Warm Cool regards from the StartupGoa fam 🤙🏽

Missed out? Get up to speed on the latest startup funding gossip from Goa

🔐 Goan startup Spintly raises 2.5M in pre-series Spintly’s IoT tech startup raises $2.5M in pre-series A round - That’s a lot of dough!

Spintly is a really cool startup based in Goa that makes smart devices for homes and businesses. These gadgets are perfect for people who want to control their doors, gates, and locks with their phones. With Spintly's technology, you can even use your phone to operate elevators and other access barriers! Their stuff is super convenient and makes life so much easier. Plus, big companies like OYO, MyGate, and L&T are already using their contactless tech to create a safer and more futuristic world.

👨🏽‍🏫 iXRLabs raises $800K in a seed funding round for their VR EdTech startup

iXRLabs co-founded by Goan Nihar Madkaiker, is a Gurugram-based VR EdTech startup that provides highly immersive, interactive, and insightful virtual reality experiences for higher education that helps users keep up with the rapidly changing pace of industry and technology. The startup provides experiential and immersive virtual reality (VR) educational modules in engineering, medicine, and sciences to universities and colleges.iXRLabs has collaborated with iVAR Lab at IIT Kharagpur to explore VR for higher education. The funding will be deployed for scaling up the product.

Made with ♥️ by the people of Goa

⚡️From diesel to electric: Goan startup Powerland, India’s first and only electric ATV manufacturer
Powerland is a Goa-based startup that manufactures and exports electric all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) for agriculture, defence, and adventure sports segments. They produce their ATVs at Goa’s Verna Industrial Estate with a team of 25 workers, producing 400 units annually. Their ATVs are used for agriculture, defence, and adventure sports segments. In August 2022, Powerland raised $1.2 million in equity and debt finance in its pre-Series A round from Germany-based ILAFA Vertriebs GmbH, for an 18% stake in the startup to scale up its production.

✍🏽Audiopen.ai: a no-code tool by Louis Perieira that got 500 paid subscribers after a month of launching it

Louis Pereira's journey with AudioPen is an inspiring one to follow. He built the MVP with No-Code and grew it to around 500 paid subscriptions in just 30 days after launching. Starting as an experiment with GPT-4 and Whisper, AudioPen proved to be the most popular of Louis' experiments on Twitter. Building in public from the start and involving his followers helped Louis build the MVP. Excitement grew among early users and Louis received his first payment within hours. Thirty days later, 2500+ users had signed up, and about 500 people bought his lifetime deal for the launch. A promising product indeed.

Innovating by the sea: Goan tech & startups in the spotlight

🔋From Coimbatore to Goa: Pulze Batteries Leads the Charge for Sustainable Power
Pulze Batteries is a brand of Lithium batteries produced by Pinnacle Lithium Power, a Coimbatore-based start-up in partnership with Syamantaka Technologies, a Goa-based start-up. Pulze batteries are used in various applications such as Electric Vehicles, Solar, Robotics and Marine. It has a state-of-the-art facility with the production capacity to produce and test 100 batteries daily. They have an efficient Supply Chain and minimized lead time. Pulze Batteries have also tied up with Lucas TVS to produce Make in India Battery Packs. They are working in the field of advanced thermal management and thermally stable battery packs.

📊 Engage, Earn, Repeat: How Buildoor is changing the game for dApp adoption
Buildoor Labs is a Goa-based tech startup that envisions devising a platform with an engage-to-earn economy as its force that drives adoption for dApps (or decentralised apps for the uninitiated 😛) like never before. It aims to solve the lack of adoption/conversion for developers, lack of feedback mechanism for developers, and lack of motivation/patience to learn web3 for users. With Buildoor, users can come and engage with a wide array of dApps and get paid to perform some key tasks on their way.

🌱Goa’s E-Rickshaws: Accessibility Meets Sustainability!
The office of the state commissioner for persons with disabilities in Goa has introduced wheelchair-accessible e-rickshaw services managed by Ezy Mov to make travel hassle-free for persons with disabilities. The service will be available from 7 am to 10 pm and can be availed by calling on 9029090880. Two family members can accompany the passenger with disability in this vehicle, which has a ramp that doubles up as the door in the rear and the wheelchair is strapped on all four sides for safety.

