Meet The Finalists of Dubai Startup Hub's Smartpreneur Competition 6.0: Aiotize
"I feel that the best thing about Dubai is its acceptance of expatriates. We are a small Indian startup, and we are among the top 10 finalists for this competition, which in itself shows that the city welcomes foreign entrepreneurs with open arms."
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Aiotize is one of the top 10 startups pitching for prizes worth a total of AED150,000 at the finals of Dubai Startup Hub's Smartpreneur Competition 6.0, which will be staged as part of Entrepreneur Middle East's Enterprise Agility Forum 2022 at Expo 2020 Dubai on January 20, 2022. Register HERE to be a part of the event.
Shivansh Sethi founded Aiotize in Chandigarh, India, in 2018 with a mission to create a one-stop-shop for all artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-enabled requirements of governments and organizations. "Aiotize is a deep tech startup that provides automation and business intelligence to stakeholders for better situational awareness and aerial intelligence, by using state-of-the-art technologies," Sethi explains. "We create an autonomous system to deliver rapid situational awareness and aerial intelligence to the stakeholders of the enterprises and their production areas. We focus on the sectors of health, safety, environmental security and inspection by making their work and production environments efficient, reliable, safe, and versatile."
His visit to Dubai in September 2019 proved a game changer for the fledging startup. "I was working on the internet of things (IoT) technology stack for Aiotize, and I was in Dubai to conduct a market research and feasibility study for it," Sethi recalls. "But then I met Gustavo Carriconde during a meetup at Dubai Future Foundation's Area 2071. Gustavo was a pilot at Emirates Airline back then, and he was helping entrepreneurs enrolled in F6's startup accelerator StartupSpace.io. Being an aviation expert myself, I also took his suggestions and feedback regarding the unmanned aerial systems."
Sethi was left inspired to focus on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector, and following extensive research, to develop Aiotize's UAV system. "We are now working on empowering the UAV industry with our research in the latest technology and materials, which disrupts the conventional ecosystem of drones, UAVs, and remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS)," Sethi says. "The major development is amalgamation of drones and robotics with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, which are used to automate industrial workflows. At present, we are working in the B2B space, mainly with corporate clients, like DP World, a Dubai-based multinational logistics company, and Adani Ports and SEZ, an Indian integrated ports and logistics company, in order to automate and disrupt the conventional operations in the health, safety, and environmental sectors."
Source: Aiotize
Talking about the process of building his business, Sethi says that one of the most challenging aspects of his entrepreneurial journey has been in establishing trustful and effective partnerships with large corporations. "In corporates, the operations are designed in such a way that everything depends on the return on investment, whereas our startup culture is all about experimentation, and corporates are not much interested in that," Sethi says. "Startups working in deep technology, such as ours, don't have proven technologies, especially in a nascent stage, but we somehow managed to prove that our technology is disruptive, and that it has a lot of potential."
As one of the finalists of Dubai Startup Hub's Smartpreneur Competition 6.0, which will be staged as part of Entrepreneur Middle East's Enterprise Agility Forum 2022 at Expo 2020 Dubai on January 20, 2022, Sethi has one simple piece of advice on pitching for other contestants: call a spade a spade. To all of them, he adds, Dubai provides plenty of reasons to focus on winning and consequently further developing their businesses in the emirate. "I feel that the best thing about Dubai is its acceptance of expatriates," Sethi says. "We are a small Indian startup, and we are among the top 10 finalists for this competition, which in itself shows that the city welcomes foreign entrepreneurs with open arms."
Source: Aiotize
Plus, Sethi believes that Dubai is a market where disruptive startups can test their technologies on a wide and diverse customer base. "We plan to do proof-of-concept presentations for our potential industrial clientele here in order to give them an idea of the look and feel of how aerial intelligence can work within their production processes and on inspecting their own infrastructures." In addition, with the UAE Ministry of Economy introducing the Entrepreneurial Nation initiative to attract and support 20 startups valued at more than $US1 billion by 2031, Sethi concludes by saying that "in the UAE, no one can stop you from becoming an unicorn." He adds, "We have seen the best startups from around the world expanding to the Middle East for help, and the rest will be history."
Aiotize is one of the top 10 startups pitching for prizes worth a total of AED150,000 at the finals of Dubai Startup Hub's Smartpreneur Competition 6.0, which will be staged as part of Entrepreneur Middle East's Enterprise Agility Forum 2022 at Expo 2020 Dubai on January 20, 2022. Register HERE to be a part of the event.
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