Meet The 10 Startups That Won The India Mobile Congress Grand Innovation Challenge

The India Mobile Congress today announced the winners of its IMC Grand Innovation Challenge. The challenge was hosted by IMC in association with AGNIi and Invest India, and supported by NALCO ETBI, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea Ltd. and Reliance Jio.

Out of the 110 applicants, the ten startups that were felicitated at the event include SenseGiz, SnapIoT, Nebula, BKC Aggregators (Fasal Salah), Marisoft Technology, PlayAblo, Vawsum School, JUV Technologies, Learning Matters, and Notifyvisitors.com. 

The competition theme ranged across sectors such as IoT services, edtech, cybersecurity, customer experience, agritech and more. The challenge was an initiative to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and skill development in the telecom sector. It was aimed at identifying unique solutions and encourage the development of innovative products and solutions that can improve connectivity, enhance the user experience and facilitate digital transformation.

Each of the 10 winners were given a cash prize of INR 20 Lakh, along with benefits such as induction in Emerging Technology Business Incubator at NALCO CoETE, access to test beds and technologies available to Airtel, Jio and Vodafone, and a chance to visit and work in the Ericsson Innovation Lab in Europe. 

Meet The 10 Winners Of The India Mobile Congress Grand Innovation Challenge: 

SenseGiz: Belgaum and California-based company was founded in 2013 by Abhishek Latthe. SenseGiz makes enterprise and industrial IoT products for sensor-based condition monitoring, security and real-time asset or people-tracking applications using a combination of proprietary mesh connected hardware, cloud, analytics and apps.

SNAS IoT Laboratories: Pune-based SNAS IoT has built an automation product that not only works in homes, but can also be applied for offices, restaurants or hotels. The SNAS Home Automation product is said to be a scalable product fit for any of the above segments with IoT-enabled smart solutions. .

Nebula Tech Private Ltd: Nebula provide cloud-based products and services that enable SMEs and enterprises to successfully undertake the digitisation journey. It focusses on orchestrating the entire supply chain for the industry of retail, manufacturing and logistics industry.  

Fasal Salah (BKC Aggregators): Agritech startup Fasal Salah is a mobile app designed to help farmers by providing real-time personalised crop advisory based on current and forecast weather. The app claims to provide accurate weather forecast for the next 10 days at a block and village level. Fasal Salah’s forecast includes temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall and more with voice and text-based predictions. 

Marisoft Cybersecurity Labs: The main premise of Marisoft is to make software think like a human cybersecurity expert thereby helping solve some complex problems in simpler ways. The company claims to have emulated how many human cybersecurity experts solve bugs and vulnerabilities to inform the development of this product.

PlayAblo: Edtech startup PlayAblo provides an online gamified learning platform for K12 students, focused on math, English grammar, and communicative English. PlayAblo works to supplement the structured education system and the elements of gamification inherently motivate learners to practice more and in turn improve the outcomes. It also offers a so-called lightweight LMS (learning management solutions) for corporates to train blue-collar workers.

Vawsum School: Kolkata-based Vawsum School is a parent-teacher engagement application to keep parents updated about the progress of the pupil through regular class updates, progress reports on homework, pictures of school activities, fee collection, school bus tracking and more. 

Ringlerr (JUV technologies): Delhi-based Ringlerr provides an AI-based voice recognition app which seeks to improve the trust between callers and recipients even before they are connected. With Ringlerr, callers can make intent-based calls so the recipient can know the purpose of the call the moment they receive it. This gives the recipient added motivation to respond faster. 

Learning Matters: Bengaluru-based startup was founded by Ramamoorthy G, Gowri Mahesh, Saras Ramamoorthy in 2016. The edtech company is looking to impact student outcomes by improving teacher quality.  Some of the products built by Learning Matters include Tara, an NLP-powered virtual voice coach that uses Amazon Alexa); StarTeacher, a comprehensive, and customised teacher training programme, Kengine, a cloud-based digital content platform, ToolBox hands-on activity kits and Konnect, which trains graduates in soft-skills.

Notifyvisitors.com: Cofounded by Siddharth Gupta and Aman Gupta, NotifyVisitors is a marketing automation software that allows businesses to send personalised push notifications and messages to customers to boost engagement and retention. The Delhi-based company claims to have over 6K clients including Vodafone, Coca-Cola, MakeMyTrip, TataSky, Vodafone, Jet Airways, PVR, and more.