What we’ve been reading at StartupGoa

The Happiness Hypothesis - If technology is so great, why are people so unhappy about it?
The tech industry is facing criticism from various groups, including those who are unhappy with technology and the venture capitalists who fund it. While the purpose of technology is to increase the potential for happiness, most people do not feel like technology makes them much happier. The tech industry often produces products that seem unimpactful or silly at first, but through natural selection, the useful ones survive and contribute to human happiness. Technological progress is an infinite hedonic treadmill, where people quickly take for granted the things that once brought them happiness. Despite this, the tech industry promises to fix our problems, but with the caveat of giving them carte blanche to potentially cause harm

📋Featured Jobs from the StartupGoa job board

• Senior Software Engineer – Integrations - Spintly

• Sr. PHP Developer – Work From Home - Webfills

• UI/UX Designer - Codanto

• Senior Ruby On Rails Developer - TenTwenty

• Fullstack Web Developer (Remote) - Octalogic
  

The StartupGoa.org community is grateful for the support from our partners

Numadic

Numadic is on a mission to undisrupt movement by enabling automated vehicle payment applications and infrastructure. Numadic’s vehicle payments platform supports several major banks in India. Proudly built almost entirely in Goa.

Passbolt

Passbolt is the best password manager for teams and collaboration. Secure, flexible, and automation-ready. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, governments and defence forces. Passbolt is partially built in Goa.

Featured founders/startup

🦄Goa-based Molbio Diagnostics becomes a unicorn after raising $85M

Molbio Diagnostics, a Goa-based health tech firm, has become India’s 108th unicorn after raising $85M from Singapore-based private equity firm Temasek & existing investor.
The Goa-based company is known for its molecular diagnostic platform, Truenat, which it tweaked for COVID-19 testing, and was approved by the government. The company has also made Tuberculosis (TB) testing faster and has been validated by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for screening. In 2020, it was approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for the initial detection of TB and is pre-qualified to be part of the global plan to eradicate TB by 2030. 

🚅Kineco bags ₹113-crore order from ICF for Vande Bharat interior works

Goa’s Kineco has obtained a ₹113-crore order from the Integral Coach Factory, Chennai for Vande Bharat Express interior works. The Railway product portfolio includes rail coach interiors, toilet modules, aerodynamic front ends, driver cab interiors and hard seating systems.

🐦FlappyMusk - A web3 play to win based on the popular FlappyBird

Most of us have played FlappyBird, but Noah Martins and his teammates have gone one step ahead & developed a web3 based game where you can earn some crypto. You can also play for fun for free. So go ahead and see how far you can make Musk fly far. To Mars and beyond! They have recently launched another web3 game called Whack a Tate

🤖Goa daily wage worker builds robot to feed his differently-abled daughter
The entrepreneurship spirit seems to be catching on in Goa. A daily wage worker with no prior technical knowledge has built a robot to feed his differently abled daughter. The voice controlled robot was built by Bipin Kadam after researching online on the software required to build the robot. The Goa State Innovation Council is providing him Kadam with financial help and to improve the robot. The council is also looking to commercialise the robot.

Made with ♥️ in Goa or by Goans

🌽Goan startup creates a biodegradable alternative to single-use plastic

LaFabrica Craft is a Dona Paula-based biodegradable packaging startup that recently developed food packets for wet, semi-wet and dry items that is heat sealable and waterproof for 48hrs, which is made using cornstarch-based biopolymer called PLA (polylactic acid) which the company claims biodegrades in just 180 days - and also working on a 90 days biodegradable variant that is faster to degrade than any other biodegradable packaging available in the market.

The startup has also developed packaging and paper bags for food delivery, takeaways, envelopes, protective packaging etc. LaFabrica’s patent-pending paper bag design can carry up to 20 kg of weight. As the company tries to keep prices competitive with plastic packaging, the pouches are priced at Rs 2.2 each and hoping to bring them down further as demand increases.

