CIOInsider India Magazine

Women-led businesses are playing a major role in society by generating employment opportunities in the country, bringing in demographic shifts, and inspiring the next generation of women founders. There are 22-27 million jobs created by the 63 million MSMEs owned by female tech entrepreneurs in India. According to the annual report of the Ministry of MSME, rural areas have 22.24 percent of women-owned enterprises, while urban areas have 18.42 percent, significantly contributing to the national economy. Fifty percent of women-led startups in India are filling market wants and generating massive employment. Forty-five percent of rural Indian women started a business to fulfill an unmet need. Here are the top five women-driven deep tech startups in 2024.

Ethx
Ethx is one of the first Indian Ethereum exchanges. Tarusha Mittal, an entrepreneur, started it to create a user-friendly exchange that was fast and secure and also served as a wallet. It is a complete blockchain suite that creates turnkey solutions for small and medium enterprises and also provides knowledge and financial inclusion. Users will have the chance to contribute their spare computing power to a central network, which will then give them tokens, which they can use to buy fiat. Information and assets are facilitated via micropayments by enterprises and publishers hosting data and applications on this internet. It's free of restrictions, ads, decentralization, and democratic.

The start-up is working on a crypto point-of-sale system and a physical card-based system, allowing users to pay with a swipe of a card or a button to buy goods and services. From the roughly 850,000 users they've picked up in the past seven months, Mittal expects Ethx to hit five million users in 2019.

Pratilipi: Bridging the Language Gap
The largest online platform in India connects readers and writers in English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati, and Kannada. The marketplace is a self-publishing platform for writers and a discovery, reading, and purchasing platform for readers. Over 53,000 writers and 3.3 million readers claim to be the largest self-publishing platform for the Indian language.

“Pratilipi is a (user-generated content, or UGC) reading and writing platform for the next billion internet users who hail from the small towns and villages of India. It’s a storytelling platform for Indian languages," says Shally Modi, co-founder, Pratilipi.

More than 16 million tales are read every month on Pratilipi. As of now, the company has approximately 65,000 writers who are writing on the platform in eight Indian languages. Modi adds that stories could be written fiction, audio, or visual.

Ossus Biorenewables: Clean Energy from Wastewater
Banglore-based startup Ossus Biorenewables mainly focuses on clean, carbon-free energy and the recovery of green chemicals from wastewater are the focus. They're doing it with bH2 Plus, a tech that uses specially designed microbial cell factories to make biohydrogen and metals from renewable sources like industrial waste, sewage and polluted water bodies. It's possible to retrofit storage tanks and effluent treatment facilities or even rehabilitate polluted waterways.

Ossus Biorenewables was founded by Suruchi Rao and Shanta Rao in 2017 and is currently demonstrating their technology's capability to generate value from the so-called produced water. Ossus is working on the first pilot slated for Bengaluru with upstream oil and gas companies like Shell and ONGC. By early 2019, Ossus hopes to establish a base in the U.S.

Ossus Biorenewables is among the 12 startups that are part of the sixth edition of Qualcomm Design in India Challenge (QDIC), an initiative to encourage design houses and product companies to invent useful and innovative hardware product designs incorporating Qualcomm SoC platforms and technologies. Under the mentorship of industry experts, the startup can convert its design submissions into workable prototypes using the Qualcomm Innovation Lab infrastructure.

Multibhashi
The language learning startup Multibhashi uses technology to teach English and other Indian languages via cloud, streaming video, real-time chat, and gamification. Corporate training and localization of content in local languages for rural outreach and marketing businesses are some of the services MultiBhashi undertakes. Multibhashi teaches 11 Indian languages, including English, Hindi, and nine regional languages, using a mobile application. While users can sign up for free for some limited content, they can later upgrade to blended learning models, which involve self-learning plus virtual tutor-led learning. The premium courses can cost anywhere between 200 and 5,000. Chatbots and community learning features are used for an immersive experience.

Multibhashi founder Anuradha Agarwal says, “The Company is committed to teaching job-related English communication skills to the next billion online users. We fully comprehend that a task of this magnitude can only be accomplished through the use of technology. The android app intended to impart English education not only offers self-paced learning materials in the learner's mother tongue but also allows him/her to virtually connect with a tutor who speaks his/her mother tongue and teaches English over a video/voice call.”

The company has recently added a chatbot and a voice assistant to the app. Furthermore, they've begun work on a community component that will allow people to interact with each other, share their English-related issues, suggest solutions, and even enjoy engaging content in English, all of which will enhance their familiarity with the language.

Ziroh Labs: Securing Your Data
Ziroh Labs is a data security and privacy technology startup that focuses on cutting-edge encryption techniques. The startup provides a cloud-based file storage architecture. It allows you to securely store and share personal and office files, integrate with file storage providers, and even be deployed on-premise.

Surabhi Das, founder and chief legal officer, Ziroh Lab says, “We ensure that the data stored in the computers is always encrypted and at the same time operable. The issue of privacy is fundamental; if we fail to safeguard the confidentiality of information, this community is in jeopardy. Ziroh Labs was formed to solve this problem.”