Ladies make a beeline for the Angels

NOIDA: Mahalaxmi Loganathan, 37, is a mom of two girls. For the last one year, she has been actively developing and promoting a mobile application — My Period Tracker — a preventive healthcare app for women. The app helps women track their menstrual cycles, so they can keep track of their health and take precautionary measures against diabetes, thyroid or uterine cancer.She has been running her start-up from Noida Sector 2 for the past year, and is now looking for funds to scale up operations.
Aishwarya Goel, 23, has set up The Health Bistro, her second start-up. She wants to provide healthy food alternatives to college and officer goers. She will soon set up vending machines at a few colleges and corporate buildings. Her outfit is self-funded, but she too plans to scale up in some time.
Kriti Baveja, 26, runs MomZjoy.com from Gurgaon. The portal is all about providing fashionable and stylish clothes for moms-to-be. She launched her portal in November 2015. Even before launching her e-shop, Baveja had received 100 pre-orders. She is now working on scaling her business.
This is women’s entrepreneurship Version 2. Stepping out of running home-based boutiques, bakeries and playhouses, NCR women are now embarking on the next level of entrepreneurship. Technology driven, mobile application-based businesses are being floated and now the ladies are pitching for funds to expand and scale up their enterprises.
At least 80 women from Gurgaon, Noida and Delhi have applied for angel funds to scale up their businesses at the Angel Summit at FICCI auditorium, Delhi on May 7. This is the first time a platform has been floated in the NCR, solely for women entrepreneurs to pitch their business ideas and get angel funding to expand their businesses, and women only start-ups are making a beeline for it.
“We’re getting many innovative ideas, as well as focussed women entrepreneurs from NCR. These women represent the second wave of NCR’s women entrepreneurs. From small businesses, they now want to expand to e-commerce platforms, apps, etc. We’ve got 80 applications from NCR alone, with 90 others having applied from the rest of India. From these, we’ll short-list 10 who will pitch for funds with angel investors,” said Sita Pallacholla, founder and CEO of Angel Summit.
“One of the major tasks for women entrepreneurs is to break the myth that women do not have appetite for risk. More and more women are now stepping out of safe zones to scale up businesses they had once found on their passions,” said Sarika Bhattacharya, founder of Biz Divas, a Gurgaon-based mentoring platform for women entrepreneurs.
“A lot of networking is already happening on social media. We offer a platform for on-ground networking to women entrepreneurs and help them gain funds and other support to expand,” said Sairee Chahal, founder of Sheroes. Sheroes is a Noida-based startup which supports women entrepreners.
There’s a lot happening in NCR, but women entrepreneurs work in silos, and do not collaborate as much as they should. The Angel Summit will help to connect NCR women with those from other parts of the country,” Sita Pallacholla added.
The Angel Summit is a platform created by Angel Hub, a Hyderabad based start-up that works for connecting entrepreneurs with investors. Previous to the NCR event Angel Hub hosted a similar all-woman pitch in Hyderabad with over 700 participants which pulled in 20 investors.