💧Saaf Water - An AI-IoT platform that monitors and informs people about water quality
Saaf Water, a platform that uses AI and IoT tech to monitor & warn people about water contamination, won the 2021 Call for Code Global Challenge global contest by IBM with a prize amount of $200,000. Sanket Marathe & Hrishikesh Bhandari from Goa helped confound this startup which was praised by none other than our PM during a radio show called ‘Maan ki Baat’ hosted by the Prime Minister himself.

Events & Meetups

Upcoming

👨🏾‍💻16th October - Goa developer’s summit

StartupGoa is proud to be associated with Goa’s first ever developer’s summit.Goa Developer’s Summit is a day long event showcasing insights & trends that build and empower cutting edge applications. Fetauring industry leading speakers from Goa. Topics include low-code, microservice security, cloud computing, seeverless architecture, blockchain, AI/ML, web dev and creating addictive app experiences.This is one event you dont want to miss. To know more about this event and to register please visit the website.

Done

17th September - StartupGoa Web Folks Meetup 4

After a long break that include the dreaded semester exams and the much-needed Ganesh Chaturthi festive days ✨ Startup Goa hosted an exciting meetup on the 17th of September. Keeping in mind the feedback we got from you - the people, we decided to keep things more interactive & less technical.
We started off with a session on Climate Compatibility For Emerging
Businesses by Tulshe Chowdhury, a Climate Action and Sustainable Development Consultant.
We then had a small elevator pitch session. Attendees were grouped into teams and told to brainstorm ideas on what an ideal Goan startup focussed community should be. A community where people come together to learn, network & build.
It was super fun to see the teams pitch their ideas in front of the audience, with discussions taking place between them.
We hope to see you at the next one.

What we’ve been reading at StartupGoa

🔍A look into the thought behind Figma’s growth, from stealth to enterprise
Insight from the article: This is a nice inside of the sales process at Figma at the end, instead of pitching for companies to use their product, the Figma team focused on individual users at companies. Once the individual user became hooked on the product they would introduce Figma to the rest of the design team. Even if they left this company they would pitch Figma to the next company they joined. This is how they built a community & used it for growth.

Another insight: Multiplayer collab was a game changer that Figma perfected. So Figma initially put a price on how many people can collaborate simultaneously. The logic behind this was that they wanted to keep it free for individual users, but paid for teams (which made sense since hobbyists and individuals would usually not pay, while teams and organisations would have the funds to pay). They figured that by doing this the users would not get to experience the actual magic feature in the multiplayer collab and would miss out on the point of switching over to Figma. So they switched their plan so that free users can get unlimited collaboration but only on a limited number of files.

📋Featured Jobs from the StartupGoa job board

• NodeJS developers - Wafer Technologies

• Backend developer - Spintly

• Software tester - FabCoders

• Backend developer - Cidroy Technologies

• Python Developer - SoFueled Media
  

The StartupGoa.org community is grateful for the support from our partners

Numadic

Numadic is on a mission to undisrupt movement by enabling automated vehicle payment applications and infrastructure. Numadic’s vehicle payments platform supports several major banks in India. Proudly built almost entirely in Goa.

Passbolt

Passbolt is the best password manager for teams and collaboration. Secure, flexible, and automation-ready. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, governments and defence forces. Passbolt is partially built in Goa.

Feedback

StartupGoa is always striving to improve the quality of everything that we do. Feedback and criticism from community members are important to us and are very much appreciated. In case of any feedback regarding this or any other of our previous newsletter dispatches, please fill out this form.

Featured founders/startup

🐢Turtlemint opens R&D offices in Panjim
Turtlemint cofounded by Goan origin & alumni of Don Bosco High School Panjim - Anand Prabhudessai, is an Insuretech firm that was incorporated in the year 2015. In just 6 years’ time, the company has built the largest insurance advisor network and has footpoints in 14,000+ pin codes, with penetration in the Tier 3 cities and beyond. Turtlemint has brought about a digital revolution to the insurance advisor community by empowering them to advise insurance products across health, life, car & bike insurance from more than 50+ insurance companies.

