Cohort Winners Of Maruti Suzuki MAIL Program To Be Showcased By GHV In Japan

The Mobility and Automobile Innovation Lab (MAIL) Program, a co-creation program, an initiative by Maruti Suzuki in partnership with GHV announced the results of its first Innovation Program cohort. The winners of the first cohort include Sensegiz, Xane.AI, and Eyedentify. Winners have been awarded with paid proofs-of-concept (POCs) by Maruti Suzuki, with an opportunity to scale their POCs with Maruti Suzuki. In the last week of November, these winners of the MAIL Cohort would be showcased to Corporate Partners by GHV in Japan through a Pitch Day, in association with GHV’s partner, World Innovation Lab (WiL). World Innovation Lab (WiL) is a US & Japan-based VC with capital base from governments and leading global corporations in Japan and throughout Asia - including Sony, Suzuki, NTT, KDDI and others. The Company's vision is to be the bridge between Startups and corporates in key hubs across the globe. WiL invests in companies that are ready to scale and enter new markets. The firm helps US Startups expand to Japan and Asia, and Japanese Startups expand worldwide. WiL also works with its corporate investors on evolving their own innovation capabilities through executive training, strategic advisory, and partnerships with leading Startups. GHV is a prominent Indo-Japanese cross-border Venture Accelerator that launched in October 2014.

On the success of the MAIL Program, the Founder and Chief Mentor, GHV, Vikram Upadhyaya commented – “As a market leader in the automobile industry, Maruti Suzuki has taken a brilliant step towards co-creation of innovations with startups, and sets an example for market leaders in other industries. At GHV, we have built the industry co-creation program after thorough empirical research of the corporate mechanisms, Agile methods, entrepreneurial thought process and industry needs which enables us to identify and build the best win-win value for the Industry.”

Several renowned global mentors joined the program to guide the participants on various business challenges and aspects of growing their ventures in the mobility and automobile domain. Mentors include Mr. Holger Weiss (German Autolabs), Ms. Tanja Kufner (Automobile innovation expert from Germany), Mr. Manji Suzuki (Denso), Mr. Rakesh Yadav (AGL), Mr. Atul Arya (Panasonic), and Mr. Tsutomi Tsuboi (Nagoya Denki). Some of the key enablers to the program include 91SpringBoard - one of the largest indigenous co-working spaces with over 20 centers across India - who contributed co-working space facilities to MAIL program participants; and Blue Tokai, a specialty coffee chain with over 30 outlets in major Indian cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Jaipur, and Goa.

GHV started in 2014 with a vision to solve two problems – Challenges Japanese corporates face while working with Indian Startups & Indian Startups struggle to be build long term sustainable ventures. The solution developed was GHV Accelerator, with its proprietary mechanism of T.E.S.T. PoC©, evaluating the key parameters to build successful ventures and then supporting these ventures to optimize all these ingredients in order to become fundable at a Series A level. As a part of this program, Maruti Suzuki & GHV provided a controlled environment to startups who met the “T.E.S.T.PoC © thesis”.