Exclusive: Meet The 35 Startups Selected For The First India-US Startup Konnect To Be Hosted In Silicon Valley

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s message of “Start-up India, Stand Up India” was loud and clear from the ramparts of the Red Fort, and still echoes in the Indian startup ecosystem. In order to keep the spirit of this message alive, NASSCOM, TiE, and IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE India are hosting the first India-U.S. Startup Konnect in the Silicon Valley on September 27, to highlight the strengths of the Indian startup ecosystem. This day-long event will be on the sidelines of the Prime Minister’s visit to the Silicon Valley. He will be visiting the exhibition where more than 30 Indian startups selected for this program will exhibit their products, prototypes, and achievements to investors and other potential Valley partners.

Speaking about Startup Konnect, PM Narendra Modi, said, “An event that I am enthusiastic about is the ‘India-US Start-up Konnect.’ India is emerging as a hub of start-ups in a wide range of areas and we aspire to take this further. We want the world to see our innovation capabilities in the startup sector. At this event, a group of Indian startups will showcase their innovations and forge partnerships with the vibrant American startup industry.”

The startups have been selected from among various sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, energy, financial inclusion, and biotechnology. The selected startups are:

Healthcare

1. Aakar Innovation: It’s a Navi Mumbai-based startup that provides commercially viable solutions for production, distribution, marketing, and sales of affordable and environment-friendly sanitary pads by local entrepreneurs in areas where these products would otherwise not be available.
2. Achira Labs: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that builds medical diagnostics platforms based on the principle of microfluidics to make medical tests accessible, fast, accurate and affordable for patients around the world.
3. Consure Medical: It’s a California and New Delhi-based emerging medical device company focused on developing and commercializing novel critical care technologies. Its flagship product is used for the management of fecal incontinence in bedridden patients.
4. Curadev Pharma: It’s a Noida-based drug discovery company that conducts research in preclinical space to make investigational new drugs.
5. Forus Healthcare: It’s a Bangalore-based technology-led innovation startup that focuses on preventive ophthalmic care. Its flagship products, 3nethra Classic and 3nethra Royal, can pre-screen for five ophthalmic ailments.
6. Innoflaps: It’s a New Delhi-based startup created by a team of speech therapy professionals and engineers that specialize in the field of speech products. It offers home-based therapy devices for speech impaired people.
7. Mother Diagnostic Systems: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that deals with medical equipment and devices and their supplies in rural India.
8. Navya Biologicals: It’s a Hubli, Karnataka-based startup that deal with bioprocess and biologics. It’s technology platforms (YeXtreme & ItensiMAb)  brings together pathway engineering, custom media development and flexible high intensity manufacturing processes, enabling low cost production of high quality biologics.
9. POC Medical Systems: It’s a California-based medical devices and equipment startup that offers low-cost portable breast cancer screening systems.
10. Pradin Technologies: It’s a Bangalore-based technology startup specializing in providing innovative solutions for value healthcare, green power and lighting for the rural areas. It also provides consultation for product design, develop product concepts, build working prototypes and offer technical guidance for manufacturability.
11. Sattva Medtech: It’s a Bangalore-based medtech startup that manufactures fetal healthcare equipment.
12. Sohum Innovation Labs: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that develops market-driven solutions to improve the health and incomes of people living in resource-poor settings. It conducts front-line research and develops technology and strategies that create self-sustaining value chains among the underserved.

Agriculture

13. Barrix Agro Sciences: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that develops technology enabled cost-effective solutions to reduce the use of pesticides in crop production, thereby increasing pre and post-harvest yield.
14. Khethworks: It’s a startup belonging to the MIT Tata Center ecosystem. It builds reliable, solar-powered irrigation systems that enable their customers to farm through all three seasons, and already has multiple pilot sites on the ground.
15. Sickle Innovations: It’s an Ahmedabad-based farming solution company with core focus on improving conventional farming practices through design intervention. It works closely with farming communities to identify the problems and challenges facing our agricultural sector and offer unique solutions.
16. Surya Power Magic: It’s a Coimbatore-based startup that delivers solar irrigation solutions to farmers in power deficit regions.