Turtlemint, recognised globally as one of the top 50 Insuretech companies in the world, has recently set up a Research & Development centre here in Goa to work on digital insurance products. It will initially recruit software engineers for software development and software testing roles and at a later stage would look to employ business and financial analysts, product managers, content writers, and UX professionals. Turtlmint aims for one-third of its team to be working from their offices in Goa to work on newer technology, based on blockchain, data science & AI. The company has tied up with NIT, IIT and GEC for internship programs. To apply to their open positions please visit the Featured Jobs section below.

Goan tech/projects in the spotlight

🚀Goan firm Kineco to supply key unit for ISRO’s Ganganyaan mission

Is that a bird? A plane? No, it’s an ISROs spacecraft! Kineco will manufacture a critical component which will connect the crew escape module and the equipment bay.

Kineco whose revenues are over $25 million is involved in manufacturing composites in industries such as Aerospace, Railway & Industry. Other projects involve manufacturing the composite front structure (Train Nose) of Vande Bharat semi-high speed trains which you can read about it here. Kineco will be present at InnoTrans 2022, which is a prominent rail technology trade fair in Berlin where they will be unveiling 3 products complying with European standards: An automatic sliding door, a Vacuum pressure toilet system and TSI compliant PRM Toilet module.

📜 Goa-based legal tech startup raises funds

The Legal Capsule, a Goa-based legal tech startup, raised an undisclosed amount in May 2022 from Hyderabad-based SucSEED Indovation Fund & former CEOs of TCS & Tech Mahindra. The Legal Capsule is an AI-powered Contract Lifecycle Management Platform that assists enterprises (mainly SMEs & large-scale companies) in managing contracts on a single platform. From contract drafting to redlining important areas and tasks during negotiations to dynamic approval workflows the platform helps you manage contracts without much legal knowledge.

Made with ♥️ in Goa or by Goans

📈 CryptoKida - A Goan-based crypto news aggregating platform
Started with an aim to spread crypto-related news to all corners of India, CryptoKida caters to Hindi, Punjabi & English-speaking crypto enthusiasts & soon will include other Indian languages as well. Run by Aditi SK from Panjim, CryptoKida wants to make Goa the next big crypto hub. Check it out here.

🎲 Kheo Games - A Goa-based board game creator
Kheo, run by board game enthusiasts, is a Goan company that makes its own board games. Kheo means ‘to play’ in Konkani. They specialize in board games that have themes & tell a story like Go Goa: an award-winning board game in which players get to visit different tourist destinations to collect points to win the game. Kheo Games develop its games which involve the best game designers, graphic designers and artists in the development of our board games. Check out Go Goa here.

Events & Meetups

Just got done

StartupGoa Webfolks meetup July 2022
Startup Goa organised a meetup for the tech community in Goa on the 2nd of July 2022 at 91 Springboard, Panaji, Goa. The event focussed on inspiring Goan minds with startup culture, by bringing in speakers from the event sponsor, Turtlemint, an insure-tech platform. The event also provided a great opportunity for networking for around 70 attendees over some mouth-watering refreshments.

Upcoming

StartupGoa is planning an event for August 2022. Follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn & Twitter for updates on this.

What we’ve been reading at StartupGoa

🧘🏽‍♂️ Go to market in web3 - new mindsets
Read how web3 is changing the entire idea of go-to-market strategy through the lens of customer acquisition, encompassing areas such as pricing, marketing, partnerships, sales channel mapping, and sales force optimisation.

🧳 Career advice - Build personal moats
Founder of On Deck - Erik Torenberg’s favourite advice is to build personal moats. A personal moat is a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career. Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage specific to you that's not only durable but compounds over time.

🏚 The C4 model for software architecture visualization
If you ask an architect to design a structure you will get a standardized site plan that can be read by any architecture in the industry anywhere in the world. Ask a software engineer & you might get a diagram that even their teammates may not understand 😅 . The C4 model aims at providing a standardized & concise way of visualizing software architecture.

