Check out this WhatsApp like program for online chatting

This startup is on its final stages of closing $500,000 fund.

Realizing that most communities meet on message-boards and forums, which haven't changed much in fifteen years — they don't work well on mobile, don't tap into the potential of social networks and aren't very engaging, young entrepreneurs Aravind Ravi Sulekha and Gaurav Jee Srivastava founded a platform that they claim a “complete rethink” of what forums should be like. It’s called Scrollback.

Scrollback hosts chat rooms for online communities which is unique in some way as it keeps archived contents. According to Aravind, most chat room services throw away their content (the archives) because they are hard to navigate and are not search engine friendly. Scrollback,on the other hand, uses artificial intelligence (ML and NLP) to understand, categorize and optimize chat archives for browsing and for search engines.

“We think they should feel like WhatsApp, but tailored to large groups of strangers. We think they should play nice with each community's other online assets — be embeddable on their website, read and post from their facebook page and twitter hashtag, etc,” said Aravind.

Scrollback, founded in August 2013, is now on the final stages of closing a seed round of S$500,000 led by Jungle Ventures.

According to Aravind, almost 500 communities are actively using Scrollback, including several Mozilla communities, conferences, blogs and nonprofits.

Currently, they are focusing on building a user base as their product has significant network effects.

“We plan to do this by building more virality into the product itself and by presenting Scrollback at offline community events and conferences,” said Aravind.

The Founders

Aravind Ravi Sulekha, 29, has been programming since the age of 12, and has degrees in engineering at IIT Kharagpur and management from IIM Ahmedabad. He has headed product management and development at four startups before Scrollback.

Gaurav Jee Srivastava, 31, also attended IIT Kharagpur. He co-founded one of the largest college festivals in India and ran a successful campus startup. He has over seven years of experience in finance with multiple accreditations, and excels in engaging communities.

The Backstory

According to Aravind, Scrollback was founded with the aim of building a community website around electronic gadgets. They found that current forum software was insufficient for the kind of engaging, real-time community they wanted to build.

“We brainstormed ideas for our community site and presented it at a few events and conferences, and we realized that other communities wanted them too.

We were bootstrapped for about six months, after which we were accepted to the JFDI accelerator program. It provided a small amount of funding, a lot of mentorship and the opportunity to present to over 130 investors. We subsequently raised money from angels we met there,” said Aravind.
 

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COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the company: Scrollback
Founders: Aravind Ravi Sulekha, Gaurav Jee Srivastava
Website: scrollback.io
Major Investors: Jungle Ventures, JFDI, Meng Wong
Total funding at hand: SGD500,000
Source of funding: Jungle Ventures
Start of operation: 1 August 2013

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]