Innoz Technologies - Enriching Mobile Experience

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Innoz Technologies

Enriching Mobile Experience

The Company

When we say 'mobile app' the first thing comes in our mind is a smartphone and 3G connection. But Deepak Ravindran, co-founder and CEO of Innoz technology, a mobile innovation venture headquartered in Koramangala begs to differ. "You don't need a smartphone to become smart," he said.

Everybody irrespective of age, location and vocation—has questions to ask. These could be simple or complex. And not everyone with a doubt has access to the Internet to get the answers. Innoz represents a solution for enabling feature phones, which account for 3bn of the world’s 4bn phones, to access the internet through SMS.

In 2008, Deepak Ravindran, Abhinav Sree, Ashwin Nath and Mohammed Hisamuddin incorporated Innoz Technologies. The company started commercial operations in 2011. Over a billion queries had been sent through Innoz by December 2012 (the service launched in 2011) and 20 operators have signed up. Innoz is live in seven countries now and the platform has developed quickly and impressively. Currently, it has about 120 million active users, and responds to about five million queries a day. With a revenue of Rs 6 crores Innoz targets 150% increase in next financial year. In 2013, Innoz made it into the Limca book of records for building the "Largest offline search engine

As Deepak says “Innoz is on a mission. By inventing the Offline Internet, we are changing the way India and the rest of the developing world accesses and uses the Internet”

Who is Deepak Ravindran

A twenty year old Deepak left Kannur University,LBS College of Engineering,Kerala as a dropout with a novel idea of giving Internet to the offline world in 2008. Since then Ravindran has received numerous awards, including being named one of the outstanding innovators under 35 for the year 2011 by the MIT Technology Review. Asia Society announced Ravindran as one of Asia's 21 emerging leaders under 40 for 2013. He has lectured at several universities including Stanford, IIT Bombay, IIM Ahmedabad, Semester@Sea, and international conferences including WIRED Conference, Rolex Leadership Forum, TED, and the Red Herring Global 100 forum. His work has appeared in Forbes, WIRED, The Sydney Morning Herald, CNN, Bloomberg, UTV, and several other magazines, newspapers, and blogs. Most recently, National Geographic Magazine profiled him inside India's Future Leaders in their show 'Onward'--a project to explore the world and share its untold stories.

Inception, Incubation and growth

“Hisam was in transit and trying to understand the meaning of a word. But with his phone, he was not able to connect to the internet. For us, that was an eureka moment. We sat together and thought we should do something to address this. And, Innoz happened.”

Innoz was launched by a group of engineering college dropouts who came upon the idea when they weren't able to search for "How to woo girls" on their very basic phones. From the hostel room of LBS Engineering began the journey of Innoz. The college was very supportive, they used college's Wi-Fi to do their work, in fact college gave them library to work on the project, so other than fund raising not much hurdles were found as they used the college’s infrastructure. The starting investment was from the founders who equally invested a sum of 1 lakh INR. The beginning SMS Gyan was conceived in a college and gained popularity by word of mouth, growing into a commercial venture. Later, the four-member team thought of a market opportunity beyond the curriculum and decided to turn the project into a business venture.

Innoz started their journey as a virtual incubate of Technopark TBI ,Kerela. T-TBI is designed to provide a springboard to budding entrepreneurs who wish to launch themselves into the world of technology based business careers. It provides startups with fully furnished office spaces, mentoring support in developing business and technology plans, and networking of business resources, seed capital assistance, marketing assistance, professional assistance, conference facilities and video conference facilities.

Commercial operations were formally kicked off when Innoz was selected for the iAccelerator programme by Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Accelerators accelerate the speed of your business. In most cases an existing business or an idea. The programs are short and intense. They help you hone your idea and build it out. Whereas incubators incubate your early pre-product idea, help you make a prototype, and further make a product out of it. The engagement is longer than an accelerator.

iAccelerator is one such accelerator program which focuses on internet and mobile startups and is run by the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, IIM Ahmedabad. Through its three months long, residential, mentorship based and extremely intensive program, it helps the fledgling startups in the ICT space get off the ground. Selected startups receive investment, infrastructure and business mentoring from iAccelerator ecosystem of experts, mentors, investors and enthusiasts. On an average, iAccelerator startups meet and interact with 50+ investors during the program.

It received angel funding from Freeman Murray (co-founder of Jaaga), Satish Dharmaraj (partner at Redpoint Ventures),Kris Gopalakrishnan(founder at Infosys), Arun Kumar (partner at KPMG), KCC Nair (CFO of Technopark), Sanjay Vijayakumar (CEO of MobME Wireless) among others at different stages of its growth. At present, Seedfund is the sole investor in Innoz, and owns a significant minority stake in the company

With time the team strength rose to 20 and Deepak shifted to Delhi to meet potential clients. After entering the country  telecom hub with a young team (average age of 23), Innoz faced various challenges in securing its first contract.

“When we moved to Delhi, the first challenge was to meet clients. We were all young. One day, when I was sitting in a coffee shop near a Bharti Airtel office, I met a senior official from that company. I introduced myself and spoke about our company. He was quite positive about the whole idea and Bharti came on board as our first user,” Ravindran said.

Airtel was the first service provider in the country to roll out the SMS Gyan service. Any Airtel user can SMS a query to 55444. The platform gained momentum during 2011 world cup cricket by providing real time score. After seeing the success of the value-added service provided by Airtel, other service providers such as Vodafone, Idea, Airtel and BSNL followed.