Tata Steel organises Start-up Night – ‘IGNITIA’ to mark the success of Innoventure

Bengaluru : Tata Steel organised the inaugural edition of ‘Ignitia’ – a start-up night, to celebrate the success of its start-up engagement programme ‘Innoventure’ on February 16.

More than 300 people, including founders of over 20 start-ups and senior leadership from Tata Steel, participated in the start-up night ‘Ignitia’ held in Jamshedpur. Tata Steel felicitated the outstanding projects undertaken by start-ups and various business units of the Company that supported and championed the cause of the start-up engagement. The event was marked by insightful discussions, productive exchanges, and joyous celebrations.

Innoventure, now in its fifth year, is Tata Steel’s flagship start-up engagement programme to enable collaboration with start-ups and external partners to address challenges in the steel value chain and other identified interest areas through technological interventions. The thrust areas include decarbonisation, mining, surface engineering, advanced materials, operational excellence, waste energy recovery and water treatment, safety and sustainability. The Innoventure programme scouts and identifies relevant start-ups through its robust global network of partners like venture capital firms, academia, government organisations, and market intelligence platforms.

Dr Debashish Bhattacharjee, Vice President, Technology and R&D, Tata Steel, said: “The Innoventure ecosystem of Tata Steel, created over the last four years, is testament to India’s emerging capabilities within start-ups in many different fields. Tata Steel hosted Ignitia, an event to recognise successful implementation of  solutions provided by start-ups. The technologies included carbon capture, waste heat utilisation, robotics for defect detection and underwater drones. Ignitia celebrated the success of this ecosystem that thrives on the strength of the engagement between some of the brightest minds in the start-up world and our colleagues at Tata Steel. These are early days. We expect to expand the scope of our start-up collaboration in the future.”

In the past four years, the Innoventure ecosystem has delivered tech-based solutions for surveying water bodies to estimate the water bed health and its banks, developed smart sensor solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enabling remote monitoring, process optimisation and predictive maintenance in any manufacturing setup, built intelligent API-integrated plug-and-play surveillance system for anomaly detection and powerful insights for safety norms and ground-breaking technology for creating a sustainable future by unlocking the full value of our natural resources with zero-waste technology.