Hyderabad: CIE at IIIT Hyderabad announced the onboarding of two startups Machstatz and eSkindoctor under Avishkar DeepTech accelerator cohort No. 11 & OJAS MedTech Accelerator cohort No. 5.

AVISHKAR deeptech is a 6-month cohort-based accelerator for emerging tech startups and OJAS MedTech is an accelerator for startups in life sciences, biotechnology, diagnostics, point of care devices for healthcare along with cutting edge emerging technologies facilitated by CIE@IIITH.

The accelerator brings together the deeptech expertise of IIITH’s research labs and technology mentoring opportunities that help startups build quality product/features within shorter timelines. The startups also go through a structured strategic business mentoring from Co-Creation Consulting, customer introductions and investor connect for follow-on round of investments. Medtech startups also get access to medtech consortium which includes clinicians, hospitals, pharma, biotech & manufacturing companies. Investment readiness of the cohort startups is a key deliverable for the 6-month programme.

A number of other ecosystem partners of IIITH also contribute towards the programme with business development services and tools. Prof Ramesh Loganathan, COO of CIE-IIITH said “Nurturing and growing early-stage tech startups has been our focus since we started CIE in 2008.  Over the years we have had 400 startups in the incubator and about 20 in our Accelerator programs”

For this cohort, 7 startups pitched for OJAS Accelerator and 9 startups pitched for the Deeptech accelerator. The Investment Committee panel included professors, clinicians, angel investors and other ecosystem partners.

“We are very happy to onboard eSkindoctor Healthtech private Limited, focused on Dermatology and is using Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning algorithms to address the gap in availability of doctors by improving the accuracy and efficiency in triaging skin condition”, says Dr. Sonali Khanra, Head OJAS Medtech BioNEST, IIIT Hyderabad.

She adds that skin diseases pose significant threat to patients’ well-being, mental health, ability to function, and social participation, a measure of disability defined broadly by the WHO. Technology interventions in early screening and diagnosis in low resource setting towards delivering high quality care are essential in improving the burden of skin diseases.