Meet The Seven Startups That Won At The 4th India-UK TECH Rocketship Awards

The Grand Finale of the 4th India-UK TECH Rocketship Awards was held today at the India-UK Createch Summit in Mumbai. A total of seven finalists were awarded in the grand finale from the 15 semi-finalists that pitched at Bengaluru last month.

Among them were artificial intelligence startup Staqu; table reservation platform Dineout; AI enabled fraud detection startup Thirdwatch; rent management platform Paymatrix; enterprise focused IoT startup Ayasta Technologies; medtech startup Mimyk, and agritech startup CropIn. The startups were awarded by His Royal Highness, The Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex KG GCVO.

The panelists judging the TECH Rocketship Awards included Baroness Rona Fairhead CBE, Minister of State for Trade and Promotion; Sir Dominic Asquith KCMG, British High Commissioner to the Republic of India; Mohan Reddy, Founding Director T-Hub; T V Mohandas Pai, Managing Director Aarin Capital; Saurabh Srivastava, Founding Member, Indian Angel Network; Arvind Gupta, National President, BJP IT Cell; and Alok Vajpeyi, Chairman Rainmaking Innovation.

According to the official release, more than 300 applications and 1300 entrepreneurs participated in the fourth edition of TECH Rocketship Awards, which was announced in October 2017.

Of these, 15 of the best tech startups across diverse sectors like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence were selected for the live pitching round which was held in Bengaluru last month. The UK government’s Department for International Trade (DIT), India and the British Deputy High Commission, Bengaluru hosted the 2017-18 TECH Rocketship Awards’ live pitching round at Bengaluru.

A Quick Look At The TECH Rocketship Awards

Organised by the Department for International Trade (DIT), TECH Rocketship is an India-focussed startup campaign that assists promising new startups in scale up their businesses. Its main aim is to foster technology, innovation and collaboration between startups, universities, and industry leaders both in India and the UK.

The awards, which were launched three years ago, have seen endorsement from The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, British Prime Minister Theresa May as well as some of the biggest names in Indian business.

The six award categories of 2017-18 TECH Rocketship Awards were fintech, medtech, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and data analytics, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. These domains, according to the organisers, are some of the areas with the greatest potential in terms of opportunity and demand in the UK and India.

Last year, as part of the third edition of TECH Rocketship Awards, held between 29 January-3 February 2017, 10 startups won a trip to the UK out of 10,000 companies evaluated in a multi-city tour.

An Overview Of Winners Of The 4th India-UK TECH Rocketship Awards

Staqu : Gurgaon-based Staqu, which won in the Artificial Intelligence category is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) focused research firm working in automated image understanding technology. Founded in 2015 by Atul Rai, Anurag Sahni, Chaitan Rexwal and Pankaj Sharma, Staqu enables automation of some of the crucial tasks for ecommerce companies which include image search, tag generation, real-time recommendation.

DineOut: Table reservation platform Dineout won in the Big Data category. Dineout, a Times Internet company was founded in 2012 by school-friends turned fellow-entrepreneurs Vivek Kapoor, Ankit Mehrotra, Sahil Jain and Nikhil Bakshi. The online table reservation platform enables users to book a table (online or via phone), while availing exciting discounts.

Thirdwatch: AI startup Thirdwatch won under the Cybersecurity category. Launched in April 2016 by Adarsh Jain and Shashank Agarwal, Gurugram-based Thirdwatch offers the product ‘Mitra’ which evaluates and flags every transaction in real-time as fraudulent or genuine on the basis of a trust score. Ecommerce players and merchants can integrate the application with Mitra API which automatically blocks fraudsters at large scale, without having to hire additional staff for fraud review.

Paymatrix: Rent management platform Paymatrix took the top spot in the fintech category. The Hyderabad-based end to end rent management platform that eases out rent payment and collection process was co-founded by Mukesh Chandra Anchuri, Anusha Kurupathi Parambil, and Muralidhar Nayak in November 2015. It recently raised $4K (INR 25 Lakh) from International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad’s IIIT Seed Fund.

Ayasta Technologies: Enterprise focused IoT startup Ayasta Technologies won in the IoT category. Founded by Ravi Teja Avasarala and Saideep Reddy in March 2017, the IoT/Deeptech startup helps customers understand electrical system failures and give actionable insights to prevent them.

Mimyk: The medtech startup founded by Shanthanu Chakravarthy and Nithin Shivshankar in 2017, won in the Medtech category. It works on developing immersive medical simulations for training healthcare practitioners. Their technology enables training healthcare professionals through the use of advanced simulation technology. They combine haptics, design, Virtual Reality (VR), and internet based content delivery model for providing engaging interactive medical simulations.

CropIn Technology: Agritech startup CropIn won the Judge’s Award for Creativity. CropIn was founded in 2010 by Krishna Kumar. It integrates the agricultural sector with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by putting a network of ERP and BI (Business Intelligence) across rural India. Last September, the Bengaluru-based agritech startup raised an undisclosed amount of Pre-Series A funding from Singapore-based Beenext, and existing investors Ankur Capital and Boston-based organisation Invested Development.

In addition to seven prize packages, the winners of the fourth edition of TECH Rocketship awards challenge will win a trip to the UK as well as a chance to pitch in front of potential investors at the London Tech Week. Furthermore, the shortlisted teams will be provided assistance in business development and partnership with established UK companies like Harper Adams University, Sensor City. The winning startups will also get exposure to the UK’s thriving tech ecosystem, financial services and R&D opportunities.