Accel Announces its Atoms 3.0 Cohort: Meet the Next Wave of Disruptors in AI and Industry 5.0
BANGALORE, INDIA – 28th MARCH 2024 (TGN)– Accel, a leading global venture capital firm, today unveiled the 8 startups from the third cohort of its accelerator program, Atoms. The program’s first sector-focused cohort, Atoms 3.0, backs exceptional pre-seed startups building in the AI and Industry 5.0 domains.
Atoms represents Accel’s ongoing commitment to nurturing the most innovative founders from the earliest stages of their startup journey. Accel has been the first partner to many of India’s most successful, category-defining startups including Flipkart, Freshworks, Swiggy, Urban Company, Zetwerk, and Cure.fit. The Atoms program brings the best of Accel’s network and learnings from working with disruptive companies, to help pre-seed founders during the 0-to-1 journey. The third edition of the program, Atoms 3.0, shifted from being sector-agnostic to thematic, focusing on AI and Industry 5.0. Prayank Swaroop and Barath Shankar Subramanian, partners at Accel, lead the AI and Industry 5.0 domains respectively.
The four AI startups that are part of Atoms 3.0 are: Tune AI, a GenAI stack for enterprises; Skoob, a generative AI platform for reading; Meritic, a storytelling co-pilot for financial planning and analysis; and Arivihan, India’s first AI-based, fully automated learning platform. The two Industry 5.0 startups in this cohort are: Spintly, an IoT platform for smart buildings; and Asets, a multidisciplinary CAD, simulation and engineering design platform. The two remaining startups from the cohort are in stealth.
“The shift to a thematic program design for Atoms 3.0 has enabled us to provide deeper, sector-focused mentorship for the startups. Atoms has always restricted itself to smaller cohort sizes to stay hyper-focused on the needs of a smaller group of exceptional founders. We believe we have found the next wave of disruptors in AI and Industry 5.0, and the proof of this has been witnessing the growth of each of these startups since joining the program,” said Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel. “While AI presents an incredible opportunity, the pace of innovation in AI requires founders to have the right mindset for navigating this market. As part of Atoms 3.0, founders are also learning how to build that muscle for resilience and agility.”
The cohort was launched with a four-day long kickoff program that included an AI summit with over 200 AI founders and operators, and an Industry 5.0 customer connect. The Atoms 3.0 founders interacted with senior business and tech leaders from companies like Swiggy, Flipkart, Reliance, GitHub, Facilio, ITC, Diageo, Schneider, Aditya Birla Group, and Vedanta.
“”The zero-to-one journey presents the most formidable challenge for entrepreneurs, as every decision can completely alter the trajectory of your business. Our mission with Atoms is to ensure founders have the best odds at success and can make those mission-critical decisions with insight from the world’s best domain experts. Meetings facilitated via the program have helped the 3.0 founders onboard new, large customers,” says Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner at Accel. “The 6-month Atoms 3.0 journey is giving founders insight into critical 0-to-1 areas like hiring, getting your first 10 customers, or tuning your pitch for investors. Through one-on-one sessions with their domain leaders, the founders also get clarity on how to action those learnings and lay out their roadmap for each month.”
“Beyond the capital and learning sessions, being part of Atoms has given us a strong founder community and highly collaborative peer group – for instance, when Meritic is faced with a challenge we can turn to any other team at Accel LaunchPad, which is where we currently operate, or to anyone from Accel’s network of over 200 portfolio company founders, to arrive at a solution. The Founder Anonymous sessions have helped us open up to the cohort in an unfiltered manner and the GTM talks have been pivotal in shaping our B2B sales thinking,” said Pallavi Chakravorty, co-founder and CEO of Meritic.
Accel has held more than 100 learning sessions led by experts from companies like Google, AssemblyAI, and Langchain, mentor connects, and community gatherings across the Atoms cohorts. The 24 Atoms startups from Atoms 1.0 and 2.0 have together raised over $200 million in funding till date.
For more information on the Atoms program and future cohorts visit (Link)
More details about the startups in Accel Atoms 3.0:
Spintly
Founders: Rohin Parkar, Malcolm Dsouza
Website: https://spintly.com/
Domain: Industry 5.0
Spintly is an IoT platform that simplifies access control to commercial and residential buildings. Unlike traditional systems, Spintly uses a distributed IoT architecture and edge computing technology, which eliminates the need for heavy back-end infrastructure and enables smartphone-based door access to users. Spintly has eliminated 200k plastic badges and 2k miles for wired infrastructure from the built world and currently servers 300+ customers and 4k+ doors.
Asets
Founder: Ashwini Oke
Website: https://www.asets.io/
Domain: Industry 5.0
Canada-based Asets Inc has launched an AI-powered, first-of-its-kind cloud-based Integrated Design Suite™, a multidisciplinary CAD, simulation and engineering design platform that helps Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) and end-owner companies accelerate their early-stage engineering by 10x. Customers benefit from the rapid deployment of engineering resources, lowering effort time and costs related to engineering projects.
