NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Aindra Systems, an early-stage startup, has secured backing by Villgro, the Social Enterprise Incubator focused on funding startups having a social impact. Villgro is associated with The Rockefeller Foundation, The Lemelson Foundation, Citi Foundation among others. Aindra Systems, founded in late 2012 by Adarsh Natarajan, an IIM Bangalore graduate, is developing an affordable device that can be deployed in resource-constrained settings to assist with screening and detection of cervical cancer. Aindra Systems is collaborating with Kidwai Memorial Institute of Oncology and IIT Mandi to build the device.

The genesis of Aindra Systems was when they were presented with a unique challenge of automating the hitherto manual and time consuming student attendance and then digitizing this data. Aindra built an artificial intelligence-based solution involving computer vision to capture and automate student attendance data and push the digitised data to the School Management System. This product that can be deployed on smartphones and tablets, uses Face Recognition to identify students and is generating a lot of interest in markets outside of India as well.