and Neera Nundy 36 Dasra | Amar Goel 35 Komli Media | Naveen Tewari 32 InMobi | Abhishek sinha 34 and Anubhav lary Technologies | Inderpreet S. Wadhwa 39 Azure Power | Sachin Bansal 30 and Binny Bansal 28 Flipkart
Amar Goel Komli Media
Because he has a mirror to the online world
Amar Goel’s recent entrepreneurial adventures aren’t for the faint-hearted. In the past 15 months, Komli Media, his digital media company, has been on a buying spree of sorts, acquiring five companies across Singapore, Australia and the UK. That’s an intense learning curve for any business especially one that’s just five-years-old. But Goel, who founded Komli to leverage the opportunities of a rapidly-growing world of online advertising, says it’s been a crazy, fun ride. “Before I began Komli, I’d never done business in India, not even in Asia. I grew up in the US,” says Goel. “A year-and-a-half before we acquired PostClick, I’d never even been to Australia. Now we have an office there. To see the world, travel to different places, work with different legal systems, and office cultures has been exciting,” says the 35-year-old. Not that Komli’s growth is just geographic. It tots up some impressive numbers. Headquartered in Mumbai, Komli reaches 30 million unique users monthly, and works with more than 100 advertisers through 200 partner websites across Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. Essentially, Komli helps marketers come up with targeted solutions online. Goel, who studied computer science at Harvard University and worked at Microsoft, Netscape and McKinsey before founding Komli, claims they’re already the third-largest player in digital advertising in India after Google and Yahoo. A self-confessed “product guy”, Goel says Komli is driven by revolutionising targeted advertising. On the back of innovative products like ViziSense, their leading audience measurement and ad spends benchmarking platform, Goel says Komli can be a $500-million revenue company in the next five years. ViziSense helps understand what’s really happening in the online ecosystem—tracking the fastest growing sites, understanding what women are doing online as opposed to men, and how often people visit banking site. “The digital lifestyle will explode over Asia Pacific. And we want to be there.” Goel personally seems well-equipped for the journey. Komli Media is his third start-up. In 1995, he founded Chipshot.com, a golf e-commerce company when he was just 19. By the time he was 24, he’d raised $50 million for his venture. It’s an experience he leveraged well at Komli, for which he has raised $23 million in three rounds of financing from leading firms like Norwest, Nexus and Helion Venture Partners. Goel is almost an entrepreneurship junkie now, he says, despite the many pain points—infrastructure woes in his beautifully done-up office in Mumbai’s Kalina, and the “super intense” war for talent. “But if I wasn’t building this company, I’d probably start another company.” —Shreyasi Singh
“ To see the world, work with different legal systems and cultures has been exciting.”
Nitin Gupta & Rohan Gupta Attero Recycling
Because they are cleaning up after us
Brothers Nitin and Rohan Gupta are out on a mission—to stop the planet from turning into a junkyard. Their firm, Attero Recycling, recycles e-waste like cell phones, TV sets and desktops. The idea for Attero, Latin for waste, came up five years ago. Rohan wished to dispose of a laptop. The process was difficult and led to a eureka moment. “We realised that there was a need to deal with the e-waste in an environmentfriendly manner,” says Nitin Gupta, the company’s CEO. That idea has morphed into an exciting business funded by investors like IndoUS Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Attero has a capacity of recycling 36,000 tonnes of e-waste every year. At its Roorkee plant the e-waste is put through a shredder and taken through an electro-magnetic field. Precious metals like gold, silver and copper used in the chips are extracted and sold to the commodities share market. Typically clients pay Attero a nominal service fee. Their clients could make more if they sold the e-waste to a scrap dealer, but that’s not the point. “Energy involved in extracting a single gram of copper from waste is 77 per cent less than getting the same amount from mining,” explains Gupta. Apart from being partners in this green effort, the clients benefit from the Guptas’ understanding of their needs. Attero picks up the e-junk from the offices of its 350-odd clients, some of whom are sensitive about data theft. The firm video records the entire process. They don’t confirm it, but a recent story on Attero suggests that they’re on track to a $10-million turnover by 2012. “Very few people get a chance do something good for society and still make money.” says Gupta. Now, who can disagree with that? —Ira Swasti
DECember 2011 | INC. | 3 9