Google has introduced an India-focused mentoring programme to support start-ups addressing local problems
‘Solve for India’ would provide technology support for deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools to build solutions for India in areas such as agriculture, healthcare, retail and education.
India-only pilot
Introduced last year as an India-only pilot, the programme focuses on bringing the best of Google expertise across product and user experience design and interface. This includes access to technologies like AI and ML.
“We care a lot about the emerging problems in India. The opportunity is just tremendous. We realised that Google alone can’t go out there to solve and [build] products for emerging India,” said Paul Ravindranath G, program manager, Launchpad Accelerator, Google India. Karthik Padmanabhan, developer relations lead at Google India, said the company shortlisted 10 start-ups from 160 home-grown start-ups by travelling across 15 cities in India, and are now ready to “scale this pilot to a dedicated programme for India.”
One of the firms PregBuddy is focused on creating prominence in care for expecting mothers. FarMart, a tech-enabled agricultural machinery renting platform, enables farmers to rent out their under-utilised machinery like tractors to fellow small and marginal farmers on a pay-per-use basis.
“It (programme) has helped us understand how to scale our business,” said Mehtab Singh Hans, co-founder, farMart.
Google has also conducted a ‘mentorship bootcamp’ for the teams at these companies. For Kumar Rangarajan, co-founder of Slang Labs which enables app developers to easily add a natural voice interface to control their apps, the bootcamp helped him to learn the importance of getting more “early end-user feedback,” said Mr.Rangarajan, who sold his previous venture Little Eye Labs to Facebook in 2014.
