Category technology

 By–Karun Tadepalli, CEO and Co-founder, byteXL

“On National Technology Day, we celebrate the spirit of innovation that continues to drive India’s transformation. From the launch of BharatGPT, propelling India’s AI development, to becoming a global hub for digital payments and startups, our progress reflects both vision and execution. At byteXL, we are proud to contribute to this journey by equipping students with industry-relevant skills and imparting real-world experiences, thereby enhancing their employability. We remain steadfast in our commitment to empowering the next generation of tech leaders to thrive in and shape India’s growing tech ecosystem.” 

Soumendra Mohanty, Chief Strategy Officer, Tredence

“Building a Viksit Bharat will depend not just on technological innovation, but on how well we prepare our workforce to evolve alongside it. As AI—and more significantly, Agentic AI—reshapes industries, the need for continuous upskilling and cross-skilling becomes critical. These intelligent systems are no longer just tools; they are dynamic partners that can independently adapt, make decisions, and enhance how we work across sectors.

To stay ahead, organizations must invest in holistic capability building—developing not just technical skills, but also strategic thinking, ethical judgment, and emotional intelligence. Empowering employees to experiment with AI in real-world scenarios, creating safe learning environments, and promoting AI fluency across functions are essential steps toward a future-ready workforce.

The future of work is not about humans versus machines—it’s about enabling people to harness the power of AI to solve complex problems, make better decisions, and lead innovation. A truly future-ready workforce will not fear change, but will lead it—with confidence, curiosity, and purpose. This is how we unlock the true potential of our youth and pave the way for India’s leadership in the global knowledge economy.”

By Mr. Janak Vakharia, CEO – Xpedeon

“On World Technology Day, we celebrate the boundless potential of innovation to transform industries and elevate human progress. At Xpedeon, our evolution from a traditional ERP provider to a global SaaS platform is rooted in a clear vision—to lead the next wave of digital transformation in the built environment. As the ConTech landscape rapidly advances, driven by AI, automation, and real-time data intelligence, we are committed to creating technologies that redefine how construction and engineering projects are designed, delivered, and scaled. The future of ConTech lies in intelligent, integrated systems that drive efficiency, sustainability, and agility, and we are proud to be at the forefront of that movement.”

Ram Meenakshisundaram, Chief Technology Officer, Virtusa

On National Technology Day 2025, we celebrate the power of technology to build a more sustainable and responsible future. At Virtusa, we focus on harnessing cutting-edge innovation to solve today’s most pressing business and environmental challenges. Platforms like Helio and solutions like Accello exemplify this—enabling smarter, AI-led decision-making and driving operational transformation across industries. By advancing capabilities in AI, cloud, and data analytics, we empower organizations to enhance efficiency and sustainability. We remain committed to using technology as a force for positive change and a catalyst for long-term impact.” 

“With Amnic AI, we are delivering context aware agents that move away from the traditional system of ‘click and visualize’ to an interface that is built for the demands of today’s AI-native world,” said Sathya Narayanan Nagarajan, Co-founder of Amnic. “Our goal is to democratize the understanding of cloud costs across stakeholders in the organizations while empowering FinOps professionals with an autopilot to move at an unprecedented speed and efficiency. Delivering role based contextual cost insights to every stakeholder in the organization remains at the heart of our mission.”

• Amnic X-Ray: High-level spend analysis; benchmarking; identifies areas of inefficiency and optimization focus.
• Amnic Insights Agent: Natural language insights, FOCUSTM aligned personalized by persona (CFO, CTO, FinOps, DevOps); cloud-aware and role-aware.
• Amnic Governance Agent: Proactive anomaly detection, RCA (root cause analysis), budgeting alignment, and forecasting.
• Amnic Reporting Agent: Auto-generates stakeholder-specific reports (e.g., C-level vs. Product Team) with context-appropriate depth.

