NetApp Excellerator Cohort 8: Meet 8 startups using data, cloud to power their impact across sectors

For State of Mind AI, an employee experience analytics solution, its cloud-first product helps one interact with end-users in real-time. “Leveraging the cloud also helps us scale our product performance on the fly while keeping data secure, safe, and protected. In addition, it helps us optimise costs as an early-stage startup,” shares Manoj Kumar, Founder, State of Mind AI.

Metabob, an AI company which has developed a tool to debug and visualise Python code, is dependent on using cloud-based solutions to gather and process training data. “We are a data-first company. The need to pipe data into the same locations as our training data is essential. So, leveraging cloud resources remains an essential part of our daily work,” shares Massi Genta, CEO, Metabob.

State of Mind AI and Metabob are among the eight startups which are a part of the NetApp Excellerator Cohort 8 and are leveraging the power of data and cloud solutions to drive impact across sectors and use cases. The other six startups under the latest cohort of NetApp's global startup accelerator program are Nife, Tongadive, FireCompass, Data Sutram, Maxbyte and snapblocs. Nife, Tongadive, and Firecompass also form a part of the second cohort of NetApp ExcellerateHER - NetApp’s dedicated accelerator program that supports women entrepreneurs disrupting the technology space.

“Advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning have gotten businesses across the board excited about the limitless possibilities of these technologies when it comes to growth. However, scalable solutions that leverage these technologies in securing business insights are yet to be discovered. The startups participating in this year’s NetApp Excellerator Cohort 8 have showcased great ability in bridging this gap, and we are excited to be supporting their endeavors to unlock new gateways of growth across sectors,” shares Madhurima Agarwal, Leader, NetApp Excellerator.

Let’s take a look at the eight startups that made it to NetApp Excellerator Cohort 8

Metabob

Founded in 2020 by Massi Genta and Avinash Gopal, Metabob addresses the dilemma that developers across the globe face daily - a tedious, error-prone code correction process. The startup addresses the challenge with its AI-assisted tool that can debug and visualise Python code.

“Using a combination of conventional static analysis, attention-based models, and a 360-degree visualiser, Metabob detects likely sources of problems that other tools would not find, and how they interact directly with other aspects of your codebase, as well as offer plain-text recommendations on how to fix them. Metabob’s model is based on open-source code by Python developers across the globe, creating a dynamic and uniquely-intuitive base to help identify where problems are likely to occur,” says Massi. The startup is based in Palo Alto, California.

State of Mind

Launched in 2020, State of Mind is a Bengaluru-based HR Tech startup founded by Manoj Kumar. State of Mind is a conversational app built on deep technology that captures employee experiences at 100+ functional and emotional moments across the employee journey to get the needed visibility into the evolving needs of employees and craft day-to-day experiences that matter the most.

The app provides individuals, managers, and leaders with personalised and actionable insights, and can play a critical role in retaining top talent and reducing attrition by understanding their needs and wants. It pinpoints focus areas for rapid growth or change enabling managers and management with continuous insights to lead virtual teams effectively. As a result, organisations would spend less time collecting feedback and more time in planning, further leading to a substantial improvement in engagement and wellbeing of the employees.

Tongadive

Founded in 2019 by Anubha Dixit, Tongadive focuses on solving business problems through software products based on data orchestration. Concerned over the rampant sale of counterfeit products in the healthcare industry, Tongadive developed Evidnt, which combines blockchain and neural networks-based AI to build a secure, immutable, and transparent digital journey of a product through the supply chain. The solution ensures provenance tracking, proof of origin and prevention of counterfeiting through a secure and robust supply chain tracking. Evidnt also enables businesses to comply with healthcare regulations more effectively at a reduced cost.

In addition, its AI engine provides predictive analytics-based demand forecasting capability along with end-to-end visibility. “We plan to continue to develop Evidnt into a predictive analytics solution with an aim to ‘Amazonify’ healthcare supply chain while expanding into other industries that are increasingly demanding provenance tracking from their supply chains,” says Anubha.

Snapblocs Inc.

