Cisco has announced the opening of the application process for the second cohort of LaunchPad, scheduled to begin in April. LaunchPad is the networking major’s first open innovation accelerator programme for start-ups.

Three of the eight early-to-mid-stage start-ups that graduated from the first batch of LaunchPad, which kicked off in June 2016, are on the verge of closing funding rounds.

Analytics start-up IQLECT, founded by former Jabong CTO Sachin Sinha, is near to closing a Series A funding of $10 million. The start-up offers a real-time big-data analytics platform that is available as a Cloud-based software platform-as-a-service and a converged unified box for private/hybrid Cloud.

“What differentiates us from other players is the ability to offer real-time results that can be used by retailers for customer conversions or by BFSI and telecom providers for fraud detection,” Sinha told BusinessLine . The start-up had raised $3 million in seed funding from Exfinity Venture Partners and Redwood Capital.

VuNet, a next-gen IT infrastructure management product start-up, which hadraised ₹2 crore in angel investments, is due to close a pre-Series A round of ₹5 crore. Co-founder and CEO Ashwin Ramachandran, who was formerly a Product Architect at Infosys, said: “We have six customers who use our product for real-time insights into application, security and network performance, synthesised from a vast amount of data spread across network locations, devices, applications, storage, users, security devices and data centres.” NavStik Labs is a start-up that has built an Android-like platform for commercial drones, including flight computer and operating system, that allows developers to focus on building end-user apps without the bother of managing the complexities of making the drones work. It is close to raising half a million dollars in angel funding. “Most of our customers are outside India, as the government here is yet to come up with regulations for the use of drones,” said founder-CEO Nitin Gupta.

Astrome Technologies, Algo Engines, Torchfi, Teslon, HaltDos are the other start-ups that graduated from the four-month-long LaunchPad programme.

Amit Phadnis, President – Engineering and India Site Leader, Cisco, said: “The vision of LaunchPad is to accelerate India-based B2B start-ups in deep tech and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, security, IoT and analytics. Our aim is to accelerate start-ups that will digitise the next 3 billion people in an extremely short span of time by transforming promising ideas into reality.”

All of the eight start-ups received an equity-free grant of $10,000 each from Cisco, which made available $2 million worth of Cisco equipment to the start-ups to test and validate their products. “The start-ups also received GTM (go-to-market) guidance from our India, Asia-Pacific and Japan sales team with the intent to expand access to Africa and West Asia regions in future,” said Phadnis.

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