Meet the winners of Accenture Ventures Challenge 2021

Accenture Ventures, the open innovation arm of Accenture, has announced the winners of its annual Accenture Ventures Challenge. Winners were selected across Accenture’s award categories -- Cloud, Sustainability, Women in tech and Platforms.

Launched in 2018, the Accenture Ventures Challenge is an annual event run by the Accenture Ventures team in India to identify the best business-to-business (B2B) tech startups that develop solutions for real-world challenges faced by businesses. 

The programme has been consistent in identifying the most impactful startups in the Indian startup ecosystem, addressing not just business needs but also human impact. Wysa, winner of Accenture Ventures Challenge 2020 in the Responsible Tech category, has now scaled across Accenture globally. Wysa offers a mental wellness platform, and allows users to either chat with Wysa’s AI chat, or get in touch with mental health experts.

Avnish Sabharwal, Managing Director, Accenture Ventures, India believes that with 2021 already seeing a record number of unicorns and startup funding compared to 2020, this year is turning out to be a blockbuster year for the Indian startup ecosystem. The funding penetration for deeptech startups in particular has seen significant growth during this period. 

“This holds testimony to the incredible increase in investor trust and interest in deeptech startups. Open innovation frameworks and programmes like Accenture Ventures have been instrumental in identifying the right startups pertaining to corporate requirements, and bridging the integration gaps to ensure maximum impact,” he added.

Accenture will be working with the winners on specific POCs (worth $25K each), which will then be taken to its global clients for scaled up deployments.

Meet the winners 

Worxogo

Worxogo builds high-performing sales teams with its one-of-a-kind B2B SaaS platform, Nudge Coach. Developed from advisors at Stanford, Worxogo Nudge Coach is the only platform that improves sales productivity using behaviour-led personalised coaching at scale. 

The Nudge Coach platform uses a self-learning artificial intelligence (AI) engine to assess individual motivations and provide personalised coaching tips to sellers and managers to do better. Worxogo Nudge Coach helps 80,000 sellers across global banks, insurance, pharmaceuticals and the automotive industry to become more engaged, motivated and productive with over 25 percent increase in sales delivered consistently. 

The platform claims to have received 100 percent growth in the last few years across categories such as banking, insurance, pharmaceutical, CPG and automotive. The company aims to expand its current base in India and ramp up its North American presence in the near future.

Bigthinx

Bigthinx aims to disrupt the fashion industry using AI for the virtual audience, through its digital clothing, immersive fashion shows, and virtual shopping. A deeptech focused startup, it can carry out a 3D body scan using only two photos from a smartphone to calculate 44 precise body measurements and body composition ratios with over 95 percent accuracy.

Bigthinx’s neural networks creates a personalised virtual avatar from these photos and also uses AI to digitally recreate 3D clothing from any 2D image instantly to show how it would look, fit and drape as if in reality. Bigthinx has swept AI and fashion awards globally and is backed by the startup Bootcamp as one of the top ten fashion-tech companies in the world.

Bigthinx has also ventured into digital models and virtual photo shoots, enabling brands to shoot catalogues and organise virtual runway shows completely digitally and at a fraction of the cost of real showcases.

Growing 100 percent month on month, it is working globally with Fortune 500 omni-channel retailers, one of Asia's biggest fashion export houses and manufacturers, luxury brands in Europe, and workwear manufacturers. It is operational in key markets of Europe and USA, and is currently expanding operations in Asia.

Going forward, the startup aims to impact the entire fashion-retail supply chain with its two key products of mobile body scanning and personalised avatars, along with new software for automated designing, rapid prototyping, and product sampling. 

Nirmata

Nirmata offers a complete solution for Kubernetes management and deployment for cloud-based application containerisation. It is designed to reduce complexity and drive DevOps agility.

With Nirmata’s Kubernetes Platform and its Cloud Native Policy Management Solution powered by Kyverno, it provides comprehensive policy-based automation for deploying, operating, and optimising Kubernetes applications across clouds, via easy-to-use, intuitive interfaces. It also empowers enterprise DevOps teams by fully automating the complex operations and the management of application containers.

A B2B SaaS offering, Nirmata is on track to triple revenues for its policy engine, while Kyverno has reached over 1 million downloads per month and 1.5K GitHub stars. Nirmata’s open-source Kubernetes native enables businesses to operate cloud-native applications, built using containers and deployed on Kubernetes, securely and easily.

Simreka

Simreka is an AI and data-driven simulation software. It has use-cases primarily in areas such as R&D and manufacturing teams of consumer product brands and chemical companies. Its data-powered AI engines can run hundreds to millions of simulated R&D experiments in matters of hours to days with data obtained from both public and internal sources. Not only that, it results in increasing the chances of developing a functional product that is cost-effective but also makes it safe and sustainable.

It provides licensing of a software platform and on-demand data pricing, partnership with SAP, consulting/system integrators, and claims to have a 300 percent revenue growth. Its customers include brands across chemical/material manufacturers, plastic recycling companies, and alternative energy producers among others.

It aims to scale up with the right business processes and by collaborating with partners in near future.