RITU JHA
In what has now become a regular highlight of the TiEcon entrepreneurial conference, noted venture capitalist Tim Draper was once again the judge at the TiE50 startup competition, the winners of which will feature in season 5 of the TV show Meet The Drapers.
One of the three winners at the TiE50 this year was Dr Chinmay Soman, co-founder and CEO of EarthSense. The company creates robotics and AI-powered technologies for helping manage the planet better, including creating better crops, enabling large-scale regenerative agriculture, and more.
“It’s an amazing honor to get the TiE50 Award, and especially to be selected by Tim Draper to pitch on Meet the Drapers,” Soman told indica News.
“This is an unparalleled recognition of the hard technical and commercial challenges that the EarthSense team is tackling,” Soman said. “Based on our success at TiECon, we’ve had an influx of interest from potential investors and new customers.”
The other two winners who will get to pitch on Meet The Drapers were Forest Devices and Synthara.
Vipul Singhal, TiE50 awards program chair, said 10 companies pitched to Tim Draper who selected three. However, Draper said he would also be looking at the pitch deck of all the TiE50 winners.
Singhal said hundreds of companies applied this year from 10 different countries, and around 25 percent of the companies were from India.
Asked what the companies’ focus areas were, Singhal said they were focused on sustainability, robotics for hard-to-do jobs such as sewer cleaning in the third world countries, crop planting and monitoring, EdTech/VR for education, re-skilling and training.
“There are definitely some mini-unicorns in making,” Singhal said.
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