Friday, 8 November 2019

Agro Start-up Ecosystem @ SIGCE

Agro Start-up Ecosystem @ SIGCE- Dr Rajesh Kulkarni


The Union Government has launched AGRI-UDAAN Food and Agribusiness Accelerator programme in an attempt to promote innovation and entrepreneurship, start-ups mentorship, industry networking and investor pitching in agriculture. It is managed by ICAR-NAARM’s (Indian Council of Agricultural Research-National Academy of Agricultural Research Management) technology incubator, a-IDEA along with IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation. For details click here https://aidea.naarm.org.in/agri-udaan/.
Scope for IOT, ICT, ML and AL solutions in the field of agriculture is huge. Also the need of the hour is creating and nurturing an ecosystem which is a mix of Academia, Corporates, Research Organizations, Investors, Government Functionaries, Evangelists and Start-Up Entrepreneurs.

The machine learning algorithms can help agriculturist in disease prediction, crop health classification, agriculture retailers, crop yield, bug hunting, spray machines. Smt. Indira Gandhi College Of Engineering(http://www.sigce.edu.in) campus located in Ghansoli, Navi Mumbai collaborated initially with Lemon Ideas and Lemon School of Entrepreneurship with Innovation and Start-up competitions like iNNOPRENEUR’18 and launch of incubation centre sowed the seeds of start-up ecosystem in the college. Mr. Sunil Jadhav, Managing Director and trustee of SIGCE launched incubation ecosystem Ignition with successfully incubating various start-ups. The entire seventh floor space and resources of the college are dedicated for the incubation ecosystem.
Three start-ups among twenty being targeted are showing good results. The details of one of the statrtup by name Ignisnova Robotics (https://ignisnova.com/) and Agriforetell (https://monitor.agriforetell.com) co-founded by young bright minds from BITS Pilani Mr. PiyushKumar and Ms.Srishti Arora are worth watching. Their current net worth is twenty-five crore with a projection of 500 crores in next three years are exciting news for all of us at SIGCE to cherish.

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