Honeywell and IISC’s SID to support science startups

Honeywell’s philanthropic arm, in collaboration with IISc’s Society for Innovation and Development (SID), will continue to support deep-science startups in order to encourage entrepreneurship and scientific innovations that benefit society. The initiative’s goal is to bridge the gap between incubation and early seed investments for startups.

This initiative is part of Honeywell’s Start-Up Support Program, which has been in place for several years. The initiative also promotes greater collaboration between industry and technology-based start-ups in order to advance innovations and achieve successful outcomes.

The startups supported by the programme range from cutting-edge healthcare start-ups such as Azooka Labs, HealthSeq Precision Medicine, Equine Biotech, Protein Design, Siamaf Healthcare, Mimyk Medical Simulations, PathShodh Healthcare, and Theranautilus to those in the sustainability space such as Openwater.in, among others. In recent years, Honeywell’s CSR arm HHSIF has funded nearly 30 startups. The majority of these startups are led by women or teams from underserved communities.

These startups are dedicated to developing solutions in the fields of biotechnology, healthcare, and nanotechnology that have the potential to provide advanced scientific solutions to some of the most pressing healthcare and environmental needs.

“Deep Science startups are problem-oriented and map to at least one of the sustainable development goals,” said Prof B Gurumoorthy, Chief Executive of SID. Support for such ventures is insufficient, and one reason is a lack of understanding of the underlying science and technology, which is diverse and complex.

SID will provide infrastructure and technical support, while HHSIF will provide seed capital. Last year, Honeywell’s CSR grant assisted nine startups and three EIRs in fields as diverse as Energy, Water, MedTech, Packaging Materials, and so on. This year’s startups include MagHeals, IndiaSpeaks Research Labs, Dfine Bio-Innovations, and HEM Dimensions.”

Honeywell

Honeywell intends to involve more experts from the company in mentoring startups, building their capacities, and assisting them in scaling up.

Meet this year’s startups supported by Honeywell and incubated at IISc-SID:

MagHeals Pvt Ltd is a startup.

Shilpee Jain and Rajesh Katoch founded the company.

MagHeals Pvt Ltd is developing an innovative, efficient, and cost-effective therapy to significantly improve the experience of cancer patients during and after treatment. They use nanotechnology to target and selectively kill cancerous cells with localised heat energy, resulting in minimal side effects or loss of functionality. This therapy, which can be used alone or as an adjuvant to radiation and chemotherapy, can improve their efficacy by sensitising cancerous cells to chemo and radiation therapy. It will be easily accessible and beneficial to all segments of society as an affordable treatment option.

Founders of the startup IndiaSpeaks Research Labs include Dr. Madhavaraj, Mr. Sasidharan, Dr. Ganesh, Prof. N. Viswanadham, and Lt. Col.

IndiaSpeaks Research Labs is a group of dedicated researchers and engineers working to make businesses more accessible to the general public through Voice Tech. They create language technology tools for Indian languages, allowing businesses to communicate with their customers in their native tongue. Because Indian languages differ morphologically from English, special models must be developed to address the problems of agglutination and inflexion. Their core products make use of proprietary tools for voice recognition, text-to-speech, and natural language processing. IndiaSpeaks’ mission is to break down language barriers in the internet space and make services easily accessible to millions of Indian users.

Dfine Bio-innovations Pvt Ltd is a startup.

Divya Acharya, Afser Shariff, Lokesh Murthy KM, and Prathap M are the founders.

Dfine Bio-innovations Pvt Ltd is a Bangalore-based aspiring MedTech Start-up focused on the IVD Sector. Founded in December 2020, they believe they can provide affordable, cutting-edge diagnostic solutions to smaller clinical labs worldwide, manufactured locally. They see themselves as a major player in the rapidly changing healthcare industry. As a first product, they created a coagulation device to assist clinicians in understanding the patient’s bleeding and thrombotic tendencies.