Cisco Unveils Startup Playbook, Demonstrates 5G-connected Ambulance

Cisco on Thursday launched its startup playbook at the company’s Startup Summit aimed at empowering India's deep-tech startup ecosystem.

The Cisco Startup Playbook is a detailed, comprehensive roadmap for startups in the exploration, build-up and scale-up phases of their entrepreneurial journey. The playbook compiles how Cisco’s extensive portfolio of technological stacks can fuel startups’ growth across multiple industry verticals.

At the startup summit, Cisco announced the evolution of Cisco LaunchPad into Cisco for Startups to assume a more significant mandate of expanding business alignment with deep-tech startups. This transformation aims to enhance visibility, co-innovation, and outcomes, and empower entrepreneurs to realise their true potential.

The summit was attended by some of India's most prominent investors, mentors, and ecosystem partners such as NASSCOM, TiE, Zinnov, German Accelerator, US Embassy, Ideaspring Capital, WaterBridge Ventures, and Stellaris Venture Partners, among many others. 

Over 230 startups participated in the summit. 

Speaking to BW Businessworld, Sruthi Kannan, Head at Cisco LaunchPad said, “We are looking at country digitisation opportunities in areas including aviation, shipping, manufacturing, healthcare and more. Also, we are looking at using technologies like IoT and all our networking expertise and combining them all together for country digitisation.” 

The highlight of the event was a demonstration of the 5G-connected ambulance built in partnership with Airtel 5G and Cisco-accelerated Teslon Technologies to enable smart healthcare for patients. This ambulance transmits the patient's complete telemetry data in real-time to doctors and experts at the hospital, thus saving lives on the move. A joint Cisco-Teslon whitepaper was released that underlines how Cisco and Teslon have taken tele-heath solutions across the length and breadth of the country and beyond.

“We are also looking at newer emerging technologies and seeing how we can act as an anchor for such emerging technologies along with the startups to take them towards newer use cases”, she added.

Since its inception in 2016, Cisco Launchpad has accelerated over 60 startups over eight successful cohorts and through its portfolio of startups, treated more than 5,000 patients, helped disburse USD 2 million for farmer loans, and created over 3,000 jobs.