Startup bootcamp: Bridging the lab-to-market gap

Western Digital’s Data Innovation Bazaar is enabling startups with metric-driven solutions to meet the right investors and customers.

By Srinath Srinivasan

Tech companies are not slowing down their ecosystem activities because of the Covid-19 induced lockdown and restrictions. Western Digital joins the list of companies in India helping startups working during these times to solve niche problems. “Data innovation programme is Western Digital India’s idea of enabling a confluence of data, entrepreneurship, and innovation. This edition of Data Innovation Bazaar focused on three different themes across sectors, for which we received 963 applications,” says Supria Dhanda, vice president and country manager, Western Digital India.

The themes include data for social transformation, innovative data-intensive commercial and industrial applications, connected world solutions with data as the fuel. According to Dhanda, the ideas received range from leveraging AI to identify brain haemorrhage, epilepsy, autism and TB treatment in healthcare, to skill-based personalised learning, immersive learning, assistive learning for the visually impaired in education and full stack agriculture solutions. The ideas also included smart traffic management and water conservation. “The common factor in all the ideas is the immediate need for solutions that truly make the country self-reliant by leveraging the power of data. Moreover, the initiative covered both urban and rural areas—over 65% of the applications are from outside the top eight tier-1 cities,” says Dhanda.

The startups which finally emerged winners were awarded a total prize of Rs 25 lakh. The list includes AarogyaAI Innovations which earned the first prize of Rs 10 lakh for its genomics and AI-driven rapid diagnostic solution for drug-resistant tuberculosis. AarogyaAI was also awarded a special women entrepreneur prize of Rs 2 lakh. “We have been involved in tuberculosis research for almost a decade and that has equipped us to solve this problem. Our eventual goal is to replicate this model in other infectious diseases as well,” says Praapti Jayaswal, co-founder and CEO of AarogyaAI.

The other startups in the list of winners include Anukai Solutions, Agua Wireless Systems, Paraclete Image Labs and ShilpMIS Technologies. The startups specialise in traffic management solutions, smart water management, making assistive devices for visually impaired and VR/AR for interactive learning.

The programme is not aimed at acquiring startups even though Western Digital provides capital to the startups that are deserving. “We engage with many startups around the world who are at various stages of maturity. Through Western Digital Capital, we partner with innovative startups that improve how data is generated, saved, managed, and consumed. We provide the capital, expertise and connections required to scale the organisations of tomorrow. We are always open to co-innovating and developing solutions by rethinking why, questioning how, challenging assumptions, and shaping the possibilities of data,” explains Dhanda.

The first edition of the innovation programme was in 2018 . “During the first edition of Data Innovation Bazaar, we worked with the startups post the Innovation Bootcamp too. We understood the challenges of the top 10 companies that ranged from proof-of-concept support, understanding and protecting IP, to helping them in identifying manufacturing partners, etc., and helped them with our knowledge,” she says.

According to Dhanda, the innovation bootcamp is specially designed to give startups the skills they need to commercialise new and transformative technologies. As part of the programme, all top 40 teams will make a pitch to select investors who offer feedback on the idea, business model, scalability and offer opportunities to raise funds. In addition, all the 40 teams will be provided a free membership to TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs is a Silicon Valley based non-profit supporting start-ups through networking and raising of capital), valid across all chapters in India.

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was transitioning from academia into entrepreneurship. The speed at which things move in startups is mind-boggling in comparison to the glacial pace of academia. The number of stakeholders has drastically increased, the economics are more complex making managing everything more critical,” says Jayaswal.