Gurgaon-based mentorship-driven incubator India Accelerator will make seed investment worth around $150,000 in six startups that operate across sectors such as fin-tech, artificial intelligence, transport and e-commerce.
Each of the startups, which are selected from a list of close to 150 early-stage firms, will receive $20,000 to $25,000, India Accelerator said in a statement.
“While many players in the industry provide funding as the primary offering, we would like to create a more meaningful difference. Post the seed funding, India Accelerator will handhold these startups through the intensive three-month mentorship-driven programme, said Mona Singh, chief acceleration officer of India Accelerator.
Founded by Ashish Bhatia and Abhay Chawla, earlier this year, India Accelerator is a member of Global Accelerator Network, a consortium of more than 85 accelerators around the globe.
Here are the six startups:
Voko: It is an online rental platform that provides a convenient and affordable way to get consumer goods on rent. Currently operational in Delhi-NCR, Voko works on an aggregator-based asset-light model, providing cameras, home appliances and furniture, among others. Voko aims to help young professionals relocating to new places use lifestyle goods on rent instead of spending money to buy them.
Square 1: It is a launch pad for ecommerce projects. The open source framework provides merchants with a flexible shopping cart system and control over the look, content and functionality of their online stores.
Kuants: It tries to reduce bottlenecks associated with algorithmic trading by making it a more streamlined process.
WAM (Wish-a-Mitra): The platform aims to enhance gifting experience for users. It has developed a response-based engine that provides tailored recommendations to guests so that they can buy gifts which are more relevant and useful to the hosts.
Evalk ASL: The company is developing software that allows deaf people and speakers using American sign language (ASL) to be heard, by translating ASL to English. Its process involves building video recognition technology, based on recurrent convolutional neural networks, for translating video (of ASL speakers) into text.
Cabbazar: It is a cab marketplace that provides bidding facility to compare and book one-way, round-trip cabs from hundreds of travel agencies providing quotes for the same.