“Amnic exemplifies how startups can use AWS’s AI and global infrastructure to solve critical business challenges,” said Kumara Raghavan, Head, Startups, AWS India and South Asia. “Built on Amazon Bedrock and our comprehensive cloud services, Amnic’s transformative enterprise-grade FinOps solution helps businesses across industries optimize their cloud investments. We’re thrilled to support Amnic’s journey as they scale globally and continue innovating with AI.”

•  Complete cloud cost health check and analysis in under 30 seconds
• Saving up to 24 hours a month on reporting-based tasks
• Helping FinOps practitioners reclaim two hours each day on daily scheduled processes
• Identifying anomalies and performing RCA to correlate cost spikes within deployment levels, reducing time spent debugging by nearly 90%
• 2x faster cost breakdowns for specific stakeholders within the organization using simple, natural language queries
• Helping improve resource utilization by as much as 37% with continuous and autonomous cost observability

“Having tried Amnic AI early on, the efficiency is tangible, freeing up a significant portion of our time when it comes to routine work around our cloud costs. We are able to generate reports in minutes as opposed to the 6 hours a week spent on curating data and building them, while we are able to gain answers to complex questions in seconds,” Abhra Dasgupta,  Senior Director, Uni.

8^th May 2025, Bangalore: Are you drowning in a sea of SaaS apps, constantly switching screens, and struggling to keep everything updated? You’re not alone, the average number of SaaS solutions used by companies is 112. But what if you could bring all those tools – and the power of AI- into one central hub? Enter the Slack Marketplace.

The Slack Marketplace is where partners and developers are sharing solutions, they’ve built that bring all these apps into the flow of work, where employees are already spending their time, in Slack. And these aren’t just typical apps – Slack’s innovative partners are building AI-powered apps that bring the productivity of generative AI into users’ work streams. These AI apps can help users surface information, provide recommendations, generate helpful summaries, and more, all in the same conversational interface you are already using to get work done.

Slack’s partners and developers understand how important it is to bring people, apps, and data into one work operating system, giving each employee their own command center and time back in their day. That’s why there are 25 new AI apps on the Slack Marketplace that put AI to work for use cases from drafting content, surfacing market research, managing sales, running DevOps, IT, HR, and beyond. Every one of these AI apps makes Slack more useful, drives adoption, streamlines the flow of work, and inspires a new use case.

Here is the current lineup of AI apps available now or coming soon in the Slack Marketplace:

 Apps for productivity

• Asana: Surfaces project insights and recommendations, such as status, blockers, next steps, and more, within the context of Slack conversations.
• Clockwise: Optimizes work calendars with the ability to quickly schedule and reschedule meetings within Slack conversations and create easy-to-book scheduling links.
• Graph: Empowers engineering teams with instant, context-rich answers based on GitHub, Jira and Linear data, all without leaving Slack.
• UiPath: Enhances productivity through a combination of automation and enterprise-grade tools.

 Apps for content generation and analysis

• Adobe Express: Enables employees to design, collaborate on and speed up visual content creation right in their workflow.
• Amazon Q Business: Answers questions, provides summaries, generates content, and securely completes tasks based on data and information in the customer’s enterprise systems.
• Box: Provides AI-powered content insights that help analyze uploaded account contracts, quickly answer competitive questions from internal documents, and summarize reports.
• Cohere: Streamlines content creation by accessing information from company data sources during search, summarization and content generation, while keeping data secure and isolated from their AI models.
• Glean: Surfaces relevant internal knowledge with ease, giving instant access to company information, answers to common business questions, and insights.
• Perplexity: Expands knowledge with an AI answer engine that searches the web, providing cite-able strategic insights, prospect research and summaries of public customer opinions.
• Writer: Provides easy access to custom AI apps, analyzes company data and generates on-brand content to boost team collaboration, streamline work and drive informed decisions.

