Ex-Nasscom Exec, Baring PE and IP Ventures Team Up to Support SanchiConnect, A Fundraising Platform for DeepTech Innovations

Baring Private Equity Partners India and Inflection Point Ventures have teamed up to support Sanchiconnect, a fundraising platform to support deep & emerging tech innovations in India.

Building & growing a deep tech startup is a challenge and in India its like an uphill battle.

Despite the availability of the resources and strong growth metrics (53% CAGR over the last 10 years), startups operating in this space are still eyeing access to seed capital and thematic funds and to reach potential customers who are mostly enterprises they need market access and POC-led engagements.

Deep tech startups look for deep academic knowledge & expertise while hiring for their team. And it shouldn't surprise you if you find that 85% of Founders/CEOs believe that DeepTech talent comes at substantial costs.

All these challenges & hurdles need immediate fix by creating corporate, VC and community-backed incubators for enhancing outreach and driving innovation, academia collaboration, and world-class innovation clusters.

Addressing these fallbacks, Dr Sunil Shekhawat, ex-Head of Products & NASSCOM Deeptech Club backed by Baring Private Equity Fund India and Inflection Point Ventures launches a fundraising, one-stop support platform to drive deep tech innovations from India.

Sanchiconnect enables founders to raise funds from global VCs, demonstrate their product to enterprises, hire tech talent and more- everything around growing business globally.

To fast-track funding in deep tech startups, Sanchiconnect has started with a network of more than 50 Angels, VCs and Investment networks like Capital2B (InfoEdge), Pi Ventures, Speciale Invest, Nexus VP, Yournest VC, GrowX, Ankur Capital, Modular Capital and many more as Investment partners to fund startups on the platform.

Sharing his vision Dr Shekhwat, CEO, of Sanchiconnect says" With a vision to democratize Indian innovation globally on four fronts - fund accessibility, enterprise sales, tech hiring and business services, we expect Sanchiconnect to become leading discovery to transaction enablement platform for deep & emerging tech innovations from India for the world."

The platform has come out of stealth mode in the last week of August and has already confirmed three successful term sheets through the investor partner network. The platform will facilitate investments in early-stage as well as growth-stage startups, with deal sizes ranging from $100,000 to $10 million.

Ankur Mittal, Founding Partner at IP Ventures, said, "The quantum of deep tech funding proposals coming to us has been growing consistently over the years and so does our member’s interest. This partnership is symbolic of our commitment to go higher on deep tech investing and reduce the timeframe in rolling out term sheets to deep tech founders."

"India has the potential to become a leading hub for deep disruptive technology companies. SanchiConnect is an exciting platform enabling fundraising, recruitment, customer acquisition and strategic partnerships for this ecosystem. We are delighted to partner with SanchiConnect to constructively engage with this ecosystem," said Rahul Bhasin, Managing Partner, Baring PE India Fund.

Here're 17 Startups Picked by NASSCOM for its 4th Batch of DeepTech Club

Yesterday, Nasscom unveiled the 4th batch of its DeepTech Club under which the startups will be nurtured, mentored and funded. The selected 17 startups are working in the field of new-age technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Machine Learning (ML) and virtual reality (VR).

The startups have been selected for 4-month programme that would involve guidance, enterprise connect sessions and exposure to investors and the global startup ecosystem, the IT industry’s apex body said in a statement. Out of the 17 startups selected, two are from Hyderabad which include Aptagrim and Onward Assist.

Below is the list of all 17 selected deep technology startups, for 4th-Cohort -

• Alphaa.ai - An AI-Assisted analytics platform for businesses. Simply interact with data by asking natural language questions on any dashboard and data source. Create, Discover and Share insights.
• Aptagrim Consulting - A Data Science company leveraging the advancements in Artificial Intelligence to empower people with visual impairment.
• nTalents (Ehunch Research Labs) - nTalents is an AI enabled talent assessment tool which provides unparalleled accuracy in soft skill and behavioural competency measurements.
• Evue Technologies - AI Powered Robot Interview and Assessments.
• Fluid Robotics Fluid Robotics builds smart solutions for monitoring pipelines and underwater infrastructure.
• Fourtek IT Solutions (Devnagri) - Devnagri is an AI-powered Human translation Platform to help businesses reach 1B + Indian Internet users in their regional languages at scale.
• Medtra - Medtra innovative technologies is dedicated  in delivering health tech  lifesaving global  products using Embedded- fifth generation technologies.
• Onward Assist - Onward Assist is an advanced cancer prognostics platform that assists Cancer pathologists and Oncologists. Onward provides computer vision and ML-based automated diagnostics tools and treatment decision support tools used by Histopathologists, Radiologists, Oncologists. These are built in collaboration with leading cancer institutes in India and USA.
• Pathpartner Technology - Pathpartner offers ready to go hardware and licensable software packages for interior sensing in-cabin solutions to automotive product makers addressing driver drowsiness, driver distraction, occupancy, driver activity, chid/pet left unattended, object left behind and many more safety critical problems.
• SecurelyShare - Patented technology for data security, data privacy and data enrichment enabling multiple fintech use cases including secure delivery of statements and documents to millions while improving customer experience using personalized AI.
• SecurelyShare - Sequretek is a cyber security company offering solutions in the area of endpoint security, identity governance and security monitoring through its managed detection and response stack.
• Simplify360 - Simplify360 is a leading AI powered Digital customer Service organisation.
• Sixth Sensor Technology - 6th Senser is a revolutionary anti-collision ADAS system that warns and automatically brakes the vehicle in case of a possible accident and is available as an aftermarket product that fits any vehicle at a price point that makes it easily accessible to all users, private or commercial.
• Stylumia Intelligence Technology - A B2B SaaS platform building the future of retail prediction, eliminating guesswork from product decisions in the fashion and lifestyle industry globally through ML, Computer vision and proprietary prediction models.
• Exxar - A Cloud platform for Design Communication & Collaboration; Think of it as Zoom for 3D content & Immersive Visualization using VR/AR.
• Wellthy Therapeutics - Multi-lingual smartphone prescription therapeutic patient application, decision support and intervention ready dashboards for virtual health coaches, physician dashboards and reports, caregiver interfaces, and partner dashboards for population level insights.
• Zappy.ai - ZappyAI provides AI software to automatically identify automation opportunities and generate automations for manual business processes.

