These 6 women-led startups win Covid-19 Shri Shakti Challenge award

In collaboration with UN women, six Bengaluru women-led startups have won Covid-19 Shri Shakti Challenge organised by MyGov.

Launched in April 2020, the aim of the organisation was to encourage and involve women-led startups to come up with innovative solutions that can help in the fight against coronavirus or solve problems that impact a large number of women.

The Challenge was implemented in two stages:

• Ideation stage and Proof of Concept (PoC) Stage

The challenge received an overwhelming response with a total of 1265 entries, from across the nation.

After thorough screening, 25 startups were shortlisted for presentations to the Jury which included Debjani Ghosh, President NASSCOM, Rohini Srivathsa, National Technology Officer (CTO) Microsoft India, Dr R Ramanan, MD Atal Innovation Mission, Nishtha Satyam, Dy Country representative, UN Women India and Abhishek Singh, CEO MyGov.

All 25 selected startups presented their solutions to the Jury, which evaluated the solutions proposed by the startups on the parameters that included innovation, usability, relevance and impact of their idea on the society and after thorough review 11 finalists were chosen for the next stage.

All the 11 selected startups were provided a prize money of ₹75,000 each to further develop their ideas.

In addition to the earlier announced reward of ₹5 lakh for the top 3 winners, UN Women was generous enough to agree to reward ₹2 lakh each to the 3 startups chosen for their promising solutions.

Top 3 winners are as follows:

• Dr P Gayatri Hela is the founder of Bengaluru-based Resada Lifesciences Private Limited that designs and develops home and agricultural-based products using plant extracts instead of synthetic chemicals.
• Romita Ghosh, a cancer survivor, is the founder of Shimla-based iHeal HealthTech Private Limited which is a healthcare start-up that has been at the forefront of the fight against COVID and has been providing PPE kits to hospitals.
• Dr Anjana Ramkumar and Dr Anushka Ashokan are the product manager and co-founder of Kerala based Thanmatra Innovations Private Limited have come up with the innovative solution of an anti-microbial solution that could be sprayed into handkerchiefs or dupattas for making them safe to be used as Face Masks.

Top 3 startups identified as‘Promising Solutions’ are:

• Vasanthi Palanivel, is the CEO & Co-Founder of Bengaluru-based Seragen BioTherapeutics Private Limited.As a scientist and researcher, she studied the symptoms and impacts of the virus and realized that the lungs were one of the worst infected organs in COVID and she has developed a plasma solution to treat respiratory distress due to COVID-19.
• Shivi Kapil is the cofounder of Bengaluru-based Empathy Design Labsthat focuses on healthcare, and took the pandemic as an opportunity to design solutions for pregnant women who could not go to the hospital due to risk of infection. Shehas designed Kriya, a wearable device for daily monitoring of pregnancy. The IoT-embedded product provides alerts and suggestions to expecting parents for timely action.
• Jaya Parashar and Ankita Parashar – a mother daughter duo are the founder and co-founder of STREAM Minds, and ed-tech company that works on promoting Science, Technology, Reading/Writing, Arts, and Mathematics education among school children across India. They have designed ‘Dobot’, a fully automated robot which acts as an in-house delivery assistant to make hospitals and healthcare clinics safe from the risks of COVID19.