Chennai-based
social enterprise incubator Villgro on Tuesday announced it had made
fresh equity investments in three start-up companies - OneBreath, Ecozen Solutions and Artoo.
OneBreath is a medical device company which is developing an
innovative low-cost, portable mechanical ventilator that improves ICU care for patients. Co-founded by A. Vijay Simha, Matthew Callaghan and Bryan Loomas, OneBreath claims to provide a level of performance comparable to market leaders, but at a lower cost.
Co-founded by IIT-Kharagpur employees Devendra Gupta, Prateek Singhal and Vivek Pandey, Ecozen Solutions is a renewable energy company focusing on the application of distributed power generation for agriculture and rural communities. Along with its affiliate, Ecofrost Technologies, the company is working on a solar, micro cold storage system to address the problem of wastage of horticultural produce due to lack of adequate infrastructure for storage. The company also provides solar water pumping solutions for drinking and irrigation.
Artoo, co-founded by Sameer Segal and Indus Chadha, is attempting
to address financial exclusion. A large percentage of the population does not even have a proper bank account or banking facilities as many financial institutions are not able to reach rural and remote areas. This is mostly due to the cost involved in employing personnel on the ground to serve this under served population. The startup provides an android and cloud-based platform that enables financial institutions to take all their field processes online and track their businesses. Currently Artoo is planning to go global with its operations as well as expand into other categories such as primary healthcare and rural distribution. The startup was part of Villgro's accelerator programme SEED.
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