Create @ Alibaba Cloud Startup Contest announces six winners from the city rounds across India

Alibaba recently announced six winners for the regional Indian round of its Create @ Alibaba Cloud Startup Contest, a global entrepreneur competition. The contest received overwhelming responses from startups in the fields of Artificial Intelligence / Big Data, Cyber Security, Digital Services, Immersive Media (Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality) and the Internet of Things.

The preliminary rounds conducted across three major cities ­ Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru – saw 10 shortlisted startups pitching to an expert jury to showcase their product, describe how they are refining their product-market fit, and scaling up to tap growing opportunities. Each startup’s pitch was followed by Q&A from an expert jury.

The six winning teams, comprising the top two winning teams from each city, have each won $10,000 worth Alibaba Cloud credits and will now travel to Tai Yuan in China for the City Battle round.

The six winning teams from the three city rounds are:

Mumbai 

Orowealth: Orowealth is an online wealth management platform, which offers zero-commission products to retail investors. Through its web- and mobile-based wealth management platform, ORO Wealth enables retail investors and offline intermediaries to access high-quality unbiased advice and investment services at low costs. It was founded by Nitin Agrawal, Vijay Kuppa, Yogesh Powar and Swati Aggarwal.

They currently handle over Rs 600 crore worth of assets across 4,200 active investor accounts and have over 20,000 signups.

Litmus World: Litmus World offers a single platform to measure, act and improve the business processes that enable customer centricity. The LitmusWorld customer experience solution helps businesses by initiating contextual conversations with customers in real-time, measuring and analysing trends, creating and managing issues, offering a single-customer view cross touchpoints and using data-driven actionable insight to improve internal processes.

It was founded by Ajay Row, who has nearly 30 years of experience in database marketing, analytics, loyalty and CRM; Ramesh Natarajan, who has 25 years of experience in customer management, general management, sales & marketing and research across industries and Manish Srivastava, who has nearly 20 years of experience in technology, research and innovation with additional experience in complex systems and data.

Today, Litmus World’s enterprise SaaS platform has been implemented by over 125+ brands across multiple industries to dramatically improve their customer and employee experience.

Delhi

Afterglow Tech: This startup is working towards solving challenges in street lighting by designing and manufacturing smart street lighting solutions for campuses and Smart Cities. According to Ashish Anand, CEO & Founder, street lighting is one the major sources of wastage of energy with over 40 percent of the energy budget of any city or organisation allocated to public lighting. With their solutions, they help reduce energy wastage, bring down maintenance costs and improve the safety and security on roads. The company is one of the recipients of the Elevate-100 Grant from the Karnataka government.

They currently have POC stage projects as well as full-scale projects with large campuses in the execution stage.

Deepsight Labs: An AI solutions company that applies Deep Learning to Computer Vision and image processing to analyse real-time videos and extract relevant information, their “Go Deep” platform enables cameras to be smart cameras and start adding value to business and reduce operational cost for the companies. DeepSight Labs is focused on making video surveillance an analytical tool that can be leveraged to achieve cost savings, efficiencies, and improve revenue generation apart from offering security and monitoring.

The startup, which is currently bootstrapped, was founded by Satya Tadimeti, who has 20+years of experience in marketing and networking; Rakesh Channaiah with 16+ years of sales and consulting experience; and Nishant Veer with 16+ years of experience in developing niche technologies in Telecom, Networks and Mobile.

Their platform is currently installed in three large industries in the national capital region (NCR).

Bangalore

Lazy Design Pvt Ltd: The startup has developed an AI-powered interface in form of a smart ring called Aina. Aina lets you do everything you need from your smartphone, without ever touching it. It uses Artificial Intelligence algorithms to predict what you need next and displays the right shortcut just before you need it on its curved edge display. In addition to this, the ring also lets users take phone calls from their fingers and acts as a fitness tracker. It was founded by Product Designer and Instrumentation Engineer Apoorv Shankar and data scientist and blockchain evangelist Abhishek Upperwal and is currently bootstrapped.

They were working on developing the product for one-and-a-half years and have created a final functional prototype. They are also running a crowdfunding campaign, which is doing well and according to the founders, they have received great feedback from people, who have seen their demo.

Bitonic Technology: The startup’s solution Yellow Messenger is said to be the world’s largest conversational Artificial Intelligence channel that can source data from multiple sources in the enterprise and Orchestrate conversations to market to, acquire, service and support customers across multiple platforms of engagement, including the web, mobile apps, voice assistants, voice assistants on Telephony, messaging platforms, email etc.

Yellow was founded by Jaya Kishore Reddy (CTO), Rashid Khan (Chief Hacker) and Raghu Ravinutala (CEO). The founders have previously worked in deep technologies in the areas of e-commerce, electronic design automation, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI at Myntra, Texas Instruments, Edge Verve 7 and Magma Design Automation.