Emerging tech to get a boost in 2018

Deep tech, a term increasingly quoted by investors, is used to describe start-ups or companies whose business is built around unique, differentiated—often protected or hard to reproduce—technological or scientific advances. As for the innovation in emerging technologies and deep tech, India is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to the quantum of innovative products and solutions, primarily due to the lack of requisite expertise and talent, investor risk appetite and founders’ need for early revenue generation. In 2018, Indian tech companies will primarily innovate for domestic market: Globally, young companies in the emerging technologies space are innovating and developing intellectual property with wide, global adoption potential. Be it Bite.ai’s two-member team that used advanced clustering algorithms and proprietary support vector machines to vectorize and classify over a million photographs in just two weeks, or Underwrite.ai’s use of AI advancements in genomics and particle physics to provide lenders with non-linear, dynamic models of credit risk that radically outperform traditional approaches in the banking sector, or SingularityNET’s aim to solve interoperability issue of AI leading the way for data collaboration, especially for IoT products and solutions—there are rapid advancements and innovation by small teams in various areas of emerging technologies. Be it India Stack’s Unified Payments Interface and further ‘API-sation’ of banking and payments infrastructure, Metro Bikes’ customization of the global success of dockless bicycle sharing through scooter sharing in India, Reverie Technologies’ language-as-a-service platform—for transliteration, input, localization and multi-lingual search—developed for Indic languages—all these initiatives and companies are using emerging technologies such as AI/ML and IoT to solve India-specific problems.