Energy

17. Boond Engineering: It’s a Delhi-based social enterprise that offers affordable and clean energy to rural India. Boond designs solar power centers and its products include solar light systems, solar light bulbs, biomass gas stoves, solar AC inverter systems and solar water pumps.
18. GIBSS: Green India Building Systems and Services (GIBSS) is a Mumbai-based zero net energy building systems company, helps businesses reduce costs and raise productivity through compelling “triple bottom line” energy efficiency products and solutions in their buildings.
19. Gram Power: It’s a Jaipur-based startup that enables villagers to produce and store renewable energy. It helps them integrate and generate energy out of biomass, solar or wind on-site.
20. Greenway Grameen: It’s a Mumbai-based startup that focuses on cooking energy solutions for rural consumers and manufactures fuel efficient cooking appliances that emits lesser smoke as compared to the traditional cooking stoves used in rural India.
21. Promethean Energy: It’s a Mumbai-based startup that focuses on developing solar thermal products for industrial use.

Technology And Others

22. Aquas Technologies: It’s a California-based startup that offers nano-tech based water purification solutions. The company’s proprietary system design when combined with the novel nano-technology based high surface area aerogels results in a solution for a range of feed water quality.
23. BleeTech: It’s a Pune-based startup that develops wearable tech. Its product – Blee is a wearable device that lets you synchronize with your music, through vibrations. Dance is a great medium of expression for people with hearing impairments. However, owing to their physical limitations, they face several problems. Blee adds a new dimension to music by giving a unique sensorial experience. It aims to make these artists completely independent.
24. Design Innova: It’s a Delhi-based startup that deals in all kinds of biotech instruments and innovative gadgets. It has expertise in the field of low power portable embedded instrumentation solutions, including LED applications, industrial automation, biotechnology research and downstream processing.
25. Eco-BLAC Bricks: The Eco-BLAC bricks have been created by a group of MIT students at MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design as part of a bigger project to develop low-cost, low-emission housing for India’s inner city slums. The bricks are 70% boiler ash from paper mills mixed with sodium hydroxide, lime, and a small amount of clay.
26. Eko India Financial Services: It’s a Gurgaon-based financial service company that offers branchless banking services to the common man. It offers business correspondent (BC) service for State Bank of India (SBI), ICICI Bank and Yes Bank. Customers can walk into any Eko counter (retail outlet) to open a savings account, deposit and withdraw cash from the account and for other such services.
27. Inventrom: It’s a Goa-based IoT startup that also focuses on robotics. Its product NetPlug allows users to control their electronic and electrical devices via an exclusive smartphone app and social media.
28. Leaf Wearables: A Delhi-based startup that has built a safety pendant for women in distress situations called Safer.
29. Mukunda Foods: It’s a Bangalore-based startup that manufactures automated food equipment the Indian food retail segment. It builds food-making machines for hotels, restaurants, eateries ad even homes. Its product called DosaMatic can automatically make dosas.
30. NextGen PMS: It’s a Bangalore-based technology enabled CSR and sustainability management startup.
31. Prakash Lab: Is a research group in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. They design and build precision instruments that would enable people to undertake scientific exploration even in resource-poor settings. Their products include $5 microfluidic chemistry lab; Foldoscope – a research-grade microscope made of plastic-impregnated paper, costing a measly 55 cents; and the Oscan – a 3D-printed smartphone add-on that helps diagnose the oral carcinomas.
32. Ready Bytes Software Labs: It’s a Bhilwara, Rajasthan-based startup offers Open Source Joomla products and ecommerce Solutions. This web-based application and software development company enables revenue growth, productivity improvement and cost reduction by leveraging technology to enhance the quality, context and flow of information between clients and their key constituents.
33. SenesTech: It’s a Flagstaff, Arizona-based biotech platform and research company that has developed an innovative technology for managing animal populations by fertility control.
34. SocialCops: It’s a Singapore-based data company that aims to power decision making through better data sourced from the grassroots to solve problems facing humanity.
35. Team Indus: It’s a Bangalore-based aerospace research team that won a major prize in the Google Lunar XPrize – a global competition to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon by December 31, 2016.

Apart from the above mentioned startups and research groups, incubators like IIT Bombay and special initiatives like TiE Smart City Initiative will also exhibit their achievements.

During this event, NASSCOM will also sign an MOU with TiE Silicon Valley to facilitate a startup exchange and collaboration program. IIM Ahmedabad’s business incubator CIIE shall also be signing MoUs with corporates and academic partners in the US to collaboratively build and scale-up disruptive innovations for India, through financial assistance and collaboration.

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