Winning team wins INR 1 lakh as prize money, Droom merchandise, and an opportunity to be mentored by Sandeep Aggarwal
New Delhi, November 28, 2017: Droom, India’s leading online automobile marketplace today announced the winners of the inaugural season of Droom’s B-plan competition, launched on September 15, 2017. The nationwide business strategy and planning competition saw entries from 269 contestants. An IIT Roorkee team consist of (Rohit Joshi and Renju K Kokkattu) was selected as the winner, post an extensive evaluation process lasting one-and-a-half months. The winners were awarded a cash prize of INR 1 lacs, hand-picked selection of Droom merchandise, pre-placement interview at Droom and mentorship by Mr. Sandeep Aggarwal- Founder & CEO Droom, serial entrepreneur and mentor. The first runner-up prize was jointly shared by IIM Shillong and Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon. The team IMI, New Delhi, won the second runner up award.
Droom’s B-plan competition challenged the participants to develop various innovative business strategies that could popularize Droom’s C2C marketplace format, wherein individuals will be able to list their vehicles on the platform to be purchased directly by buyers. Drafting the proposal was no mean feat in itself; as the participants were expected to undertake extensive on-ground research as well as create a detailed blueprint of the proposed plan of action, with 35% and 65% marks assigned to each respectively. With the brightest business minds across the country devoting their energies to developing the perfect strategy, the Droom jury evaluated them on their strategic response to actual business situations experienced by the platform.
Commenting on the competition, Mr. Sandeep Aggarwal, Founder and CEO, Droom, said, “Droom B-Plan Competition was designed to provide a much-needed platform to the emerging entrepreneurial talent so they can showcase their capabilities. All the entries were rich in passion, business vision and disruptive strategizing, and it was a tough for the evaluators to shortlist the seven most outstanding entries. Each of the seven shortlisted teams displayed exemplary business acumen and were pitch perfect in their reasoning behind the business plans they proposed. However, it was Team Rockets from IIT Roorkee that emerged as a clear leader due to its holistic approach as well as a detailed and systematic blueprint for policy implementation. We aim to run this competition as an annual series with the objective of engaging with fresh business talent in India.”
The seven finalists included EHFAR, Gladiator Kings, Individual, Panda Bears, Swift & Clear, Team Rockets and The Three Musketeers. The 1st and 2nd runners-up received INR 50,000 and INR 25,000 respectively, along with pre-placement interviews and merchandise from Droom.
About Droom
Droom is India’s first and only online marketplace for buying and selling new and used automobiles. At over 65% of the automobile transactions market share online, Droom is the largest auto portal in India. Droom is not only the largest online automobile platform in India but also the 3rd largest E-commerce company in India in terms of GMV. The automobile platform is category, seller, price, condition, and geography agnostic.
Droom platform has four marketplace formats i.e. B2C, C2C, C2B and B2B, and three pricing formats – Fixed Price, Best Offer and Auction. The platform offers wide range of categories from bicycle to plane and all automobile services such as warranty, RSA, insurance and auto loan. Droom uses data science to build trust at scale with a US Patent technology called Full Circle Trust Score. Droom has also built the de-facto pricing standard for used vehicles in India – OBV, which has a US patent. Droom has built the entire ecosystem for India so that the transaction for used automobiles can take place with least degree of information asymmetry and morale hazard.
It has built tech and data science heavy tools to create the entire ecosystem around used automobiles, including OBV (pricing engine), Eco (121 points vehicle inspection), History (200 mil vehicle history records), Discovery (dozens of pre-buying tools) and Credit (India’s first and only marketplace for used vehicles loans).
Droom is currently doing $647 Mil+ in annualized GMV growing at the rate of 220% Y/Y, 194K+ auto dealers (largest auto dealer platform in India), presence in 500+ cities across India (largest hyper local marketplace), 31.2 Mil+ monthly visitors, nearly 6.5 Mil+ app downloads and 5.5 Mil+ Facebook community.
Droom has the best unit economics as compared to any other E-commerce platform in India. The company spends less than 5% of GMV to run marketing and the entire cost of the company is less than 4% of GMV in terms of the net burn. Droom is the only E-commerce platform which has successfully built the cost advantage and sophistication of the tech platforms with the strong data science layer, nobody else has been able to do it in India.
Droom has always been innovating technologies and got awarded worldwide on prominent national and international media platforms like Red Herring “Top 100 Asia winners”, Forbes Japan “20 Hot Start-ups in India”, PC Quest “Top Tech Start-Up”, Business world, Your Story, Entrepreneur Magazine and many more.
Droom is founded by Sandeep Aggarwal, who previously founded ShopClues at his house in California in Oct 2010, which became 5th Unicorn in India by January 2016. Droom is a Singapore Holding Company with its subsidiary in India and United States. Droom has so far raised close to $65 million dollars in five rounds of funding. Droom is head quartered in Gurugram, India with a team size of 270+.