Rebalance Accelerator’s Inaugural India Cohort: 7 States, 11 Women Founders, 10 Startups
As entrepreneurs, we get comfortable with the chaos and the pressure of creating, nurturing and delivering what we believe in. We often forget that success comes with speed, and
Speed comes with perspective, clarity and timing.
The idea is to embrace the daily hustle and also allow the visionary in us, a chance to zoom out and change our lens once in a while. Being vulnerable and letting new perspectives in gives us the chance to stretch ourselves and find new strength in our vision even if it is uncomfortable because
To grow is to get out of your own way!
And sometimes, it’s others who give us the perspective we need.
This is what tied and strengthened 17 founders from 7 states across India into one complete charged-up unit.
Diversity in age, gender, language, and culture gave everyone the exposure and perspective to grow together, holistically.
From the youngest founder at 23 years to the eldest at 50+ years, there was as much to learn across generations as there was to teach.
While curating the cohort, we consciously evaluated and selected companies that needed perspective and clarity of vision to scale their businesses to the next level. From pre-revenue tech companies to those that had achieved break-even with multiple global clients — we hosted companies at varying stages.
It would be hard to summarise the last 14 weeks in a few words. The midnight pep-talks on our Whatsapp group, decoding VC signals, heart-to-hearts during one-on-one mentor hours, overcoming the fear of numbers and market sizing, transparent mentor-peer feedback sessions, endless versions of pitch decks with countless cups of coffee, pulling our hair out over financial projections, eleventh hour practice sessions before the demo day, excellent food with outstanding people who became family — doesn’t even begin to outline the journey until here.
Meet Rebalance Accelerator’s Inaugural India Cohort.
We hosted 10 diverse founding teams led by 11 women founders from Delhi NCR, Goa, Bangalore, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand who worked together for 14 weeks.
The companies were spread out across health & wellness, consumer brands, food-on-demand, education, language & cultural transliteration, deep technology, voice commerce, environmental sanitation, ethical pet adoption and care, the sexual and mental health of adolescents.
Meet Our Founders:
Tina Mani from Yfret
YFret is an AI-driven, real-time marketing engine that is capturing the future of commerce: VOICE — to help brands deliver personalized shopping experiences, both offline and online.
Yfret’s AURA engine plugs into mobile apps, websites, stores or voice apps, learns your preferences and helps brands deliver relevant content within 0.2 seconds.
Highlights: $340K raised with 150+ clients worldwide.
Vatsala Sharma, Aneesha Jyoti and Puneet Singh from Language Curry
Making India accessible to the world through an app that enables foreign to Indian language learning easy and culturally relevant.
It is the only app that goes beyond translation or script-based pedagogy to immerse users into the local culture through cultural tips and transliteration. It is available on android and iOS.
Highlights: 2000+ downloads in 60 days
Rhea Chawla & Saurabh Arora from Larder
Larder removes the hassle of ordering and tracking food online by reducing your 30-minute wait to a 30-second experience.
It is a 24/7, automated mini-retail booth that gives you access to the best brands, anywhere, anytime.
Click here to experience Larder.
Highlights: 4 booths live, 18+ booths in the pipeline, 20+ food partners in 4 months.
Nupur Agarwal from KiWi (Kisan Window)
Kiwi creates a platform for farmers in India to deliver health-conscious food and uniquely designs their product display based on the consumer’s life stage/ailments.
A health and wellness food brand that offers solutions to ailments/lifestyles categorized into 23 body health categories such as diabetes, moms to be, travelers, babies, PCOD through offline and online channels.
Highlights: 700+ offerings, 2 retail stores, international exports, 3 Cr revenue in 18 months
Ankita Singh and Ashish Chhanwal from Mr n Mrs Pet (MMP)
Mr n Mrs Pet is organizing and shaping ethical pet sourcing and parenting in India.
India suffers from unethical breeding in puppy mills, disorganized pet adoption process with insecure payments, unethical re-sale of pets on listing platforms, uninformed pet parents and inexperienced service providers.
MMP is India’s first pet-sensitive end-to-end platform that educates a potential pet parent and aggregates all essential services from sourcing to caring for pets.
Highlights: 300+ Happy pet parents with 30% recurring customers; 200+ responsible breeders and 100+ service providers already on the platform.
Snigdha Manchanda from TeaTrunk
A global, premium tea brand from India crafting wellness teas for the new generation of health-conscious consumers.
Snigdha is India’s first tea sommelier and introduced a long list of firsts with Tea Trunk since 2014: Matcha Tea, Blue Pea Tea and more.
TeaTrunk is available on their website, online and across hotels, restaurants, and cafes.
Highlights: Breakeven in 2017, 200+ stockists/partners, enjoyed across 15 countries.
Madhavi Jadhav from ThatMate
Building an ecosystem that leverages technology to bridge the gap in the sexual and mental health of adolescents, worldwide.
There are 270 million searches by adolescents on sexual queries every month in India. In fact, 50% of behavioral, physical and psychological problems have their onset during adolescence. ThatMate helps adolescents make informed choices through school curriculum tie-ups, their app that becomes a self-discovery-partner, and an AI-powered interactive bot: Bolo for questions they cannot ask anyone.
Highlights: 140 schools, 14000 adolescents with a 100% retention rate in 3 states of India, within a year.
Pallavi Gupta, Shubhang Arora and Vijay Nandwani from Espresso Labs
Voice is natural.
Espresso Labs is adding voice to enterprises. Their first product Hello Suite customizes Alexa and Google Home to enhance guest experiences across hotels and assist hotels in upselling their services.
Highlights: Live in 3 luxury hotels in Delhi NCR, India & Vienna (Austria); 80% of customers want to see this service in other hotels
Bhavna Singh from Authmetrik
AuthMetrik helps companies increase revenue by stopping unauthorized sharing of subscription accounts using keystroke dynamics.
119% of customers are lost due to password sharing every year amounting to $10 billion in losses for companies. Authmetrik’s algorithm can identify and restrict an account only to the person who registered for it.
Highlights: equity-free grant from Y-Combinator, 3 potential pilots
As part of our core mission and values, Rebalance aims to host at least one NGO/social impact startup in every cohort. In our recent cohort, we hosted an American native who has selflessly worked in rural India for over six years with the aim of transforming each village in India. Truly inspiring!
Marta Snow Vanduzer from Safalgram
Safalgram builds self-cleaning, evapotranspiration toilets to break the open-defecation cycle for 626 million Indians by moving the focus from mere reach to “real usage”.
The abundantly available toilet models in rural India have maintenance and adaptability challenges due to its design and don’t focus on educating users or tracking usage rates. Safalgram leverages eco-friendly, affordable and easy to use technology to transform health and sanitation outcomes in rural India.
Highlights: 300+ toilets built, 15+ villages in 5 states
And this is us — Team Rebalance. A team of only two (but equivalent to 20!) and we wouldn’t have wanted to do this any other way.
We feel absolutely grateful to all the mentors, investors and ecosystem partners who made our journey lighter and brighter.
Feel free to reach out to us at hello@therebalance.com to get involved if you‘d like to contribute to their success via introductions/connections or if you are interested in investing in any of them.
To know more about Rebalance, click here. Follow us on Instagram & Twitter to stay updated!
Photos captured by Sanyam Saini & Prateek Kashyap, you can check out their other work on Instagram at @photogreditor or @_frame_memories_ :)
