Horntell, a tech company based in Gurgaon, announced that they have raised their angel funding of $150k.
The round was led by Bharani (CEO at 91mobiles.com). Other major participating angels include Sanjiv Mital (CEO at NISG), Shobhit Shukla (Chief Revenue Officer at Near) and Rahul Agarwal (VP of Finance at Near). The company is valued at just under $2mn at the moment.
Horntell, is focused on building an unified platform which allows you to use any app/website through one single feed containing small actionable notifications. According to Horntell, an average user spends more time with notifications than all the apps combined, and still the notifications have a poor user experience. Inspired from this, they have come out with a product, that can make almost anything possible (including payments), with just a couple of taps within the notification itself. Because everything happens inside the boundaries of the notification, the user does not need to shuffle between various apps to ‘catch up’ on everything happening.
Beginnings
Horntell began by tackling the small part of the problem by offering actionable notifications for the websites. Today, it is a budding platform that can unify the notifications across multiple devices for an individual.
One of the biggest challenge for an internet business is to make their users act with minimum efforts. Horntell made that possible.
They started as a Chrome Extension and got opportunity to validate their fundamental hypothesis about the product at lightning speed. They have now launched our Android application as well which will increase the reach on to mobile, and thus unifying the platforms.
After the initial launch in March 2015, Horntell is currently integrated with 400+ internet products including ProductHunt, Shopify, Basecamp, Github, Trello, Mailchimp, Stripe and Zapier and are in talks with many others (including Indian internet businesses). On an average, they are pushing actionable cards to 200k+ people, every month, through their platform, of which about 40% are acted upon.
Thanks to the funding, they are already on web and Android and they would be making the platform available on iOS soon, and onboard bigger internet businesses in times to come.
Story of Horntell
Horntell is founded by Mohit Mamoria and is currently a team of 7 members. Mohit, the founder, now 24 has been programming since he was 11.
This long duration of exposure with software industry in a young age allowed him to observe certain patterns in the industry and make the bet on the notifications‐as‐a‐platform.
Future of Horntell
While they’re excited about what they have accomplished, they are all the more excited by what the possibilities can be.
They strongly believe that the actionable cards has potential to provide full product experience within themselves. For example, card from an ecommerce store can allow you to shop, card from travel apps allows you to book, card from music apps allows you to listen to music; and the list is endless.
They’ve witnessed two disruptions in the software industry. First, transition from native apps to web apps and second, transition from web apps to mobile apps. Actionable cards would be the third disruption which would make people transit from mobile apps to actionable cards which can be used on any device or platform.
“Cards are the new apps,” claims Mohit.
Also, web is largely dominated by search and the pull‐driven model (and Google is the mammoth in the space). Search is the entry‐point to the internet. And notifications are the entry point in the mobile ecosystem. Anyone who makes a solid entry point into the ecosystem will be the leader in the next revolution.
What future might hold is exciting!
Competition?
There are two more products that are striving to achieve the same goal of “making apps consumable through a single platform”.
These are Facebook M and Google Now.
Facebook Messenger has opened up its platform for commercial conversations. Benedict Evans puts it like this for Facebook:
Facebook isn’t taking on WeChat. It’s taking on the iOS/Android notification panel
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) March 25, 2015
And Google Now, is building the one feed through which you can access content from all the places you care about.
All three of us are chasing the same problem through different insights: Facebook through messaging, Google Now through contextual information and Horntell through notifications.
Founder’s Quote
“Cards are the new apps,” claims Mohit, the CEO of Horntell.
Investor’s Quote
“It is funny how we need to constantly keep our mobile’s hardware and software up to date to use the apps to their fullest. We don’t need to do this on desktop. I can use anything that I want through my browser. Why isn’t there something similar for mobiles?,” asks Bharani, the lead investor in Horntell.
Horntell Demo Video