Tune AI
Founders: Anshuman Pandey, Naman Maheshwari, Rohan Pooniwala
Website: https://tunehq.ai/
Domain: AI
Tune AI is a GenAI stack for enterprises with solutions that include Tune Chat, an AI chat app with over 180,000 users and powerful models for text, code generation, and brainstorming, and Tune Studio, a comprehensive solution for fine-tuning, deploying, and managing the Gen AI model lifecycle and enabling data security with enterprise-grade compliance.
Skoob
Founder: Shubham Deva
Website: https://skoob.ai/
Domain: AI
Skoob is a generative AI platform which is revolutionizing the way readers interact with books. Instead of navigating through entire volumes, we harness the power of AI to dissect books into topic-centric sections. We are making knowledge consumption intuitive and user-friendly.
Arivihan
Founders: Ritesh Singh, Sonu Kumar Prashant, Rushabh Kothari
Website: https://arivihan.com/
Domain: AI
Arivihan is India’s 1st AI-based 100% Automated Learning Platform providing each unique school student with a personal tutor in their pocket at ?300 per month, guiding them in planning for their exams, teaching them with video lectures, talking to them, solving their queries instantly, and validating their knowledge by testing and improving them anytime they want, in the speed they require.
Meritic
Founders: Pallavi Chakravorty, Nipun Gupta, Swapnil Basak
Website: https://meritic.ai/
Domain: AI
Meritic is a storytelling co-pilot for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams to automate reporting and business analytics. Meritic combines the power of knowledge graphs and language models to do highly contextual analysis, collect qualitative insights, generate relevant commentaries and automate financial deck creation.
Two startups from the cohort are currently operating in stealth.
About Accel Atoms:
Atoms is Accel’s pre-seed accelerator program. Atoms founders receive up to $500k in funding, access to perks worth more than $5M, personalised mentorship, a strong peer community of early-stage founders, and access to Accel’s network of 200+ portfolio founders, industry buyers, and customers. The program shifted from being sector-agnostic to thematic in its latest edition, Atoms 3.0; partnering with exceptional startups in AI and Industry 5.0. For more information visit: https://atoms.accel.com
About Accel
Accel is a leading global venture capital firm that aims to be the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Accel has been operating in India since 2008, and its investments include companies like BookMyShow, BrowserStack, Flipkart, Freshworks, Cure.fit, Musigma, Mensa Brands, Myntra, Swiggy, Urban Company, Zetwerk, and Zenoti, among many others. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more information visit https://www.accel.com.
Quotes by Atoms 3.0 founders
“Beyond the capital and learning sessions, being part of Atoms has given us a strong founder community and highly collaborative peer group – for instance, when Meritic is faced with a challenge we can turn to any other team at Accel LaunchPad, which is where we currently operate, or to anyone from Accel’s network of over 200 portfolio company founders, to arrive at a solution. The Founder Anonymous sessions have helped us open up to the cohort in an unfiltered manner and the GTM talks have been pivotal in shaping our B2B sales thinking,” said Pallavi Chakravorty, co-founder and CEO of Meritic.
“We’ve been through many renowned accelerators. But what makes Atoms stand out above the others is its extremely engaging program design, which was enormously useful for us as early-stage founders – with sessions by subject matter experts and operators who have built successful companies. I’d recommend the program to anyone looking for mentorship in any area. Atoms accelerates growth exponentially, positioning pre-seed founders for long-term success,” said Naman Maheshwari, co-founder, Tune AI
“Accel Atoms should be the first choice for startups looking to raise pre-seed and seed capital. The accelerator’s program design which includes sessions on product market fit, GTM strategy and growth through marketing have helped us immensely. Further, the program gives us unparalleled access to a network with the best of the best, and we have great support from Accel’s investment team in general,” said Rohin Parkar, co-founder and CEO of Spintly.
Shubham Deva, Founder, Skoob.ai said, “Joining Accel Atoms has been instrumental in our journey at Skoob.ai, empowering us to redefine the reader-book relationship through AI. With guidance and mentorship from Accel, we can navigate crucial decisions with confidence, from team expansion to customer acquisitions and pitch presentations.”
“Accel Atoms hasn’t just been about accelerating our startup; it’s propelled our vision into reality alongside a community of believers, innovators, mentors, and supporters. It is where determination meets collaboration, ambition meets guidance, and dreams meet execution. We are not just building companies, we are shaping the future of engineering with Accel” said Ashwini Oke, Founder, Asets.
Ritesh Singh, Founder, Arivihan said, “Atoms has been significantly helpful in our growth in the last few months. We got connected with the right mentors & influencers which has helped us progress in the right direction. Atoms has also helped us find the right investors for the rest of the funds which helped us achieve targets on time.”Ends/ TGN