Esri India partners with AGNIi to roll-out ‘GeoInnovation’

Esri India, country’s Geographic Information System (GIS) software and solutions provider, has announced GeoInnovation 2022 – an acceleration platform for startupreneurs, in partnership with AGNIi (Invest India). GeoInnovation program aims to help start-ups leverage Location Intelligence technology to build new businesses.

As per Geospatial “Artha” Report, India’s geospatial economy has the potential to grow to ₹63,100 crore by 2025 with a CAGR of 12.8%. GIS ecosystem in India has been growing steadily over the past few years. In addition, recent government policies like liberalization of geospatial data & new drone policy have laid the foundation of new Geo-enabled era, which is opening a huge opportunity for start-ups.

GeoInnovation 2022 would be divided into three phases

Phase 1 - Applications Phase (ending on 25th Jan 2022)
Phase 2 – Technical guidance and business focused mentorship from Esri India, AGNIi and Funding companies (Feb – March 2022)
Phase 3 – Business pitch (April 2022)

On the occasion, Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India, said, “Now is the right time to make bold transformations, aided by GIS technology & data, start-ups can aim to develop solutions that solve critical problems. With this partnership with AGNii, we want to make Location Intelligence Technology available to every start-up in India and pave way for its large-scale adoption. This program will enable brightest talents in start-up community of India to build specialized businesses leveraging the power of Mapping and Location Intelligence.”

The start-ups working across sectors including agriculture, healthcare, security, smart cities, water management, utilities, retail, BFSI, among others, would be able to benefit from this program.

Rahul Nayar - Head, AGNIi Mission, said, “AGNIi is excited to partner with Esri on the GeoInnovation 2022. This unique program will ensure that the Startups who are looking to create their own IP can add location intelligence and Geo-Enable their offering. The Government’s liberalization of geospatial data regulatory frameworks will fire up India’s innovation ecosystem – democratizing Indian innovators’ access to this crucial data asset. Via the GeoInnovation 2022 program, the AGNIi Mission will partner with Indian geospatial technology start-ups, enterprise, and researchers, to explore how our innovators can transform enterprise, economy, and governance.”

With the 3rd largest Start-up ecosystem in world and more than 50 unicorns created in 2021 alone, India is certainly on its way to become the Start-up superpower of the world. Within this ecosystem, the technology led Start-ups have doubled to about 9000+ Start-ups and 1600 new tech Start-ups emerged in 2021.

Girish Shivani, Executive Director and Fund Manager, YourNest, said, “As we enter 2022, followed by a benchmark year for Indian start-ups, we are extremely excited to be part of GeoInnovation. The GIS market is driven by the adoption of cloud, AI/ML, AR & VR as well as other emerging technologies, and this is exactly what our focus has been at YourNest.”

Esri India actively works with start-ups to provide them with an early-stage technology support. DronaMaps, Saartha Labs, Genesis Ray and iSpatial Techno Solutions are some of the successful start-ups that participated in earlier GeoInnovation Programs.