Kolkata or Calcutta, the Empire’s Second City after London that had gone into decades-long hibernation has suddenly woke up with a big bang where IT startups are rising galore. While economists believe that this has been possible after NASSCOM’s Startup Warehouse program that incubates startups from a diverse range of verticals, others emphasize on present day West Bengal government’s luscious incentives that has kindle the fire, inviting entrepreneurs to ride the bandwagon. This reality has also been corroborated by Ravi Gururaj, chief of NASSCOM Product Council in a recent meeting he attended in Kolkata.

 

However, let’s take a quick look at the upcoming startups from the City of Joy, as of now.

1)  Taxmantra – Founded by Alok Patnia, a Chartered accountant and expert in Company law, Taxmantra loves to work with startups and SMBs providing them with technical assistance, financial support and tax relief, issues that prove so baffling for toddler companies. Operating from Kolkata (Salt Lake), Taxmantra aims at making all tax-related activities for startups as much paperless and painless. as much as possible. The company has already helped with 5000+ business registrations while helping to manage 8000+ businesses.

 

2) Buy Hatke – Online price comparison engine BuyHatke was started by Gaurav Dahake, Prashant Singh and Srikanth Sethumadhavan when they were final year students at IIT Kharagpur, to counter the problem of finding the best price for any product sold online. The company has raised USD 1 million in seed funding.

 

3) Mihup’s Nectar is a Personal Mobile Assistant (PMA) that excels in providing user desired information on demand, while locating best things from the web eco system. It is also an SMS based web search engine for context independent information retrieval. The application has been hosted at a third party platform, having more than 5 million-user hit till now, while its monthly user growth has been estimated at around 15%.

 

4) SIBIA Analytics – Founded by Angshuman Bhattacharya, it is a cloud hosted predictive analytics solutions start up. It offers real time intelligence through deep predictive modeling and provides decision enabling tools. Their core competency is in algorithms and modeling, however they wrap it up with enabling technologies like Big Data, cloud computing etc. They mainly work with retail and consumer brands.

 

5) MindHour is an ed-tech company that has been initiated by two husband-wife team. To be precise, MindHour specializes in gamification (concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate students to achieve their goals. However, MindHour concentrates on students of classes VI to X. The company is fully self sufficient and has already got 10,000 registered users.

 

6) iKure Techsoft is a healthcare startup that builds technology that can be used to provide affordable healthcare services for the rural masses. Supported by Sujoy Santra, the unit has developed in-house software that enables treatment of patients in remote areas where access to clinics and hospitals are limited.

 

7) Surgerica: Founded by Amit Bhagat, Surgerica aims at bringing transparency to healthcare in India. The company has raised USD 2,00,000 in funding and users can browse the website to look for the best doctors and hospitals.

 

8) Outbox– Started by young, first-time entrepreneurs, Outbox offers a hassle-free experience of delivery of gifts, cakes and flowers in Kolkata. Powered by a call centre, the company has had a good start and shows potential to take on various routes for scaling up and getting the hyperlocal wave going in the city.

 

9) Fashionove – Co-founded by Sharad Kumar and Tanushree Khaandenwal, Fashionove is a location-based, hyperlocal fashion search and review portal, connecting shoppers with local independent fashion stores and boutiques. The company has launched in beta with 800 boutiques and has raised an angel round from cricketer Umesh Yadav.

 

10) Justshop24 is a budding e-commerce portal that provides doorstep delivery of groceries in Kolkata and adjoining areas. Founded by three friends Utkarsh Lohia, Chetan Sethi and Porav Jain, it is already well established, making more than 30 deliveries per day.

 

11) Packr and Paaltao are two different companies that have common origin. While Packr is an on-demand logistic unit that helps clients deliver anything legal, anywhere in India, Paaltao serves as a marketplace for nature oriented, handmade as well as vintage items.

 

Tailpiece

The sudden surge in startups in Kolkata after so many years of stagnation in growth of new business venture is an indication that the city will soon vie with other metropolitan areas in the country that has already made their niche in IT industry, which in near future will become one of the biggest source of employment in India.