting you your own Dumbledore,” the app

flashes, referring to the headmaster of the school of wizards in the Harry Potter series as it

finds a tutor in less than four minutes.

In other words, HashLearn aims to disrupt the way the coaching industry works in India by

imbibing elements of social networking.

In other words, HashLearn aims to disrupt the way the coaching industry works in India by

imbibing elements of social networking.

HashLearn Education Pvt Ltd has two products to offer. HashLearn.com, which went live in

December 2014, is a platform where students post their queries and exchange inputs on many

major exams, such as the IITJEE, GMAT, GRE, SAT or BITSAT. HashLearn Now, which is

the more recent offering, is a mobile-only product that connects students with tutors for

private sessions any time of the day.

Co-founder and CEO Jayadev Gopalakrishnan says HashLearn.com is like the Twitter for

education while HashLearn Now is akin to WhatsApp.

Gopalakrishnan is a serial entrepreneur with 14 years of experience in education and mobile.

He has previously worked as president of retail education at Pearson Education Services, MD

at test preparation platform Tandem and CEO of mobile games and apps developer Tinfo

Mobile. Gopalakrishnan set up the company along with Gokul Janga, its CTO. Janga is a

technologist who was the former country head of the India Development Center at Aventail, a

network security product company that was acquired by SonicWall. He also co-founded

Mapunity, a social technology company that built Bengaluru Transport Information System –

India’s first real-time traffic monitoring system. Prior to that, he worked for DHL in San

Fransico Bay Area.

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The app was launched after HashLearn in June acquired Edvice, a company focused on

mobile-based tutoring co-founded by BITS Pilani alumni Shashank Murali and Binay Kumar

Shivam.

Potential market, competition

Every year, an estimated 13 lakh to 14 lakh students take the first part of the Joint Entrance

Examination for admission to the country’s top engineering colleges including IITs. Of these,

about a 10th reach the second stage. A large number of these students, if not all, take

coaching either from individuals or private institutions. It is this potential market that

HashLearn is looking to tap into.

Including primary and high-school students who take help from private tuitors, the overall

coaching market is a Rs 1.5 lakh crore industry in India, according to a survey by the industry

group Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India.

While the coaching industry is dominated by offline players, the number of companies in the

e-learning segment is rising. The segment has established players such as Khan Academy,

which provides tutoring through videos, and upcoming players such as FlipClass,

Buddyschool, Tutorindia and 2tion. However, none of these provide tutoring through a

mobile app.

While HashLearn hasn’t disclosed whether it has received funding, the ed-tech space is

generating a lot of investor interest and many startups have received investment in the recent

past.

In September, MockBank, a startup that provides online mock tests for government jobs,

had raised about $400,000 (Rs 2.6 crore) in seed funding from Blume Ventures and others.

India Educational Investment Fund had invested an undisclosed amount in two Indian

education technology startups – Report Bee Edusys Pvt Ltd, a cloud-based learning platform

and Guru-G Learning Labs (India) Pvt. Ltd, a gamified platform for teachers.

However, investors are in two minds about the scalability of HashLearn’s business. Angel

investor Ajeet Khurana, who has not invested in HashLearn, said the company can create a

small, profitable niche for itself because the market size is large and engineering aspirants are

willing to pay.

“Using text chat for micro training sessions of 10 minutes or less for engineering aspirants is

an interesting twist to the usual method of coaching. This presents a nice value-add to

students who are being coached elsewhere and need the equivalent of a second-opinion,” he

said.

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VCCIRCLE – 25th of February, 2015

Travel app Trip38 raises $1M in seed round from IndiGo owner & Lantern Capital

BY PRIYANKA SAHAY This is the maiden start-up investment by InterGlobe Enterprises.

Bangalore-based Trip38 Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates travel management

app Trip38, has secured $1 million (₹ 6.2 crore) in a seed round of funding from InterGlobe

Technology Quotient, a part of the promoter group of IndiGo, and Singapore's Lantern

Capital, a top company executive told VCCircle.

