Samsung Invites Startups to Join ‘Make For India with Samsung’

At Samsung, we are committed to transform the future by creating products that enhance your life. That is why we created ‘Make for India’, an initiative we announced in 2015 to develop meaningful innovations with local insights.  Since then, Samsung has been engaging with the local ecosystem to develop innovative products and solutions as per the needs of the Indian consumers. Samsung R&D Institute Bengaluru (SRI-B) recently organized an event at The Taj, Bengaluru, which was designed to connect with the startup communities for collaboration and to explore a journey of building next generation products and services for India, thereby enabling innovation, excellence and co-prosperity.

Around 50 startups from all across India attended the event, where they interacted with Samsung Leadership about their products and solutions. The startups belonged to multiple domains ranging from camera, community building, finance, health and travel, to entertainment. Dr. Aloknath De, CTO, SRI-B delivered a keynote speech at the event.

The highlight of the event were the experience zones where themes like Bixby (Vision and Home), Marketplace (Samsung Mall), Finance and Health (Samsung Pay and Health), Entertainment (My Galaxy and Lock Screen Stories) and Device Enhancements (Smart Manager, Iris and keyboard) were showcased. The demos were aimed to help the startups understand their expertise and connect with the desired platform that their solution or app can be plugged into.

Speaking at the event, Mr. Dipesh Shah, Managing Director, Samsung R&D Institute, Bengaluru said, “Samsung is a consumer centric company and strives to develop meaningful innovations, specifically for Indian consumers under the Make for India initiative. As a multinational company with global reach, our focus is to grow the local ecosystem and connect budding entrepreneurs to our consumer base. We strongly believe in co-prosperity and welcome collaboration and partnership opportunities to yield benefits together.”

(L-R) Ritesh Jain (Director, SRI-B), Dipesh Shah, (MD, SRI-B), Aakrit Vaish (Co-Founder and CEO, Haptik Inc.) and Inder Singh (Head of engineering, Glance) participate in a panel discussion

Samsung invited InMobi and Haptik, which had a fruitful engagement with SRI-B, to participate in a panel discussion. The panelists included Inder Singh (Head of engineering, Glance), Aakrit Vaish (Co-Founder and CEO, Haptik Inc.) and Dipesh Shah, (MD, Samsung R&D Institute Bangalore).

Samsung Electronics had recently held its Global Startup Acceleration Program in Bengaluru, where they selected three winners. The program, which was done in partnership with the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) to mentor startups in varied fields, as a part of a global program being held across Indonesia, Malaysia, India, South Africa between July and September with 80 selected startups. As part of its corporate social responsibility, Samsung R&D Institute, Bengaluru (SRI-B) signed a MoU with IIIT-B under which three startups will get extended support from the local incubation center at IIIT-B for the next 24 months.

For interested startups who would like to collaborate, please reach out to startup.connect@samsung.com.