Meet the 9 startups in the maiden India DeepTech accelerator cohort

India DeepTech (IDT) has chosen nine early stage startups for the first cohort of its accelerator programme.  

IDT is a pan-industry alliance between venture capital funds, incubators, startups, corporates, governments, organizations and individuals in India. Key members of the alliance include Flutura, GDC-IITM, Chiratae Ventures, Blume Ventures, SINE-IITB, WRVI Capital, Axilor, UTEC, Speciale Invest, YourNest, GrowX Ventures, Pi Ventures, CIIE-IIMA, Agnii / Invest India, Dream Incubator, DSCI and Headstart Network. 

The six-week programme offers no equity or grant. Startups in the programme, a statement said, get validation for their business ideas, understand market growth better, get acquainted with best practices and finally, pitch to investors.  

The virtual programme claims to be the first deeptech accelerator with a focus on industrial automation, cybersecurity, and genomics segments.  

Deeptech is a term often used to denote companies that are born out of a science or technology innovation, with a desire to apply it into a typically new class of products or services. 

Kris Gopalakrishnan, chairman of Axilor and co-founder of Infosys, who was present during the announcement, said, “If India needs to become a developed economy, it has to focus on deeptech. In the US, most amount of wealth is being generated in companies with deeptech as their starting point. Today, with our deep engineering capabilities, when India does something in deeptech the entire world benefits. Hence, India has a potential to create products for 100% of the world, not just top 10%.” 

The startups chosen for the maiden cohort are as follows:  

CynLr: Founded by Gokul NA and Nikhil Ramaswamy in 2015, Bengaluru-based CynLr is a visual object intelligence platform, enabling industrial robotic arms to see, understand and manipulate any object in random unstructured environments. 

Mowito: Founded in 2019 by Aditya Nagesh and Puru Rastogi, the Bengaluru-based startup develops navigation technologies that enable robots to navigate in indoor environment. 

Avisa Myko: Founded in 2019, Avisa Myko develops natural soluble melanin for multiple uses that contribute to better health and environment. The startup is working on developing various use cases for its natural melanin in cosmetics, pharma and industrial applications, including rechargeable magnesium ion and sodium ion batteries. 

Jeevtronics: A Pune-based medical device startup founded in 2013, Ashish Gawade and Aniruddha Atre’s Jeevtronics has developed the world's first dual powered bi-phasic defibrillator that works even in geographic areas without electricity and is one-fourth of the cost of regular defibrillators. 

30M Genomics: The Andhra Pradesh startup, founded by Pavani Pavuluri and Benet Dhas, helps clinicians understand the genetic make-up of patients in just 30 minutes and prescribe drug dosage accordingly. 

HaystackAnalytics: Founded in 2018 by Anirvan Chatterjee, Mumbai-based HaystackAnalytics provides genomics-based diagnostic services for infectious diseases. 

Trunome: Acrannolife Genomics-run Trunome was founded in 2018 by Agragesh R and Avinash Ramani. It is a Chennai-based clinical genomics company, which looks to provide the most affordable point-of-care pharmacogenomics and genomic diagnostics tests. 

Cypherock: Co-founded by Rohan Agarwal and Vipul Saini in 2018, Cypherock provides secure storage solutions for users' digital assets. It is developing a decentralised recovery system to ensure that users do not have to write recovery phrases on pieces of paper. 

Spherical Defence: Founded in 2017 by Dishant Shah and Jack Hopkins in San Francisco, California, Spherical Defence offers an alternative approach to WAFs and first generation API security tools that protect APIs from malicious attacks and misuse in real time with unsupervised deep learning.