Bengaluru: N/Core, a not-for-profit start-up incubator managed by the Nudge Foundation, on Monday announced the selection of eight early-stage companies for its six-month incubation programme, which offers a grant of Rs10 lakh to each graduating start-up.
N/Core is a tech incubator created in partnership with Cisco Systems, which focuses on solving social and economic problems using technology. The start-ups for the current cohort were picked from a pool of 713 applications, including from academic institutions such as IIT, IIM, UC Berkeley, Harvard Business School and London School of Economics, among others.
The eight early-stage start-ups in the current cohort work in diverse sectors, including education, employability, financial inclusion, healthcare, human rights, sanitation, and water, and their non-profit work ranges from remote villages, including Dankuni in West Bengal and Sadri in Rajasthan, to urban cities such as Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
For instance, Intelehealth founded by Neha Goel, has developed a telemedicine platform, which allows health workers to remotely work with doctors in rural parts of India where access to healthcare is low.
Another start-up, Change with One Foundation, launched by Kiran Verma, is helping patients find blood donors by connecting them with the nearest source using a pre-populated database of existing blood donors. The platform claims to have connected over 2,000 patients across 11 countries till date.
Hyderabad-based Lakeer, co-founded by Dipika Prasad and Varun Pawar, works with state governments and municipalities to develop data-driven solutions for improving air quality, emergency response, healthcare, sanitation, and more.
In addition to the innovation grant of Rs10 lakh for each start-up, N/Core also offers guidance by a select set of mentors and technology experts, including industry veterans Sanjay Purohit, ex-chairman of Infosys Consulting; Maneesh Dhir, former managing director of Apple India; K.R. Lakshminarayan, chief endowment officer of Azim Premji Foundation; and Ujwal Thakar, the former chief executive officer of Pratham and GiveIndia.
“As N/Core plans to focus on highly underserved thematic areas of poverty alleviation, we are looking for progressive, visionary partners such as Cisco to work with us and bring the required support for early-stage non-profits in the sector,” N/Core CEO Sudha Srinivasan said in a statement.
“Through this partnership with N/Core, we seek to inspire and empower a generation of global problem solvers who can combine tech know-how, ingenuity, and social consciousness to solve some of the most pressing social challenges,” said VC Gopalratnam, senior vice president for IT, Cisco India CSR.
N/Core was founded by Atul Satija in early 2017. In April, the incubator closed its first cohort under its non-tech programme, which included nine start-ups working on poverty-related solutions in India.