How startups are hunting in packs to land corporate clients

Bengaluru: Akshaya Patra provides mid-day meals to 1.8 million school children across India. The NGO came to Accenture a couple of years ago with a simple query: how do we feed more children? The consultant looked at the supply chain and then worked with three startups from different domains for a solution. One startup used data from IoT sensors to streamline cooking processes and monitor the quality of food. Another one used machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the demand for food. And a third startup used blockchain to put feedback from schools on a distributed ledger in a tamper-proof manner.