Freedom from multiple app downloads, courtesy SuperGenie

app enables users to chat with SuperGenie agents and order food, movie tickets, flight and bus tickets, groceries etc

A chance meeting at the International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship brought Chaitanya Pampana and Prabhjot Singh together. While Pampana had quit his job at health care-focused private equity firm InvAscent to pursue entrepreneurship, Singh was looking at floating his third start-up.

Three months ago, Pampana, experienced in business strategy and investment management, and Singh, with considerable business acumen, teamed up to start SuperGenie Innovation Labs here.

“The e-commerce space is becoming very cluttered. Our idea was to offer an app for everything and eliminate the need to download multiple apps for categories such as food, travel and shopping, saving about 200 Mb of memory space on users’ mobile phones,” says chief executive Pampana.

The start-up’s all-in-one app enables users to chat with SuperGenie agents and order food, film tickets, flight and bus tickets, groceries, hotel reservations and make bill payments. SuperGenie has 2,000 users across the WhatsApp and Android platforms.

Initially, SuperGenie started offering the service on WhatsApp and saw good traction, with about 300 users in the first week. Since then, it has focused on developing its own mobile app. Recently, it launched an Android app that supports English, Hindi and Telugu.

“We are planning to make the service multi-lingual by adding six more languages, including Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam and Tamil, and reach 10,000 users by the end of this year,” says Pampana.

To gain scale, SuperGenie is making a product road map.

This includes rolling out an iOS app and developing a complete ‘message commerce’ platform for automating and seamlessly integrating the chat, search and order processes.

At the core of this will be an artificial intelligence system for automating chats, which would allow it to scale rapidly and handle thousands of chats simultaneously, without a large team of agents.

SuperGenie is in advanced discussions with a couple of early-stage venture capital and angel investors to raise seed capital of $1 million (Rs 6.6 crore) for expansion. “We should be closing the funding round in the next couple of months,” says Pampana.