The India-Israel Innovation Challenge announced the winners of the grand challenge recently. As part of winning the challenge, the 18 teams from India and Israel will now get to work with Invest India and Israel Innovation Authority to take their ideas to the next level.
In July of 2017, the respective Prime Ministers of India and Israel launched the India-Israel Innovation Bridge – a tech platform that facilitates bilateral co-operation between the two countries’ startups, tech hubs, corporations and other key innovation ecosystem players. The platform also hosted the innovation challenge wherein startups were called to develop solutions for critical problems in the field of agriculture, water and digital health.
Two specific problem statements were identified within each of the areas being worked upon – i.e agriculture, water and digital health. The agriculture challenges focused on reducing post-harvest loss, improving market linkages, enhancing agricultural productivity and increasing farmers’ earnings. The issues identified in the area of water technology revolved around wastewater treatment, desalination, recycling or purifying large water sources and producing portable drinking water at point of use. Digital Health invited solutions to health management for NCDs (Non-Communicable Diseases) and low-cost diagnostics in rural areas.
The India-Israel Innovation Challenge is jointly managed by DIPP (Ministry of Commerce and Industry), and the Israel Innovation Authority. The challenge was hosted on the Startup India Hub, a one-stop shop web platform developed by Invest India for the Indian startup ecosystem. In India, the more than 650 applications came in from Indian innovators and startups.
The Indian startups and innovators selected as winners of the Indo-Israel Innovation Challenge agriculture are Amvicube, RF Wave Technologies. The runner-ups in this segment are Yuktix Technologies, Amber Solutions, Jagadeesh B Henjarappa and Vignesh Ravichandran. In the field of water technology the winners are Innotech Intervention and Pure Paani while the runner-ups named are Vanita Prasad, Rinaldo John, Karthikumar S and Oceo Water. In the digital health segment, I Love 9 Months Fitness Solutions and Bioscan Research were titled the winners whereas Innov4Sight Health and Biomedical Systems, Zeolr Technologies, Mercuri Biotechnologies and Ujjwaal Bhardwaj were runner-ups in the segment.
The winners of the challenge will receive Rs. 5 lakh and the runner-ups get a cash prize of Rs. 2 lakh. The winners will also work on the proof of concept for their solution with the support of Corporate and Investor partners, and selected incubators from India and Israel. iCreate and T-Hub are the anchor incubation partners and will be offering a 6-month program to the top teams.
In addition, the winners would also get to participate in a first-of-its-kind market access program, ‘the Co-Creation Summit’ that will bring together stakeholders from both startup ecosystems to facilitate collaborations. The summit will provide both Indian and Israeli innovators access to a range of Indian field experts, representatives from Corporate Partners, Government officials, and other partners. Along with meetings and focused mentorship sessions, startups will be taken added for field visits to provide a more hands on experience.