📋Featured Jobs from the StartupGoa job board

• Java/Spring Boot, Android/React Native/Kotlin, Javascript/ReactJS/Angular, Python/Data Engineering, Blockchain - Turtlemint

• QA Engineer - Numadic

The StartupGoa.org community is grateful for the support from our partners

Turtlemint

Turtlemint is an online insurance platform that identifies and purchases appropriate consumer insurance policies. It aims to “demystify” insurance by explaining the jargon in a simple way and providing smart tools to help a user make the right choice.

Passbolt

Passbolt is the best password manager for teams and collaboration. Secure, flexible, and automation-ready. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, governments and defence forces. Passbolt is partially built in Goa.

Numadic

Numadic is on a mission to undisrupt movement by enabling automated vehicle payment applications and infrastructure. Numadic’s vehicle payments platform supports several major banks in India. Proudly built almost entirely in Goa.

Feedback

StartupGoa is always striving to improve the quality of everything that we do. Feedback and criticism from community members are important for us and are very much appreciated. In case of any feedback regarding this or any other of our previous newsletter dispatches please fill out this form.

We are back with our second dispatch!

Amidst a backdrop of crashing crypto markets, we are still optimistic and confident about the web3 space as a whole. We’ve got news about a blockchain park that’s coming to Goa, as well as continued progress by Goan entrepreneur Jason Fernandes.

About a week and a half ago, we held our second web3 meetup and this one was an absolute blast. We had a full house (thanks Cafe Rasa!) and folks still waiting outside the doors to get in. Some brilliant sessions and good after-hour sessions. We are definitely going to organise more of these.

We’ve found new friends and added new volunteers to the team. The community keeps growing. We are looking out for volunteer candidates for our community manager role and WordPress developer role. Volunteers at SG enjoy benefits including free tickets to conferences, fast-track routes on apprenticeships and full-time roles etc. Get in touch if you’re interested.

Warm regards from the SG team

Featured founders/startup

🛖Bluelearn - building the future of student communities
Bluelearn co-founders & BITS Goa graduates Harish & Shreyans recently got featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia 2022 list. Along with founding members Kenan (engineering) & Vinit (design) they’ve built one of India’s leading online student communities having more than 60,000 members. They’ve been working from their office in Dona Paula for the past year.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview with Shreyans. You can read the full article on our blog.

“Building something from 0 to 1 is difficult, the odds are stacked against you, but I think the top 3 values that every entrepreneur needs to have are: Persistence, Resilience and hard work. Over the last 3 and half years we have learned so much, from how to cold call, to hiring someone 10+ years older than us. Every day we face a new problem that we have to extinguish and that’s what keeps us all motivated and excited for the future”

Goan tech/projects in the spotlight

🏙️ Blockchain Park launched in Goa
We have some good news for you web3 folks! - Major crypto exchange WazirX launches a Crypto park in our very own state. In collab with the Goa Institute of Management, WazirX will aid entrepreneurs to identify the value drivers of these innovative technologies. It will also ensure the creation of a policy framework for accelerating the growth of the start-ups and the Blockchain ecosystem.

Made with ♥️ in Goa or by Goans

💰Jason Fernandes’ crypto launchpad raises $2mn in 5 days

Candolim based serial entrepreneur & investor Jason Fernandes’ venture AdLunam raised $2mn in just 5 days, bringing the company’s evaluation to $22mn. The AdLunam platform which is based on “Proof of Attention” allows investors & users to earn tokens based on activities such as creating content, commenting, voting & referring. AdLunam’s own public sale will take place in the coming months on exchanges like Gate.io & Bitforex.

📕 New book launch by a community member!

‘The Incessant Debt Cycle’, a book by Johann Silva & illustrated by Gyles Ferrao is now available on Amazon and Flipkart.
The book lays the foundation for being able to make the right decisions in the stock market and would be the right category for a beginner to start studying.

