Horntell, a Gurgaon based technology company which provides interactive push notifications in a bid to “reinvent” the way notifications are pushed to users, has today announced closure of a $150,000 in its seed funding round. The round was led by Bharani, CEO of 91mobiles.com.
Along with him, 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).
Post this current capital raise, the company — which is directly taking on the likes of Facebook M and Google Now — is now valued at just under $2 million — which is (WOOOW!) great, considering this was a seed round. Horntell already has presence on web and Android. With the newly raised funding, the company will be able to make the platform available on iOS, and onboard bigger internet businesses in times to come.
Founded by Mohit Mamoria, Horntell currently has a team of 7 floks. After the initial launch in March 2015, the company is currently integrated with 400+ internet products including ProductHunt, Shopify, Basecamp, Github, Trello, Mailchimp, Stripe and Zapier and are in talks with many others.
It was started as a Chrome Extension and got opportunity to validate fundamental hypothesis about the product. Horntell has also launched an Android application which with an aim to increase the reach on mobile, and thus unifying the platforms.
As for the stats, Horntell says that every month it averagely pushes actionable cards to more than 200,000 people through the platform, of which about 40% are acted upon. The company claims that they are building a unified platform that allows users to use any app/website through one single feed containing small actionable notifications.
Horntell’s insights suggests that 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, Horntell has came out with a product that can make almost anything possible (including payments) with just a couple of taps within the notification itself.
As everything happens inside the boundaries of the notification, user does not need to shuffle between various apps to ‘catch up’ on everything happening. And thus, what began by tackling small part of the problem by offering actionable notifications for the websites, it has turned into a budding platform that can unify the notifications across multiple devices for an individual.
The company believes that the actionable cards has potential to provide full product experience within themselves. After web apps and mobile apps, the company claims that actionable cards will be the third disruption.
Bharani, the lead investor in Horntell, said,
“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?
Talking to us on what lies in the future for Horntell, Mamoria says that 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 allow you to book, card from music apps allow you to listen to music; and the list is endless,
he adds
