Reliance to start investing in startups, here are 11 companies it helped accelerate

The GenNext Innovation Hub is a joint initiative of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and Microsoft Ventures to develop the startup community across India. The Mumbai-based accelerator recently announced the graduation of 11 technology startups from its accelerator program. Here are the 11 companies:

AxleRate: Founded by Varadharajan Kumaravelu (18+ years of experience working with organizations like Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, IBM and ISRO), AxleRate is in the business of in-taxi engagement, providing entertainment, e-commerce and safety. The aim is to engage the captive audience inside moving public transport vehicles such as taxis and autos. They’ve developed a platform with state-of-the-art safety features that which includes voice/visual triggered panic alerts, continuous location tracking, targeted entertainment and e-commerce opportunity for passengers while they’re on the move.

CarIQ: Founded by Sagar Apte (with nearly16 years of experience across sales, marketing and tech roles in startups, as well as large companies), CarIQ is building a connected car platform for connecting cars to the Internet. CarIQ's solution enables real-time knowledge of car needs in terms of servicing, maintenance, repairs & etc. Engineers can remotely login into the car, and fix it. (read full story)

Coitor: Co-founded by Mahendra Vellingiri (Anna University, University of South Australia alumnus; sales consultant in a product start-up), Coitor provides e-wardrobe trial-rooms. They have an app that uses augmented reality to build virtual dressing rooms for retail companies. It reduces dependence on trial rooms thereby reducing the time and cost for conversions. Going forward, the technology will be integrated with e-commerce firms to help customers visualise products on display on their websites.

Health Vectors: Founded by Dr. Subhasish Sircar (Ph.D. is in Materials Science from Michigan State University and MBA is in Marketing and Strategy from Wharton Business School with 15 years of work experience), Health Vectors helps measure and improve health through predictive analytics and focused medical intervention. Built on a platform of predictive analytics, cognitive computing and evidence-based science, Health Vectors offers a solution for managing personal health through data, detailed analytics and timely proactive medical intervention.

InterviewMocha: Founded by Amit Mishra (a Computer Science engineer who worked with IBM as a technologist for around four years before becoming an entrepreneur who exited his first business in 2012), InterviewMocha helps companies save time, money and efforts on recruitments. Supported by a global network of subject matter experts to create question banks, IM helps customers enhance their recruitment efficiency and minimise their recruitment cost.

Light: Co-founded by Animesh Samuel and Sanjeev Menon (Animesh is an engineer with consulting and marketing experience in India and the Middle East. Sanjeev is an MS from the University of Florida, was head of Laboratory for Information Systems Telecommunications (LIST), Gainsville), Light is an answering engine for the search market. Light is an answering engine algorithm that provides users with relevant and exact answers instead of just links. Light answering engine is an alternative to existing search engines where it is easier for you to just ask a question and get answers instead of digging through links to find an answer. LIGHT Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engine has the capability to analyse text information, understand relational and contextual references and derive meaning out of that input, resulting in an almost human-like response to any query/data it is faced with.

LogiNext: Co-founded by Dhruvil Sanghvi & Manisha Raisinghania (Graduates from Carnegie Mellon with experience of advising a variety of Fortune 500 companies -starting from e-commerce companies to state and federal governments- on how to convert Big Data into intelligence), LogiNext helps businesses saving time and cost in logistics. They have proprietary algorithms to generate insights that help companies predict delays, save cost and provide reliable customer service. LogiNext has built a real-time and data agnostic platform for logistics, which can integrate multiple data sources to give you a real-time visibility into the delivery network and perform analytics like clustering, trend analysis, time series analysis, load balancing, scheduling and route optimisation on top of that location data. (read full story)

Tootle: Co-founded by group of technologists from TCS, Tootle helps customers find and organise online group activities. It is a platform that helps people organise simultaneous and real-time events. It helps users organise, manage and engage group activities in real-time using a mobile app available on iOS, Android and Windows platforms.

Oztern: Led by Saiju V Stella (a technologist, with 10+ years of experience with fortune 500 companies), Oztern helps provide stress-free studies and exam preparation through a personalised adaptive learning platform. It was set up to help young learners in the K12 bracket prepare for their exams in a personalised practice environment by helping them prepare for future exam preparations using adaptive learning and "gaming techniques."

Flexiguru: Co-founded by Mehak Aggarwal & Ankur Aggarwal (Mehak has 8+ years of experience in operations and business development in banking and KPO sectors. Ankur has more than 10 years of experience, and has led startups in both the US and Asia), Flexiguru is a personalised learning platform. It curates quality learning content from various sources including open sources. It also optimizes the curated content with its analytical technology to make learning personalised and tailored to preferences and specific interests of different learners.

Fropcorn: Co-founded by Kartik Poddar and Kartik Bansal (Kartik P. has over 7+ years of experience with companies like Komli Media and Microsoft. Kartik B. is also ex-Microsoft with over 6 years of experience in large scale data transfers and security), Fropcorn provides entertainment for people-on-the-go. Travellers can download or stream entertainment for their journey by connecting to Fropcorn WiFi hotspots at major travel locations across rail, bus and air transport. It uses location-caching technology to enable high speed delivery with zero dependence on user's data connection and DRM systems to protect content owner's IP.

None of these companies have received investment from either Reliance or Microsoft, but the accelerator claims that VC introductions have helped 30-40 per cent of these companies get funded. According to this ET report, Reliance Industries is now looking forward to invest in new companies.

This first batch started on October 27, 2014 and demoed on the 13^th of March this year. The accelerator is now taking in applications for Batch 2, the last date for which is April 30^th.

Website: GenNext Innovation Hub