Apex IT industry body, National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), has decided to exit Sunrise Incubation Hub at IT Special Economic Zone, Rushikonda, after its decision to handhold and groom startups on virtual mode.
Nasscom, which started its ninth warehouse in the city in August 2016, after inking MoU with the State government, wanted to use 8,000 sft of space with plug and play facility at the imposing structure, which was once named Sunrise Startup Village. Once fully functional, it had planned to induct 25 startups with 75 seats.
Asked to comment on the development, AP Innovation Society CEO Winny Patro told The Hindu that they had been informed about the decision to vacate the space. A decision on utilisation of space will be decided once the government finalised its view on the request made by Nasscom.
Sources said Nasscom, which has located its warehouse at T-Hub in Hyderabad, has felt that it is more effective if they incubate startups at the place of their convenience on virtual mode and invite them for field visits and lectures by domain experts to a place convenient to them as and when required.
The first Nasscom Warehouse was started in Bengaluru in 2013 after extensive research in association with Zinnov, a management consultancy firm. It was then decided to incubate 10,000 startups by 2020. Thus, the initiative came to be known as 10,000 or 10K programme.
Affordable co-working space
The warehouses were able to provide affordable co-working space during the six-month incubation period by providing the startups access to legal literature, patenting and copy rights. It was successful in helping the prospective technology entrepreneurs with innovative and out-of-the box ideas to convert their startups into commercial entities.
Some startups could get crowd-funding whereas others had to bank on funding from venture capital firms and angel investors. “One could leverage on huge opportunities thrown up in disrupting age mainly after emergence of digital technologies if more number of startups get an opportunity for handholding in virtual mode,” founder of one of the startups, which was incubated at the warehouse here and is now doing good business, said.
