Oz startups keen on setting up ops in Hyd

Hyderabad: For cross border collaboration and knowledge transfer among startups based out of different geographies, the governments at the Centre and the State in India should introduce innovation and growth friendly policies, say startups from Australia.

From the past 10 months, Australian startups are in the city as part of the first cohort of the Big Leap Incubator programme launched by Australia-based digital marketing agency, Arrow Digital in partnership with Hyderabad-based innovation centre, T-Hub and La Trobe University.

Speaking exclusively with Bizz Buzz, Jasmine Batra, Director, Arrow Digital, and Programme Director of the Big Leap Accelerator programme, said: “Cross border collaboration and knowledge transfer bolsters innovation. As a progressive nation making huge strides in digitisation, India can set an example by breaking the barriers to build business beyond borders.”

Currently, international startups have to collaborate with startups here to establish an India founding team for carrying out business in the Indian market, Batra informed stating further that there is a need for making international startups accessible to the Application Programming Interface (API) as available to local companies besides putting in place a streamlined process to gain that access.

“API allows two separate programmes and databases to communicate with each other using requests and responses. For example, a programme requiring access to publicly available government data. While access to APIs are easily available to local companies, that is not the case for us. We request the government to streamline the process, through which international startups can also gain access to APIs,” she said.

Will HQ, a startup from Australia, founded by Brendan Murphy and Vern Chan, is exploring various metro cities for setting up its base and like-minded entrepreneur to partner with. Will HQ enables users to complete their will in a seamless online session including digital signature and witnessing, video recording of the session, encryption, storage and distribution.

Chan said: “We make will-writing simple, accessible, inexpensive, with automatic prompts to review and update, ability to communicate the will to heirs and executors, and practical elimination of fraud, damage or loss of document. We see India as a huge market with vast opportunities for our platform.”

To a query about the support these startups expect from the government, Batra said that the Telangana government should extend the Government as the first customer policy to international companies looking to set up office and generate employment in Telangana.

“We could run a pilot with the government to create a global precedent whereby Telangana could become the first State to implement an innovative digital service, we believe is becoming essential due to increasing asset values and changing legislation. The government can take a level ahead leading in policy formulation and then becoming an early adopter of the solution. In other words, Telangana could change the world in a very specific way with economic and social implications,” Batra added.

Australia-based Tech Ideaz, co-Founded by Devini Goonetilleke, said its the application Fabinet, a B2B and B2C service allows real-time transaction with businesses and/or personal users to manage personal records collection and sharing in real-time.

“For a population as that of India cybersecurity and safeguarding personal records is a mighty task. Our platform is best suited for the Indian market and which other city than Hyderabad is the thriving place to start operations,” she said.

The third Australian startup Linkmate, a peer-to-peer social network founded by David Titeu has partnered with Radha Gautam as India founding team. Their startup is designed for providing emotional support.