Startup Street: This Startup Is Building A Forest In The Middle Of Delhi
Here’s what went on this week on Startup Street.
This week on Startup Street, we have the journey of Afforestt which is “bringing India’s lost forests back”. Haptik, a Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.-backed conversational artificial intelligence startup, has brought in the founding team of startup Convrg. Information Technology industry lobby Nasscom and property consultant CBRE said they will mentor and support three startups that offer tech-based solutions for the real estate market. And Microsoft Corp. has made a billion-dollar investment in OpenAI.
Afforestt Wants To Restore India’s Forest Cover
In 2008, Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki visited the Toyota plant in Bidadi, Bengaluru, to create a one-hectare forest inside the facility to turn it carbon neutral. Shubhendu Sharma, then an engineer with the carmaker, shadowed Miyawaki. Three years later, Sharma switched his career to what he calls “bringing India’s lost forests back”.
Today, Afforestt and its team of 13 have managed to reforest 1.5 lakh square metres of land in 144 different patches across 13 different countries, Sharma told BloombergQuint. In India, its list of clients include Godrej Properties Ltd., L&T Infrastructure Ltd., Tata Chemicals Ltd., Tata Projects Ltd. and Samsonite.
Apart from companies, the startup has also received requests from religious organisations, the Indian government and foreign organisations to consult, manage a reforestation project, hold workshops, or straight out build a sustainable forest, said Sharma.
One of its biggest projects so far is to make a 12,000-tree forest near the sundial in Delhi’s Barapullah area. “The first phase of the project has been completed, we already have a patch of forest there which has started showing a difference,” Sharma said. “We have monitors inside and outside the forest area and it shows a difference of 5 degree Celsius.”
Seven of the top 10 most polluted cities in the world are in India, with Delhi NCR showing some of the worst pollution levels in 2018 owing to vehicular discharge, smoke from industries and burning of crop residue by farmers in the neighbouring states.
For the second phase, the startup said, it is waiting for the government to clear the next round of funds required. It is also considering corporate sponsors, which Sharma said would only need a fraction of what companies spend as a part of their “sustainable initiatives”.
The tree-planting startup is months away from launching its new service—building small 9-12 square meters of a forest patch for private individuals. The service, called Tuiny, has already been launched in The Netherlands where an person can have a forest in their backyard for €198 (roughly Rs 15,000). While this is a subsidised price, Sharma hopes to launch the service for roughly Rs 60,000 in India.
But Sharma is uncertain about its success in India. “There (In Holland), people are paying now for a forest that will be built in November. I don’t see that happening in India,” he said, adding that the product will have to be packaged differently for his native country.
That isn’t the only challenge in India. “The biggest challenge is that of supply chain,” Sharma said, explaining how the country generates sapling of only 100 species when it has over 2,800 different species in its flora. The startup plans to soon enter the seedling-generation business to overcome the supply-chain limitations.
India has lost over 1.6 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2018, about four times the geographical area of Goa, according to a study released by the World Resources Institute in April. This includes multiple lost species, native to the country.
The Green India Mission 2020—launched in 2010 to protect and restore India’s diminishing forest cover and responding to climate change—is also severely underfunded. “The scheme is proposed for 10 years with an outlay of Rs 60,000 crore. During 2017-18, Rs 47.8 crore has been allocated for the scheme which is grossly insufficient as the committed liability for 2015-16 and 2016-17 is Rs 89.53 crore which is much more than the budget allocated,” according to a parliamentary committee report in February this year.
To increase the forest cover, Afforestt said it plans to plant 2,800 species of trees in different parts of the world. “We are hoping this will tip the scale somewhere and influence others to do the same,” Sharma said. The startup said it documents all its methods and techniques and keeps them open sources for others to refer to.
Haptik Acquires Founding Team Of Conversational AI Startup
Haptik, a Mumbai-based conversational AI startup which powers customer interactions for brands such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., KFC Corp. and The Coca-Cola Co., has brought on board the founding team of Los Angeles-based Convrg.
This comes after Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio made a $100 million strategic investment in the startup in April this year.
The startup said it was looking for full-time operations in North America. “We’ve been doing business in North America for a few years now, but given the nature of the market, we knew we needed a dedicated full-time operation there,” said Aakrit Vaish, co-founder and chief executive officer at Haptik. “Given what they’ve accomplished in AI and in enterprise software leading up to this, the team we’ve put in place now gives us a solid foothold in the region.”
Convrg builds chatbots. Its founding team—Audrey Wu, Liz Snower and Amit Gupta—began working in the conversational AI space several years prior to starting Convrg in 2017.
Nasscom, CBRE To Mentor Three Tech Realty Startups
IT industry lobby Nasscom and property consultant CBRE on Friday said that they will mentor and support three startups that offer tech-based solutions for the real estate market.
Touchwizard Technologies, XLSYS Technologies and WEGoT Utility Solutions were declared winners after three stages of evaluation, CBRE said in a statement. Nasscom and CBRE South Asia began the competition in May this year.
The initiative, according to Srikanth Srinivasan, head of membership at Nasscom, is a step towards building a sustainable ecosystem for “proptech startups” in the country. “We wanted to create a platform in India that advocates proptech and slowly but steadily walk towards creating a truly global experience for consumers in the realty sector,” said Anshuman Magazine, chairman and CEO for CBRE India and South East Asia.
Chennai-based Touchwizard Technologies, which came first in the challenge, deals in manufacturing and trading of video projectors, interactive boards, projector screens, interactive floor systems, virtual field trip service and virtual reality kit trip services. Bengaluru-based XLSYS Technologies offers jobsite management and analytics services for the real estate industry. WEGoT Utility Solution specialises in utility management and water management solutions.
With inputs from PTI
Microsoft Bets $1 Billion On OpenAI’s For-Profit Arm
Microsoft has agreed to invest $1 billion in a partnership with research group OpenAI, gaining a prominent cloud-computing customer from the artificial intelligence field.
OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to train and run the group’s AI software, according to a Bloomberg report. The two will also jointly develop supercomputing technology, and Microsoft will be OpenAI’s preferred partner to commercialise its creations.
The $1 billion investment goes to the for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, but the partnership is between Microsoft and the whole entity, OpenAI said.
Founded in 2015, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel committed at least $1 billion to the non-profit in a bid to match or improve on the technology being developed by tech giants such as Google, Facebook Inc. and Microsoft. Musk, however, left OpenAI’s board last year after disagreeing over the group’s future plans.
The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI will focus on artificial general intelligence, which aims to get computers to learn new skills and complete varied tasks like humans can. That’s a contrast to existing AI, which can learn specific jobs, such as understanding images, but can’t tackle different problems on its own.
“We chose Microsoft as our cloud partner because we’re excited about Azure’s supercomputing roadmap,” Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and chairman, said in an emailed statement. “We believe we can work with Microsoft to develop hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI.”