As a partner, Infineon is helping startups worldwide to turn their ideas into reality, offering semiconductor solutions and network building with decision makers to accelerate their ideas into business. Innovations across a range of applications are not limited to pure semiconductors but also encompass software and system designs that optimize performance and process efficiency. Some of the technologies under development include radar-based blood pressure sensors and low latency & always-on voice applications requiring high sensitivity to varied noise and audio inputs.
Vinay Shenoy, Managing Director, Infineon Technologies, India said, “Artificial intelligence has already found its way into many areas of our daily lives, which in turn impacts the way we work- on the one hand influencing our future product portfolio, and on the other hand elevating our way of working to a new level. AI is a valuable ally for achieving digital transformation as it helps faster analysis of complex digital data and generates valuable insights. This challenge has been a great platform as it leverages a wide array of experts and talent in this field to validate our hypothesis from multiple perspectives. We are proud to have Invest India as our partner for this program.”
Deepak Bagla, MD & CEO of Invest India, said, “Entrepreneurship is one of the underlying pillars of India’s growth story. It continues to create new jobs besides introducing new services, products, processes, and business models. The growth of the ecosystem is facilitated by initiatives like Startup India and AGNIi. These initiatives help in connecting the industry leaders with startups across the country to develop solutions for real-life problems. We are delighted to have partnered with Infineon for their AI Challenge- which has provided many promising entrepreneurs to showcase their capabilities”
Rohit Girdhar, VP Strategy M&A, Infineon Technologies Asia Pacific, elaborated, “We have been impressed by the quality of entries received for the inaugural edition of Infineon’s AI challenge. This is a testament to the rich pool of technology talent that India possesses. All three winning teams were able to demonstrate their innovative approach towards the problem statement and the readiness of their respective product for deployment. The winning solution will now be piloted by us and if successful, deployed across Infineon offices globally. We hope to continue working with the dynamic team at Invest India on similar challenges in the future.”
With the aim to offer an engaging solution to connect the digital with the real and provide Indian start-ups a platform to showcase their talent in the AI domain, Infineon launched the AI Challenge in December 2019. The challenge sought an Intelligent Document Finder tool that can provide easy and intelligent searches among the document files. The main idea behind this problem statement was to combine human tagging with an automated semantic search for efficient document finding.
The initiative was started in collaboration with Startup India and AGNIi and several preliminary rounds later, Infineon selected ten finalists from over 250 start-up applications. Young entrepreneurs from across the country submitted their solutions to a jury whose members included AI experts from Infineon.
Kalyankar Analytics Pvt Ltd won the challenge while Resonova Technologies Pvt Ltd secured the first runner-up spot. The second runner-up and a special category awarding Best All Women's Team included student groups from across the country. The winning teams were awarded gadgets worth INR 3 lakh, along with a paid pilot of INR 5 lakh and an opportunity to intern with Infineon Technologies India.
Infineon has been actively engaging with the startup and entrepreneur ecosystem in India since 2017. Over the past few years, the company has partnered with the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) at Niti Aayog and various incubators across India including Electropreneur Park, NSRCEL and AIC-Sangam to foster and nurture promising start-ups and drive tomorrow‘s solutions addressing some key societal concerns like climate change. Most recently, Infineon has been actively funding technology-based healthcare solutions developed by premier institutes to enable India to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
