Bits’n’bytes: Know about business events in Pune

Legrand India inaugurated its 12th state-of-the-art experience centre Innoval, housing the entire range of Legrand’s products including the newly launched connected offering, in Pune. Innoval is Legrand’s global brand of product showcases

Sistema.bio invests Rs200 million in biogas plant manufacturing unit in Pune

Light Information Systems announced receipt of Series A investment of $5.4 million led by Pavestone Ventures. (REPRESENTATIVE PHOTO)

Mexico-based social enterprise Sistema.bio, a provider of high-quality anaerobic digestion technology to smallholder farmers, has invested ₹200 million in its first biogas plant manufacturing unit in Pune.

The production facility is spread across 20,000 sq. ft. across 25 acres. By December 2021, Sistema.bio India aims to achieve a capacity of manufacturing 2,000 biodigesters per month, and achieve full capacity of the unit by March 2022.

Camilo Pages, co-founder and chief production officer of Sistema.bio said, “We incorporated Sistema.bio India as an Indian entity in 2018 because we understood the country’s huge potential for biogas plants. The Pune facility will have the capacity to manufacture 30,000 biodigesters in a year and will help us cater to farmers across Asia and, in the near future, Africa.”

Piyush Sohani, managing director, Sistema.bio India said, “With the vision to serve smallholder dairy farmers in the furthest corners of the country, we are now moving towards manufacturing our biodigesters in India to ensure that our products are even more affordable for the farmers and are available throughout the year. We will also export biodigesters made in India to African and South-Asian countries.”

Legrand India inaugurates Innoval in Pune

Legrand India inaugurated its 12th state-of-the-art experience centre Innoval, housing the entire range of Legrand’s products including the newly launched connected offering, in Pune. Innoval is Legrand’s global brand of product showcases. The centre will host its India group company products – Legrand, Numeric and Valrack.

Innoval’s design approach is based on the concept of Designeering. The purpose of this centre is to support all partners (investors, system integrator, architects, panel builder, end customer) by helping them to acquire new skills in order to better understand the market.

Tony Berland, CEO and managing director, Legrand India said, “Customers are evolving and becoming more involved towards the product they are buying. This is a great way to establish dialogues with these new-age modern customers and to showcase new offers.”

E42 raises $5.4 million in Series A round

Light Information Systems announced receipt of Series A investment of $5.4 million led by Pavestone Ventures. Their no code AI platform, E42, has fuelled enterprise cognition by automating complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive processes so that they no longer require human intervention. The automation is powered by multifunctional cognitive agents or “AI Co-worker”, which enterprises can create and customise on the E42 platform based on their needs.

The Pune-based company, founded in 2012 by Animesh Samuel and Sanjeev Menon, makes process-centric and people-centric automation easier across verticals by driving human-like cognition across these processes.

Animesh Samuel, CEO, Light Information System said, “The funding will help us strengthen our research and partner ecosystems and help us scale and serve enterprises across geographies. We believe that an AI-driven strategy will be at the core of every business to succeed. We want to help these organisations in mapping out this strategy with the help of our multifunctional cognitive agents / AI Co-worker which will help these businesses succeed by optimising profits while reducing time-consuming and difficult processes. We want to open up our easy to deploy, maintain and migrate no code platform to enterprises and partners globally.”

WebEngage Startup Program: Edition 2

New-age retention operating system ‘WebEngage’ has announced the launch of second edition of WebEngage Startup Program, a growth accelerator for early-stage B2C startups.

WebEngage has launched this Startup Programme with an objective to help startups nail the customer experience right from first impression, on boarding to post purchase. This year the programme will be open for startups across E-Commerce, D2C, Marketplaces, EdTech and FinTech segments.

Applicants can enrol themselves free of cost by visiting https://webengage.com/startup-program. Applications close on 25th November, 2021. Once shortlisted, 50 startups will have a dedicated team of WebEngage advisors coach them accelerate their business.

Selected startups will get access to WebEngage’s comprehensive Marketing Automation Suite with credits worth $25,000 for a period of six months. Members of the programme will get to participate in masterclasses on best practices in retention and engagement so that they can pave a path to accelerated growth.

Avlesh Singh, co-founder & CEO, WebEngage, says, “Through the program, we aim to help startups to lay the groundwork for long-term retention, in setting the right dashboards and running highly personalised engagement across channels.”

ASTRA 2022 programme: apply by November 26

Applied Ventures has announced the third cohort of the ASTRA (Applied Start-up Technology and Research Accelerator) programme to collaborate with start-ups and to provide support in accelerating their innovations. Interested start-ups are invited to apply here by November 26, 2021.

This cohort will focus on start-ups in the areas of life sciences, semiconductor and display manufacturing technologies, advanced optics and photonics, resilient supply chain, sensors, advanced materials, industry 4.0, and AI hardware. The finalists will be considered for collaboration with Applied Materials and investment from Applied Ventures.

Applied Materials India will act as a consultant to the selected start-ups for addressing market and technology challenges and to explore potential scale-up pathways. The selected companies will also have access to the Applied infrastructure and ecosystem connect through this engagement.

Om Nalamasu, President, Applied Ventures, said, “The mature and growing Indian high technology and entrepreneurial landscape is a great place for us to identify new white space opportunities focused on disruptive innovation with new products and business models.”