While there were numerous neo banks and spend management platforms mushrooming & becoming successful across the world, the startup ecosystem in the middle east was relatively quiet in this fintech space. Karun Kurien and Parthi Duraisamy, 2 Ex-McKinsey Alumni spotted this opportunity and started AlaanPay with a mission of simplifying finance for underserved businesses in the Middle East and helping them prosper.

For SMEs, managing their business spends is a time-consuming, manual or semi-automated process. It involves issuing cards to employees, controlling spends, expense approval that often take place through different systems and often require manual actions. The admin/ finance in-charge has no visibility into the spends until all receipts and claim forms are submitted by the employee. As the number of employees grows and expenses grow, the task of tracking expenses, reviewing receipts and processing reimbursements becomes very cumbersome.

For their customers, Alaanpay addresses these pain points.
1. Admins issue smart corporate cards to the team members, adjust spend limits or block cards - all instantly, at the click of a button.
2. Team members get cards issued instantly. They can use the Alaan app to store cards, capture receipts & track their spending.
3. Admins and team members don’t have to go through the hassle of manual expense approval or reimbursement processes.
4. Admins get real time visibility and insights on company spend. Access out of the box spend analytics to reveal potential cost saving opportunities

They came to us with the mandate of building the MVP which allows the SMBs to issue virtual cards, set and manage spend controls, view clear analytics as the MVP. We achieved this by integrating with one of the largest API infrastructures - M2P FinTech, with the required security & compliance, which in turn worked with local banks in multiple countries.

We designed & built the MVP in 2.5 months, helped them with best practices in Product management, design, development & devops. We also helped them build their tech team, trained them & handed over the MVP so they could continue building it. As of today, Alaan is Middle East's first multi-currency spend management platform to manage all company spend through corporate cards. Since the MVP release, Alaan has also introduced automated invoice payments to extract details from invoices and initiate payments on top of what we built & are going strong to become one of the biggest Fintech companies in the region.

Livspace is India's largest trusted home services platform & is fast moving into other geographies in South East Asia, worth over a billion USD. While the core business is targeting the new home owners for their interior decorating requirements, the leadership also saw a wide open space in helping existing tenants & owners with other home maintenance & renovation services. While the conviction was large at the leadership, the current team of Livspace was heavily occupied with their current priorities & had little or no bandwidth to create the new platform & test waters to see if their hypothesis that this could be a large business is true.

They wanted to create a platform that provides the consumers the best experience by connecting them with trained service experts & managing the entire process in an automated way until the work is done. Livspace Home Services is a platform that helps customers to find home repair and maintenance services such as deep cleaning, pest control, painting, sanitisation, and more - delivered by trusted and trained experts at their homes, seamlessly. As a Livspace Partner and with the LivspacePro App, service experts have the opportunity to win customers, earn more, and manage daily projects efficiently and profitably.

MVPRockets partnered with Livspace for this work - worked with their product and business team and helped them launch this product in 3 months. The tech stack used was NodeJS, ReactJS and Flutter.

The app has been live & currently hosts 500+ trained experts serving over 5,000+ happy customers. Launched in 2022, they are currently serving customers in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi (Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida, Ghaziabad).

StreamAlive is a product that was started with a vision of helping streamers and conveners of webinars engage with their users seamlessly. They do this by bringing meetings and webinars to life by turning the audience chat into real time visualisations. The app helps track, increase and convert the audience engagement.

StreamAlive’s growing list of AI-powered interactions read the native live chat from Youtube, Microsoft Teams & Zoom to plot map locations in real-time, show chat-fueled polls, create magical word-clouds, automatically detect questions that participants ask, pick a winner and lots more.

Ever since the pandemic, large-scale conversations have been the thing not only for the most high-profile people on the internet but also for people at work and students in school. It's not difficult to get lost in the virtual setup. We're at the height of the streaming business and it's frustrating to not be able to pay attention to majority of the audience. This is where the founding team of StreamAlive - Lux, Joe and Tina came up with a novel solution where capturing the chat directly from the platform and making sense of it with fun interactions can simplify and exponentially improve the participants' experience. It helps keep the audience better engaged and the presenters to convert this engagement.

StreamAlive came to us with this brilliant idea after having validated the need of speaking to a bunch of influencers & corporate honchos & it was up to us to bring their vision to life. The aim was to create a web application where streamers can connect to their Youtube live streams through our platform. They can then run interactions like polls, maps or word-clouds where we'd pick up the comments directly from the live chat & populate the interactions. We then built the integrations for Microsoft Teams & Zoom as well.

There are two major parts to the application :
1. Integrating different platforms with StreamAlive and fetching the live comments in real time.
2. Creating fun interactions that are powered by the audience comments.

Our very first beta testing was done on Eric Decker aka Airrack's Youtube live Stream. Airrack has more than 9 million followers on Youtube and we knew there was a tsunami of comments headed towards us. StreamAlive seamlessly processed more than a million comments at an average of 20 comments per second throughout the 3 hour stream and helped Airrack do a live tabulation of fans voting in the chat.

On July 18th, StreamAlive was publicly launched. StreamAlive was also featured as the #3 product of the day and #5 products of the week on Product Hunt. Check out the app for yourself at streamalive.com.

Kachow! is India's most versatile social trading platform - on a mission to democratize trading for all with a community led and technology first approach towards financial growth and inclusion. They aim to create the smartest online community of investors/ traders and the largest social trading platform that would help retail participants in making smarter trading decisions - using the wisdom of the crowd.

Stock investment & intraday trading is a massive market in India. The stock market has become accessible for large segments of society and is considered cool even among a certain younger segment of society. But the penetration of investing and trading has still not permeated to the younger strata of the population.

The founding team of Kachow noticed these problems and decided to solve them for the GenZs and Millennials. The team found that the majority of first-time investors invest money without any concrete knowledge or are hesitant to start investing as they are unsure of what lies ahead. They loved to learn from others, who are pro and novices like themselves - follow their investment decisions, analyse their portfolio and get a peak into how they think.

The team came to us with a mandate of creating a super cool app for the GenZ crowd - where they can learn from fin-fluencers, their peers and others like themselves. The app should also allow the users to trade virtually, but on the real time stock prices - a practice ground of sorts. The requirement was that the MVP was fairly complex & a feature rich one (given that similar models have seen success elsewhere in the globe).

We had two major parts to the app :
1. The community of traders - The user base consists of early traders and experienced investors. People can share their trading ideas, ask for opinions and interact with others to learn more.
2. Virtual trading - What’s better than a place to practically apply the learnings that you have just acquired? Everyone is provided with a virtual INR 10 lakh to start with. The virtual trading platform simulates the exact behaviour of NSE and you can experience real-world trading without being worried about losses.

Not only can you get live prices of stocks in Kachow, but you also get to mimic all the trading rules like Intraday margins, FIFO, Stop loss, Limit price, etc. The product is technically architectured in such a way that the app behaves very smoothly even when thousands of concurrent users use the app. This was one of the most technically challenging products that we worked on. In addition to our usual stack of NodeJS, ReactJS and Flutter - we extensively used socket, Kafka queues etc to build the platform. The product was tested for multiple users & was performing over 1.5 Million calculations per second, even as we launched. We took 3.5 months to build this product.

The product was earlier launched as a closed beta in mid-July with 100 odd members and was able to garner 1000+ downloads within a month of the public launch.