Captchas are those alphanumeric strings you have to key-in everytime you open an account, make a payment or take a poll online. Instead, Ankit Gupta (right) and Neeraj Agarwal came up with Yo!Captcha, an online advertising platform that offers readable brand advertisements and all the user has to do is fill in the blank based on the image to pass the captcha. “Advertisers know that target consumers are looking at their ads,” says Gupta.

The duo founded Innovese Technologies in November 2009 when they were at BITS, Pilani. They began work on Yo!Captcha in October 2010 and decided to make a business out of it. Dhruv Sogani joined them in January 2011. The company was chosen by the CIIE’s iAccelerator programme in October 2011 and won a seed funding of Rs.5 lakh. The product was launched in January 2012 and currently some 35,000 captchas are solved everyday — advertisers are charged for every captcha solved correctly and the revenue shared with the publisher of the site. The aim is to reach 500,000 catpchas by FY15.