AI to chip tech: Groundbreaking solutions unveiled at IISER Kolkata start-up summit
Telegraph | 27 March 2025
A chip for prompt detection of a wide range of diseases. An X-ray technology aimed at reducing radiation exposure in medical imaging. An AI-powered system to help farmers with loans.
An entrepreneurial summit at a research institute last week saw a battle of innovations. The ideas aimed to address critical challenges in various sectors such as healthcare, diagnostics, medical imaging and agricultural finance.
The Inter INCI Entrepre-neurial Summit (IIE-S) 2025, organised by E-Cell of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata, was held on March 21 and 22.
Students from several institutions took part in the summit.
The two-day meet featured a start-up competition and expert-led workshops, which were preceded by a series of preparatory sessions.
The first position was secured by a team that came up with a chip to detect a host of diseases. Named BubbleSense, the team developed a “biosensing microfluidic chip” to simultaneously detect multiple pathogens in a single test from blood plasma samples.
“It could enable faster disease detection in hospitals and diagnostic labs, particularly for infections like dengue, leptospirosis and tuberculosis, which require early intervention. By lowering diagnostic costs, this technology improves healthcare accessibility in low-resource settings, making early disease management more feasible,” said the team.
The team behind the pitch was from IISER Kolkata.
“It was a great learning curve. We got a sense of what the journey from the lab to the market entails,” said Om Khare, one of the team members.
The top three innovations received cash prizes.
Agrolytix, billed as an AI-powered farm loan approval system, came fifth. The system is designed to support small-scale farmers who struggle to access institutional credit because of lack of financial history and collateral. Most of them have to rely on informal lenders. The loans come with high interest rates.
“Agrolytix’s solution leverages satellite imagery and AI-driven risk assessment models to analyse farm productivity, soil health and weather conditions. Instead of relying on traditional credit scores, the system evaluates historical crop yields and environmental factors to determine a farmer’s loan eligibility. By integrating with banks and government credit schemes, the platform automates loan approvals, making financial aid more accessible to rural communities,” said the pitch by students of IISER Pune.
Xperts, an AI-integrated, flexible X-ray detector that operates at significantly lower radiation levels while improving image clarity, came fourth.
The prototype was developed by a team from the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) in Bhubaneswar.
The panel that judged the innovations comprised Soujit Das, senior manager, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park; Poyni Bhatt, former CEO, SINE, IIT Bombay; Anil Kondreddy, CEO, ASPIRE BioNest; Jaydip Mukherjee, founder, Snap-E Cabs; and Khalid Wani, serial entrepreneur and TEDx Speaker.
Ayan Banerjee, physics professor and one of the founder-directors of the Research Innovation and Scientific Entrepreneurship (RISE) Foundation at IISER Kolkata, said the summit helped in instilling self-belief in the budding entrepreneurs.
“Many of them have a solution to a problem. But the solution is in the form of a prototype. To transform the solution into a product that can make money, they first need validation from experts. That is what they got in the summit,” said Banerjee, also the dean of students at the institute.