How agritech and healthcare tech are creating social impact

NEW DELHI: One social entrepreneur in India has his business model down pat.
He knows that while farmers in India use smartphones, not all of them have access to the Internet. Anand Babu from Bellary district in Karnataka started a social venture, Jayalaxmi Agrotech, which develops apps with information about crops in the local language to help with the farming process. These apps can be downloaded free by farmers without an Internet connection.

“We are looking to help farmers understand their crops, the diseases that affect them and much more. They don’t even need the Internet for these apps,” said Babu.

Jayalaxmi Agrotech and two healthcare technology startups were the top three projects of the Intel and Department of Science and Technology-Innovate for Digital India Challenge, which were selected from over 1,900 entries.

Today, the social startup world is their oyster. The teams will be travelling to the US this month to compete against about 1,750 finalists across 77 countries for approximately Rs 20 lakh in awards and scholarships. Healthcare and agritech startups are garnering interest from venture capitalists and private equity firms.

“These startups are building transformational technologies for farmers and these will make a huge impact,” said Mark Kahn, founding partner of Omnivore Partners, a Bengaluru-based VC that is investing in such entities. “We are taking a keen interest in them because they monetise faster and burn less cash, unlike other startups that give away money to get business.”

Omnivore has invested in Ecozen Solutions, Stellapps and Barrix Agro Sciences. Ecozen delivers solar-powered products for irrigation and for cold storage. Stellapps brings Internet of Things solutions for dairy and cold chains and Barrix helps farmers cut costs by replacing pesticides with eco-friendly crop protection methods.

“There is a lot of interest in both agritech as well as healthcare tech right now. Top funds are betting big on these sectors,” said Archit Garg, vice president at Rabo Private Equity, the investment advisor to a $120-million private equity fund.

Another project, TJay, has developed a wearable product and cloud solution to enable tracking, remote monitoring and support for people with epilepsy.

Two days after the birth of her son Tejas, Rajlakshmi Borthakur discovered he had epilepsy, a neurological disorder that affects one in 100 people in the country. Borthakur, with her team of 10, designed TJay – also a sobriquet for her son. It is a glove embedded with sensors and a software solution to facilitate the remote monitoring of epilepsy patients.

The team started off with epilepsy and the glove is scalable to other neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease and movement disorder.

The other healthcare tech startup, Tamil Nadu-based Asha+, has created a handheld remote health monitoring device that aids early detection and enables effective intervention, especially in medical emergencies. This is an at-home device that can also help in the prevention and early detection of heart attacks, co-creator Sai Ram Mannar explained.

All three companies hope to scale up in the months ahead with the seed money they received through this exercise. They hope to create databases around their social innovations to help both the government and private entities with big data.