Recently, Indian Government has launched a Startup India Seed Fund Scheme with a corpus of 945 crore rupees to provide seed funding to qualified startups through eligible incubators across India in the next four years. In other news, Indian AI startups raised almost $836.3 million in 2020, as per Startup Funding Report. Pandemic notwithstanding, the country’s startup ecosystem is indeed going places.
Below, we look at AI startups that got funding in the last few months.
(The list is in alphabetical order)
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1| Cron AI
The edge inference platform–founded in 2015 by Tushar Chabbra and Saurav Agarwala– has raised $4 million from VenturEast and Kitaki Ventures in a Series A round. Cron AI has developed a real-time AI, Deep Learning-enabled edge inferencing platform accelerating algorithms and neural networks on the product edge. Cron’s unique real-time scalable and dynamic hardware and software architecture can be used to develop intelligent solutions using 3D sensors with applications in autonomous vehicles, mobility, logistics, robotics, intelligent transport infrastructure, smart spaces etc.
2| Elucidata
Founded in 2015 by Abhishek Jha, Swetabh Pathak, and Dr Richard Kibbey, bioinformatics platform Elucidata has raised $5 million in pre-Series A led by IvyCap Ventures with participation from Hyperplane Venture Capital and a few angel investors. The company provides a code-first SaaS platform for data-driven drug discovery teams that merges proprietary and public biomedical molecular data for machine learning applications.
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3| Miko
The robotics startup–founded in 2015 by Sneh R Vaswani, Prashant V Iyengar, and Chintan S Raikar – raised $6.7 million in a Series B led by IvyCap Ventures. Existing investors Chiratae Ventures, YourNest Capital, and former chairman of Nasscom, Keshav Murugesh, participated in the funding round. The Miko series of robots cater to the learning and development needs of children. The company leverages proprietary and state of the art artificial intelligence, robotics and internet of things and aspires to bring their platform solutions to 20 million homes by 2023.
4| Myelin Foundry
Founded in 2019 by Gopichand Katragadda – the deep tech startup has raised $1 million in pre-series A led by Beyond Next Ventures, a Japanese venture capital firm. Myelin Foundry is transforming human experiences and industry outcomes by building Artificial Intelligence algorithms on video, voice, and sensor data, for edge devices. Myelin’s first product, Fovea Stream, enables HD viewing experiences with SD transmission. “Myelin has developed globally leading products and capability in Edge AI. We look forward to partnering with BNV and accessing the Japanese ecosystem,” said Gopichand Katragadda, the Founder and CEO of Myelin.
The fresh funds will be used to consolidate Myelin’s products in the India video streaming market and to enter international markets.
5| Nextbillion.ai
Nextbillion.ai–founded in 2019 by Gaurav Bubna, Ajay Bulusu and Shaolin Zheng – has raised $6.25 million as part of its extended Series A fundraising round from Microsoft’s venture fund, M12. The startup provides tailor-made solutions addressing the unique map-related requirements for businesses. To create a customised map, the company uses advanced AI to unlock hidden intelligence in business data. Map editors assist in curating the custom map and fine-tuning it to meet corporate requirements.
6| Obviously.ai
The B2B predictive analytics startup–founded in 2019 by Nirman Dave and Tapojit Debnath Tapu – has raised a seed funding of $3.6 million from TMV (based in New York and Chicago), Capital Group, Golden Gate Ventures, Arka Venture Labs. Obviously.ai offers tools that enable non-technical business analysts to run predictions on their historical data. The startup will use the fresh capital to grow R&D, expand sales and marketing teams, introduce additional time series and other cutting edge algorithms and build an integration ecosystem that can further automate it’s predictive AI capabilities.
7| Vernacular.ai
The AI-First SaaS startup has raised $5.1 million in Series A led by Exfinity Ventures and Kalaari Capital. Founded in 2016 by Sourabh Gupta and Akshay Deshraj, Vernacular.ai enhances customer experience through intelligent voice conversations. The startup’s flagship product, VIVA, is an intelligent, multilingual platform that uses NLU & speech recognition to automate up to 80% of call centre operations.
8| Wysa
Healthtech startup Wysa–founded in 2015 by Ramakant Vempati and Jo Aggarwal – has raised $5.5 million in Series A led by W Health Venture. It’s a mental and emotional well-being Life Coach powered by AI. The service, launched in 2017, uses three techniques to deliver the early intervention to high-risk groups:
- An AI chatbot
- A library of evidence-based self-help materials
- Messaging-based support from human therapists
