• 11 social enterprises selected from 120 applications
Hyderabad, India, October 5, 2019 : AIC-IIITH FOUNDATION, Telangana’s only Atal Incubation Center [AIC] for incubating and nurturing tech-based social enterprises organized a startup selection event for its first cohort, and workshops for startups on 26-27 September 2019.
Atal Incubation Centre is an initiative of Atal Innovation Mission NITI Aayog, Govt of India. AIM intends to support the establishment of new incubation centres called Atal Incubation Centres (AICs) that would nurture innovative start-up businesses in their pursuit to become scalable and sustainable enterprises.
The aim was to select startups for Akash – the Flagship Incubation Program of AIC-IIITH FOUNDATION for Social Enterprises and at the same time engage and provide value to the applicants.
The 6-month incubation program will provide startups with business coaching in essential fields like investability, riskiest assumptions, business models, finance, legal, pitching, etc. It will culminate with a demo day where the startups will pitch to investors. After an overwhelming response from 11 States and 29 Cities with 120 applications, a panel that comprised Raj N Janagam, RadhaRangarajan, RohitRanganathan, AnupPuthan and SaiPramodh judged the final selection.
The final 11 social enterprises selected are : 1MONEY, Xshala Energetics, Aquatic Livelihoods, Nudge Technologies, Candiphi Healthcare Private Limited, Cellerite Systems, Ambus Services, Vitthai Agri Solutions, Truspectra India Pvt. Ltd, Rainroof and Scaleup Consultants.
As value-add for the applicants, over the 2 days, AIC-IIITH also organised a series of workshops for the social entrepreneurs on various topics. These included a pitching and communication workshop by Ms Johanna Hull and Meet a Successful Social Entrepreneur where Mr Bala Reddy of Our Food talked about the challenges faced by startups especially like the valley of death. Ms Vyshali Sagar from PwC Innovation Cell introduced the relevance of an Incubation and Acceleration ecosystem to the social entrepreneurs.
On the second day, Ms Lakshmi Misra from IIITH provided an orientation on the support and resources the institute provides to startups via CIE@IIITH’s various initiatives. This was followed by interaction between Shravan Kasam of T-SIG on relevance and importance of NGO, Government and CSR connect for startups.
The selection process ended with the judges giving their feedback to the applicants. One of the judges, Rajkumar Jangam, CEO, AIC-IIITH said, “AIC-IIITH is going to become the ‘go-to-place’ for early-stage social entrepreneurs leveraging technology. Atal Innovation Mission team is creating a national ecosystem for early-stage entrepreneurs, that couple with the IIITH and AIC team brings together best of technology and business worlds. We’re positioned to offer a world-class incubation facility that social entrepreneurs can leverage“.
Ramesh Loganathan, Professor of Practise, Co-innovations said, “We’re happy to see yet another research translation endeavour from IIITH getting off the ground. Adding to the existing deep-tech and medtech incubators at CIE, the AIC-IIITH will help us enable social startups creating social impact through technology with our research, enriching and amplifying these startups”.
The profiles of selected Startups is a follows:
| Name | Sector | Profile |
| Cellerite Systems | Transport | Develops “innovative” battery charging solutions for EVs, UAVs, robotics and industrial equipment. |
| 1MONEY | Finance | A software platform that helps an Aadhar card function as a debit card. |
| Rainroof | Water | An application that utilizes ML and pattern recognition to provide home owners with rain water harvesting solutions and tools. |
| Truspectra India Pvt. Ltd | Health and Sanitation | An AI-based smart UVC disinfection system that can be utilized across the hospitality,transportation, pharma industries and more. |
| Candiphi Healthcare Private Limited | Health | A software platform that integrates information from any medical device with an exposed SDK and uses ML to analyse incoming data to make predictions and analysis on diabetic & cardiovascular illnesses. |
| Scaleup Consultants | Education | A hardware tool that creates a Wifi Zone that will help digitialize school administration records and helps with content dissemination. |
| Ambus Services | Health and Transport | An On-Demand ambulance booking application. |
| Xshala Energetics | Transport | A hydrogen production unit that can be remotely monitored and is powered by renewable energy; also develops smart hydrogen kits that can help convert fossil-fueled motor boats into 0-emission hydrogen boats. |
| Nudge technologies | Agriculture | An application that acts as a managed marketplace and information hub on exports for farmers. |
| Aquatic Livelihoods | Agriculture | A sensor-based water quality monitoring board that collects data and monitors parameters such as pH, salinity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, etc. to feed into anML algorithm that will output suggestions that will help in scaling up marginal fishing households. |
| Vitthai Agri Solutions | Agriculture | A solution that provides oxygen to roots in order to provide a healthy environment for open field farming while removing harmful chemicals in the water. |