The money will be used for marketing, customer acquisition and enhancing technology.

Founded in 2014 by Niranjan Gupta, Seshadri Krishnan and Markish R, the start-up offers

travel assistant such as check in alerts. It is a location aware mobile app that provides context

sensitive content in terms of flight e-tickets, flight status, airport information, sightseeing

options, restaurants, local events, weather, hotel offers, deals, embassy information etc.

Gupta has over 25 years of experience in the travel industry. Before founding Trip38, he had

co-founded online travel agency via.com and hotel aggregator MagicRooms. MagicRooms

was acquired by Yatra in 2011. He has a MBA degree from Case Western Reserve University

- Weatherhead School of Management.

Markish was earlier CTO with MagicRooms.

Krishnan, a BITS Pilani grad, started his career at Wipro and later worked at Sapient.

Previously he had started another travel tech start-up iVinca, a trip planning and experience

provider.Trip38 offers information of over 350,000 hotels and 180,000 sightseeing options

across the world. It also provides information about check-in, baggage allowance for more

than 100 leading airlines across the world. Its current revenue stream includes platform usage

fee or transaction fee from hotels and tourism boards.

According to the company, India accounts for 40 to 50 per cent of the total app usage of the

firm.

It says it has over 25,000 downloads across 170 countries so far. It aims to have 3 million

downloads in 12 to 18 months.

The company is working on features such as introducing mobile boarding passes for airlines.

"We are already in advanced discussions with airports, airlines and OTAs and will have

them powered by our platform in the coming weeks," said Krishnan.

Meanwhile, this is the first start-up investment from InterGlobe Technology Quotient, created

as a strategic business unit of InterGlobe Enterprises. InterGlobe Enterprises is a holding

company for various businesses such as aviation, hospitality, etc. and is best known as the

promoter of India's top budget carrier IndiGo.

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THE HINDU BUSINESS LINE – 2nd of February, 2015

Sanjeev Kaushik joins IIFCL as ED

NEW DELHI: Sanjeev Kaushik, a Kerala cadre IAS officer, has joined India Infrastructure Finance Company (IIFCL) as Executive Director. Prior to this, Kaushik was handling financial markets in the Department of Economic Affairs in the Finance Ministry. An MBA in finance from the London Business School and Mechanical Engineer from BITS Pilani, Kaushik had worked for over a decade in global investment banking.

26

YOUR STORY – 17th of January, 2015

Someone just created an aggregator app for all the taxi aggregators

Alok Soni | January 17, 2015 at 12:33 am The process of opening multiple apps not knowing which one will have better availability not

only consumes time and mind space but a little frustration inadvertently seeps in too. What if

I tell you there’s an aggregator app for all these taxi aggregator apps?

Basically, an app which makes your cab hailing process smarter by comparing availability

and real time ETA of cabs across different cab services/aggregators like Olacabs, Uber and

Taxiforsure. Precisely, that’s what ScootApp is all about. Launched few minutes ago,

ScootApp is nothing short of the master key to your woes of switching between multiple

apps.

Masterminds ScootApp is developed by Gunjan Thakuria and Sagar Yarnalkar as a side project. While

Gunjan is an IIT-Madras alumnus who has previously worked with Carwale after exiting

from his venture zophop.com (a multi modal transit app combining various modes of transit);

Sagar is a graduate from BITS Pilani Goa campus. They only gave two hours daily for 3-4

days to build this app.

While UBER and Ola had open APIs, they are still talking to TaxiForSure about the

permission. This doesn’t seem to be a for-profit venture by the duo and since they are

eventually driving traffic and conversions to the respective apps, they don’t expect any major

objection too.

