Online Incubation Platform Startify, has struck a mix of cash and stock buy out deal with Pawas Jain, Co-Founder of Blue Box Media (The company that owns and manages The Tech Portal) based out of Jaipur. Pawas Jain will be acquiring Startify in his personal capacity.
While the exact terms of the buy out are undisclosed, it has been confirmed that Pawas, Chartered Accountant by education and working on Blue Box Media since last one and half years, will be acquiring a majority stake in the startup, which primarily describes itself as an Idea growth-cum-management portal along with startup services. The founders of Startify will continue to provide a value addition to the team in future as well, holding a minority stake in the company. While Startify closely competes with giants such as StartupWave, yet it has some very interesting and innovative features such as step-by-step walkthrough on developing a business plan, customer validation (with analytical results of surveys), interactive communication channels with various mentors through the platform and much more.
“The main attraction is not just a technology-enabled, cloud-based virtual incubation centre, but the very idea of providing a young entrepreneur, end to end services online, that can help him / her in scaling from an idea stage to a funded startup is very exciting to me. Startify is on a path to connect startups across India, and startups with mentors seamlessly, which has a lot of potential” Pawas Jain quoted.
Startify already has over 100 registered startups, over 140 angels, mentors and incubators on board and is partnered with Google Developers Startup Launch and E-Cell of IIT Mumbai. Interestingly, Founded by 3 IIT Jodhpur students, Himanshu Sikaria, Achyut Joshi and Anshul Agarwal in 2015, Startify is already cash flow positive.
“We had started Startify in our sophomore year purely out of our sheer passion for entrepreneurship. We felt the need, and we created something amazing out of it. We had a small team and working out of a small city like Jodhpur was tough. But we have seen the ecosystem
in India changing in front of us, and it is changing for the better. We hope this deal helps us reach more budding entrepreneurs and bring out more innovative startups”, commented Achyut Joshi on behalf of Startify in regard to the buy-out deal.
Pawas will be using the platform to aid the online / virtual activity of Wired Hub, a co-working incubation space in Jaipur, Rajasthan (in which Pawas is already an investor / mentor in personal capacity). It will also be further developed to help other co-working spaces across the country to communicate with their startups in a better way, and the technology will be further strengthened to enable better online mentoring of startups coming on board. The vision behind the buy-out is to create India’s largest online incubation space, where startups can find answers to every question!
