American conglomerate United Technologies and Hyderabad-based startup engine T-Hub have announced the five startup finalists working in video analytics to join their Smart City/Smart Building NanoAccelerator program cohort. The finalists are IntelliVision, Duranc, Emza Visual Sense Ltd, Uncanny Vision Solutions and Cognitifai.
Startups across the globe sent in applications for the program and the finalists include two start-ups from India, two start-ups from US, and one start-up from Israel.
According to a statement by T-Hub, these five companies have a combined revenue of more than $4 million and have raised between $7 million and $ 8 million in funding. They have strong technical and research teams and hold more than 20 granted and pending patents, providing services to Fortune 100 companies.
“I was positively impressed with the startups that presented. Some of them are matured companies while some of them are at the starting stade. For us video surveillance is key and we are present across business segments where video analytics are important. We are looking for something that can bring in that level of accuracy,” Ali Saidi, Vice President, UTC Systems and Control Engineering said.
UTC also launched a lab at T-Hub in Hyderabad to foster innovation. UTC will also use this lab to showcase its Building products and platforms so that startups get an opportunity to develop collaborative solutions with the company.
“T-Hub fosters fresh thinking and opens minds to new possibilities by encouraging the ecosystem to collaborate, propelling India and the world into the future. As a part of our corporate innovation program, we bridge the need to have our industry partners meshed tightly to innovators. Furthering our partnership with United Technologies, we are announcing our first cohort of start-ups working in the video analytics solution domain. These truly global start-ups were researched, analysed and scouted for the Smart City / Smart Building NanoAccelerator program. The start-ups selected are from across the world and come with strong technical and research teams. The solutions they offer are niche, and will play a key cog in the near future as the smart buildings and cities not only become reality but a scalable necessity,” Jay Krishnan, CEO of T-Hub said.
The five startups that have been selected will further pitch and of these, one or two will be finally picked. UTC will fund these startups up to $50,000 to create a proof of concept for a product. UTC will look for solutions that can be applied across any of its business segments. The startups will also receive mentoring from the top executives and engineers at UTC.
Prakash Bodla, Executive Director & Center Head of UTC Hyderabad Research & Design Center (HRDC), said, “UTC HRDC is engaged with T-Hub on various events and activities. One such event is the ‘Video Analytics Challenge,’ to identify strategic partners from start-ups in the space of video analytics and security. Thanks to T-Hub, we saw outstanding participation from start-ups around the world and have created a list of five finalists, who are here to demonstrate their proof of concept to United Technologies. The one or two start-ups that develop concepts of great interest to UTC will advance to the next steps of engagement.”
Meet the startups
IntelliVision is a Pune-based startup and claims to be a market leader in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning-based video analytics and video cloud software. Its solutions provide actionable insights for security and monitoring in smart home, smart enterprise and smart city applications, business intelligence for smart enterprise and smart retail, and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for car/road safety in automobiles.
Duranc Inc provides small-medium businesses and organizations with a secure, reliable and cost effective cloud-based video surveillance platform that provides deep intelligent analytics and insights.
Emza Visual Sense is an Israel-based company that develops smart, trainable IoT visual sensors that can detect human presence, count people, and analyze their activity for security, safety and energy savings. Consuming less than 1mW, Emza’s sensors operate for years on a small battery.
Bengaluru-based Uncanny Vision delivers AI-based surveillance solutions using Deep Learning-based vision algorithms that have been optimized to run on Edge servers to provide cost-effective and scalable security for next generation safe cities and smart industries.
Cognitifai is a video intelligence platform that uses surveillance feeds for hyperlocal intelligence discovery and autonomous urban monitoring. With applications in smart cities, surveillance, business intelligence and healthcare.