Rajeev Jorapur of Bajaj Auto said that corporates provide stability whilst startups have the flexibility. “However, I have noticed that with startups we need to break the problem into several small tasks because they are good at solving one problem, not a host of problems,” he added.

He was speaking during the panel discussion on ‘startup-corporate’ collaboration during the Startup Master Class (SMC) 2019 which was held at IISER on Sunday.

The discussion was moderated by Darshan Doshi, director, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Flame University, and the panel members were Amit Sharma, Global AI Accelerator Ericsson; Rohit Toshniwal, Sr Director, VMware; Tarak Shah, GM, Telstra; Satish Gupta, Agarwal Containers; Ravi Ranjan Choudhary, executive vice-president, Yes Bank and Rajeev Jorapur, Bajaj Auto.

The panellists talked about their company’s interest in startups. Choudhary said, “As a bank, we have both corporate as well as startups as clients. We help the startup community by asking our corporate clients to share their problem statement with us. This we put forth to the startups who, then, find a solution. We help connect startups, corporates and investors.”

Doshi asked the panellists to share what were the top two areas in which they felt startups could help their companies.

Amit Sharma, said, “We are keen on finding someone who can help us with labelling data. AI is good at classifying data, but we need to know the why. If a startup can help us with that it would be great.”

VMware is looking for solutions in ‘software infra space, analytics and workflows” says Toshniwal. Shah’s Telstra is “looking for partners in Stacks, Amazon Web Services, SalesForce, IoT expertise.

Satish Gupta’s Agarwal Containers needs voice and image analysis and Yes Bank needs solutions in customer onboarding “which is an art that we want to fine-tune and solutions in the financial sector supply chain management”. Needless to add that the end of the session saw funders queuing up at the Corporate Connect room.