Start-ups sizzle @ NetApp Excellerator day!

Last week, there was a session with the start-ups of NetApp ExcelleratorProgram at NetApp Bangalore Campus, ITPL Main Road, Hoodi, Bangalore.

Ajeya Motaganahalli, senior director, Engineering Programs and leader of NetApp Excellerator, NetApp India, said: “We received 450 application in 2018. Earlier, we received 250+ applications in 2017. Out of 450, 21 start-ups were selected to pitch. We had boot camps with 11 of them. We shortened this down to six start-ups.

“June 28 is the demo day where these start-ups will demonstrate before the investors. There is no IP contamination. We are also opening the applications for the third batch of cohorts on June 28.”

Now, let’s have a look at the various start-ups and their wares.

Anlyz: It provides next-generation security product with granularity and visibility of enterprise threat landscape using machine/deep learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to address enterprise cybersecurity needs.

Gartner forecasts that by 2019, total enterprise spending on security outsourcing services will be 75 percent of the spending on security software and hardware products, up from 63 percent in 2016.

Also, the worldwide security spending will reach $96 billion in 2018, up 8 percent from 2017. Enterprise security budgets are also shifting towards detection and response, and this trend will drive security market growth during the next five years.

Apoorv Garg, co-founder, said it provides a cognitive and coherent cybersecurity product. The problems were:
* the ability to detect is not supported with surround data path.
* Delayed analyses and impacts overall capability to combat threats.
* Today’s products are not very agile.

He added: “There is a need for an inclusive solution. Enterprise security budgets are shifting toward detection and response. We also offer one-month PoC (proof of concept).”

The Anlyz PoC allows the organization to quantify their security stature. Scalable features enable the CISO team to take quick decisions with tremendous visibility and vehemently, with the absolute data path to identify, analyze and detect basic and advanced requirements of security threats for the organization.

The NetApp Excellerator is a gauge adding wings to Anlyz.

ArchSaber: It provides intelligent infrastructure analytics. It automates the diagnosis and prediction of issues occurring in a large and complex IT stack, thereby offering real-time monitoring and alerting of all core and non-core infrastructure components, and advanced data science techniques to detect and fix these issues.

Arpit Jain, team leader, said the problem was how to ease incidents diagnosis in a fast-paced environment. “We provide performance analytics platform for data analytics. We enable accurate alert prediction, to prevent issues become large.”

ArchSaber also provides easy knowledge sharing. It auto-documents diagnosis and post-mortems, and shares them across teams and community. The market size of IT monitoring is roughly $10 billion.

Jain added: “We are targeting high-growth SMBs such as Ola, Zomato, etc. We are enabling fast-paced development. There will also be an effective use of precious engineering resources.” It is running non-commercial beta pilots with the likes of Zomato, Lenskart, hypertrack, etc.

He said: “We leverage NetApp’s years of experience in building and evolving IT infrastructure. It is perhaps, the best accelerator programme in India focused at deep technology ideas.”

Blobcity: It is in the analytics marketplace that allows companies to distribute their analytics products on its platform. BlobCity has a multimodal database and provides deep analytics.

BlobCity provides its customers with end-to-end data capabilities by making storing and processing diverse data easy. Most analytic products today are required to collectively analyze data of diverse natures, BlobCity offers real-time analytics over this diverse data.

For the analysis of transactional data at the speed of transactions, one needs a real-time analytics system. An example could be ATM fraud detection, where your analytical algorithm needs to analyze possible fraudulent nature of an on-going ATM swipe, before the machine actually dispenses the cash.

Unlike ATMs, not all systems need analytics at real-time. If you want to analyze stock market data of the previous day, compare it with a year’s trend and then take a position when the market opens next day, you need a system that can perform this analysis with low-latency to be able to complete analytics for all stock quotes, before the markets re-open.

Depending on the nature and complexity of the requirement, the term low-latency covers processing times from a few milliseconds to even several hours. BlobCity’s analytics solutions are extremely well suited for such requirements and support a high volume of transactions without compromising on analytics speeds.

DataKen: It provides intelligent network and infrastructure operations. It is focused on providing deep learning-driven business process automation, predictive network management, customer insights and micro-segmentation, augmenting AI/ ML.

Suresh Gokarakonda, co-founder and CEO, said the company was established in 2015 as an innovative data science start-up. It signed six customers inside a year and currently has five business partners. It has also worked for tier 1 operators in the US, the UK, and Australia.