📱Voter Q: Local voting app for Goa built by Sridhar Maskeri
Budding GEC undergraduate, Sridhar Maskeri, built an android app “Voter Q” for the Government of Goa. The app displays the number of people currently in the Queue in your particular Ward. Also, it would display the voting percentage.
The app was built using React-Native. Django was used for the back-end and was deployed using AWS.

Responses to articles from the community

🗣️ Google Translate adds Konkani: What are the Limitations?
Following up with an article from our last newsletter, community member Saurabh Kanekar shared with us an article which highlights some challenges that Google Translate faces when it comes to Konkani translation and alternate approaches to overcome the same.

Events & meetups

Upcoming

🌊 Web3 by the Sea - A blockchain, NFT & gaming summit
The Web3 by the Sea Blockchain and NFT summit is a showcase of the industry’s thought leaders, front runners and upcoming talent. On the 15th of July 2022, Blockchain and NFT minds will converge in Cavelossim, Goa to exchange, network and present ideas that are changing the landscape of the industry as we know it. Featuring Industry leaders, Developers Traders, Educational Institutions, Market makers, Gamers, NFT artists, Government and Launchpads. Interact with 18 speakers, and 7 partners as they cover topics in the Metaverse, NFTs, GameFi, Defi, Market Making, Regulation and new locations to host your Web 3 company. We hear there’s going to be an awesome after-party as well 🥳

🏝Web3Conf India is happening in Goa!
A nationwide web3 event happening on the 12th-13th & 14th of August. The event will include prominent speakers from across the globe. The event kicks off with a cruise party in a true Goan way & also includes ‘Community Spaces’ which are villas & coworking spaces run by DAOs, groups, projects & companies. Other events include a web3 Hackathon & Education summit - where discussions on best practices around hosting events, managing communities & educating folks will take place

Just got done

GM folks! We just got done with our very first event in a while - the Chainlink web3 meetup by the Chainlink Goa community & StartupGoa. It was really fun to interact with everyone. We covered several topics during the meetup:

• Intro to Web3 by Mizan Mohammed, Crypto & Stock Trader & Analyst

• Intro to Blockchain and Smart contracts by Yashwant Choudhary, DeFi and NFT Analyst

• Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Networks by Elio Lopes, Co-founder/CEO - IntoTheVerse Inc & Shrey Keni - Engineer at socket.tech

• The state of UX in web3 by Salil Naik - Lead frontend engineer at socket.tech

• Chainlink Community Programs by Mr Bharath Silagani, Community Manager, India - Chainlink Labs

We’ll keep you posted on our upcoming events!

Suggested reading

🧱Thinking about building software like Legos
Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance. Ideas can build on each other like legos. Just like software, ideas are composable.

📚Learn the basics of Web 3.0 in this brilliant Twitter thread
A thread to introduce you to what are the primitives, protocols, languages, & tools needed to build decentralized applications - an attempt to describe the web3 stack

📋Featured Jobs from the StartupGoa job board

• Vue.js Developer - TintBytes.com

• React Native Senior Developer - Creative Capsule Infotech

• Frontend Developer - Numadic

• Backend Developer - Numadic

• Fullstack Developer - Numadic

The StartupGoa.org community is grateful for the support from our partners

Passbolt

Passbolt is the best password manager for teams and collaboration. Secure, flexible, and automation-ready. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, governments and defence forces. Passbolt is partially built in Goa.

Numadic

Numadic is on a mission to undisrupt movement by enabling automated vehicle payment applications and infrastructure. Numadic’s vehicle payments platform supports several major banks in India. Proudly built almost entirely in Goa.

Grandworks

GrandWorks is a full-stack web design and development agency working for clients such as Spotify, OnePlus, OPPO, The Indian Government, UpCloud, Borosil, Hidesign, etc.

Contact mail@startupgoa.org if you’d like to support the community or volunteer.

We began this project more than 11 years ago, but over the past 3 to 5 years, we lost a bit of steam as we got caught up with our own projects. Surprisingly, the community and especially the job board continued to power on.

We’re happy to share that we now have a young set of volunteers, taking over the reins of our little community project. We are joined by Dave Paiva, Enrich Braz, Shriram Parab and Yesh Surve working on various functions at StartupGoa. We will be relaunching our Webfolks meetups (now Web3 folks ;)) as well as kicking off a mentorship program (in which we already have two startups onboarded).

