Event Coverage
Indian innovator Chandramouli Samatham shortlisted for the Underdog Tech Award 2024
Mumbai: Caare founder and CEO, Visakhapatnam based start-up, Chandramouli Samatham has been shortlisted among 20 finalists from around the world for the Underdog Tech Awards 2024. Being selected from 294 applicants and representing India on a global level is an incredible achievement.
The Underdog Tech Award is a new international prize for founders of the best tech startups located outside of major tech hubs and startup communities. The award has been established to support successful technology startups that are thriving despite facing challenges such as limited resources, lack of access to funding, as well as inability to attend important industry events due to their location.
The Underdog Tech Award head Ekaterina Smirnova, says: “ The Underdog Tech Award is a business award for the ‘underdogs’ of the tech startup world, which is what inDrive once was. All too often we hear about companies from the same global capital hubs and their founders, who have graduated from the same Ivy League universities. With this award we want to support companies from other regions and for their founders, who might not have graduated from Harvard, to believe in themselves and to know that they too can change the world. Together we are building a more diverse and inclusive world, which takes into account the interests of many different communities and people, including those living in some of the world’s most remote places.”
The Underdog Tech Award has a total prize fund of Rs 60,000 and recognises the winners with a monetary reward and other assistance, including training from industry experts and PR support.
The winners of the 2024 Underdog Tech Award will be announced on 1 April 2024 at https://underdogtechaward.com/.
The panel of judges will include prominent tech entrepreneurs, members of academia and industry experts. Members of the jury include Fatma Nasujo, global head of corporate operations at Wasoko; Sean Kim, president and chief product officer at Kajabi; Charles Eesley, associate professor and W.M. Keck Foundation faculty scholar in the department of management science and engineering at Stanford University; Daniel Gándara, vice president at MercadoLibre; Damla Buyuktaskin, senior regional livelihoods and economic inclusion officer for Asia Pacific countries in the United Nations high commissioner for Refugees; and Arsen Tomsky, founder and CEO of inDrive.
The Underdog Tech Award 2024 shortlist –
1. Victor Juarez from Guatemala: Founder of TuConsejeria, a startup focused on providing comprehensive psychological and mental health support to the Hispanic community, and specifically women, youth, and young adults, tackling issues such as socialization, family, citizenship training, sexual education, prevention of violence (bullying), gender equality, and education, as well as helping users to open up about their mental health issues.
2. Basima Abdulrahman from Iraq: founder and CEO of Kesk, a startup building the first green energy platform in Iraq. KESK synergises solar power and cloud computing technologies to build alternative energy projects and generate new revenues.
3. Elmira Safarova from Chile: founder and CEO of Rarus Health, a digital ecosystem that helps to improve diagnostics, assist the families of children with rare genetic diseases and generate data to accelerate the development of drug and gene therapies.
4. Omar Ahmed Abdelwahed and Ibrahim Karim Eid from Egypt: co-founders of Valify Solutions, an Egypt-based RegTech company specialising in digital identity infrastructure technology. Currently the market leader in Egypt, Valify offers its services to financial institutions, telecos, e-commerce platforms, as well as many others in various sectors.
5. Carlos Andrés García Iguarán from Colombia: co-founder of Numera, a platform enabling companies to automate their accounting processes, making everyday tasks like sending and receiving invoices, settling taxes and payroll, and generating timely and reliable managerial reports from centralized data, simple.
6. Amos Muthoni Kimani, from Kenya: founder and CEO of TausiApp, an application providing on-demand beauty services to customers who don’t have time to visit a salon or spa. With TausiApp, beauty professionals go directly to the customer’s location of choice, be that at home, work, or elsewhere.
7. Mostafa Dawoud from Egypt: co-founder and CEO of Dentolize, a fully-customisable dental practice management solution that scales with clients’ needs and enables dentists to streamline their financial, clinical, and operational processes. Dentolize can also be used for managing patients, employees, other associates including insurance companies and suppliers, inventory and much more, without the need for additional software.
8. Roikhanatun Nafi’ah from Indonesia: founder and CEO of Crustea, a startup leveraging eco-friendly aeration technology with smart IoT to support advanced aquaculture ecosystems, helping increase pond farmers’ productivity and reduce operational costs.
9. Chandramouli Samatham from India: founder and CEO of Caare, a company on a mission to make basic healthcare accessible to rural and senior communities by offering a full spectrum of healthcare services via its online platform.
10. Ashraf Bacheet from Egypt: founder of O7 Therapy, a startup revolutionising access to mental health services through its digital platform and mobile app. O7 Therapy offers online therapy, corporate wellness programs, and psycho-educational resources, empowering Arabic-speaking people by building the Middle East’s largest mental health institution.
11. Royford Mutegi from Kenya: co-founder and head of programs at Vermi-Farm Initiative, which aims to empower smallholder farmers with sustainable and innovative agri-tech solutions that increase crop yields and reduce water usage, while creating market linkages for their surplus produce.
12. Sadman Sadek from Bangladesh: founder of digital innovation for Impact, a startup empowering smallholder farmers by providing them with valuable meteorological, agricultural, and technological insights that help them mitigate their exposure to climate risks. The team specialises in cutting-edge climate modeling, assessing agriculture vulnerabilities and anticipating long-term impacts, providing stakeholders with the foresight they need to make informed decisions. .
