The Business Bytes
TBB BUREAU
MUMBAI/NEW DELHI, JUNE 21, 2021
Vedanta Group, India’s leading producer of metals, minerals and oil & gas today announced 23 start-ups as winners of the first edition of their unique ‘Vedanta SPARK’ initiative.
The 23 winning start-ups are: Sparkcognition, Machinemax, Throughput, Promethean Energy, Dimension NXG, Infrrd, Zededa, MaximL, Tachyus, Neewee, SenseGiz, Guardhat, Prysmex, MicroSilicon, Detect Technologies, ExactSpace, Imaginate, Algo, Affine, Safe AI, Planys, Enmovil, and Edgistify.
As part of the Vedanta Spark programme, the winners will be offered various opportunities including partnerships and collaborations, funding and investments, capacity and resources etc. to pave the way for outcomes in operational excellence, revenue growth from new products and markets, and new digital ventures. The chosen start-ups will get pilot opportunities within Vedanta Group to implement and demonstrate business impact, opening up revenues to win commercial orders for a potential global roll out.
The winning 23 start-ups having been selected after a highly rigorous process of evaluation involving business executives and industry experts and under strong competition hold the potential to deliver a business impact of around $45-50 million in the current financial year.
“We have selected these 23 start-up partners after a rigorous selection process. I am very excited and very happy to be working with you. At Vedanta, we will make it our duty to embrace these start-up partners as we strongly believe Vedanta can derive huge enterprise value. Vedanta will make this a periodic program going forward and consider expanding this partnership with global educational and research organizations as well,” said Sunil Duggal, Group CEO, Vedanta.
Daniel Raj David, CEO and Co-Founder, Detect Technologies said: “Vedanta Spark is a very structured and incredible platform for startups to work with large conglomerate for its digitization. For fostering innovation we need – awareness, execution of pilots and scale. The Vedanta Spark program provides all the 3 things on a single platter.”
Brenton Welford, VP Business Development, SafeAIInc commented: “As an autonomous tech company with Vedanta we envision building systems that can bring people outside the line of fire. SafeAI is really excited to implement its first autonomous haulage system in India with Vedanta.”
Vedanta SPARK (www.vedantaspark.com) was launched on 30 October 2020 with the objective to build technology capabilities for achieving business transformation and strategic growth by partnering with early-stage, growth stage and venture stage Digital Tech start-ups. The initiative organised as an innovation grand challenge and corporate accelerator program attracted over 1,350 registrations from across 19 countries with more than 250 overseas startups.
The program roadmap has been formulated towards scaling up the engagement models with Innovative start-ups, whose partnership provide Vedanta with the potential to combine the speed, cost, scale and scope advantages of Start-ups in Innovation with the scale, reach, production, distribution, financial, and commercial capacity of Vedanta Limited. The key national partners for Vedanta Spark are Forge (strategic partner incubator), Start up India, AIM, Agnii (Invest India) and the key global partners are Core Hub, World Startup. The company plans to make Investments of about Rs 100 croretowards the implementation of this programme.
