Airbus Partners with Three Indian Startups to Power GenNext Aviation Solutions


India’s proven excellence in IT and innovation is gliding across the globe and earning the country profound partnerships with renowned companies. Making a colossal push for ‘Make in India’ initiative, Airbus subsidiaries NAVBLUE and Aerial partners with three Indian Startups namely – Stelae Technology, EFLIGHT and Airpix, accelerated at Airbus Bizlab India,  to power cutting-edge technologies for ushering new industry benchmarks in aeronautical data services, flight operations and imagery services.

NAVBLUE signed up Bengaluru-based Stelae Technologies to enhance aeronautical data services quality and consistency while enabling faster introduction to the market of next generation fully data-driven and connected EFB (Electronic Flight Bag) solution. Likewise, its agreement with EFLIGHT aims at providing comprehensive service solution to Indian business aviation market. The third agreement is signed between Airbus Aerial and Navi Mumbai-based Airpix for a joint go-to market in India to provide geo-analytic solutions and imagery services.

While the agreement marks the successful culmination of Season 3 of Airbus BizLab’s start-up acceleration programme TAKE OFF 2018, it seeks to bolster government’s ‘Make in India’ and ‘Startup India’ initiatives. The latest partnerships, however, are similar to Airbus’ earlier association with Bengaluru-based startups – Neewee and EFLIGHT (February 2018).

Clipping Innovation with Business

On the occasion, Bruno Gutierres, Global Head, Airbus BizLab asserts, “For the last couple of years, I have been convinced with the potential and the quality of entrepreneurs in India. I am pleased to see that all these partnerships between Airbus and Indian startups are proving me right”. Bizlab is part of Airbus’ innovative strategy to bring together start-ups and Airbus ‘intrapreneur’ to work and speed up the transformation of innovative ideas into valuable businesses.  It has a community of over 2000 B2B start-ups from India, South East Asia and Israel.

Through its six-month ‘acceleration programme’ for start-ups and internal projects, Airbus Bizlab gives access to numerous coaches, experts and mentors in various domains to help start-ups and internal projects speed-up  transformation process. As part of TAKE OFF programme, the company will sponsor two travels to Europe for Indian start-ups (within six months) and fund up to 50,000 euros for the demonstration of proving concept.

Fabrice Villaumé, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, NAVBLUE states, “NAVBLUE believes in India’s potential for multiple reasons. One is India’s proven capacity for innovation within the IT sector, which is demonstrated perfectly by start-ups present at Airbus’ BizLab, with whom we work very closely. Another is the potential of aerospace industry; India has the world’s fastest-growing domestic airline market”. Further, he adds, “We are very excited to work with startups and SMEs in India to help power this growth and bring value to Indian aviation industry with our integrated solutions”.

The Key Drivers

Airbus is a global leader in aeronautics, space and related services. It provides tanker, combat, transport, mission aircraft and delivers most efficient civil and military rotorcraft solutions worldwide. While Airbus Aerial focuses on developing new imagery services by leveraging prime software and aerospace technology to offer actionable data and analysis of information through drones, satellites, high altitude aircraft and other sources, NAVBLUE is an integrated Flight Operations and Air Traffic Management Services company rendering end-to-end, innovative and integrated flight operations solutions for wide-ranging customers present globally.

Carving stature within this arena are the three think-tanks. Airpix offers customized 3D drone data analytics, automated data interpretation, aerial data visualization and measurement solutions for project monitoring, asset inspections, encroachment and change detection, improved planning decisions, audits & compliance, surveying and other applications. On the other hand, EFLIGHT, India's first complete trip support company, simplifies and automates entire flight planning process while Stelae Technologies (an enterprise software product company) transforms unstructured documents to structured, searchable and analyzable outputs like Json (for Big Data), S1000d, ATA (for Aerospace and Defence) and DITA (for Manufacturing).

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