So far, the Nasscom DeepTech Club has mentored 78 companies which are the best of the Indian DeepTech product ecosystem curated by Nasscom & Industry Experts and selected at single-digit acceptance rate from 1000+ applications across a dozen cities over the last 2.5 years.

Under Nasscom DeepTech Club - Each selected Start-up companies building on deep technologies such as AI (ML, DL, NLP, CV), AR/VR/MR, IoT, Robotics, Security, Blockchain, Quantum, RPA, among others, undergoes an exclusive 4-month mentoring & connects program.

Nasscom DeepTech Club is working with a large number of technology, product, business, investor and academia mentors & experts spanning 1000s of hours of effort. They represent great diversity of the business application of DeepTech across all business verticals/ sectors. These start-ups are India's best of the best and hold key to India becoming an innovation leader.

Given the high level of curation by Nasscom and Industry Experts, the club encourage all segments of Ecosystem - businesses, investors, academia, tech partners, govt and other ecosystem players to reach out and work with these companies.

Nasscom Selects 22 Startups for 2nd Cohort of its DeepTech Club Program

Nasscom Product Council (NPC), a Nasscom's platform for product-based companies, has announced its second batch of the Nasscom DeepTech Club, which is its flagship program for startups in deep technologies.

The DeepTech club involves start-ups working on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), AR/VR, Robotics, NLP and similar technologies.

Launched in October 2017, Nasscom DeepTech is a 3-month mentor-mentee program where the latter typically is a founder who is passionate about working with cutting edge technology, one who is comfortable reading and applying in journal papers in their chosen area, creates new IP and is keen on adopting latest technologies – AI, ML, Robotics, Algorithms, Drone, AR/VR, Speech/Image, Cyptography etc.

The program provides a platform to foster engagements, enterprise, investor & global connects, global expansion and in process, get a lot of visibility to choose customers & markets.

The startups selected were judged on the combination of the several criteria including -- Technical Depth, Business value, Unique/Idea innovation and adoption of solution.

The startups selected will be recognized, nurtured and promoted by NASSCOM via various programs, platforms and events. The Club has three segments: Lab to Market, Pre-Revenue & Post-Revenue.

The 22 Deep Tech startups selected are --

1. Imaginate Software Labs Pvt Ltd




2. Constems AI Systems Private Limited




3. Artivatic Data Labs private Limited




4. DheeYantra Research Labs




5. Bitonic Technology Labs Private Limited




6. SwitchOn/ Abee research labs




7. Invento robotics




8. Uber Techlabs Pvt Ltd




9. QuNu Labs Private Limited




10. Active Intelligence Pte Ltd




11. CLAP Research




12. CogniCor Technologies




13. Coeo Labs




14. Scapic




15. Horus Intellisys Pvt. Ltd.




16. Clootrack Software Labs Private Limited




17. Wobot Intelligence Private Limited




18. Matisoft Cyber Security Labs




19. Tesseract




20. TRANSERVE TECHNOLOGIES PVT LTD




21. Infrrd




22. FORMCEPT

The first cohort of the DeepTech Club program had 20+ companies who were mentored and supported by industry leaders. Three of the 1st cohort startups got funded and 3 were accepted by Mass Challenge in Israel. Most importantly, almost all participants saw their value proposition, go-to-market and growth rate improve.

Besides Nasscom DeepTech Club program, to catapult India's deep tech startup ecosystem onto the next level, Nasscom recently has also launched Accelerate 10X, a second phase of Nasscom's 10,000 Startups initiative, which was launched 5 years ago. With Accelerate 10X program Nasscom aims to mentor 100 mature stage startups every year.