How Google is supporting young Indian firms with Launchpad programme

At the annual technologies event of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, last year, one of the participants was Geethanjali Radhakrishnan, founder and chief executive of Chennai-based startup Adiuvo Diagnostics. The event, held in the US, attracts thousands of participants from all over the world, including top executives from companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Radhakrishnan, a bio-engineer from Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology & Research Academy in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district, used the occasion to present a paper on photonics and exhibit a device for rapid wound infection assessment that her company had come out with. Impressed with the technology, she was approached by Google and asked to join the Google Launchpad Accelerator in India.

Adiuvo is among several young Indian companies that are being mentored and supported by Google through its accelerator programme to facilitate the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based innovations that they are coming out with to address some of India’s core problems. For example, AI is being used to detect cancer, create “emotionally intelligent” bots to solve mental health issues or even detect insurance frauds and claims management.

“We are trying to address the problems in India at scale. We believe that the use of AI and ML will help address many of those challenges,” says Paul Ravindranath, programme manager, Google Launchpad Accelerator, India. “Most of the startups that we are supporting have AI and ML as a central theme for building their solutions.”

Google’s three-month accelerator programme in India matches young companies from emerging ecosystems with the best of its people, network and advanced technologies to help scale their products faster. It also connects them with venture capitalists and mentors from top tech firms.

Adiuvo was provided with the ML model as well as the cloud credits that enabled it to do pilots for its innovation. Though the device was bulky initially, the Google team helped to make it as small as an iPhone, improve the user interface and create a lighter app. Illuminate, Adiuvo’s portable gadget, can detect the presence of pathogens in the skin and infected soft tissues within minutes, using advanced image processing and ML algorithms. This helps healthcare professionals pick the right treatment of antibiotics or anti-fungal agents at an early stage of the infection.  

“There is a golden period of wound recovery, but it takes almost 72 hours to determine the right treatment as the tissue needs to be taken to the lab. We are reducing that time to a few minutes and also eliminating human error,” says Mukund Ramamurthi, who leads business operations at Adiuvo. 

Experts say that about 90 per cent of amputations can be prevented in India if the infection is managed at an early stage. While Adiuvo’s device is being used in some hospitals in the country, the company is now planning to launch it in global markets such as the US, Canada, South America and Southeast Asia.

Google is also supporting companies trying to address mental health disorders with tech. Wysa, an AI-based chat therapy platform for mental health, has an “emotionally intelligent” bot that acts as a virtual coach and responds to the users’ emotions. It uses evidence-based cognitive-behavioural techniques (CBT), meditation, breathing, yoga, motivational interviewing and micro-actions to help the user build mental resilience skills and feel better.

Based in Bengaluru, Wysa is the result of a year-long effort by a 15-member team of psychologists, designers, developers and over 500,000 users to understand how AI-enabled chat bots can help build emotional resilience.

“Mental health is a big problem in India, given that the country has less than 5,000 trained mental professionals (psychiatrists) for its 1.2 billion population. There is a huge supply-demand gap,” says Ramakant Vempati, co-founder, Wysa. Citing a World Health Organization (WHO) report, Vempati, who is an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and a former Goldman Sachs executive, says that one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives.

Besides providing access to its high-quality AI expertise, Google also helped Wysa improve user experience, increase user base and monetise the platform. People from over 30 countries are now using Wysa.

Financial inclusion is another big area in which Google is supporting young ventures. Gurugram-based Perceptiviti Data Solutions, which provides an AI-powered platform for insurance claim flagging, payment integrity, fraud and abuse management, uses advanced machine learning models to provide a risk score for each incoming claim. This helps flag dodgy claims and also enables faster clearing of genuine ones. The firm says that it has assessed a million claims so far with 90 per cent accuracy, thus reducing the cost of fraud detection by over 70 per cent.

Perceptiviti’s Sherlock Platform is able to read through a 100-page health insurance claim document in seconds to detect missing information and inaccuracies. The platform, which has been built using Google’s Vision API and TensorFlow ML capability, automates the entire health claim cycle.

“Typically, a patient has to wait for 4-8 hours for the insurance claim to get approved and for reimbursement, which, too, takes several days sometimes. Our AI engine cuts down that time to minutes,” says Sandeep Khurana, founder of Perceptiviti.

The mentors at Google accelerator helped Perceptiviti make their ML models more efficient as well as reduce their size. The mentors included a team from DeepMind, the AI-company owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., as well as top professors from an Israeli university, says Khurana, who is an alumnus of IIT-Delhi.

Another company, Financepeer, also supported by Google, is addressing the unique problem of school (K-12) fee financing. The Mumbai-based peer-to-peer lending platform, which connects individual borrowers to lenders, pays the entire year’s fees to the school in one instalment and then collects it from parents in 9 or 12 monthly installments at zero interest. Financepeer uses an algorithm that quantifies risk from credit and non-credit bureau channels by leveraging AI. The company claims to have reduced customer onboarding time by 50 per cent after implementing the learnings from the mentorship boot camp and ‘design sprint’ at Google’s accelerator programme.

Similarly, SmartCoin, an app-based lending platform, is focusing on enhancing access and choice for financially underserved people. Using data science, ML and AI, it provides small to mid-sized loans to users, while building a credit score for future transactions.

Google invites many of the entrepreneurs driving these companies to visit its offices in the US to receive mentoring. One such is Geetha Manjunath, founder and chief executive of Niramai Health Analytix, which has developed an AI-based solution for detecting early-stage breast cancer. The core of Niramai’s solution is Thermalytix, a diagnostic engine that uses a high-resolution thermal sensing device and a cloud-hosted analytics solution for analysing thermal images. The low-cost, portable device, which is free from radiation, uses big data analytics, AI and ML for early and accurate breast cancer screening.

Last year, Manjunath flew to one of Google’s offices in the US to attend a start-up boot camp and was mentored by the likes of Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, internet pioneer Vint Cerf, and Peter Norvig who is Google’s director of research and an expert on AI.