News

Chennai, February 25, 2016: 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.

About PayPal Start Tank

PayPal India formally launched its startup incubator in association with TiE Chennai in November 2013. The exclusive facility in PayPal’s Chennai technology center provides an obligation-free environment as well as technology and business mentorship for select startups to evolve. It has an office area of more than 11,000 square feet with a world-class incubation space, state-of-the-art conference rooms and other amenities.

Start Tank is located globally across PayPal offices in London and Chennai and provides access to global mentors, angel investors and venture capitalists. Start Tank Chennai currently hosts four other startups: CashFree, D-Rewards, Notifie and ftcash.

About PayPal

At PayPal (Nasdaq:PYPL), we put people at the center of everything we do. Founded in 1998, we continue to be at the forefront of the digital payments revolution. In 2015, 28% of the 4.9 billion payments we processed were made on a mobile device. PayPal gives people better ways to connect to their money and to each other, helping them safely access and move their money and offering a choice of how they would like to pay or be paid. With our 179 million active customer accounts, we have created an open and secure payments ecosystem that people and businesses choose to securely transact with each other online, in stores and on mobile devices. PayPal is a truly global payments platform that is available to people in more than 200 markets, allowing customers to get paid in more than 100 currencies, withdraw funds to their bank accounts in 57 currencies and hold balances in their PayPal accounts in 26 currencies. For more information on PayPal, visit https://about.paypal-corp.com. For PYPL financial information, visit https://investor.paypal-corp.com.

About PayPal India Technology Centers

PayPal’s technology centers in India (Chennai & Bangalore) have over 1,300 engineers who support the PayPal business globally. These talented technologists are part of a global team that is constantly innovating and driving software development initiatives that enhance and expand PayPal’s global payments platform. The India technology centers house a best-in-class team of software developers, architects, user experience engineers, web developers, data analytics & project managers.