Konotor & PiQube Successfully Complete their Tenure at PayPal’s Start Tank at Chennai

PayPal, a global leader in online payments, today announced the graduation of the second batch of startups incubated at its Start Tank Incubation Center in Chennai, India. The two companies — Konotor and PiQube — started their incubation at Start Tank in November 2014. At their time of graduation, PiQube has raised $500,000 in funding from private investment company, HR Fund, while Konotor has recently announced its acquisition by software firm, Freshdesk. The occasion marks another milestone for Start Tank, which is located within PayPal’s Technology Center in Chennai.

PayPal’s Start Tank incubates early-age startups with the aim of enabling them to help revolutionize and drive innovation in the industry. The startups receive mentorship and infrastructure support from PayPal, as well as access to an extensive network of leaders from the industry, including The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Chennai, a not-for-profit organization committed to the cause of entrepreneurship.

“This graduation is another major step in our commitment to the development of a strong technology ecosystem in India. As one of the world’s largest startups, it is rewarding to see the startups incubated at Start Tank benefit from our mentorship and expand their teams and businesses during their incubation period. PiQube and Konotor have done extremely well over the past year, and we wish the two companies the very best in their entrepreneurial endeavors.” said Guru Bhat, General Manager, Chennai Technology Center, PayPal.

Graduating Startups:

Konotor, founded by Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar and Deepak Balasubramanyam, is a product of Demach Software India Private Limited. It enables messaging between businesses and their app users for customers support, promotions, re-engagement, and more. Konotor provides the businesses the right tools to manage customer conversations, as well as the ability to engage in a contextual and personal way with their app users.

“This tenure at PayPal has helped us with our growth as a product and a business. We were able to benefit from availing access to great infrastructure to support our business, consult with PayPal architects for technology guidance, and bring more structure to our organization growth and business metrics. We are extremely delighted about the fact that Konotor has recently been acquired by Freshdesk Inc, a leading cloud-based customer support software company,” said Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-founder, Konotor. 

PiQube, founded by Jayadev Mahalingam, is a hiring intelligence platform that uses Data Science and Human Judgment in the right proportion to help companies hire smarter, swifter, simpler. The machine learning platform aggregates companies and recruitment agencies. PiQube raised $500,000 from The HR Fund during its incubation at Start Tank.

“Since our incubation at Start Tank in 2014, PiQube has grown leaps and bounds. In terms of manpower, the company has expanded from a five member team to a 25 member team in a span of 15 months. On the business front, we have grown from zero customers to 75 customers with a 20-fold growth in revenue. PayPal has helped build our company in such a short span of time and we are extremely thankful to PayPal for the mentorship they have provided at their Start Tank facility,” said Jayadev, Chief Problem Creator at PiQube.