UK calling city start-ups

The city soared high at the grand finale of the fourth India-UK TECH Rocketship Awards held recently at the India-UK Createch Summit in Mumbai. Two Hyderabad-based start-ups, Paymatrix and Ayasta emerged winners in their respective categories amongst 300 applicants. The TECH Rocketship Awards is an initiative of the United Kingdom’s Department of International Trade, that seeks to bring together budding Indian entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from the UK under one platform for better business opportunities.

Ravi Teja A., one of the founders and the director of Ayasta Technologies that won in the Internet of Things (IoT) category, elaborates on the awards’ procedure, “The judges selected one winner from each of the seven categories — Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, IoT, Fintech, Agritech, Meditech, and Cybersecurity — after the final round of pitching our ideas. The winners will get the opportunity to pitch at London Tech Week in June.”

Ravi further added, “Winning this award is a great privilege and provides us with a unique opportunity to globalise our work with the UK as the base. Gaining access to the UK market will help accelerate not only revenues but also our product roadmap. We are specifically looking at working with some of the big energy and utility companies present in the UK. Our mission is to digitise the electrical stack. We help companies identify anomalies in the electrical arena and help prevent failures.” Notably, Ayasta Technologies was started last year by Ravi and his two partners, Saideep Reddy and Raghu Kumar. “Saideep and I are classmates and have known each other for 10 years now,” mentions Ravi.

Another T-Hub protégé, Paymatrix, lead by Mukesh Chandra Anchuri, Anusha Kurupathi Parambil and Muralidhar Nayak, was named the winner in the Fintech category. Paymatrix is an online rent payment and collection platform, which also lends credit for rent deposits. Elaborating on how the platform was started, Anusha says, “House rentals have always been a big unorganised market in India, with 70 per cent of transactions happening in cash. We wanted to tap into the market and organise it when we first started it in 2015. In 2016, we became a part of T-Hub’s facility. Post demonetisation, things started to pick up as landlords and tenants were more willing to transact digitally.” Like the Ayasta team, Anusha and her Paymatrix colleagues are eagerly awaiting the upcoming interaction in London, which is sure to open up a whole new world of opportunities for the entrepreneurs.