Snapblocs delivers no-code data platforms. The startup was founded by Jin Kim, Janardhan Guduru, and Paul Skillen, who had been working together for 10 years building large-scale data engineering systems for a social network and people search business.

The three observed that IT teams often spent too much time building foundational infrastructure for each project. They also observed that the teams were reinventing common data platform patterns within their projects, thereby making the process time-consuming. snapblocs was designed to address these challenges, based on the founders’ deep belief in software architecture and automation. The platform offers a library of pre-built architected data platform solutions, and its SaaS-based dpStudio UX makes it easy. snapblocs radically reduces the time and effort required to design, build, and operate data platform infrastructure in the cloud.

The startup claims snapblocs’ process is 30x faster, and businesses can see a significant increase in the percentage of time spent working on business goals vs. building foundational infrastructure. The product is currently in the beta pre-launch phase.

Data Sutram

Data Sutram was founded by three batchmates of Jadavpur University — Rajit Bhattacharya, Aisik Paul, and Ankit Das in 2018. Its core product is a B2B-Location Data Engine that cleans, processes, geotags data from multiple sources and blends them together with AI & ML methodologies to create actionable accurate data and insights for every location.

Data Sutram’s data engines have the capability to handle data in any form, collected from any unstructured repository, and convert it to useful forms of data. It further marries the platform’s 200+ multiple data fields interactively to bring out over 150+ insightful indexes applicable to any geography at a fine, granular level, thus making it very comprehensive to understand and read.

Its granular data and sector-specific customised verticals help reduce adaptability time for businesses to shift to data-driven decision making. The product’s architecture has a scope for end-mile customisation, thereby meeting the needs of businesses.

Nife

Nife is an enterprise application deployment and orchestration platform provider based in Singapore. It aggregates infrastructures to deliver last-mile computing for low latency and cost-effective use-cases.

The platform aggregates CDNs, data centres, ISPs, hyper-scalers, and telecom companies. The platform’s use-cases include applications like the internet of things, AI, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Nife also enables enterprises to get access to local regions at scale with one-click deployment and helps them offload compute from devices to a closer edge location.

Nife was founded by Nida Sahar during the lockdown announced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The concept validation, product prototypes, and stakeholder discussions were all done remotely. 

Nife is cofounded by Murthy Bjas and has offices in Singapore and United States.

Maxbyte Technologies

Maxbyte Technologies is an Industry 4.0 company that caters to the digitisation and robotisation needs of factories and industries. One of its flagship portfolio products, byteFACTORY, is a digitisation solution for the entire digital thread of the smart connected product lifecycle for manufacturing enterprises.

Today, in many factories, contextual data and information reside in silos across enterprise systems and individual machines or processes. The challenge is compounded by the fact that there is no correlation of the data across the product value chain. With byteFACTORY, all the assets (including production machines and energy and utilities machines) and the enterprise systems are connected, and flow of data happens seamlessly across the product lifecycle - right from designing to manufacturing and even beyond.

With byteFACTORY applications, manufacturers can increase productivity, reduce the time taken to market new products and improve the aftermarket service. Maxbyte Technologies was founded in 2016 by Ramshankar CS, Viswanathan T, Srisabarinathan D, Surendran D, and Vinoth Kumar P.

FireCompass

Cybercriminals have an edge from the perspective that they only have to succeed once whereas defenders need to succeed every time. Organisations typically test some of their assets, some of the time, whereas hackers are attacking all assets, all the time.

Continuous Automated Red Teaming, or CART, is an emerging new area of cybersecurity that can be a gamechanger in solving this problem. This is where FireCompass comes into play. FireCompass helps organisations to map out their digital attack surface including Shadow IT blind spots by continuously discovering, indexing, and monitoring the web. The platform then automatically launches safe multi-stage attacks, mimicking a real attacker, to help identify attack paths before hackers do.

FireCompass CART (Continuous Automated Red Teaming) is designed to automate red teaming to achieve the breadth and depth of the process and eliminate the need for multiple tools and significant manual effort while providing continuous and proactive security. The startup was started in 2019 by serial security entrepreneurs and is being led by Bikash Barai, Priyanka Aash, and Paul Dibello. FireCompass has offices in Boston and Bengaluru.