Meet the cutting-edge companies that have made it to the Cohort 6 of NetApp Excellerator

AiKaan Labs, CyborgIntell, iqlect, KoineArth, KubeSafe, and Myelin Foundry, have made it to the sixth cohort of NetApp Excellerator, NetApp’s global startup programme. The six startups are the latest additions to the accelerator’s portfolio of 29 other B2B startups that have graduated from the programme since its inception in 2017.

These six startups are working on some of the most advanced technologies and will be offered class technical and business mentorship, collaboration and productivity tools, along with co-working space out of the NetApp’s global centre of excellence in Bengaluru. At the end of the four-month accelerator programme, the participating startups will get access to investors and NetApp’s customer portfolio as well as networking opportunities with potential investors and partners . They will also receive an equity-free grant of $15,000, or a NetApp-sponsored POC.

Commenting on the virtual launch and impact value of the programme, Madhurima Agarwal, leader, NetApp Excellerator, shared, “Startups will play a crucial role in the nation’s economic growth as we emerge from this pandemic. Despite the constraints, we have selected our cohort over online sessions and held introduction meetings virtually without any disruptions."

“The transition to remote learning and working is strengthening our community as everyone doubles down on their efforts to succeed. Mentorship sessions and industry connects, too, will be held remotely for the duration of the crisis. We continue our focus on giving the startups best-in-class training, access to venture capitalists and a real opportunity to make a difference in their businesses.”

Meet the super six of cohort 6

KoineArth

Founded in 2018 | Bengaluru | 15 member team | Blockchain

After working at HP Labs and Analytics Data Lab, Praphul Chandra, a game theorist and ML expert, began building a platform on Blockchain for real-world use cases. Today, the startup works at the intersection of blockchains, ML and mechanism design.

The startup has two key solutions for supply chain management and B2B marketplaces.

“The blockchain-based supply chain solution brings transparency and transactional visibility to a complex and multi-tier supply chain thereby helping the businesses make informed decisions, especially related to inventory management, order management and better manage disruptions,” explains Praphul.

With B2B transactions being fundamentally different from B2C transactions, billing reconciliation is a herculean and time-consuming task. “But embedding contracts embedded on the blockchain, there is a clear audit trail which completely eliminates the need for reconciliation,” explains the CEO.

Today, Rakuten and Aditya Birla Hindalco have leveraged KoineArth’s solution and the startup is readying up for a deployment with two other big businesses. Besides Blockchain, the solution also leverages AI, both in terms of prediction algorithms and recommendation engines, in aiding supply chain professionals to make decisions during the operations. . “We also have the ability to integrate third-party IoT supply chain solutions to work with Blockchain” he says.

AiKaan Labs

Founded in 2018 | Bengaluru | 10 member team | Edge Computing

While helping a Japanese multinational set up a precision agriculture system in Bengaluru, industry veterans Chetan Kumar S and Pronoy Debnath saw the need to solve management problems in IoT edge computing applications. Joined by Siddharth Munot, the trio, founded AiKaan Labs in 2018. AiKaan is an edge computing platform that orchestrates and manages applications and devices.

Orchestrating and managing large-scale distributed applications and IoT solutions is tough. The installations are prone to failure, due to distributed deployments and difficult to debug due to remote locations. Applications, devices and network failures are common in large scale deployments.

“The conventional management frameworks fail to solve the needs of new-age IoT and edge computing requirements. This can be a big deterrent for enterprises building connected solutions and adopting digital transformation. AiKaan has adopted an analytics-based approach to solve this problem. Management with an analytics-first approach reduces the complexity of distributed edge computing and IoT applications,” says Chetan.

With Edge computing witnessing an upward trajectory and experts predicting more than 65% CAGR for the next five years, the startup believes they are in an exciting phase.

CyborgIntell

Founded in 2019 | Bengaluru | 12 member team | Enterprise AI

Started by AI and product experts - Suman Kumar Singh, Amit Kumar and Mohammed Nawas, CyborgIntell helps businesses solve complex problems with AutoAI-based predictions that are fast, accurate, explainable, efficient at scale and actionable, irrespective of industry or data size.

The startup’s flagship product, iTuring AutoAI is a cohesive data science & ML platform.

“It helps organisations meaningfully leverage data from across the business to get real-time insights and solve business problems related to growing revenue, optimizing cost, improving customer experience and reducing risk exposure,” says Suman.

