Indian Women Entrepreneurs Bag Google’s $100K Women Founders’ Fund Award

Two women founders from India, whose AI-focused startups are aiming to help businesses address some of the key challenges, on Thursday received equity-free cash award of $100,000 each and dedicated mentorship from Google’s inaugural ‘Women Founders’ Fund.’

Megha Aggarwal, co-founder of India-based Fundamento, uses AI to automate support for customer inquiries that are manual and repetitive. Their goal is to help clients better manage customer queries and reduce frontline costs by up to 80 per cent.

Sophiya Jagannathan founded MetaShop in India to help businesses create photorealistic 3D assets at scale using only a video input. Using AI has resulted in a process that is 10 times quicker than most solutions in the market, and comes at a mere quarter of the cost.

The Google programme provides funds, mentoring and product support to female entrepreneurs running AI-based startups based in the Asia-Pacific region to successfully lead their startups and grow as leaders.

“I’m happy to support the Women Founders’ Fund to startups that are creating innovation with AI technology. I hope that we can act as a stepping stone for these startups to expand globally. We will continue to support women founders in their growth and development,” said Mike Kim, Head of Google for Startups APAC.

The team at Fundamento has been working tirelessly to develop cutting-edge AI solutions that address real-world challenges, particularly in the financial services and travel sector.


“It's a significant milestone for Fundamento, but it’s only the beginning. We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us, and this award will further fuel our mission to harness the power of AI to revolutionize how companies think about customer support,” said Aggarwal.

MetaShop is democratising 3D content creation for industries like e-commerce, gaming, real estate and others.

“At MetaShop, we aim to supercharge this next digital era by empowering businesses to provide XR experiences to millions 10x faster, while keeping in mind the market needs and evolving as we go,” said Jagannathan.

Google for Startups will host a Founders Academy for female entrepreneurs in the first half of 2024.- IANS