 Apps for sales, service, or marketing

• Dovetail: Brings teams closer to customers by accessing deeper customer knowledge and insights to help teams make more customer-centric product decisions.
• Gainsight: Boosts customer retention with immediate, data-driven answers to customer-related questions, generated content like emails, and customer success best practices and guidance.
• Highspot: Increases sales team efficiency and success with conversational search and by surfacing high-impact sales content right in the flow of work.
• Jasper: Scale end-to-end marketing workflows and keep every output on-brand with easy access to 100+ marketing apps right in the flow of work.
• Productboard: Empowers product teams with AI-powered customer feedback analysis directly in Slack. Product managers can instantly analyze voice of customer data, co-author insight documents, and identify key customer needs without leaving their workflow.

 Apps for HR and IT

• BambooHR: Simplifies HR processes and enables employees to instantly self-serve needs like HR information access, PTO requests and checking who’s out of the office.
• Copado: Automates and streamlines DevOps processes, including simplifying sprint planning, automating test workflows and improving deployment efficiency.
• Moveworks: Automates employee support with instant resolution of IT, HR and facilities-related service requests.
• PagerDuty: Streamlines and enhances incident management workflows directly within Slack, delivering real-time insights, automated responses and intelligent recommendations.
• Ravenna: Streamlines IT operations with automated help desk ticket creation, instant answers and auto-generated knowledge base articles, all directly within Slack.
• Rootly: Manages incident response with an SRE copilot that examines critical incident data to summarize conversations, automate root cause analysis and draft stakeholder updates.
• Wiz: Enhances security with real-time threat intelligence, automated incident response, proactive vulnerability insights and automated remediation recommendations.

 Discover trusted AI apps in the Slack Marketplace

The most important part of any AI solution is security, making your data and systems stay in your control. Not only are these AI apps innovative and powerful, they are trusted. As with any AI solution in Slack, every one of these AI apps is held to meet Slack’s high security standards. With 25 AI apps already available and 10-plus on the way in the next few months, the Slack ecosystem is rapidly building AI apps that fuel a powerful experience in Slack, empowering people to get work done in one conversational interface. Explore the Slack Marketplace today to find AI apps that boost your productivity.

 Salesforce Comments:

Rahul Sharma, Vice President – Sales, Salesforce India, shared “With new AI apps now available in the Slack Marketplace, we’re seeing a powerful shift in how work gets done – right within the conversational interface employees already use daily. According to Slack’s Workforce Lab, desk workers globally spend 41% of their time on repetitive, low-value tasks. That’s a significant drain on innovation and output. But now, with more AI-powered apps and Agentforce in Slack, we’re entering a whole new era of workplace transformation, unlocking agentic productivity for every employee. It enables organizations to turn on a dedicated, always-on digital labor force in Slack, seamlessly integrating them into conversations as a natural part of your team’s flow of work. AI agents in Slack have the potential to transform employee productivity at a scale rarely observed in history.”

New Delhi, 7th May 2025 – Lifechart, a fast-scaling health-tech startup focused on gut wellness, has raised $360,000 in an extended seed round for its premium gut health brand Guttify, led by Prajay Advisors, the family office of the founders of Unichem Labs, Dr. Prakash Mody and Jayendra Shah.

Launched just a month ago, Guttify has quickly gained investor confidence with its diagnosis-first approach—a first-of-its-kind model in India’s growing $18 billion gut wellness market. Unlike most D2C wellness brands offering generic solutions, Guttify combines clinically validated products, instant DIY diagnostic kits, and personalized Ayurveda-based regimens.

This $360K raise follows a $500K seed round in October 2024, backed by Expert Dojo, Agility Ventures, Sunn91 Ventures, government seed schemes, and super angels like Nitish Mittersain and Ahana Gautam—bringing Lifechart’s total funding to over $1 million in record time.

Speaking on this, Mr. Mukul Shah, Founder & CEO of Lifechart, said, “We are solving gut health at its root through affordable at-home testing and personalized care. Guttify is not just a product brand, it’s a wellness ecosystem built on diagnosis-first science.”