Following best practices and deep rigour in data science, iTuring AutoAI self learns from data, identifies patterns, predicts future outcome and makes decisions using advanced mathematical and statistical algorithms. With iTuring AutoAI, businesses can scale up data science capabilities from day 0, without increasing headcount.

Today, the platform is being used by a leading lending company in South Africa, large-scale staffing and HR services companies in India, Insurance lead generation firms in South Africa, and a host of other companies in mobile commerce, health and accident insurance companies.

IQLECT

Founded in 2015 | Bengaluru | 25 member team | AI & Analytics

Simplifying and democratising predictive real-time data analytics for better business intelligence and optimisation is a five-year-old startup, IQLECT. Founded by Sachin Sinha, IQECT is a AI data platform which allows users and developers to build their use cases in a simple and time accelerated manner on cloud or on-premise. “The platform is like a smartphone for analytics, which allows removal of several silos to provide ease of use and simplicity. We also have our own app store to host domain specific solutions which allows users to simply download, configure and ready to go,” explains Sachin.

IQLECT’s journey began much before the company was formally instituted.

“With data trends suggesting that there will be an influx of data from devices in real-time and predictive use cases will become a matter of survival for businesses, I started writing NoSql designed for such use cases.”

Before launching NoSQL formally, Sachin started IQLECT and offered solutions on top of it to ensure they were rightly positioned. “In the process we have acquired more than 120,000 active users for BangDB. I offered BangDB under BSD license free of cost to developers and several clients for the solutions built on top of it. We are also launching BangDB formally with the novel ‘NoSQL + AI + Stream’ model. This is new and totally aligned with the future.”

Myelin Foundry

Founded in 2019 | Bengaluru | 20 member team | AI

Dr. Gopichand Katragadda started Myelin Foundry in January 2019 with his co-founders Ganesh Suryanarayanan and Aditi Olemann. Leveraging their experience and expertise of delivering critical products in India and global markets, the entrepreneurs are working on building Myelin Foundry as a Indian deep-tech company with global-first products, leveraging AI at its core. Myelin Foundry is transforming human experiences and industry outcomes by building Artificial Intelligence algorithms on video, voice, and sensor data for edge devices.

Video streaming is not usually profitable, there is a limited control over quality of experience, willingness to pay for streamed content is still low, and most content is still viewed in Standard Definition. Additional challenges include re-buffering, end-device capabilities outpacing content availability and the fact that 4K and 8K content is limited prompting the need for higher constant bandwidth for high viewer experience. These challenges are set to increase with 5G. This where Myelin’s on-device AI product, Fovea Stream, comes into play.

“It enables efficient video streaming while enhancing the viewer experience.”

Their R&D pipeline also has solutions for the Health and Wellness industry.

Kubesafe

Founded in 2019 | California, USA | 10 member team | Cloud Infrastructure

Founded by Swami Ramany and Vijay Krishna, a veteran team of storage experts, to couple the new application paradigm with the capabilities already built into modern storage platforms, KubeSafe is a data management startup based in California with an additional development center in Bengaluru. KubeSafe backs up and recovers container- based applications, automates application Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) with policies, and leverages storage platform capabilities to both backup only the data that has changed and replicate the data to other locations as needed. It runs on all distributions of Kubernetes, the leading container orchestration platform, and works with all major storage infrastructures. It is simple to use and does not require specialised expertise.

“Unlike traditional backup solutions, we focus on applications rather than nodes on virtual machines. We take advantage of modern storage systems’ capabilities for efficient snapshot differencing – each backup takes less space, making it more economical to back up frequently,” explains Swami.

The startup believes that they are a vital piece of puzzle in making infrastructure pieces like Kubernetes more robust and thereby driving the growth of data driven innovation.

The journey to support new-age disruptive companies continues with vigour

NetApp Excellerator has so far mentored 29 B2B technology startups through five cohorts. The startups have cumulatively raised follow-on funding in millions. Eight of these startups became NetApp’s Global Alliance Partners, while three - Adya, ArchSaber, VitaCloud have had successful exits.

With its mentorship-driven startup accelerator programme, NetApp is focused on creating an impact in the startup ecosystem through its unique set of data-driven B2B tech startups and enabling them to reach tangible commercial success.