He added: “We provide intelligent automation for network and infrastructure operations. We have a smart surveillance hub that looks at 550 different devices for network monitoring, testing and diagnosis.”

DataKen’s smart surveillance hub does network monitoring, and test and diagnosis. The technology stack comprises streaming, distributed computing, distributed storage, AI, ML, SVG and networking protocols.

DataKen has received best-in-class mentorship from NetApp. It has learned to focus on the target segment, customer discovery skills, articulating the value proposition, and industry trends impact review.

Nanobi Data & Analytics: It provides an interactive and visual full-stack end-to-end analytics platform that offers services for everything an organization needs to prepare, analyze and visualize complex data, while also eliminating the need to use a multitude of technologies.

Abhishek Purohit, co-founder and VP, Partner & Product Strategy, said Nanobi delivers analytical insights to clients that help them better understand their customers. Their analytical solutions deliver measurable business impact across revenue upside, cost optimization and end-consumer delight to clients in the healthcare and BFSI spaces.

Nanobi’s LiquiData platform integrates data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive and prescriptive analytics into a single visual stack, thereby allowing their clients the ease, efficiency and flexibility of using a one-stop platform to serve their analytical requirements.

With a ‘nanomart’-based data architecture and a rich API framework, solutions are built speedily and in easy-to-consume modules. Nanobi’s platform has built-in conversational bots, which makes it easy for anyone across the enterprise to use analytics to drive decision-making.

SigTuple: It provides data-driven intelligence for healthcare. It works on the digitization of pathological slide images and running cloud-based image processing for diagnosis in pathology labs.

Rohit Pandey, co-founder and CEO, said: “We use robotics, AI and data to deliver smart intelligence solutions for healthcare. We are partnered with IIT Kharagpur and III-T Bangalore.

“The healthcare industry is underserved. At least 40 percent of labs in India have underdeveloped performance reporting. We are trying to improve the accuracy for medical. Our focus is to make common screening tests more accessible and accurate.

“We currently analyze for blood, urine, chest, semen, retina, etc. We provide an indigenous AI-based solution. A patient can get reports in less than 10 minutes, without the sample traveling.”

Blood analysis: Second most voluminous test. ~400 million tests are done every year in India.
Urine analysis: Third-most voluminous test. ~200 million tests are done every year in India.
Semen analysis: 12 percent of couples globally are facing fertility problems. Cost of device $40,000+ in India.
Chest x-ray analysis: 2.8 million TB cases are reported in India every year.
Retinal scan analysis: ~9 percent of global population are suspected to be suffering from diabetes.

SigTuple provides:
Shonit: Solution for blood analysis
Shrava: Solution for urine analysis
Aadi: Solution for semen analysis
Vaksha: Solution for chest x-ray analysis
Drishti: Solution for retinal scan analysis.

All of these run on Manthana, a continuous learning AI platform. He added: “We provide an indigenous cloud-based AI platform, supported by the advancements in robotics to power a suite of solutions.

“We have over eight clinical trials ongoing, and are partnering with different medical experts. We have filed 22 patents, 10 in India, and six overseas. We are trying to make tests more accessible and affordable. We only charge for the reports generated, and not for the reports not generated. We plan to look into Bangladesh and Indonesia in future. We have applied for FDA approval in USA.”

Startups from first batch
Adya and Scalend Technologies, startups from the first batch, also talked about their businesses.

Adya’s Deepak Balakrishna, co founder, said: “We help enterprises manage and protect SaaS apps. There is a SaaS explosion. There are many ways data can get exposed, eg. Gooogle Calendar. There may be exposed calendars, publicly shared documents, unauthorized third-party apps, etc.

“We connect all critical SaaS apps from a single application. The problem is also with management and cloud app management. We shipped our first version in April 2018. We have four customers, and eight trials are going on.”

Scalend’s CEO, Ravi Madhira, noted: “We have a business challenge: e-commerce purchase journey challenges. For all digital marketing efforts made by the e-commerce merchants, the overall conversion rate is very low.”

Merchant challenges include:
* Understanding digital spend effectiveness; SEO/SEM/campaign dashboard
* Increase conversions
* Payment gateway performance
* Sales analytics.

Madhira added: “We provide Scalend Commerce Insights. It is based on Big Data, a multi-tenant SaaS application.” Scalend is currently focusing on the mid-sized market. It has 14 customers trialing the product.

Now, for June 28!