Guttify’s first offering, a DIY saliva-based pH test kit to detect acidity, is already available on the official website of Guttify, with more kits priced as low as INR 99 set to launch in the coming months.

The latest round adds to the company’s momentum, with earlier backing from Expert Dojo (US VC), Agility Ventures, Sunn91 Ventures, and angel investors such as Nitish Mittersain (Nazara Technologies) and Ahana Gautam (Open Secret). The funds will be used to expand diagnostic R&D, grow distribution, and scale both Guttify and Lifechart’s product portfolio.

In a joint statement, Dr. Prakash Mody and Jayendra Shah said, “We see Guttify filling a glaring gap in India’s gut health space—diagnosis. We’re excited to support Mukul again in his mission to build the Indian version of Viome, tailored for Bharat’s needs. His execution ability, proven with Yolo Bus, gives us strong confidence in Guttify’s future.”

With Guttify, Lifechart is positioning itself as a category creator, aiming to bring precision diagnostics and targeted gut wellness to India’s urban masses—starting with Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities.

DUBAI, UAE –  6 May 2025 – Zindi, the leading professional network for data scientists and AI developers in emerging markets, is pleased to announce that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Cassava Technologies, a global technology leader of African heritage, to deliver artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaas) across the African continent.

This partnership represents a significant step in accelerating digital transformation in Africa and will see the two organisations collaborate on several initiatives. These include using Cassava’s GPUaaS capabilities for Zindi’s AI solution development and identifying opportunities for both organisations to leverage one another’s platforms and ecosystems.

As Africa’s pioneering data science competition platform, Zindi collaborates with companies, non-profit organisations, and government institutions to develop, curate, and prepare data-driven challenges. This partnership underscores their mutual commitment to nurturing AI talent and innovation throughout the continent.

Zindi CEO and Co-Founder, Celina Lee states:

“Zindi is thrilled at the opportunity to partner with Cassava Technologies to strengthen African datasets and address local problems with locally developed solutions. Using Cassava’s GPU capabilities, which are essential for handling the large and complex computations that AI and machine learning models require, and collaborating on the launch of a competition specifically aimed at nurturing Africa’s AI talent will not only expose entrepreneurs and innovative solutions; it will help build new skills and create employment opportunities,”

With the signing of this MOU, Cassava and Zindi are set to make significant inroads in Africa’s AI landscape. The partnership supports Cassava’s objective of providing world-class digital solutions and advancing responsible AI adoption, innovation, and growth in Africa. This follows its recent announcement of its plans to build Africa’s first AI factory and the 2024 launch of Cassava’s AI business.

Udaipur, 05^th May 2025: Hindustan Zinc Limited , India’s only and the world’s largest integrated zinc producer, sees early breakthrough in the research of next-generation zinc-based battery technologies. The research targets delivering higher energy efficiency, improved safety and longer operational life. The company is pioneering emerging zinc battery technology to support the ongoing clean energy transition.

Zinc has emerged as a powerful alternative to lithium owing to its abundance, stability and cost effectiveness. While the lithium market continues to face supply constraints and rising costs, zinc-based systems present a more economical, and geopolitically secure pathway for India’s energy ambitions. Zinc-based batteries are increasingly recognized for their superior safety (non-flammable), long cycle life, wide temperature operability, and recyclability. They deliver dependable backup power for 3 to 72 hours, utilize non-hazardous raw materials and have a greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint nearly six times lower than conventional technologies. The proven use of zinc-based materials in high-demand sectors such as aerospace, marine, renewable energy, data centers, 5G network and mission-critical infrastructure further reinforces their reliability and adaptability.

