Meet the five Indian ventures selected for Start-Up Chile's November 2013 batch

Five startups from India have been selected for the new batch of Start-Up Chile accelerator programme. A total of 85 companies from across the globe have been selected for the six-month-long programme which will begin in November 2013. The selected Indian ventures are Profoundis Labs, i7 Networks, Brainwave Education, Croak.it and Cubicle.

Start-Up Chile is an initiative by the Chile government to improve the startup ecosystem in the country by inviting top startups across the globe. In the course of the programme, the government supports the companies with funding, business establishment support, building a team and expanding their market across the country. The startups also get the opportunity to take part in seminars, talks and classes in local universities; mentor young Chilean entrepreneurs; and travel the country from North to South, sharing their experiences.

In the programme, IT & enterprise software is the most strongly identified industry (19 per cent of the selected startups), followed by education (13 per cent) and e-commerce (12 per cent). Other categories include social media, healthcare & biotechnology, energy & clean tech, social enterprise and tourism.

Here is a quick look at the Indian startups selected by the accelerator.

Profoundis Labs: Builds products and delivers services in the area of data analytics and optimisation. Its flagship product iTestify makes collection and management of customer feedback and testimonials as well as their presentation simple.

i7 Networks: Offers Indian companies a suite of products to help manage web content classification and ensures efficient bandwidth management.

Brainwave Education: A mobile and web app that helps 5th to 9th graders learn science and math, and their practical applications by simulating experiments in a virtual laboratory connected to a framework of do-it-yourself experiments (that can be performed anywhere with household material), and video-games that teach practical applications.

Croak.it: Allows users to discover, collect and convey thoughts and expressions over voice in 30-second audio snippets called croaks.

Cubicle: An ERP application tailor-made for project intensive engineering design companies. Cubicle connects different processes such as resource management, progress tracking, performance monitoring, etc. and places them on a central platform.

The overall batch size of the startups picked for the Start-Up Chile programme has been on the decline for the past two-three batches. In the November 2012 batch, the accelerator picked 105 startups, while in the ongoing batch (started in July 2013), the number came down to 100. It further decreased to 85 this time around. Accordingly, the number of Indian representatives also came down. Eight Indian ventures each represented India in the previous two programmes, while only five startups from the country will go to Chile for the November 2013 programme.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)