Accel Announces its Atoms 3.0 Cohort: Meet the Next Wave of Disruptors in AI and Industry 5.0

? Atoms 3.0, Accel’s 6-month pre-seed accelerator program, unveils the 8 startups that are part of its cohort focusing on AI and Industry 5.0.

? The cohort receives up to $500k in funding, access to perks worth more than $5M from Accel’s network partners, personalised mentorship, and the opportunity to collaborate with a strong peer community of founders from past Atoms cohorts and Accel’s network of 200+ portfolio founders, industry buyers, and customers.

? The 24 startups, which were part of the two previous Atoms cohorts have raised over $200 million in funding since the launch of the program.

Bangalore, India – 28th March 2024 – Accel, a leading global venture capital firm, today unveiled the 8 startups from the third cohort of its accelerator program, Atoms. The program’s first sector-focused cohort, Atoms 3.0, backs exceptional pre-seed startups building in the AI and Industry 5.0 domains.

Atoms represents Accel’s ongoing commitment to nurturing the most innovative founders from the earliest stages of their startup journey. Accel has been the first partner to many of India’s most successful, category-defining startups including Flipkart, Freshworks, Swiggy, Urban Company, Zetwerk, and Cure.fit. The Atoms program brings the best of Accel’s network and learnings from working with disruptive companies, to help pre-seed founders during the 0-to-1 journey. The third edition of the program, Atoms 3.0, shifted from being sector-agnostic to thematic, focusing on AI and Industry 5.0. Prayank Swaroop and Barath Shankar Subramanian, partners at Accel, lead the AI and Industry 5.0 domains respectively.

The four AI startups that are part of Atoms 3.0 are: Tune AI, a GenAI stack for enterprises; Skoob, a generative AI platform for reading; Meritic, a storytelling co-pilot for financial planning and analysis; and Arivihan, India’s first AI-based, fully automated learning platform. The two Industry 5.0 startups in this cohort are: Spintly, an IoT platform for smart buildings; and Asets, a multidisciplinary CAD, simulation and engineering design platform. The two remaining startups from the cohort are in stealth.

“The shift to a thematic program design for Atoms 3.0 has enabled us to provide deeper, sector-focused mentorship for the startups. Atoms has always restricted itself to smaller cohort sizes to stay hyper-focused on the needs of a smaller group of exceptional founders. We believe we have found the next wave of disruptors in AI and Industry 5.0, and the proof of this has been witnessing the growth of each of these startups since joining the program,” said Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel. “While AI presents an incredible opportunity, the pace of innovation in AI requires founders to have the right mindset for navigating this market. As part of Atoms 3.0, founders are also learning how to build that muscle for resilience and agility.”

The cohort was launched with a four-day long kickoff program that included an AI summit with over 200 AI founders and operators, and an Industry 5.0 customer connect. The Atoms 3.0 founders interacted with senior business and tech leaders from companies like Swiggy, Flipkart, Reliance, GitHub, Facilio, ITC, Diageo, Schneider, Aditya Birla Group, and Vedanta.

“”The zero-to-one journey presents the most formidable challenge for entrepreneurs, as every decision can completely alter the trajectory of your business. Our mission with Atoms is to ensure founders have the best odds at success and can make those mission-critical decisions with insight from the world’s best domain experts. Meetings facilitated via the program have helped the 3.0 founders onboard new, large customers,” says Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner at Accel. “The 6-month Atoms 3.0 journey is giving founders insight into critical 0-to-1 areas like hiring, getting your first 10 customers, or tuning your pitch for investors. Through one-on-one sessions with their domain leaders, the founders also get clarity on how to action those learnings and lay out their roadmap for each month.”

“Beyond the capital and learning sessions, being part of Atoms has given us a strong founder community and highly collaborative peer group – for instance, when Meritic is faced with a challenge we can turn to any other team at Accel LaunchPad, which is where we currently operate, or to anyone from Accel’s network of over 200 portfolio company founders, to arrive at a solution. The Founder Anonymous sessions have helped us open up to the cohort in an unfiltered manner and the GTM talks have been pivotal in shaping our B2B sales thinking,” said Pallavi Chakravorty, co-founder and CEO of Meritic.

Accel has held more than 100 learning sessions led by experts from companies like Google, AssemblyAI, and Langchain, mentor connects, and community gatherings across the Atoms cohorts. The 24 Atoms startups from Atoms 1.0 and 2.0 have together raised over $200 million in funding till date.

For more information on the Atoms program and future cohorts visit (Link)

More details about the startups in Accel Atoms 3.0:

Spintly
Founders: Rohin Parkar, Malcolm Dsouza
Website: https://spintly.com/
Domain: Industry 5.0
Spintly is an IoT platform that simplifies access control to commercial and residential buildings. Unlike traditional systems, Spintly uses a distributed IoT architecture and edge computing technology, which eliminates the need for heavy back-end infrastructure and enables smartphone-based door access to users. Spintly has eliminated 200k plastic badges and 2k miles for wired infrastructure from the built world and currently servers 300+ customers and 4k+ doors.

Asets
Founder: Ashwini Oke
Website: https://www.asets.io/
Domain: Industry 5.0
Canada-based Asets Inc has launched an AI-powered, first-of-its-kind cloud-based Integrated Design Suite™, a multidisciplinary CAD, simulation and engineering design platform that helps Engineering Procurement Construction (EPC) and end-owner companies accelerate their early-stage engineering by 10x. Customers benefit from the rapid deployment of engineering resources, lowering effort time and costs related to engineering projects.

Tune AI
Founders: Anshuman Pandey, Naman Maheshwari, Rohan Pooniwala
Website: https://tunehq.ai/
Domain: AI
Tune AI is a GenAI stack for enterprises with solutions that include Tune Chat, an AI chat app with over 180,000 users and powerful models for text, code generation, and brainstorming, and Tune Studio, a comprehensive solution for fine-tuning, deploying, and managing the Gen AI model lifecycle and enabling data security with enterprise-grade compliance.

Skoob
Founder: Shubham Deva
Website: https://skoob.ai/
Domain: AI
Skoob is a generative AI platform which is revolutionizing the way readers interact with books. Instead of navigating through entire volumes, we harness the power of AI to dissect books into topic-centric sections. We are making knowledge consumption intuitive and user-friendly.

Arivihan
Founders: Ritesh Singh, Sonu Kumar Prashant, Rushabh Kothari
Website: https://arivihan.com/
Domain: AI
Arivihan is India’s 1st AI-based 100% Automated Learning Platform providing each unique school student with a personal tutor in their pocket at ?300 per month, guiding them in planning for their exams, teaching them with video lectures, talking to them, solving their queries instantly, and validating their knowledge by testing and improving them anytime they want, in the speed they require.

Meritic
Founders: Pallavi Chakravorty, Nipun Gupta, Swapnil Basak
Website: https://meritic.ai/
Domain: AI
Meritic is a storytelling co-pilot for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams to automate reporting and business analytics. Meritic combines the power of knowledge graphs and language models to do highly contextual analysis, collect qualitative insights, generate relevant commentaries and automate financial deck creation.

Two startups from the cohort are currently operating in stealth.