Towards this end, Hindustan Zinc has collaborated with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras and the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru to develop sustainable energy storage solutions. Early-stage research findings indicate potential for significant technological advancements and future commercial scalability. The world is witnessing a rapid evolution in the battery industry and zinc-based batteries have the potential to transform the sustainable energy storage solutions market.

Under the MoU signed with JNCASR in August 2024, Hindustan Zinc is advancing the development of Zinc-Ion batteries. Commenting on the development Prof. Prem Senguttuvan, said, “The team is focusing on novel zinc anode formulations, coupled with advanced electrolytes. We have made noteworthy progress in electrode/electrolyte interface engineering, which is very encouraging”.

Complementing this, a second collaboration with IIT Madras, formalized in October 2024, is targeting the design of a 1 kWh rechargeable Zinc-Air battery module using a 6/12-cell stack. The project, led by Professor Aravind Kumar Chandiran from the Department of Chemical Engineering, prioritizes rechargeability, structural integrity, interface durability and overall battery longevity. Speaking on the development, Prof. Chandiran, highlighted, “These batteries are an emerging solution for electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage and consumer electronics”.

According to a recent BloombergNEF report, the global energy storage market is projected to expand at a 21% CAGR, reaching 442 GWh by 2030. Hindustan Zinc’s ongoing innovation efforts are well-aligned to meet this growing demand while enhancing India’s energy independence.

Commenting on the development, Mr. Arun Misra, CEO – Hindustan Zinc Limited, said “The battery segment is primed for innovation as the world shifts towards long-lasting and environmentally friendly energy sources. We at Hindustan Zinc, are poised to play a key role in supporting this transition through the production of critical metals like zinc. Our collaborations with two of India’s premier research institutes reflect our commitment to advancing cutting-edge innovations that can redefine the future of energy storage. Batteries have the potential to accelerate this shift through energy storage and we aim to drive responsible innovation and long-term impact across the value chain.”

Hindustan Zinc is leveraging its metallurgical expertise and advanced electrowinning capabilities to drive innovation. The company is also utilizing proficiency with critical materials including commercial-grade electrodes and performance additives to advance the battery revolution. Hindustan Zinc is playing a catalytic role in scaling these technologies for industrial-scale production. The company has also signed a MoU with a leading US-based battery manufacturer AEsir Technologies for cutting-edge nickel-zinc battery technology. By providing technical inputs, specialized commercial alloys and industry linkages, Hindustan Zinc is fast-tracking the journey from laboratory success to real-world deployment.

Hindustan Zinc Limited, a Vedanta Group company, is the world’s largest integrated zinc producer and the third-largest silver producer. The company supplies to more than 40 countries and holds a market share of about 75% of the primary zinc market in India. Hindustan Zinc has been recognized as the world’s most sustainable company in the metals and mining category for the second consecutive year by the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment 2024. The company also launched EcoZen Asia’s first low carbon ‘green’ zinc brand, produced using renewable energy. As a world leader in the metals and mining industry, Hindustan Zinc is pivotal in providing critical metals essential for the global energy transition for a sustainable future.

Gurugram, May 5, 2025 – JSW MG Motor India recently announced that the MG Windsor PRO will be launched soon in the Indian market.  The upcoming car will include new features that shall enhance the overall appeal of the MG Windsor for customers. In a newly released video, the company has indicated that the Windsor PRO will be equipped with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), providing additional safety with every drive.

The Windsor PRO will be offered with Level 2 ADAS, which offers 12 major features and three levels of warnings – audio, visual, and haptic–always ensuring the safety of occupants. A few examples of these features include Traffic Jam Assist, Adaptive Cruise Control, and Lane Departure Warning, among others.

The MG Windsor, India’s best-selling EV since its launch, combines a sedan’s expanse with a SUV’s versatility, making it a premium offering for discerning consumers who seek both value and class. The MG Windsor PRO will feature new tech features like Vehicle-to-Load and Vehicle-to-Vehicle, enabling customers to utilise the vehicle beyond mobility usage.