Eight Indian Start-Ups in Zeroth.ai Fourth Cohort
Zeroth.ai, a Hong Kong based accelerator for early-stage start-ups in Asia has selected 27 startups as part of its fourth cohort from Hong Kong, India and Japan. It has selected 10 startups from Hong Kong, 8 from India and 9 from Japan. Startups selected from India include Codeplay Labs, Deepsight Labs, Deepsync Technologies, Kvinna, MikeLegal, The Solar Labs, Unreal.ai and Vizzbee.
The firm generally invests in AI technology startups, with a focus on edge computing, natural language, autonomous vehicles, agri-tech, HMI tech and ethical computing.
“We have a focused reputation for investing in frontier technology startups that solve discrete problems driven by macro factors. We invested in Marax AI because ecommerce SaaS was going to the next necessary thing after the ecommerce boom in India. Spoonshot made a lot of sense because of the unstructured data of food intelligence and the need for FMCGs to anticipate the next hit flavors. Wolkus optimized agriculture production in a country where almost 50% of the population is affiliated with food and agricultural production,” says Tak Lo, Partner, Zeroth.ai, an early-stage funding program for Asian AI/ML companies.
The share of Asian unicorns has increased from less than 5 percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2019. According to Tak Lo, this is because the cost of capital has become cheaper and due to the sharing of best practices. “Innovation is no longer in just the Silicon Valley. Talent is distributed equally but opportunities are not,” he says.
Zeroth.ai usually invests between USD20,000 to USD 120,000 in funding in exchange for a six percent stake in the companies.
Four Indian startups that were part of Zeroth.ai’s earlier cohorts — Fasal, Spoonshot, Mate Labs and Marax — were also part of the demo day organised by the accelerator in Bangalore. Spoonshot, which leverages food science and AI to predict consumer taste and food preferences was a part of its second cohort and raised $ 560,000 in venture funding so far($120,000 from Zeroth.ai and $400,000 from TechStars and Arts Alliance). Marax, which focuses on goal based user engagement at scale, was a part of Zeroth.ai’s second cohort.
Startups selected from Hong Kong include BestShot, Dapp.com, Deeptrace, Docpack, Easychat, Graychain, RumbleMonkey, Sharpsense.ai, Strint and Veremark. Startups selected from Japan include Anytech, Clocksmith, Cotobox, Finhay, Generalized Intelligence, Matarstars, Roboken, Rosetta.ai and Sapiens.
