Like every year, the NetApp team is once again gearing up for their NetApp Excellerator Demo Day set to be held on July 20. The event will shed light on the latest innovations in the world of data, cloud and AI, with startups from across the globe and spanning across industries from edtech, healthtech to even climate change.

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The startups that will proceed to showcase their solutions at the Demo Day are Kubermatic, LivNSense Technologies, AccuKnox, ShardSecure, Sktreamingo, RXOOM, Subconscious Compute, and EduFuse. Here’s a glimpse at the problems they are solving:

Kubermatic | 2016 | Sebastian Scheele and Julian Hansert

Germany-based Kubermatic was born to ease and harmonise services in organisations which aim to scale with digital solutions. The founders noticed that even though many innovative cloud-native technologies including but not limited to containers and Kubernetes help speed up development cycles and boost application performance, organisations which seek to adopt these cutting-edge technologies struggle with complexity that quickly explodes as the size of the installations grows. To that end, Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform harmonises all elements of organisations’ IT landscape while providing best-in-class open source components with the flexibility to swap.

The solution was propelled to the spotlight due to the growth of cloud computing and the pandemic, which accelerated digitisation. Speaking about their experience in the NetApp Excellerator program, the duo said, “NetApp focuses on innovative and high-growth technologies like Kubernetes and makes the programme stand out from many others. To us, the key highlight of the programme is its comprehensiveness, ranging from business and technology membership to investor connects and grants.”

LivNSense Technologies | 2018 | Avnish Kumar, Priyanka Kumar, and Ajatashatru Singh

The threat of climate change is growing bigger every year and limiting global warming within 1.5°C above pre industrial levels can avoid the most dangerous and irreversible effects of climate change. Global GHG emissions are currently at about 33 gigatons of CO2e, as per IEA report. These emissions are due to a combination of Input Energy and Process Emissions (Chemical or Thermal) which generates Co2 emissions in the environment from key sectors like chemicals, cement, and metals. LivNSense has taken up an ambitious mission to impact 100 Mega Tons of GHG emissions across each of the energy-intensive industries with the world's first Green-AI Platform, GreenOps™.

GreenOps™ harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Twins Metaverse with its innovative “Energy Balance” proposition to reduce carbon emissions and make the planet greener. It is a SaaS-based decarbonisation platform that leverages AI and Process Digital Twins to measure, track, simulate, and optimise CO2 emissions in real time. “GreenOps™ would integrate into these technologies in the future as a full stack decarbonisation platform for comprehensive ‘energy balance’ across electrical energy, combustion, and chemical process emissions.” revealed Avnish Kumar, Founder and CEO, LivNSense. Speaking about NetApp, he noted that NetApp’s usage of data fabrics among other technologies such as AI, distributed enterprise, and security provided them an opportunity to consider certain technology elements that can help in future scalability and performance.

AccuKnox | 2020 | Asif Ali, Nat Natraj, Phil Porras, and Rahul Jadhav

With AccuKnox, the founders are solving the problem of run-time Kubernetes/Cloud Security, preventing advanced attacks. While simple threats can be handled by basic security tools offered by the cloud providers, advanced threats are sophisticated. Since the Solarwinds and Log4J breaches, Zero Trust has become an imperative for most organisations and governments. Zero Trust security shifts the focus from trying to identify what is bad and stopping it, to identifying what is good and allowing it.

AccuKnox delivers Zero Trust run-time security for public and private clouds, for modern / greenfield (Kubernetes, k8) workloads and for legacy / brownfield (virtual machine, bare metal) workloads, along with current (cloud) and future (IoT/Edge, 5G) platforms. The solution protects network, application, and data in the most automated manner, and leverages seminal inventions (15+ patents) in container security, anomaly detection (leveraging unsupervised learning), and data security. Speaking about the NetApp Excellerator program, Nat Natraj, Co-founder and CEO, AccuKnox said, “NetApp has been able to bring unique skills in the areas of cloud cost management, cloud data orchestration that are very relevant to our strategies.”

ShardSecure | 2019 | Bob Lam, Lou Steinberg, Christer Roslund, and Jesper Tohmo

ShardSecure’s Microshard technology was invented to keep control of the data in the hands of data owners, regardless of where it’s stored, while making it unintelligible and of no value to unauthorised users. It works by shredding unstructured and structured data into four-byte, which are too small to contain sensitive data. The microshards are mixed with poison/dummy data into multiple logical containers that are then distributed to multiple, customer-provided storage locations.

