The second day of RAISE 2020 virtual summit was eventful, notably with the AI Startup Pitch Fest that featured the winners from Aatmanribhar AI Solutions Challenge. The list of winners included 15 startups spanning across six categories, namely healthcare, agriculture, education, NLP, mobility and 'others'. The AI Startup Pitch Fest, hosted by Shraddha Sharma, founder of YourStory, had an eminent panel consisting of MeitY secretary Ajay Sawhney, Atal Innovation Mission Director R. Ramananan, Special Secretary and Financial Advisor to MeitY Jyoti Arora and NegD and Digital India CEO Abhishek Singh.

The Startup Pitch Fest featured many notable names in India's AI ecosystem, including Haptik, Embibe, SigTuple, Uncanny Vision and Intello Labs. However, the stand out pitches in the event did belong to some of the new and upcoming startups in the space, echoing Abhishek's Singh's words, that the session was for dreamers. 

Amongst the pitches, one of the most remarkable ones was Cogniable. Founded by the husband-wife duo of Manu Kohli and Swati Kohli, Cogniable offers autism screening and intervention in children with the power of AI. Manu and Swati, being the parents of an autistic child, was motivated from their own hardship in creating Cogniable. Other winners in the education category were Embibe and Hind AI labs.

Sasikaladevi N, an AI researcher and academician, presented LungXpert, which immediately won praises from the panellist and the viewers alike, with Ajay Sawhney calling it a phenomenal innovation. LungXpert uses image recognition technology on black and white X-rays to provide early detection of various cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases. The other startups in the healthcare category, SigTuple, with its microscopy solution, and Aritvatic with its integrated health insurance solution, also stood out. 

R. Ramananan pointed out that healthcare needs more effort from the tech community, not just to diagnose existing conditions but also to find other things that elude us. Abhishek Singh stated the need to transform these solutions to a production setting, where the impact can be of benefit to billions of people. Jyoti Arora announced that there would be new funding programs coming from MeitY, that will promote and support frugal innovations with AI.

In the NLP category, the winners were Haptik, Rezo AI, Enixta, Devanangiri and Gnani AI. While the first three built their products around chatbots and virtual assistants, Devanangiri and Gnani gained attention for their focus on speech and text translation systems for Indian languages. Gnani AI, a speech to speech translation system currently supports 12 Indian languages, making it an important player in the space for achieving the goal of closing the language barrier in the country with AI. 

The mobility section featured Nayan, Uncanny Vision and Roadmetrics, while the 'others' segment winners were Sequretek, GingerMind, Sirena and Matisoft Cyber Security Labs. 

Agriculture was another important segment that featured Intello Labs and TartanSense. However, it was Megara Robotics' coconut tree climbing and harvesting robot that won the hearts of both panellists and other winners, with the founders of TartanSense taking extra effort to mark their appreciation for Megara's founder Rajesh Kannan.

"If you the problems for the bottom of the pyramid in India, you can solve the problems for the rest of the world," noted Sawhney during his the event. With so many solutions for the social and economic challenges facing us, these innovations and inventions certainly mark that India's AI journey is in the right direction.