Serial entrepreneur and author of The Golden Tap, a book on—what else? — start-ups, Kashyap Deorah, is close to launching his fourth start-up, HyperTrack, which has created software for tracking products or people across the globe.
Deorah, 38, who has been working on building HyperTrack for almost nine months, is testing the software in several countries including India, the US, the Middle East, Australia and some in Europe.
The software is currently in private beta and is being tried out by 25 clients.
HyperTrack was founded in October 2015 by Deorah and Tapan Pandita, who together pooled in $300,000 to launch the venture. The company has already raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from investors in Silicon Valley.
HyperTrack is Deorah’s attempt at creating a global technology firm from India.
“Only a few companies in the world have built the smartphone tracking technology that HyperTrack aspires to build. Uber and Google are two such companies. Today you can track your Uber but it is surprising that there is just no publicly available web service to continuously track people and things while they are out and about,” said Deorah.
Delhi-based HyperTrack’s services will allow businesses or consumers to track goods or people in real time.
Imagine ordering food online and getting to track the order on a map, as it moves towards you. Just like a cab ride, Deorah eventually wants to enable businesses to track bike taxis, shuttle services or any other kind of feet-on-the-street through its services.
“It’s a problem that app developers are facing worldwide. There is no web service to “track the app until it gets there,” he added.
HyperTrack’s software will allow businesses to track people, goods and pay per use. For companies that are just starting out and are in boot-strap stage, the services will be offered free for up to 1,000 orders a day.
HyperTrack is largely looking to make money from established and sufficiently funded start-ups. The companies could pay $35 per 1000 orders tracked.
The biggest challenge in front of Deorah would be to convince consumer internet firms, especially in India, which are already trying to curb costs to invest in software that helps improve service levels.
Deorah believes these services will help companies to plug into a technology which is expensive and hard to build in-house.
HyperTrack has a six-member team and Deorah is actively scouting for talent in Silicon Valley. He has managed to attract Google’s Abhishek Poddar to join as the head of product at HyperTrack.
Poddar, who was working as the product manager at Google San Francisco for more than three years, decided to quit his job and relocate to India to help build HyperTrack.
According to Deorah, unlike high-flying Silicon Valley executives who joined Indian unicorns at million dollar salaries only to move back a year later, Poddar will draw a fraction of his salary at Google but have high ownership in the company.
“The motivation is to move back and make most of the market. It is a good time to start up in India because you have a chance of building a real valuable company now rather than what was happening a year or two ago,” said Poddar.
Poddar is a graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and holds a management degree from Stanford.
HyperTrack is also close to hiring an engineer from Amazon who will be joining the firm in Delhi in the next 30 days, added Deorah, who declined to divulge further details.
The company has got Meena Srinivasan, formerly at fitness device maker FitBit, as its advisory chief financial officer and is looking to further strengthen its advisory board by signing on a couple of technology heavy hitters in the map space.
Last year, Deorah authored The Golden Tap: the inside story of hyper-funded Indian start-ups. Over the last 15 years, he has started and sold three companies. He is also an angel investor in over 20 companies in India and Silicon Valley. Deorah founded Chalo, a payments app which was acquired by OpenTable in 2013. Prior to that he founded Chaupaati, a phone commerce marketplace, sold to Future Group in 2010. He served Future Bazaar as president for over two years.
“I am a big believer of selling shovels in a gold rush. At a time when everybody is building consumer centric businesses, the company that makes software such as these to help them reduce costs and bring in efficiencies can be a billion dollar opportunity,” says Rohan Malhotra, co-founder Investopad, a start-up incubator.
This article was originally published in LiveMint
