Airbus wants to redefine future of aviation: Anand Stanley at BizLab 2019

The fourth cohort of Airbus BizLab, a global business accelerator programme from the French aerospace major, took flight on Thursday during the Airbus BizLab ‘Take Off’ event. Designed to be a six-month-long programme, the fourth edition seeks to emulate the success of its previous iterations, creating more opportunities for startups to work in the aerospace and defence sectors.

The core objective is to help startups speed-up the transformation of ideas into valuable businesses. And to this end, Airbus BizLab provides early-stage projects a wide-ranging support in the form of access to a large number of experts and mentors across various domains, including technology, legal, finance, marketing and communications, easing prototyping and market access.

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Kickstarting the event on Thursday, the head of Airbus BizLab India Siddharth Balachandran spoke on aerospace innovations and the role played by Airbus BizLab in India. He was joined by Anand E Stanley, President and Managing Director, Airbus India and South Asia, who touched upon the future of aviation in a conversation with YourStory.  

He said,

“What we want to do is redefine the future of aviation through being a technology leader. And there is no better way to do this than work with innovators and entrepreneurs.”

Commenting on the cohort that saw participation from seven startups this time around, Stanley added, “Even though Airbus is redefining itself internally, we are also very honoured that we have situations and places like these, where we can work with the entrepreneurs, and with technologies.”

Around 100-200 startups and innovators send in their applications, from which Airbus cherry-picked seven startups this year. Here’s a quick look at them:

Flutura – An AI solutions company, Flutura is focused on improving "asset uptime" and "operational efficiency" of a business.

Agnikul – It designs, manufactures, tests, and launches orbital class rockets for micro and nano satellites.

Gnani.ai – The AI startup is working on building ASRs for leading Indian languages. Gnani.ai’s speech-to-text engine is currently available in Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Gujarati.

Hey Flyer – Hey Flyer plans to integrate airline apps (APIs/SDKs) with a flight attendant chat functionality, which would enable them to know what passengers want without having to go to their seats.

Trapyz – Trapyz enables brands and marketers with AI-driven insights for better understanding of real-world consumer journeys.

Traxof – Headquartered in Bengaluru, Traxof Technologies is developing cutting-edge solutions in various segments such as aerospace, manufacturing, healthcare, education, construction and supply chain.

Scapic – The platform allows users to build and share VR, AR, 360 and 3D content without coding. Simply drag and drop.

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Each startup selected for the fourth cohort brings a unique and new-age technological solution to the table, as Siddharth Balachandran, Airbus BizLab India Leader adds:

“We have 7 startups that have been chosen, they have all made the cut for a reason.”  

Also read: Airbus signs up Indian startups to push 'Make In India'