Gunjan shared the app in a Facebook group sometime ago. He also mentioned,

“I am a regular user of Ola, Uber and Taxi for Sure and always find it very painful to juggle

between different apps to find the nearest available cab. Hence I decided to do something

about it and created a simple aggregator of these 3 apps to show me real time ETA of all of

them. I have been using it myself for couple of weeks and found it very useful, so thought of

putting it out for others too for use, so published it on play store yesterday ( even though

discussions are still going on regarding usage of their API, but what the heck its very useful

and hurts nobody, since it’s landing traffic to their apps).”

So, how does it work? The app functions in following ways:

It takes the pain out of juggling between multiple apps to find the nearest

available cab, and brings all information in one simple screen.

Once you have selected your nearest cab, the app will lead you to the relevant

service providers app to complete the booking

In case you do not have the service providers app installed, it will take you to the

play store to install the relevent app to complete your booking

Currently it shows nearest available cabs across Olacabs, Uber and Taxiforsure

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BITSAA INTERNATIONAL – 2nd of February, 2015

Announcing the new Chairman of BITSAA International

Monday, February 02, 2015 Dear BITSians,

BITSAA International is proud to announce Jayan Ramankutty as the new Chairman of the

BITSAA board of Trustees. Jayan takes over the reins from Raju Reddy, who completed his

term in 2014.

Jayan Ramankutty graduated from BITS Pilani in 1980 with a BE (Hons.) in Electronics.

Subsequently, he worked in India till 1983, Singapore for a little over 3 years before moving

to the Silicon Valley in January 1987. Jayan has over 20 years of extensive experience in

designing and developing large, multi-processor computer systems, complex ASICs and

SoCs in the field of networking, telecommunication and multimedia markets. During the last

two decades, Jayan has founded five companies. Most recently, he founded YuMe networks a

company focused on “real-time online video Ad insertion” and KRK Labs. Prior to this,

Jayan co-founded Lara Networks in 1997, a world leader in Network Search Engine; this was

acquired by Cypress Semiconductor in 2001 for approximately $300MM.

In 1991, Jayan co-founded Nimbus Technology a leading designer and manufacturer of Sparc

Chipset. Nimbus was acquired by Alliance Semiconductor prior to going IPO. He is the

founding President of BITSAA-SVC and mentors graduating students at Duke University on

Entrepreneurship.

Excited about his new role, Jayan aptly says:

"I’m really honoured and deeply humbled to be serving as the Chairman of BITSAA

International. For that I want to thank the outgoing Chairman, Raju Reddy, Prof. SP Kothari,

the BITSAA Board and the countless dedicated volunteers who have placed their trust in me.

Your passion and vision has created an organization that could easily be the envy of any

alumni association around the world.

During the past year, I had the opportunity to visit several chapters. I was impressed by the

level of enthusiasm among the Alums to commit their time and money with a passion to make

their Alma mater better than ever. The message was clear for us: to perpetuate the work that

was already set into motion by the earlier teams– to make BITS a world class institution!

Building on the foundation that was already established by the earlier teams, I aim to work

diligently to seek out and build strong partnerships between BITS and other universities

around the world. As Corporations continue to focus on their bottom lines, I believe

fundamental research and development of Intellectual property would once again be in the

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hands of the Universities. Generating Intellectual Property in that fashion would enable rich

entrepreneurial eco systems to be developed locally, not only raising the brand value of the

University but also the quality of life for the society at large. Here in lies one of the greatest

opportunities for BITS to become the centre-piece for not only research but also a place

where world class entrepreneurs are created!

When Alumni, the University, the Management and the Faculty work together many a

wonders could be created. I’ve personally witnessed this and this symbiotic relationship is

stronger than ever! That has brought us together to work on several big ideas - BITSConnect

1.0, BITSConnect 2.0 and Bridges to the Future. Let us continue to work together on new

ideas to take our Alma mater to new heights.

Do feel free to call on me with ideas or just for a good time! On behalf of my team, I’d like to

thank you for your support."