Hand-holding startups in rolling out products

Hyderabad: The AVISHKAR deep tech accelerator programme at CIE@IIITH incubator has selected its 6th batch of deep-tech startups. The 4 new startups in this batch follows the 8 startups from the previous 5 cohorts.

The 6-month deep-tech accelerator programme is specially designed for early stage startups building products in the areas of Machine Learning, Image Processing, Robotics, AR/VR, NLP and other sub domains of AI.

They will also gain strategic business coaching, market access and tech mentoring from IIIT-Hyderabad’s research labs.The startups in this new cohort include:

• HyreLabs – leverages AI to find interview-worthy candidates in minutes
• Rayd8 – an AI based eye disease detection, analysis and monitoring startup
• Mashinga – an intelligent meeting assistant that co-ordinates meetings, can converse and collaborate locally and remotely, as well as track meeting outcomes.
• Metafact – aims to debunk fake news in real time, increase the metacognition of society and build a trust layer over the internet by harnessing the power of AI.

Abhishek Kaushal, co founder of Rayd8 says, “IIITH has some of the best research papers published in the field of retinal image analysis. This research work was very complimentary to what we intended to do hence we applied for the avishkar acceleration. We intend to develop some unique clinical diagnostic tools and clinical decision support system tools using retinal image under the mentorship of IIITH professors which will have a global market."

CIE@IIITH’S 1st batch of Medtech Accelerator program has been started in the BioNest setup with support from BIRAC, Govt of India. The 6-month cohort-based program includes mentorship, connections, investment that culminates into a public pitch event or demo day to accelerate the growth of early-stage startups in the medical deep tech domain, announced the early stage startups selected for its 1st cohort:

• Psynapce India Private Ltd, founded by Raji Harish and Girish Patinharepat has created the Savika platform that brings human, technology and product offerings together to make pregnancy an enjoyable experience for couples by providing ways and means to prepare for, learn and understand the journey.
• Peregrine Innovations, founded by Nimish Mehra will work on designing, development and fabrication of a cost effective, precise and robust powered (bionic) trans femoral (above knee) prosthetic leg. Peregrine uses ‘Electrical sensors’ (Rotatory Potentiometers and Piezos) and by placing ‘EMG’ (Electromyography) sensors on the residual part of the limb which can capture the muscle activity.
• Onward Health, founded by Dinesh Koka will provide oncology analytics tools that will help oncologists look at information of a large volume of patients and come to accurate clinical diagnosis.
• Pinoty, founded by Dr. Niranjan Ravuri, has developed a heuristic questionnaire, which identifies risk in any user and segregates them accordingly. Every user is subjected to a battery of investigations like blood tests, urine tests, fasting lipid profiles, thyroid levels etc. A baseline ECG, Echocardiography and a USG abdomen are also taken and stored in a HIPPA compliant electronic medical record format for future comparison and measure the developments.
• Prof Ramesh Loganathan, COO at IIITH Foundation, Professor Co-Innovation and Head Research Outreach says, “Two years ago, after helping start T-Hub we pivoted IIITH Incubator into a Deeptech incubator. Today our emphasis is on getting a strong research connect with startups, infusing research insights into their products. We now have over 20 startups that engage with our professors and their labs right from advisory to jointly creating products.
• A unique initiative in the country where research is becoming a key part of startup products." IIITHF is the largest technology business incubator in the country. Just 10 years since its inception, CIE@IIITH has already supported 150 + startups so far.