Maruti partners five startups for AI, battery recycling solutions

The startups will work on end-of-life lithium-ion battery recycling, procurement automation, multilingual customer engagement, brand visibility and software development

Maruti Suzuki India (MSIL) on Monday said it has partnered with five startups to develop solutions aimed at improving operational efficiency and customer experience, besides recycling end-of-life electric vehicle batteries.

 

The five startups selected under the fifth cohort of the Maruti Suzuki Incubation Program (MSIP) are MiniMines, Easework AI, Sarvam AI, Siftly and CodeMate AI. The incubation programme is run in partnership with IIM Bangalore's startup support centre, NSRCEL (Nadathur S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning).

 

MiniMines will develop environment-friendly solutions for recycling end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and recovering valuable materials from them, MSIL said.

 

Easework AI will automate procurement workflows for indirect consumables, or non-production items such as office supplies, maintenance materials and safety equipment, using agentic AI, which refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of carrying out tasks with limited human intervention.

 

Sarvam AI will deploy generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), a technology that creates text, images or other content, with multilingual support to improve customer interactions across different touchpoints. Siftly will use GenAI to enhance brand visibility, while CodeMate AI will help speed up the development of software applications used in Maruti Suzuki's business processes.

 

"At Maruti Suzuki, we have been actively working with startups to co-create innovative and practical solutions to address real business challenges. We are delighted to collaborate with five more startups. One of these startups, MiniMines, will support us in safely recycling end-of-life batteries, while the other four startups will help improve customer engagement and drive efficiency across our business operations," said Hisashi Takeuchi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Maruti Suzuki India.

 

Maruti Suzuki said it has built multiple innovation programmes to support startups working on mobility and manufacturing technologies. Over the past seven years, it has screened around 7,400 startups, engaged with more than 250 and onboarded 38 as partners.

 

Apart from the incubation programme launched in 2020, the company runs the Maruti Suzuki Accelerator for growth-stage startups, the Mobility Challenge for mature-stage startups, Nurture, a pre-incubation programme for idea-stage ventures, and FundRays, an investment-readiness programme launched in 2025 for startups that have graduated from its innovation initiatives.