13. Akhlad Mohamed Alabhar from Egypt: founder and CEO of Egrobots, an agritech platform that enables farmers to produce more with fewer resources. Through data and analytics, their solution improves farm sustainability, reduces costs, and addresses food security challenges. Egrobots minimises resource wastage, optimises water and pesticide usage, and reduces chemical runoff.
14. Julian Garcia from Argentina: founder of Wiolit, a company working to reduce food waste in institutional canteens by providing companies with a platform through which they can monitor their consumption and adjust production accordingly, empowering them to meet their CSR objectives.
15. Biplab Karki from USA: founder of Hyperce, a startup providing innovative and personalised e-commerce solutions to businesses of all sizes, with a mission to address the challenges of traditional e-commerce technology by offering scalable, cost-effective, and highly customizable modern suite solutions that are easy to manage.
16. Mohamed Tarek Mohamed Abdelzaher from Egypt: co-founder of P-vita, an innovative startup recycling agricultural waste to produce raw material for the cosmetics and food industry.
17. Felipe Castañeda from Chile: CEO and founder of Gliber, a fintech company providing gig economy workers with access to a range of financial services, helping them to reach their financial goals and their employers to reduce turnover.
18. Constantine Fedosev, based in the USA: founder of Visionary, an energy storage plus cloud service for power grid companies that operate low-voltage distribution power grids. Visionary’s solution helps companies reduce their capital and operational expenses by as much as 2-7 times, increasing the effectiveness of local renewables by up to 8 times and helping to manage distributed energy assets.
19. Abdelrahman Rashwan from Egypt: founder of Credify, a startup empowering digital lenders with alternative data insights, optimising creditworthiness assessments at the point of application and driving hyper-personalized marketing post-on boarding.
20. Saúl Paniagua-Lapenta from Bolivia: co-founder and CCO of Vaka, a platform that connects farmers with investors, helping the latter more easily finance agricultural projects and the former to boost their production capacity through increased funding and technical advice.
The winners will be announced on 1 April 2024.
Event Coverage
Anime India announces Amazon MX Player as co-presenting partner for Anime India Kolkata 2026
MUMBAI: Riding high on the success of its blockbuster Mumbai debut, Anime India is accelerating its nationwide expansion with the announcement of Amazon MX Player as the co-presenting partner for Anime India Kolkata. The partnership marks a significant step forward in the festival’s mission to deliver large-scale, accessible, and fan-first anime experiences across the country.
Scheduled for 14 and 15 February 2026 at the iconic Biswa Bangla Mela Prangan, Anime India Kolkata will launch the first regional chapter of what is set to be a year-long, multi-city tour. As the curtain-raiser for the 2026 circuit, the Kolkata edition aims to fuse the energy of global Japanese pop culture with India’s fast-growing community of anime, manga, and pop-culture fans.
A household name in digital entertainment, Amazon MX Player brings unmatched reach and cultural relevance to the Anime India platform. With its expanding focus on anime and youth-driven content, Amazon MX Player’s involvement as co-presenting partner reinforces Anime India’s vision of making anime culture more inclusive breaking barriers of language, geography, and accessibility to connect with fans nationwide.
Anime India Kolkata 2026 will showcase cosplay competitions, interactive zones led by the Indian Gunpla Community, India-39 Vocaloid Community, The Japan Curry, and Adda-o-Otaku by The Otaku Guild. Fans can join tournaments across fighting games, Pokémon VGC, and more. Acclaimed Japanese director Susumu Mitsunaka (Haikyu!!) will attend as guest of honour, appearing in panels and live sessions. Positioned as an immersive celebration of fan culture and industry collaboration, the Kolkata edition marks the beginning of Anime India’s nationwide expansion.
Sharing their perspective on the partnership, Amazon MX Player director Aruna Daryanani expressed, “Anime in India has evolved from a niche interest into a mainstream cultural movement, driven by an increasingly engaged and passionate fanbase. At Amazon MX Player, our focus is on expanding access by bringing anime to audiences across the country for free and in multiple local languages. Our association with Anime India reflects our commitment to supporting the growth of anime in India and deepening connections with fans, while continuing to build Amazon MX Player as a trusted destination for free, high-quality entertainment.”
“Anime India Kolkata is a celebration of how anime has grown beyond entertainment into a powerful cultural and creative force. By bringing fans, creators, and industry leaders onto one shared platform, the festival is helping define the future of pop culture in India,” said Anime India co-founder and director Neha Mehta.
The debut edition of Anime India 2025 in Mumbai attracted over 29,000 fans, quickly cementing its status as a landmark celebration of anime and Japanese pop culture. Riding on this overwhelming response, the Kolkata chapter is projected to draw more than 40,000 visitors across two days, positioning it as one of the biggest anime conventions ever held in eastern India.
Anime India is focused on bringing together fans from across the country to create a truly pan-India celebration of anime, manga, cosplay, gaming, and Japanese culture. With plans to expand into four key metropolitan hubs in 2026—east (Kolkata), north (Delhi), west (Mumbai), and south (Hyderabad)—the festival seeks to deliver globally benchmarked experiences while supporting and uplifting creators, artists, and fan communities throughout India.
