The Fantastic Five Of Oracle Accelerator Programme Meet the five startups selected for Oracle's accelerator programme in India
By Ritu Kochar
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Getting the right mentoring at the right time can do wonders for any startup just beginning their journey. And imagine what would happen when this mentoring is given by multinational computer technology corporation Oracle.
Announced in April, Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator will be a platform for startups to help them grow by providing technology, mentoring, go-to-market strategy, investors, working space, and more. Running for three weeks, this program looks at building innovative solutions that solve real-life problems for their customers. It also possess an impressive team of mentors which include Manish Chawla from Paytm, Sanjay Kharb from InMobi, Mitesh Agarwal from Oracle and Rashmi Mohan from Yahoo Labs to name a few.
This program will be a great boost to India's startup ecosystem and support to the Digital India initiative. Talking about this growth, Sanket Atal, Group Vice President of Development of Oracle India said, "The entrepreneurial spirit in our country is going through a complete revolution. We see cloud technology playing a crucial role in enabling this change."
A few perks these startups have earned are mentorship from Oracle and industry experts, 24x7 access to a co-working space within Oracle's premises, and access to Oracle's vast ecosystem of customers and partners along with its cloud services.
The first batch of six startups has already been selected. Let's find out who are Oracle's fantastic five.
ExpertRec
This startup is a plug-n-play search and recommendation engine that helps users find products more relevant to their personal tastes and needs. To make this search more efficient, the startup uses three features - Recommendation Engine, Smart Search and Predict. With an impressive response time of 0.1 second, the cloud based search works real time as the user types in the search box.
For business, it gives personalized product recommendations, search and machine learning solutions to boost sales and conversion rates on e-commerce and online portals.
What makes this startup unique is its algorithm which is based on Expectation Maximization. It presents the user with choices that maximises the probability (Expectation) of a favorable action (say a buy). Since it takes into account, not only the user behavior, but also the behaviors of the device, widgets, it optimizes the end goal leaving behind traditional algorithms like collaborative filtering and content based filtering.
Niyo Solutions
This FinTech startup founded by Virender Bisht and Vijay Nagri is disrupting the consumer banking experience at a global level with its innovative and market first solutions. The startup aims to provide alternate payment mechanisms.
Keeping the startup in stealth mode, the official launch will be in January next year. Yet, the startup holds great promises with Virender's former experience of working with MobiQuik and Vijay who was the Business Head at Kotak Mahindra Bank.
Ray iCare
Founded in 2014 by Sanchi Poovaya and Ranjana Nair, Ray iCare provides a sleep monitoring device that can diagnose epilepsy, sudden infant death syndrome and heart attacks. The promising team behind Ray iCare has a track record of developing cutting-edge AI systems, especially for traffic surveillance and healthcare monitoring.
Ray iCare can draw from technological solutions that are capable of measuring location, heart rate, ECG data, respiratory data, temperature, accelerometer data and much more. The big data streaming through these devices is then used to power algorithms and generate actionable insights. These insights could be fed to intelligent systems that could diagnose, forewarn and predict future medical events. We could then deliver information to the emergency response teams and medical services.
Tydy
Tydy was founded to bring HR teams the power of automation and ease of use. Launched in 2015, Tydy has quickly become an HR darling and is on its way to helping organizations - large & small - with the power of a great employee onboarding and engagement platform.
Tydy is a combination of tools for paperless processes, document management, content management, real-time analytics & a personalization engine that sits on top of it all.
What makes Tydy special is that it provides both automated employee on boarding and employee engagement platform. Where the former makes sure that new hires understand the company culture and appreciate the organization, the latter helps to retain talent by making their experience better.
Vear
An Augmented Reality and Virtual reality app, Vear was founded in 2014 by Nadeem Mohammed. On the platform, you will find high quality digital content curated by brands. In simple words, it helps these brands distribute their content and deploy their campaigns by directly engaging with the customer.
Vear can be used across smartphones, tablets and even wearables.
This global startup accelerator initiative by Oracle will prove to be very fruitful for these budding startups. These initiatives are a great boost to the already growing startup culture in India providing them the correct direction and mentorship they require. Other than Oracle, other prominent accelerators include .Kyron Global Accelerator, Microsoft, Khosla Labs, Target, Google's "Launchpad Accelerator' and NUMA Accelerator.