Techstars Bangalore picks 9 startups for 3rd cohort in India

The acceleration programme will run virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic and each selected startup will get an investment of $120,000.

Bengaluru: Mentorship-driven Techstars Bangalore on Friday announced it has selected nine Indian startups for its third cohort in India.

The acceleration programme will run virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic and each selected startup will get an investment of $120,000.

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“It’s heartening to see how Indian founders are increasingly focusing more on IP, and building for global markets, and not just India. These only go to create better outcomes, sustainable business models and more value creation for investors,” said Dhritiman Hui, Managing Director, Techstars Bangalore.

Among the nine chosen start-ups are AfterShoot that is creating the ‘Grammarly for Taking Photographs’ in a world where taking pictures has become zeitgeist for expressing oneself; Asanify, a Human Resources Platform for small businesses in emerging countries; Asvin Tech, which provides low-cost, high precision 3D scanning solutions to dentists; CogniSaaS, which aims to reduce churn in the enterprise SaaS industry; and CustomerGlu a low-code platform that helps companies solve the $400 billion ‘lost revenue’ opportunity by creating interactive workflows that drive user stickiness.

Dara.network is creating the world’s finest alumni engagement platform; EasyLokal is a translation solution enables businesses to localise mobile apps and websites easily and quickly using its cloud-based software tools; General Systems provides robotic solutions for the multi-billion-dollar global construction industry and Xook makes robotic food kiosks for office canteens, college, university campuses and apartment complexes.

Besides the investment of $120,000, the programme includes mentor madness sessions during which the startups connect with over 70 mentors from India and abroad.

Among the mentors who chip in during the initial weeks include Priya Mohan of Venture Highway, Hari TN of Big Basket and Vir Kashyap who co-founded Babajobs.

This year, the entire programme is virtual and the Demo Day in early July is also slated to be a virtual event, according to the company.

“While Techstars Bangalore alumni founders — Rephrase and Redwing — made it to the Forbes 30 under 30 for 2021, the 2019 acceleration batch alumni Nira Finance raised $3.1 million, Rephrase.ai raised a round of $1.5 million led by Lightspeed partners and the 2020 batch alumni Lancify raised an angel round of $300,000,” the company informed.

Founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado in the US, the American seed accelerator has accepted 2,439 companies into its programmes with a combined market capitalisation of $43.3 billion. These companies have received $14.1 billion of funding.