Protection of the environment has become an essential part of business organizations. Many reforms are being made and actions are being taken to maintain sustainable development which includes minimizing the use of paper. As per seeing the current situation, the day doesn’t seem so far when one would have to pay a sum of bills to get some fresh oxygen from trees.
The people who are aware of such problems are coming forward to eliminate them and create this world a better place to live. Entrepreneurs are also contributing their efforts to this great cause.
Ecobillz, the startup which aims at minimizing the usage of paper for making bills, is becoming a major example of the environmental protection act. The founders of this innovative start-up are Dr. Ameet Patil and Nitesh Singh Rathore.
Ecobillz Founders Journey
Dr Ameet Patil, a little social adventurer since his childhood, comes from an engineering family background who moved from city to city, creating friends and acquaintances everywhere he went. Since his childhood days, he had innovative skills and led him to start various small ventures/initiatives. He had a keen interest in computers and knew numerous programming languages.
He took up Computer Science engineering and after graduating, joined a college as a lecturer of Data structure and Design & Analysis of Algorithms (DAA) due to huge recession and no jobs availability.
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In February 2001, he got selected at Oracle India Pvt Ltd in development sector in Hyderabad. During that time he started developing a tiny kernel for RTOS. Later he shared his work with Dr Neil Audsley, a professor at the Real-time System Group in The University of York, UK and did his PhD course under him. During his third year, a group of people started a venture called Rapita Systems Ltd, it was a product to measure/estimate the worst-case execution time of real-time software that runs in mission-critical systems such as aircraft, satellites, etc. He joined the venture to do development, European Union research project management, and travel to set upstalls in trade shows to do technical sales as well. That gave him a tremendous opportunity to learn and expand his know-how of the start-up world.
In late 2008, he decided to move back to his town, Belagavi, India to start his own start-up. He started a company, Spundhan Softwares Pvt Ltd, providing embedded systems development services. That company got their first overseas customer – Rapita, and gradually increased its team size andacquired more contracts from customers such as Robert Bosch, Cisco, L&T, TATA Automation Ltd, etc.
He also experimented with other businesses such as CCTV security and GPS devices in 2010-11. In 2014, he merged Spundhan into another start-up in Huballi – LinkEZ Technologies Pvt Ltd.
In 2013, Nitesh, the co-founder of Ecobillz helped Spundhan in marketing their products/services.
Nitesh Singh Rathore has always been interested in technology and was a great admirer of great product designs. He used to wonder about people's behaviour and how technology could make an impact on it. He conceptualised and began his first start-up named Intuitive Education System, which used 3D labs and gamification techniques for teaching Physics experiments. He was a keen observer of human behaviour and using his key interest in design thinking came up with a golden tool for devising business models. He possesses more than 8 years of experience in the start-up world through which he developed a great understanding of unfastening customer's behaviour. He believes that it helps tremendously in improvising new business models, state-of-art product designs and powerful marketing and sales plan.
They both joined LinkEZ, and after 2 years, they decided to build something impactful, that will bring good to the environment. They used to exchange a lot of ideas about the next start-up they could start.
They wanted to work on an idea that was environmentally positive, impactful and yet made some business sense. One of their friends mentioned about wastage of paper in the retail industry and from then on, they started digging deeper into that idea.
Once, while buying a single item in a supermarket, Ameet and Nitesh received almost a foot long receipt for it. They just looked at it once and threw it. At that very moment, the idea to do something to curb such wastage of paper stuck in their minds. They researched this field and the different markets where paper is being used and wasted. They agreed to use technology to digitalize business and eliminate the usage of paper. That's how Ecobillz was born.
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Ecobillz Startup
Established in 2016, Ecobillz is an innovative SaaS-based real-time digitization platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to digitize, collect, aggregate data and build complex back-office automation systems. The product, connects with the existing systems and software, accessing the data and streamlining them onto the Ecobillz platform to ease the document management process in large organizations. The platform aims to build the technology that can read, accumulate documents and store data in real-time, thus leading to an efficient digitised document management system. As the platform focuses on industry wise intervention to replace paper-based transactions with customers, the artificial intelligence embedded in Ecobillz help to crunch the data, thus generating valuable insights for the respective businesses. Ecobillz, while currently focussed on the hospitality business, also aims to foray into multiple domains such as hospitals and automotive sector.
As the product is currently in use and implementation across top hotel chains in India, it is working with the businesses to fine tune and personalise the requirements of these chains. Ecobillz has already provided options like sending Registration card via email or WhatsApp in advance; providing access to all invoices/documents on guest phone, verification of resident and non-resident guests, accessing digital Food and Beverage menu on guest phone, placing orders and providing payment options online.
Currently, Ecobillz is being used in more than 150+ premium luxury hotels all across India and abroad. Ecobillz is the winner of Elevate 2021- a start-up funding initiative by the government of Karnataka and was selected for the Singapore Cohort 4 by 500 start-ups. The company scaled their operations from a small city – Belagavi to all around the world. The company's team is growing fast with young talented individuals. Nitesh looks after every aspect of sales, customer management and product design methodology; and Ameet being the technology person,after the back-end technology, operations and development of new products. They are constantly expanding their team of bright-minded souls.
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“My idea of business is based on value creation, and that has been the motto behind Ecobillz. My driving force has always been my love for technology and when I saw that there is such a big gap in the market wherein by introducing technology the environment can be saved too, it was the perfect objective for me to fulfil.” says Ameet.
The main factor of their success is the agenda of bringing value to the table, being consistent and innovative in their approach, not giving heed to negative criticism and continuing to do good work have helped the entrepreneur across all areas of his life. Ameet believes that without value creation, no idea or business can grow and without innovation, no one can survive in the market. One has to keep improving the status quo to ensure they are ahead and bring good value to their customers.
As a serial entrepreneur, Ameet says that he was fortunate enough to have the support of many friends who knew him from the old days. Theyreceived their initial funds from friends and family. After the recognition into Startup India and incubation into NASSCOM 10,000 Start-ups warehouse in Bangalore, they raised their seed/angel round in 2019. Since then theyhad been growing their business on its own and have been profitable this year. They are currently looking to raise the Series-A round to scale globally.
Their journey to accomplish a great feat has been full of challenges. The major challenge was the fact that since, paper billing systems have been so prevalent for time immemorial, making such a switch that too at an extensive level was initially hard for people to accept. Businesses need return on investments. They worked on their offering to not just make it for saving paper alone, but much more than that. By way of initialization, they have performed advanced analytics and automation which saves huge amount of time spent earlier in doing mundane manual activities.
There was a time when their business was going downhill; they had little to no money in the bank. At that time they were paying the salaries of their employees from their own pocket and there was absolutely no money coming in. They were convinced that hospitality will work in their favour. They had to pause the Retail market to focus on hospitality because they had full faith in their idea anddecided to go all in; finally, it all turned out to be much better.
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Ecobillz Target Customers
Currently, their key target customers are players in the hospitality sector, along with the travel and tourism sector. They are aiming to spread their project across various overseas markets including middle-east, Africa, south-east Asia and Europe.
“There is only one formula to being successful at whatever you do; and that is Perseverance.” Ameet says. He hadseen many young entrepreneurs coming up with innovative ideas but he noticed that they give up easily. They must remember that ups and downs are a part of the journey, being an entrepreneur, one must be ready to weather storms without shaking.