Startups that are working with the government to bring change

With India being home to the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world, it is in a very strong position to support the government in the latter’s most challenging problems. 

The Indian government has introduced several programmes and initiatives to train as well as aid, including financial and technical, and other essentials, to entrepreneurs and startups to further fuel their growth. In the wake of these initiatives, there is a bouquet of startups spread across verticals that are working closely with the Indian government to streamline services and help the country at large.

Here are some startups that are joining hands with the government to bring about a grassroot level change across sectors. 

Ed4All 

Chennai-based ED4All, a new-age edtech startup launched in 2020, provides a comprehensive, advanced, sustainable, and inclusive Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) learning, skilling, and testing platform. Powered by Microsoft core technology, the platform caters to the needs of the K-12, higher education, and vocational markets, and aims to deliver affordable and accessible solutions.

Ed4All is India's only edtech startup that works solely with the central, state, and local governments to deliver learning, skills, and testing outcomes.

In addition, it aims to complement the existing educational system by enabling students to learn core curriculum anytime, anywhere and develop new-age technical skills to improve employment outcomes regardless of their physical or learning abilities.

In September 2021, Microsoft and Ed4All partnered with the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) to make learners job-ready.

SatSure 

Founded by Prateep Basu, Rashmit Singh Sukhmani, and Abhishek Raju in 2017, SatSure leverages satellite data, big data capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI), and remote sensing satellites to provide decision intelligence solutions to the financial services, insurance (BFSI), and banking sectors.

Satsure’s value to the BFSI segment lies in the sustainability nexus of climate change, infrastructure, and agriculture.

It also strives to create a positive impact on the lives of farmers by helping improve crop insurance, innovating agri lending services, and improving market linkages by creating intervention and decision intelligence frameworks for agri value chain stakeholders.

The startup has mobile app platforms for delivering information on supply statistics of crops and crop stress in their region.

It helps with the decisions on what to sow, when to irrigate, add fertilizers, or prepare for harvest.

Currently, the startup’s solutions are being used by the Andhra Pradesh government. Some large banks and insurance companies in India are also leveraging its solutions.

NITI Aayog has supported the startup through initiatives like the Grand Agriculture Challenge, which further validates the belief that data mining and analysis are of high value to the agriculture sector.

WiJungle

Launched in 2017 by Karmesh Gupta and Praveen Gupta, Jaipur-based network security platform WiJungle enables organisations to secure and strengthen their entire network through a single window.

The AI and ML-driven security platform offer a comprehensive security stack encompassing multiple standalone solutions like network firewall, web application firewall, hotspot gateway, SD-WAN, data leakage prevention, and vulnerability assessment, among others.

Its AI-powered capability and unified single-window network management capability enable enterprises to streamline and cost-effectively manage their cybersecurity operations.

WiJungle is currently serving government and private giants across industry verticals like hospitality, healthcare, education, defence, transportation, retail, BFSI, and ITES, among others in pan India.

The startup claims to serve over 15 ministries and the PMO along with various state-level organisations.

Innefu Labs

New Delhi-based Innefu Labs, founded by Tarun Wig and Abhishek Sharma in 2010, provides information security and data analytics solutions.

The startup offers solutions such as defence and paramilitary, law enforcement, enterprises, and retail.

The AI-backed startup offers Prophecy, a product of Innefu Labs, that works on video and image analysis, authentication security, and big data analytics. It also offers ARGUS, AI Vision, and Auth Shield.

Innefu Labs claims to provide its services to government institutions and intelligence agencies such as the Border Security Force (BSF), DRDO, and CRPF.

Dataval Analytics

Founded in 2016 by Indian army veterans Lt Col Naveen Xavier and Lt Col Shashi Kiran in Bengaluru and Chicago, it focuses on the human way of understanding language, including space analysis, and word sense disambiguation, integrated multiple processes related to language preprocessing, coreference resolution, and preposition association.

The startup focuses on a holistic view of the environment and ecosystem to reason and understand situations, an approach similar to the human approach to problem-solving.

The startup claims to provide a variety of solutions to Smart Cities and municipal corporations that consist of IoT sensors to measure air quality index, working on Hindi language translation to various other languages, and crop quality analysis.

The startup completed a 20-part AI challenge hosted by FAIR (Facebook AI Research) with 100 percent accuracy, which was created to promote the goal of automatic text understanding reasoning.

WRMS

Gurugram-based WRMS (Weather Risk Management Services), founded by Anuj Kumbhat, Sonu Agrawal, and Ashish Agarwal in 2004, is an endeavour to empower farmers to overcome the most daunting agrarian challenges.

It leverages data, technology, and financial innovation to help farmers enhance productivity, gain a secure income, and practice sustainable farming.

WRMS has worked with names like PepsiCo, Safal, ITC, Mother Dairy, etc., along with government and govt-run bodies like NCFC, and Bihar Government. Apart from this, it has also partnered time and again with multilateral agencies such as Work Bank Group, UNCDF, and insurance bodies like ICICI Lombard, HDFC

Ergo, to name a few.

WRMS helps government bodies in the successful implementation of government schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY schemes) by subsidy optimsation, timely loss assessment and claim settlement, providing farm-level manpower services for crop assessment and monitoring agriculture insurance, and promoting innovation in agriculture. 

It also works with government bodies such as the Mahalanobis National Crop Forecast Centre (MNCFC) to conduct pilot studies related to the optimisation of crop cutting experiments (CCEs).

Ingen Technologies, a fully-owned subsidiary of WRMS, recently collaborated with the Regional Meteorological Centre, Guwahati, Assam, India, Meteorological Department (IMD), and the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Government of India, and bagged the contract for procurement, installation, and maintenance of automatic rain gauge stations in the North Eastern States of India.

It is working with many government bodies like the Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, the Andhra Pradesh State Development Planning Society, and more.