London has often been touted as the “European headquarters” for most Indian businesses. High-flying Indian start-ups and go-getters see no different. Despite the obstacles presented by Brexit and a looming coronavirus pandemic, scale-ups with a vision to establish a global footprint visualise London as a starting point.
According to the latest data from Startup Genome’s ‘The Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2020’, London has one of the world’s most favourable ecosystems to build a globally successful startup. The UK capital has jumped to second position in line with New York this year as opposed to being ranked third in 2019. FICCI Council UK is instrumental in incubating StartUps like CareMotherIndia, Oizom Redefining Resources, and vPhrase in London through their TechXchange program.
Pollution source detection and campus monitoring
“Climate emergency will be one of the biggest talking points in the coming years and the UK is already spearheading awareness around the climate crisis. Since the inception of our startup, we had realised that our business module will be suited to collaborate with UK stakeholders considering our focus is on providing environmental monitoring technology and solutions,” said Jainam Mehta, Co-founder of Oizom.
Oizom is an Environmental IoT company offering data-driven environmental solutions for better decision making. They use sensor-based hardware, and monitor various environmental parameters related to air quality, noise, odour, weather, radiation etc. Oizom’s partner first approach means that they have partnered with Environmental Monitoring Solutions (EMS) based in Sheffield. Their major applications include monitoring air quality index across campuses for schools, universities like University of Warwick, hospitals including the Sheffield Hospital among others. They are currently working with Vodafone Headquarters in Newbury and are conducting a similar pollution source detection project with the University of Salford.
CareMother India develops technology for early Foetal Distress detection
Monitoring air quality index has been extremely important in recent times especially for pregnant women for the pollutant particles present in the air can cause fatal complications for the foetus. While the NHS provides one of the best maternal care facilities. StartUp like CareMother India aim to digitise maternal care especially in a post Covid-19 world where physical examinations would take a backseat as opposed to online consultations.
CareMother India provides a mobile application (app), a web application and a medical kit that is carried by health workers to perform doorstep diagnosis and tests. AI driven algorithms help health workers to detect high-risk pregnancies and connect them to a nearby gynaecologist for further diagnosis and treatment. The model has been a tremendous success in impoverished rural India especially where access to maternal care and awareness about neonatal medicine is limited. Now, Co-Founder of CareMother India, Aditya Kulkarni has been attempting to roll-out this solution driven technology app to other parts of the world. Speaking about the
“Through TechXchange, I was able to come to the UK and collaborate with DeepMind UK which is an AI based arm of Google. Academics and researchers have thus helped me to design additional technologies for early identification of the foetal distress syndrome in pregnant mothers. We are also fortunate to be funded by Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust and Comic Relief who are supporting my pilot programs in India to experiment with innovative technological solutions. We had started running pilot programs with the NHS as well but considering the model of our business that is more targeted towards the developing countries, we have not commercialised our start-up yet. But the UK has played a significant role in enabling us to achieve ground-breaking solutions in maternal care.”
Other unicorn companies who have already scaled heights in the UK include Ola cabs and Oyo homes.
