Being Sunil Mittal’s son, Kavin Bharti Mittal would have been expected to take leadership position in his father’s flagship venture, Airtel. But being Sunil Mittal’s son also means having the entrepreneurial spirit. At 25, he is already running three operational ventures, has shut one down and is in the process of starting a fourth.
At the age of 20, Kavin founded a start-up named AppSpark to explore the possibilities in the mobile applications space. In 2009, AppSpark launched ‘Movies Now’ in partnership with >www.movietickets.com an iPhone/iPad application aimed to change the way consumers bought movie tickets on the go. Kavin's determination to build services with better user experience and immense focus on design led Movies Now to be recognised by Apple as 'One of the 10 Essential Movie Goer Apps' for the iPhone.
In 2010, Kavin shifted AppSpark's focus to build ‘Foodster’, a whole new take on food recommendations. In a world of long reviews and ambiguous five star ratings, AppSpark wanted to disrupt the food recommendations industry by building a service that would allow users to find restaurants that served great food catered to ones taste near them on the go. Foodster was launched in Beta in June 2011.
The big bet
But the big move came in October 2011 when he led Bharti Enterprise to enter into a joint venture with Japan’s Softbank Corp and offer mobile Internet services under Bharti Softbank Holdings Pte Ltd (BSB). The focus was on three key areas - social media, gaming and e-commerce. “India, which has emerged the second largest mobile market in the world, stands at the cusp of another revolution – mobile Internet,” says Kavin.
“With a fast growing economy, a large youth population and access to cheaper and faster data, there is a unique opportunity to build services ground up for mobile, especially in a country where the first screen for most is a mobile device.”
Through this venture Kavin entered the global instant messaging segment with the launch of Hike. While there are a number of other players in this segment, BSB’s messaging service allows users to communicate over SMS as well as data networks.
“Given the lack of smartphones and data penetration in the market, the existing instant messaging apps don’t allow one to connect with all your friends given the nature of a closed network. So we asked ourselves – is there an app that combines the real-time, free nature of instant messaging plus the openness and ubiquity of SMS that gives users control of spam? We couldn’t find one, so we built Hike,” Kavin says.
There are a plethora of messaging platforms globally such as WhatsApp and Nimbuzz that are agnostic to handsets, operators and operating systems. Then there are also platforms from handset makers such as BlackBerry Messenger, iMessenger from Apple and Samsung’s ChatOn. But Kavin reckons that the SMS facility on Hike gives BSB an edge over the others. “In countries like India, only a few people have smartphones and, therefore, having the ability to combine SMS with instant messaging is a huge differentiator,” he said.
“We want to first reach 10 million users as early as possible. There are four or five ways to monetise this platform but that comes later,” he says.
Telecom ties
BSB is hoping to leverage its relationship with large telecom companies including Idea and Vodafone to get to the end user. In the process it is also hoping to bring the telecom companies back in the applications and value added services space, currently dominated by over the top owners of application stores like Google and Apple.
While pursuing his masters in Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Imperial College, London, Kavin interned at some of the world’s top companies.
In 2007, Kavin interned at Google's Mountain View campus in California where he worked in the prominent partners facing group Partner Solutions Organization. He worked in the team responsible for Google's Mobile YouTube and Apps strategy. Having cut his teeth at the world’s largest Internet firm, Kavin wants to make sure that BSB becomes big.
Hike is BSB’s third venture. It had earlier acquired a start-up to launch Hoppr, a location-based service where users can find places of interest around them through SMS. There are now nearly a million active users a month on this platform. BSB has also partnered with Yahoo! Japan for a venture that aims to revamp mobile operators’ portals. For example, Bharti Airtel’s portal Airtel Live is being revamped by BSB-Yahoo! and will be re-launched over the next few months.
Going forward BSB plans to move into the gaming space as well. Although the first venture Hoppr happened through acquisition, Kavin says he wants to build his future ventures from scratch.
“Despite being part of such a big group at BSB we think and work like a start-up. Our funding is dependent on us achieving certain set targets,” says Kavin.