India is now producing some of the world’s most innovative technology solutions, and these latest entrepreneurs from EF India are leading that charge. They are building some of the most cutting-edge innovations, while attacking ambitious global problems. It’s exciting to see how fast these young entrepreneurs move, turning today’s adversity into opportunity and taking advantage of changing consumer behaviours.
The latest announcement takes the global talent investor’s portfolio to 34 investments in India. From genomics-based diagnostics technology for faster, more accurate and affordable Covid testing to NLP-based in-site search engine for online commerce and AI-powered music creator tool for video and podcast content creators, EF’s Indian tech start-ups are targeting massive global opportunities. Entrepreneur First (EF), UK-based global talent investor, has announced investment in six cutting-edge tech start-ups from India. With the latest funding, EF has invested in 34 tech start-ups in the country since its launch in India in 2019. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, early-stage investment activity has been resilient, with a substantial increase in the average deal sizes and funding rounds closing in record time. In fact, start-ups in EF’s India portfolio, such as ImmunitoAI and NeuroPixel, have gone on to raise follow-on rounds within few months of the pre-seed investment.
According to a recent report, segments like D2C are expected to grow to $100 billion by 2025, thanks to increased digital adoption across India. Tech start-ups, such as Omniflo are tapping these opportunities to enable fast and efficient offline retail distribution for online-first and D2C brands. Similarly, an easy-to-use investment platform, Flippy, which provides actionable signals for users to invest in cryptocurrencies is tapping the opportunities presented by the growing cryptocurrency space in India. As per a report, around 15 million Indians are believed to have made investments in private cryptocurrency holdings in the last few years.
The pandemic has, no doubt, accelerated India’s efforts with innovation, driven by technologies that help make businesses more agile, flexible, and responsive. As these technologies continue to complement and augment human capabilities, the potential for growth and innovation is huge. While Zolnoi holds the promise of helping manufacturing companies reduce downtime and improve productivity significantly through its AI-first, end-to-end maintenance management platform, D-NOME is making genomics-based diagnostics affordable and accessible for all. In fact, it has already been successful in making Covid testing faster, more accurate and affordable as compared to the RT-PCR testing, with its D-Lamp technology.
As a global talent investor, with a presence in six global markets, EF has built over 300 tech start-ups with a worldwide community of over 3000 entrepreneurs, and a portfolio that is valued at over four billion dollars. In India, EF has supported more than 250 ambitious entrepreneurs and invested in 34 tech start-ups since its inception in January 2019.
BOX: The innovators
- Zevi: Redefining in-site search for brands, retailers, and other ecommerce stores – a powerful search engine with NLP at its core, along with vernacular support that measurably improves conversion and engagement for brands online. Its advanced NLP engine is also capable of handling queries for mixed languages such as Hindi+English. In the last 3 months they have integrated with the e-commerce stores of 3 brands, with an additional 5 pilot confirmations in the pipeline. They have already demonstrated a jump of ~11% in conversion for their customers post deploying their search.
- D-NOME: Ground-breaking D-Lamp technology to make genomics-based diagnostics affordable and accessible. With its innovative reagents and proprietary technology, D-NOME’s platform is poised to disrupt the PCR and genomics-based diagnostics space globally. Diagnostic labs are estimated to reduce their operational costs by 10x and reduce delivery time by 5x. All made possible with cutting edge D-LAMP technology — an easy to do RT-PCR that operates at a single temperature of 37 deg C, without need for multiple reagents, skilled technicians or even an RT-PCR machine. Starting with a focus on Covid testing, they aim to disrupt large adjacent markets of several other diseases subsequently.
- Beatoven: An AI powered music creator tool for video and podcast content creators. It uses artificial intelligence to help content creators compose original soundtracks without any knowledge of music by simply specifying moods, sections, and genres. It reduces their music acquisition time from several days to a couple of minutes. They are currently live with 25 Beta testers along with 300 customers waiting in the pipeline. It has received tremendous inbound paid subscription interests from early adopters.
- Omniflo: A data-driven digital platform to enable fast and efficient offline retail distribution for online-first/ D2C brands. With a growing network of retail shelves across India, and multiple data points from brands, retailers and location intelligence, their platform identifies the right stores to place each brand’s products, optimal inventory levels for each, and enable seamless distribution access to these stores. The data engine and tech platforms for all players enable dispersed operations at scale, providing unprecedented value to each stakeholder.
- Flippy: Decrypting crypto investments with a social-first, assisted investment platform where users can gather signals, and act upon them. Flippy’s intuitive easy-to-use platform provides actionable signals for users to invest and trade with confidence, alongside their favourite pro-traders and others in their social circle. They’ve partnered with one of the largest Indian exchanges with over 1.3 million dormant users. With their MVP, they have already seen 67% of novice investors putting in their first investment with their platform.
- Zolnoi: Zolnoi helps manufacturing companies reduce downtimes and improve productivity through an AI-first end-to-end maintenance management platform. Their first product is an AI-first end-to-end SaaS platform, addressing these issues through an IoT cloud for data integration, proprietary ML for manufacturing analytics, and a web app to visualize data, generate insights, and recommend actions. They have delivered pilots for 3 medium-to-large scale F&B manufacturers with potential to save millions of dollars in maintenance.