Our original vision was grounded in the belief that entrepreneurs can change society, and need not wait for government or institutional intervention. We continue with that mindset, working collaboratively at the grassroots level, to sprout world-class startups from Goan soil.

This newsletter is a work in progress so please get in touch with your feedback.

Much love and warm regards from team 1.0; Caslino, Aprup, Siddharth & Luke. Now over to team 3.0!

Goan tech/projects in the spotlight

🥥 Konkani added to Google translate

Konkani is now one of 133 languages around the globe supported by Google Translate. This gives our mother tongue and its speakers a significant boost & would definitely be helpful for translators and language learners. The addition was made possible by Sanjeet Hegde Desai, Senior Manager of Business Systems at Google and Konkani activist Chetan Acharya.

🌱Goan agro-biotech startup raises 4.3 crore funding

Goan startup GreenPod Labs has raised a pre-seed round of 4.3 crores. It aims at solving the food waste in India which amounts to a loss of $12 billion by extending the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables. The funds will be used for research and development as well as scaling operations.

💳These Goa-based entrepreneurs are simplifying credit for retailers and distributors

Founded by Sanket and Sanmati Shendure, Goa-based startup Minko has over 10,000 retailers and aims to expedite its growth in the offline retail space. They also target to lessen the credit gap by addressing the credit bottleneck through a full-stack Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) led payment product for independent distributors in the Indian retail market.

Made with ♥️ in Goa or by Goans

🛠 The super creator Louis Pereira from Porvorim has built Nicheless, a platform for sub-300-word essays. It has no public likes or comments 😌 and is aimed at first time writers. Louis’ goal is to take away the cognitive and social load off of writing and let thinkers get their thoughts out clearly. Give it a try: nicheless.blog

✨[EXCLUSIVE] We interviewed Salil Naik to learn more about his work. Salil Naik works at Socket helping build a cross-blockchain fund transfer app called Bungee. Here’s an excerpt and you can read the full interview on our blog.

“When building a unique solution, you will always be challenged. There are few to absolutely no apps you can take inspiration from, but that also puts us in a sort of unique position. We are the ones to set the path, be it with our infrastructure, our product or our design.
Though my work is limited to Bungee at the moment, I’m trying to step into the unknown and try a few things that will make socket integration even easier. Imagine integrating Socket into your application in a few hours. How about a few minutes?”

Upcoming events & meetups

🤝Startup Saturday by Headstart

Inviting aspiring founders and startups for a meetup and listen to Sandeep, Cofounder of BLive on "How Blive built in Goa? " at Headstart Startup Saturday on 21 May 2022 afternoon 3 PM at build3 villa, Candolim

RSVP at https://bit.ly/ss_goa

Upskill yourself

✍🏽Writing is an important skill to develop while working at a startup. Whether you are an engineer documenting a feature or writing an article on something you just learned or a Product Manager planning something new, documentation helps focus on your thoughts and make them clearer. Here’s a good place to learn writing for folks in tech.

📋Featured Jobs from the StartupGoa job board

• Node JS Developer - Kilowott

• Senior UI/Frontend Developer - TenTwenty

• Social Media Manager - DroolMonkey

Head over to the StartupGoa job board to post or apply for jobs

The StartupGoa.org community is grateful for the support from our partners

Passbolt

Passbolt is the best password manager for teams and collaboration. Secure, flexible, and automation-ready. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, governments and defence forces. Passbolt is partially built in Goa.

Numadic

Numadic is on a mission to undisrupt movement by enabling automated vehicle payment applications and infrastructure. Numadic’s vehicle payments platform supports several major banks in India. Proudly built almost entirely in Goa.

Grandworks

GrandWorks is a full-stack web design and development agency working for clients such as Spotify, OnePlus, OPPO, The Indian Government, UpCloud, Borosil, Hidesign, etc.

Contact mail@startupgoa.org if you’d like to support the community or volunteer.

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!