How multinationals like Siemens are bolstering their innovation capabilities by engaging with startups
For a long time, India has been seen as a low-cost back office for big corporate houses. When Target, the Fortune 50 retailer, launched its accelerator programme in India last year, it was an endorsement of the fact that the giants had started looking at India, especially Bengaluru, as a source of innovative technologies.
Several other corporates have seen the trend, understood it, and wanted to build innovation capabilities in India. Technology giants like Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and the likes are all involved in the ecosystem of accelerators, directly working with startups, or, as in the case of Yahoo!, acquiring talent from the ecosystem by scrupulously hiring.
Siemens Technology and Services Pvt. Ltd (STS) that houses Siemens’ research and development arm in India has been leveraging the IT force of Bengaluru for over 10 years now. Rohit Kumar, who is the global strategy head for Corporate Development Center housed at STS, said, “We have been developing world-class products at our center in Bangalore for over 10 years. During this period, we have seen the local ecosystem change significantly making Bangalore’s startup scene one of the most thriving ones in the world. The startup community here is going through a transformation and I believe multinational companies can learn a lot about next generation businesses by engaging with them. In return, our extensive global network, decades of experience, and accumulated knowledge can help startups evolve more quickly.”
The Siemens Tech StartUp Meet recently aimed to do exactly this in collaboration with Siemens Technology to Business (TTB), an entity of Siemens AG that seeks out the latest in technology from startup companies, individual inventors, universities and research labs through collaboration, hiring and licensing new technologies. TTB is located in Berkeley, Munich and Shanghai.
The event saw nine startups pitch their ideas to a closed audience and an internal panel that evaluated how these companies and the new technologies could be encouraged.
Altizon is a 20-month-old industrial IoT-focused startup from Pune. With 12+ customer engagements and 50 self-service accounts, the company is growing fast. Their flagship product, Datonis, helps launch new IoT products and solutions in a matter of weeks using the industry’s best self-service layer and BigData analytics platform. These solutions are used to enable today’s smart factory, city grid and health initiatives both on premise and on cloud.
ConnectM is a global machine-to-machine technology solutions and business intelligence company headquartered in Bangalore. With over 100,000 assets connected, ConnectM’s Yantra Solution Delivery platform is robust. It offers a stop shop for IoT needs. They’ve delivered their solutions to various domains including telecom, energy, utilities, industrial, construction, IT/ITES enterprises and transportation market segments.
DataWeave builds products that make data on the web easily accessible in both human and machine readable formats. PriceWeave is their flagship product. It provides real time analytics for retails stores and brands at scale. It offers pricing and assortment intelligence, in-depth product feature-based analytics, promotion analysis, besides public data aggregated from thousands of online stores. Retailers use these insights to take decision on pricing, assortment and promotions quickly and confidently to improve margins and increase sales.
Enlightiks is headquartered in PaloAlto, California, US with an office in Houston, Texas. It’s supported by a data science lab in Bengaluru, India. Their proprietary product, Querent, uses complex mathematical, statistical, computational and cognitive models with a simple user interface to create a solution that predicts the future state of health of any individual. Along with healthcare, the company also works in consumer goods and life sciences.
Flutura Decision Sciences and Analytics
Flutura is a niche Big Data analytics solutions company based out of Palo Alto, and has its development centre in Bengaluru. Flutura has a vision to transform operational outcomes by monetizing machine data. It does so by triangulating economic impact signals from fragmented data pools generated from various disparate data sources. Flutura has developed over 30 nano apps for the utilities sector. Each nano application is designed to tackle important business problems for retail, transmission, distribution and generation companies. Flutura is a Tech30 company from 2013.
Kavaii Business Analytics India
Kavaii is a product company focused primarily on healthcare analytics that targets the growing Indian healthcare market. Their analytics solution, MedSmart, provides actionable insights by analysing data extracted from the Healthcare Information System (HIS) and various other operational data sources. It provides Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and analytic views on financial, operational and clinical parameters. Kavaii also has an analytic solution, BizSmart, that provides KPIs and actionable insights for the IT services industry.
Meddiff was founded in 2007, and was primarily known as MedSphere Technologies. Their advance tele-imaging solutions transmit high-quality DICOM images necessary to diagnostic usability in quick time. Meddiff products are committed to absolute compliances and quality. They’re FDA-approved (USA), HIPAA compliant and conform to HL7 standards. Headquartered in Bengaluru, Meddiff has representation in the US and Europe. They have over 500 customers and more than 700 installed sites distributed globally.
Osteo3d is based out of Bengaluru, focused on 3D printing for healthcare. They help doctors to 3D print medical models for surgical planning, customised surgical guides and implants. The material used for surgical models are ABS/PLA/SLS, depending on the complexity of the model. For guides and implants, other bio-compatible materials are used. Their goal is to extend the reach of 3D printing to healthcare professionals at an affordable price to enable them to apply this disruptive technology for efficient and accurate procedures. The parent company df3d is one of the 2014Tech30 companies.
ParaBlu Systems handles concerns such as security, privacy and lack of administrative control during adoption of the public cloud. They address these concerns squarely through their technologies and solutions. Enterprises can accelerate their cloud adoption with higher security and privacy of their data, while retaining complete control over how users access cloud-based services. The company is based in Bengaluru with an overseas office in Burlingame, USA.