Six startups graduate from Axis Bank innovation lab

 Private sector lender Axis Bank on Friday announced the graduation of six startups from its first startup accelerator programme at its innovation lab Thought Factory, which was launched a year ago.

Apart from providing a platform and mentoring startups, the bank also provided access to data and angel investors to fine-tune their pitches.

Axis Bank Executive Director Rajiv Anand said, “Of 108 applications that we received, we selected six startups across the country. The duration of the programme is three months, and we are planning to do at least two such programmes every year.”

Six startups that graduated from the accelerator programme are S2Pay, Pally, Perpule, FintechLabs, Paymatrix and Gieom.

The bank, apart from co-creating proof of concept with these startups, will also use some of the solutions that are developed by them. These six startups represent sectors in the FinTech space such as payments, investments, lending analytics and credit in rental space. Stressing on machine learning and artificial intelligence, Anand said the bank has been using technology to improve productivity to its customers.

Since its launch, Thought Factory, has been a major FinTech ecosystem enabler in the city, hosting multiple events, workshops and other corporate clients, thereby enhancing industry-startup collaboration. The Thought Factory team has collaborated with Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC Bank) and Visa Innovation Lab, Singapore and AWS, India, for co-innovating.

A Tech Advisory Board comprising Sharad Sharma of iSpirit, Manish Chokhani of Enam, Vishal Gondal of GoQii and Singapore-based serial entrepreneur Shankar Narayan, along with Axis Bank senior management form the think tank for Thought Factory.

Apart from the accelerator, Thought Factory also runs its in-house incubator where it is building a chatbot with Active AI (a Singapore-based startup specialising in AI stack), to provide speedy redressal of customer queries via chat.