The young team of Ajmal Azeez, Ashwin R, Kishan Pankaj, and Balram P. from Kerala founded Spenwise, a prepaid ATM card and mobile app, during the six-month programme of the digital incubator, SV.CO (the digital platform of Startup Village).
At the end of it, they were selected to Zone Accelerator, Mumbai. The company is valued at Rs. 1 crore today.
Similarly, Varghese Goerge and his team from college formed ZPay during their course at SV.CO and got acquihired by software firm Tally.
Parking app
Back in Visakhapatnam, the team of Parkeeze, a part of the second batch at SV.CO, will be launching its parking app in Bengaluru and Hyderabad shortly .
It was with this aim of helping the college students across India take their first step in entrepreneurship, SV.CO, purportedly world’s first digital student incubator and a digital makeover of the Startup Village (SV), was launched recently.
“India’s biggest start-up ecosystem in Bengaluru, which is ranked 17th in the world, is 15 years behind the Silicon Valley. Any Tier-2 or Tier-3 city will be far more lagging behind in the global start-up scene. As SV.CO is fully online, it helps students learn from the best industry faculty to build a ‘real product’ anywhere in India in six months,” chairman of Startup Village (SV.CO) Sanjay Vijayakumar told The Hindu .
The digital incubator, which functions under a PPP model with the Government of India, the State government, and private sectors working together, aims at bridging the gap between smaller cities and their access to entrepreneurial facilities and mentorship.
Teams under the digital incubation programme are helped to select an idea, build a prototype, and launch to early customers in six months and then taken for one week to the Silicon Valley to gain global experience. Since its nationwide launch last week, SV.CO has received over 1,000 applications from cities across India for its six-month entrepreneurship programme.
The digital incubator has already completed first two batches started as a pilot project for selected start-ups from the States of A.P., Kerala, and Gujarat.
“The digital platform of SV.CO works like a virtual timeline, where the progress of our start-up projects is regularly monitored by the mentors. It is very beneficial for teams in cities like Vizag or Vijayawada, where we otherwise do not have access to top industry leaders. We either meet our mentors in Google Hangouts or through Slack, an internal app,” said Pranay Metta, co-founder of Parkeeze and a final year engineering student.
“The digital platform is a huge help for start-ups in Tier-2 cities as it also helps develop skill sets,” said Varun Satyam, co-founder of Advoge, which is a part of the second batch of SV.CO.
