Tie-Canaan Challenge Picks

Update: Oversight on my part. TiE-Canaan announced the winners of its entrepreneurial challenge on Saturday — Equitas, Druvaa and iKen. More details here.

Proto.in unveils its showcase startups next week (July 18-19) and I hope to catch a few interesting companies. Meanwhile, the TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge 2008 finalists have been in the public domain for for some time. They will pick three winners out of the eight finalists soon. Meanwhile, here’s a quick look at some of them:

The last on the list, Equitas Micro Finance India, is the only pure non-technology venture on feature. This is a regular micro-finance company and operates out of Chennai, serving Tamil Nadu. Seems to be a one-year old company and is targeting 1,80,000 members in its first year of operation. The founders come from NBFC backgrounds (promoter and managing director PN Vasudevan was with Cholamandalam Investment & Finance). I’m a little intrigued by the profile description for COO S Bhaskar. It says he “started in Pricewater House…” Doesn’t quite sound like the PwC we are familiar with. I picked this company because it kind of sticks out in the line-up. Micro-finance is still a niche business but a fairly established business model, in India and globally. Does Equitas really need to contest its business plan in this sort of an entrepreneurial challenge?

If not anything, 11rupees is certainly an interesting name for a company. This seems to be some sort of online personal finance management company. Founder Anuj Gupta writes on his blog, “This started when my father gave me his list of stocks and accounts for me to put together in a spreadsheet for him to track his expenses. I was looking to find an easy way for him to track his finances and not update spreadsheets everytime. When I didn’t find anything, I decided to start this website.” Not much more information available on the company’s website.

Another IIT Bombay incubated startup, iKen Solutions, makes it to the list this year — the first edition had Vegayan Systems. Have absolutely no idea what this company does (the website talks about ‘intelligent business systems’), but do hope it has better business development capabilities than its peers — university research spin-offs seem to struggle to get that bit right.

And finally, meet HealthcareMagic which is an online, one-stop shop to address all your healthcare needs — you can chat with or call a doctor, compare hospitals and products (medicines) and so on. Not much information on the founders but I like this company because, though online, it again it breaks out of the ‘tech startup’ mould. Just one niggle — why do I get the feeling I have seen something similar before? And some more information on the founders would be nice.

Since we are on new startups, a friend pointed me to an online startup today — he saw an ad sticker on a train — which I found quite cool. Check out Rentimental. The proposition is seductive, particularly in Bombay city. Anything you want to rent — dabba, office chairs, television, DVD player, even roomates — you’ll get it here. I don’t know how well it works and for something like this to work well, you need a very robust back-end inventory supply chain…but, I like the idea.