The founders shared that secure cloud adoption has been their biggest growth driver. “Improved business continuity enabled by our self-healing data has been an important value driver. Particularly in Europe, the control that data owners have of their data helps considerably to address privacy concerns relative to data residency and data sovereignty,” shared Bob Lam, Co-founder and CEO, ShardSecure. As part of Cohort 10, the team felt that the access they received to all relevant software solutions, technical documentation, and support staff were the key highlights.

Streamingo | 2015 | Vinay T S and Vidhya T V

Vinay T S and Vidhya T V, who each come with over 20+ years of experience in product development, noticed how video is quickly becoming an ubiquitous and rich source of data. But video data wasn’t being used as a key ingredient in Business Intelligence Solutions around the world. This led the founders to launch Streamingo Solutions in 2015, which automates the processing of video data, fine analysis of multiple nuances of data inside the video, and conversion of unstructured content in the videos into a ready-to-use structured format. The aim was to ensure that video data collection, data preparation, and data analysis on video is simplified to the extent that multiple market segments will benefit from the same.

Leveraging deep learning algorithms specifically in the area of computer vision, text processing and speech processing, the duo noticed how the advanced technologies they used to build their product are starting to see general availability status in the last 12 months. Speaking about the NetApp Excellerator program, the duo praised how the program helped them through relevant mentorship and access to the comprehensive NetApp ecosystem.

RXOOM Healthcare | 2019 | Sanjay Sawwalakhe and Nilesh Kurwale

It isn’t a secret that there is a lack of effective and affordable advanced surgical systems in India to service the needs of the poor. Sanjay Sawwalakhe and Nilesh Kurwale saw the need to create powerful tools using the latest technology available and make power-packed products using the latest advancements in HW, SW Electronics, and SW algorithms, and RXOOM Healthcare was born.

“We have an opportunity to leapfrog over the western world and make surgical tools available worldwide at an affordable cost and improve availability even in rural areas. Our NeuroSAPIR Neuronavigation product matches the best in the world, feature for feature, " revealed Sanjay Sawwalakhe, Co-founder, RXOOM Healthcare. It is a customisable solution in the hands of the neurosurgeon, easy to set up, and designed to be in good condition even in rural or hostile set-ups. It is fault-tolerant with built-in context-sensitive direction. Sanjay added that several proprietary and unique algorithms, and image processing building blocks are being deployed in the making of the solution. Looking back at their journey with NetApp, Sanjay remarked, “NetApp is the industry leader in storage and cloud and our product NeuroSapir uses a petabyte of imaging data (MRI/CT) that needs backup/ restored in real-time with minimal latency is key. We are planning to leverage Netapp HIPAA-compliant cloud storage with caching architecture for our solution.”

SubCom (Subconscious Compute) | 2020 | Anter Virk and Dilawar Singh

Despite increased IT spending on endpoint security, 70 percent of successful breaches originate there. It is impossible to identify, isolate, and remediate threats in real-time. With 500 billion connected devices in use by 2030, incessant attacks will overwhelm our systems, and existing solutions will prove highly inadequate in combating these hyper-efficient attacks.

Anter Virk and Dilawar Singh founded SubCom in December 2020, where they have developed an ultra-light solution that can be deployed even on very low resource footprint IoT devices. “We process network, filesystem, application, and kernel events in near real-time and compute a security score for devices and users. This security score enables us to automate security for data and devices in real-time. Our proprietary 'Habituation Neural Fabric' enables us to process events across the network, filesystems, applications, etc, in real-time,” revealed Anter Virk, Co-founder and CEO, SubCom. At NetApp, the duo found a lot of support through the mentors and they feel that NetApp's strength will help them tremendously in conceptualising, testing, and scaling their solution.

EduFuse | 2022 | Rahul Raj, Anjali Kumari, and Sandip Kishore

Most educational institutions have an inefficient and incoherent process of arranging and coordinating sensitive files and crucial details. It is critical for academic data to be organised and compiled through automated systems. When it comes to data processing, due to human intervention often it is found to be incorrect, inaccurate, and sometimes incomplete which can lead the whole process to a massive error and the whole process could fall into the abyss. These are the challenges that EduFuse hopes to solve through digitisation, process re-engineering, automation and innovative analytics.

The platform derives an institutional framework from the National Standard Institutions and provides system requirement specifications with customised solutions on the digital platform. “As an emerging startup, we needed mentorship and exposure from industry leading experts who are already working in the product domain. And that’s what NetApp gave us,” Rahul Raj, Co-founder, EduFuse shared.