The 11 Startups Which Made The Cut For The First Cohort Of Govt-Backed Cultiv8 Accelerator

The Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) has launched Cultiv8 Accelerator Program to foster the growth of early stage tech startups. The program has selected 11 tech startups in its first cohort ranging across healthcare, fintech, industrial IoT, cybersecurity, and agritech, among others.

The selected startups include Ango Health, Ask Arvi, Fasal, MaxByte Technologies, METI M2M, NeoEYED, Syntellect, Text Mercato, TrustCheckr, Towno, and Yottaasys.

The Cultiv8 Accelerator Program is a six-month programme that will focus on the scaling and growth aspects of a startup’s journey including mentoring, ecosystem outreach, and getting the right growth mindset beyond early revenues and market validation. The programme will incubate startups who have crossed the stage of product market-fit, and have started generating early revenues. It’s specifically focussing on B2B startups with deeptech capabilities.

Kaarthick Balakrishnan, head of Cultiv8 said, “Participation in the programme comes with advantages such as getting industry experts to help them fine tune their existing businesses, build a compelling go-to-market strategy, positioning their brand for improved visibility and industry connects.”

“We will evaluate the startups at the end of the programme and may award grants to some of them,” he added.

First Cohort of Cultiv8 Accelerator Program

The 11 startups selected as a part of the Cultiv8’s accelerator programme come from all over India, but most are based in Bengaluru. Here is a quick overview of the cohort:

Ango Health

Delhi NCR-based Ango Health was founded by Barkha Kaul, Yogesh Chauhan, Krishnamurthy, and Anudeep Chappa in 2016. It is a femtech startup focused on pregnancy care and health tracking. Agno Health provides pregnancy-related information ranging from diet, exercise tips to body changes. It also enables pregnant women to get their queries answered on the platform. The company claimed that some of its content is created in collaboration with specialist doctors and experts.

Ask Arvi

Mumbai-based Ask Arvi was founded by Sushant Reddy, Ashwin Narkhede, and Mandar Zope in 2017. It is an artificial intelligence (AI) conversational assistant in the fintech space, now with cultiv8 accelerator. The bot can be used by users to get consultation on the insurance process, specifically micro insurance.

Fasal

Bengaluru-based Fasal was founded by Shailendra Tiwari and Anand Verma in 2018. It is an agitech startup leveraging the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) to record a variety of growing conditions in the farms. This data then empower the company to make on-farm predictions for farmers with the help of AI and data science.

MaxByte Technologies

Coimbatore-based MaxByte Technologies was founded by Ramshankar C.S. in 2016. It is an end-to-end SaaS company which offers digital technology solutions ranging from sensors, communication gateways, cloud and SaaS applications and business analytics.

METI M2M

Mysuru-based METI M2M was founded by Geethesh N.S. in 2014. It is an industrial automation startup offering solutions such as APIs for ERP Integration, Industrial IoT-enabled hardware, altering engine, secured IoT platform for enterprise, big data management and analytics platforms.These solutions are aimed at increasing the efficiency of the manufacturing sector by offering the right Industry 4.0 hardware and analytics platform. The company claims to have served over 100 clients in the past five years.

NeoEYED

US-based neoEYED was founded by Alessio Mauro and Tamaghna Basu in 2016. A cybersecurity company aimed at reducing bank and enterprise frauds. neoEYED claims to monitor over 100 behavioural factors to detect anomalies and prevent account takeover in real-time.

Syntellect

Founded by Sumedha Salunke Naik, Syntellect is a fintech company which provides customer profiling and customer decision support system to aid the credit underwriting process for formal lending institutions. It’s also working to bring the underserved sections of the population into formal economy fold.

Text Mercato

Bengaluru-based Text Mercato was founded by Kiran Ramakrishna, Subhajit Mukherjee, and Nanda Kishore in 2015. The company has built a SaaS tool which could help ecommerce companies in automating their product cataloguing process.

TrustCheckr

Bengaluru-based TrustCheckr was founded by Adhip Ramesh, Shivraj Harsha, Ayush Malhotra in 2017. The data analytics company uses AI, image processing, and machine learning technologies to compute a ‘trust score’ for people based on factors such as age, gender, interests and income range. The company said its solution can be used for social scoring of first-time loan applicants, identifying fake customer profiles, and increasing marketing campaign efficacy for ecommerce companies.

Towno

Bengaluru-based Towno was founded by Ratti Bhalla, and Rahul Kesar in 2016. The online travel company uses machine intelligence to design customised travel packages for customers. The company claimed that its data-driven recommendation engine collects data from a multitude of data sources and uses machine learning to identify patterns from a wider customer community to match users with relevant experiences.

Yottaasys

Bengaluru-based Yottaasys was founded by Arun Pandey and Dinesh Krishnan in 2015. The data analytics company helps users solve business problems with the help of statistics. The company’s products cater to various domains including the banking, manufacturing and finance sector with high-tech industrial robots and supply chain management through last-mile delivery bots.