In January, tech entrepreneur Geetha Manjunath flew to one of the Google offices in the U.S for a ‘start-up boot camp’ organised by the Internet giant. There, she was able to pitch her start-up Niramai Health Analytix and receive mentoring from the likes of Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research and an expert in artificial intelligence.
Dr. Manjunath, co-founder and CEO of Niramai, is among a growing number of women entrepreneurs whose ventures Google is nurturing at its ‘Launchpad Accelerator,’ in India. Google said it was scaling up focus on women-led start-ups to include more female founders for the programme.
These include ventures that use AI to detect cancer, provide data intelligence to facilitate relief during natural disasters like floods and earthquakes.
“Women in tech don’t ask for help or don’t proactively sign up for support programmes,” said Paul Ravindranath G, program manager, Google India. “We reached out in a focused way to... a lot of organisations who work with women entrepreneurs and we saw a lot more women applying,” he said. He said the company observed an increase of more than 25% in the number of women applicants for its accelerator programme this year.
The firm’s six-month accelerator programme matches young companies from emerging ecosystems with the best of its people, network and advanced technologies to help scale their products. It also connects them with mentors from top tech firms and venture capitalists in the U.S.Niramai has developed an AI-based solution for detecting early-stage breast cancer. The low-cost, portable solution, which the company claimed is free from radiation, can be deployed not only at hospitals and diagnostic centres but rural camps as well. At a mentoring session with Mr. Schmidt, a director on the board of Alphabet, Dr. Manjunath received guidance about how her venture can serve rural and poor people to detect cancer free of charge and yet be able to support that as a sustainable service. She also asked him about the three decisions he made that played a key role in Google’s rise to power.
“His answer was; ‘work with founders, always think about scale and don’t run out of cash’,” said Dr. Manjunath, an alumnus of IISc.
Parenting app
For Naiyya Saggi, founder and CEO of parenting platform BabyChakra, mentors and the other ventures that were part of the accelerator programme enabled the company to learn “how to cut short the processes.”
These included training the algorithms, building datasets and integrating TensorFlow, a software that makes it easier to build AI systems. The Mumbai-based firm, which also has a parenting app, aims to help parents make the right maternity and childcare choices. The company got the feedback that more than technology, the focus needs to be on ‘consumer experience’, said Ms. Saggi, an alumnus of Harvard Business School.
Google’s accelerator programme is also backing SocialCops, a data intelligence company founded by Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka. In 2015, it used its data platform during the Nepal Earthquake and Chennai floods to facilitate better relief management and logistics.
The firm works with more than 150 organisations across 17 countries on problems as diverse as driving rapid village development and tracking national welfare schemes. It works with partners such as the United Nations, Government of India and World Bank. In 2017 alone, the firm’s data intelligence platform processed 11 billion data points and ‘touched the lives of one in 25 Indians through its projects and partners’.
Ms. Sankar of SocialCops said the challenge of having fewer number of women entrepreneurs and women in technology needs to be addressed while girls are still at school. “The problem is that there are not enough girls studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” said Ms. Sankar, an alumnus of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Mr. Ravindranath of Google said that the company had observed that teams having a good mix of women-founders are able to create better user experience and user interface designs in products compared to groups primarily led by men. “There are some inherent use cases where they [only men-led teams] don’t think through because there was no diversity in the leadership of the product team,” he said.
