Startup's out of Impulsesoft and SiRF

Reading about the Burrp mafia by my friend Avlesh took me back to the time when I started my own startup journey. One of the awesome thing that a startup does to (most) of us is that it implants the seed (keeda) of entrepreneurship in you. Be it a large company like Google, Yahoo or even Infosys, or small companies like Burrp. They give birth to even more startups.

Implulsesoft did not become as famous as Burrp, but it had a decent exit when SiRF acquired it. SiRF also acquired another company in Bangalore called Truespan and within 3 years was forced to close down it’s Bangalore office(That actually is a very interesting story. maybe some other time). As a result of which most of us ventured out to start stuff we had always dreamed of. Here are those crazy guys.

Amagi : Baskar, Vidhya and Kas. Original founders of Impulseoft left SiRF early on and started Amagi. An unheard of and a daring proposition of bringing local advertisements on your national cable channels. They have gone through two rounds of funding and are growing at an exponential pace.

Zebu : Inspired by Small Giants Sri (Founder and CEO of Impulsesoft) along with Raja and Bikash started Zebu. I along with Kausik joined them after SiRF closed down. We worked briefly on a nifty application we called dog-earz

Althea : I met Vinod, Sagar and Kishore in SiRF after it acquired their company TrueSpan. SiRF had planned to close down the ex-Truespan division couple of months before they closed down the whole bangalore office. These guys started Althea soon afterwards. Raised one round of investment, got Techcrunched and created quite a flutter in the valley with their cool social video browsing tool called Shufflr.

Amberroot : Sudhakar is a master of hardware board designs. Yogesh an awesome coder only next to our great Sala coder. And Karthik, well don’t go on his looks or sweet talk. He could fool you by his knowledge of his products that he is not the sales guy. These guys ventured out to make solar energy efficient to generate and economical to make it mainstream.

Muddyboots : If you thought TV advertisements, Business consulting, Video browsing and discovery, Solar energy was as orthogonal people could get coming out of a single startup, wait till you hear about Roby. He abandoned more than 20 years of being in IT and setup a travel company organizing bike trips and treks in unexplored territories of Nilgiris and other places.

ActWitty : Sudhanshu, who just calls himself a coder, worked with Amagi for some time before venturing out into ActWitty. He is building a cool product to help you connect with people with common interest in the noise that social browsing has become.

That brings me to the end of the list, except obviously for myself :-). You may have, but I have not forgotten about myself. I started with Sri and others in Zebu. Left within 6 months to be a solo-entrepreneur. Experimented with lots of ideas (Smstweet, mCoupons, mLoyalty, Revu). Worked as a consultant for a friend. Met a bunch of people over coffee and made some quite interesting and new friends. And finally settled at ONZE (More of that later).

I am sure there are a bunch of others who left early and started on their own. And some in the valley itself coming out after SiRF’s acquisition by CSR (Lytro being one of them).

After learning about Burrp, and telling my own story about Impulsesoft+SiRF, would love to know more such stories of startups being born out of startups. Do share if you come across any.