A peek into the startup incubation drives of India's next-rung campuses

Not all great ideas are nurtured at IITs and IIMs; many enterprises with formidable products today have come from the country's deeper regions and have received parenting at lesser known institutes

In 2019, a smart chess board became one of the biggest crowd-funded products in India, raising over $1 million from around the country through crowd-funding platforms. Square Off, the smart chess board that would make a counter move automatically against a human player, is an innovation by InfiVention Technologies which has been incubated at not an IIM or an IIT but at the Somaiya Trust-backed Research Innovation Incubation Design Laboratory Foundation (riidl).

Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurship cells and startup incubators at not just top tiered IITs and IIMs but at mid-tiered campuses and regions are also making a mark, churning out innovative businesses and products that are both, nationally and globally relevant. 

"The startup ecosystem has gradually begun spreading to non-metros and campuses other than premier institutes as well. It is no more about a big name backing these startups. Sheer innovation, marketability and scalability of products and services are attracting investors to these incubation centres and entrepreneurship cells. Moreover, they are also garnering support from state and central government agencies who are not limited to just top-tiered centres," says startup expert and chief executive officer of i-Hub, a student start-up and innovation hub in Gujarat, Hiranmay Mahanta.

Which is why, what started as a small venture operating from the campus of K J Somaiya College of Engineering in 2010 has now grown to churn out award winning startups that have caught the fancy of government and corporate alike, attracting investors and mentors alike. What is more, several startups being incubated at or through these centres have their genesis in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and towns. 

For instance, Madurai-based JioVio Healthcare, a startup incubated by Riidl was conferred with the prestigious '10th Anjani Mashelkar Inclusive Innovation Awards' in November 2020 for providing end-to-end solution that ensures the availability of high-quality maternal care for mothers in remote places.

"There have been startups coming out of towns like Satara and Kolhapur whom Riidl is facilitating in meeting customers as well as helping them pitch to investors, apart from rolling them into our acceleration programs. So far, over 120 startups have been incubated with hundreds of job opportunities being created in the last 5-6 years," says Gaurang Shetty, Chief Innovation Catalyst and CEO at riidl. The centre has gone on to raise Rs 15-20 crore through various agencies including Government of India (GoI)'s Department of Science & Technology (DST), Department of BioTechnology's BIRAC and Government of Maharashtra's MSINS that has helped scale up its incubation activities.

Since inception, riidl has supported over 5,000 innovators through its initiatives Maker Mela and Darwin, to develop their early-stage ideas into fully-functional companies, by providing them educational programmes, industry-specific resources, intellectual property protection and other required resources. In merely a decade, the not-for-profit organisation has focused on building startups in the field of biotechnology, healthcare, energy, mobility, ML, AI, and Robotics, facilitating 109 startups and 5,400 innovators across sections and raising roughly Rs 34 crore in the past five years.

Similarly, incubated at Forge Accelerator in Coimbatore, Abhaya Information Tech has caught the fancy of investors for its telemedicine platform for remote health monitoring that works through wearables. The wearables collect data on the patient’s vital parameters and enabling doctors with remote consulting services. another startup AI Health Highway has successfully launched AiSteth, a smart stethoscope to screen, detect and predict cardio-respiratory disorders using state of the art signal processing integrated with AI/ML. 

Unlike its peers engaged in software as a service (SaaS)-based products in metros like Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai, Coimbatore Innovation and Business Incubator--an enterprise of the Sakthi Group, a TBI catalysed by DST, Govt of India Coimbatore and hosted by Kumaraguru Group of Institutions--has been making a mark in one of the growing industrial and manufacturing hubs of Tamil Nadu. Popularly branded as Forge, the incubator has focused on promoting hardware and industrial product startups.

"We realised early that there is not enough support available for hardware startups, especially physical products, given that there are startup hubs around software in major cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai, among others. Our endeavour, therefore, has been to make hardware startups successful," says Forge co-founder and chief executive officer Vish Saharanamam.

Putting things in perspective, Sahasranamam asserts that for every 100 hardware product ideas, only 10 reach prototyping stage and only one goes to production stage. "Hence, we want to address the value of depth at our centre. As a result, we have built a 20,000 sq ft facility in Coimbatore since last three and a half years, of which 10,000 sq ft is for innovation and product prototyping labs in Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality (AR) and mobility, with Forge providing technical infrastructure to these startups," he adds.

So far, nearly 130 startups have gone on to raise over Rs 20 crore worth of investments through Forge, which itself has raised funds of over Rs 75 crore over the last five years for incubation of startups. 

Scalability and success of startups emerging from mid-tiered cities and towns have been at par with their counterparts in metros and top centres. For instance, hardly six months old Vadodara Startup Studio (VSS), an accelerator set up by Parul University, has already incubated and helped scale nearly 70 startups. While the varsity had set up an entrepreneurship development cell (EDC) in 2013 for promoting student start-ups, VSS takes them a step further by helping them accelerate and find markets for their products and services.

"We are now at par with similar accelerators in major cities. In just six months, we have been able to help several startups raise funds and scale their businesses. Some of them have gone on to find nation-wide market for their products and services on their own merit," says Nikhil Suthar, chief operating officer at VSS.