Startup Name: Colangels

Founders: Simran Chhabra, Shruti Kaur  

Founding year: June,2018

Headquarter: Bangalore

Sector: Recruitment

We hardly know any startup who has aggregated the needs of the startup community & tried to solve the problem through technology. Most of them have been doing individually or a very small part of it; some with tech & some without tech. Colangels is a tech platform to simplify and bolster the footings across all verticals for startups to synergise with mentors, budding talent, aggregating co-working spaces and investors for angel and crowdfunding investments.

Colangels - Vision and Mission

Colangels wants to become an epitome of the startup industry by helping startups scale up exponentially by connecting them with Mentors, hiring talent, doing alliances, etc.

Colangels - Founders

Shruti Kaur

Shruti hails from Ranchi and has been predominantly into teaching. It is rightly said “A teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others”; and that’s what the Shruti believes in and thus came up with the idea of Colangels. Shruti has done her MBA & B.ed. from Ranchi University. She leads growth at Colangels.

Simran Chhabra

Simran has done her MBA from Amity University & was into recruitments before starting Colangels. She leads recruitment at Colangels. She believes in starting small but doing something which is scalable & provides an extraordinary experience to the users.

Aman Singh

Aman did his grads from BIT, Mesra & a post-graduate diploma from Stanford University, United States. He has been working in the e-commerce, retail, recruitment industry since last 7+ years.

Prateek Lamechwal

Prateek did his grads from Jain College, Bangalore & has been handling family business since then. He is a fitness enthusiast and is a certified sports nutritionist apart from being a part of Colangels.

The company has 10+ employees.

Colangels - The Idea

The idea struck Simran during her stint with her first job at Beam Commerce wherein she was looking to do an alliance with Flipkart but did not know whom to reach out to. She connected with a couple of category managers but that did not help. Reaching out to the right person became a big problem. So, she thought of a platform where anyone can reach out directly to the Alliances head/Co-founder of the company easily.

Read more: Interesting idea of PropStory

Colangels - Name and logo

Colangels, if broken into words, defines the objective, the target audience & the vision behind it. (the characters below in the words in uppercase are from the name of the startup)

COLlaborate with COmpanies & COLleges in a way so that they GEL with each other for mutual growth & end up becoming an ANGEL for the start-up community. The logo shows a hand in hand, showing collaborations or working together and helping each other grow.

Colangels - Product

Colangels provides an ease to reach out to the investors globally across Industries to help entrepreneurs validate/scale up their idea. This can be done just by sending them the elevator pitch at the press of a button.

Along with this, Colangels also tries to connect founders with the right mentors. We always came across multiple websites which showcase the name of mentors but it has always been at the jurisdiction of that website if they would be connecting us to a mentor which ideally flushes out some of the great ideas which startup founders have. The platform doesn't charge anything for connecting entrepreneurs with mentors or investors.

Read more: Interesting services of NestAway

Colanagels can help your startup grow fast by connecting you with the right person or co-founder for alliances and partnership with a top organisation. It does a 5-step verification at the background to make sure the message reaches out to the right person.

Changes are bound to happen in any product or service that is how the best products are made. So, Colangels keeps on implying changes to give the best product to our consumers. (They are currently at an early growth stage where the beta version of the platform is already live.)

Colangels - Revenue model

A major source of revenue for Colangels is hiring done through the platform for Internships & Jobs. The company counts Alibaba, Amazon, Chaayos, Flipkart, ShopX, Unicommerce, Roposo, Urban Ladder, Instamojo, Milkbasket, etc. as their clients.

Colangels - Initial customers acquisition

Colangels mainly helps startups connect with mentors, potential talent, aggregating co-working spaces, investors for angel & crowdfunding investments. So the main target audience is:

• Working Professionals looking for Jobs & Networking
• Mentors
• College students looking for Jobs, Internships & to connect with Mentors
• Startups looking to hire professionals for Job & internship

Initial customer acquisition was through references & prior work experience.

Colangels - Challenges

It was difficult to ask for time from Industry specialists (CEO’s/CXO’s, etc.) who can be potential mentors on the platform, but once they helped them understand the model & the difference the platform can bring in the startup ecosystem; most of them agreed to be a part of it.

Read more: Major challenges faced by Sequretek

Colangels - Growth

Till last Month - December ‘18, the platform had 10,000+ users in less than 6 months. The company is looking to gain traction of 100,000 users in next 6 months & 1 Million+ users by end of 2020. Colangels is currently operational in Bangalore & Gurgaon. However, they have plans to entering Mumbai as a location in the next couple of months.

Colangels - Building work culture

In the interview with StartupTalky, Simran said that we believe in flat hierarchies and everyone in the organization is very much approachable at any given point in time. It is important to have fun at work without compromising on the organizational goals. We also have an offshore every year to a location where the entire team works for a week & parties together.

Colangels - Funding

As of January 2018, the company is bootstrapped and they want to raise funds around mid-2019, when it plans to enter in SEA market.

Colangels - Advisors and Mentors

A lot of people from the hiring and e-commerce space have advised Colangels. Most of them were friends and were connected beforehand with the founders. In a way, all the advice taken was unofficial. No official mentor was reached out especially for advice or mentoring purposes.

Colangels - Competitors

Colangels doesn’t directly compete with any single organisation. There are multiple platforms for hiring like Linkedin, iimjobs, Naukri, etc. but the closest would be AngelList. However, Colangels differentiates itself from Angellist as Angellist doesn't connect you with mentors.

Colangels - Future Plans

The company is expecting to reach to 1 Lakh users in the coming months. By the end of 2020 it is looking at a user base of a million users.

Colangels plans to go global in mid-2019 when they enter SEA & that’s when they will take Indian talent from tier-1 colleges to SEA for internships & full-time placements as there is a massive increase in demand for Indian talent.

Read more: Future Plans of BookMyShow

Colangels  - Recognition

Colangels has officially been affiliated to the Jharkhand government and would be helping startups in the state grow exponentially. In fact, IAS Sunil Burnwal (Industries Secretary, Jharkhand Govt.) quoted, “This is one of the finest & promising tech platforms I have come across in the country”.

Colangels  - Mentors/Investors

Colangels counts following as their mentors:

• Ankit Khandelwal (COO, Unicommerce)
• Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder, PayTM)
• Nitin Jain (Co-founder, OfBusiness)
• Bhavna Agarwal (CEO, NDTV Gadgets360)
• Sahil Barua (CEO, Delhivery)
• Narinder Singh (MD, Numero Uno)

Colangels - Partners

Colangels has an official partnership with Internshala which enables them to inculcate growing startups hire the best of interns across different verticals.

Colangels - Technology Stack /Tools / Softwares

The company uses a variety of services, tools and programming languages to make up its core infrastructure. At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with Memcache.

Advice for candidates who aspires to join Colangels

We hire both interns and full-time employees across verticals. We look for a candidate who is full of confidence, energy, has knowledge about their field, has great communication and entrepreneurial skills, is high on enthusiasm and is always open to learning.

Website: Colangels