Google's 'Solve for India' engages with upcoming entrepreneurs, developers

Aiming to support and mentor new initiatives in the field of technology, Google on Friday announced its 'Solve for India' program to inspire the new wave of entrepreneurs and startups in emerging cities like Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi, Indore, Nagpur, Nashik, Madurai, Kanpur and Chennai.

Through this initiative, Google aims to expand and energise the startup ecosystem in these 11 tier II cities and inspire the budding entrepreneurs to solve for India and its underserved user needs.

The internet today provides an opportunity to everyone to pursue their passion and create solutions to solve for the real problems of India.

The program will provide a platform for developers and entrepreneurs in tier II cities to hear from experts and learn about the latest Google technologies and get access to direct mentoring and support from Google.

Entrepreneurs will get an opportunity to learn directly from Google engineers who will share product usage insights, how to develop mobile first solutions with strong offline and language capabilities and help them build solutions across areas like agri-tech, healthcare, transportation, education, sanitation and more.

"Majority of India's Internet users are Indian language users and over 80 percent of them access the Internet from their mobile phones. However, the current Indian startup ecosystem is building products for English speaking audience and caters only to 15 percent of the population," said Karthik Padmanabhan, Program Manager Lead for Google India.

"Through this initiative we want to bring the best of Google under one program and join forces with them to help create solutions that serve the needs of a billion Indians," he added.

Developers and entrepreneurs will gain from a variety of Google's programs starting with the Google Launchpad mentoring program which will help them to build, scale and accelerate product ideas into category leaders.

Launchpad includes a six-month mentorship program covering all aspects of product design, business models, technology support to build for scale and go to market strategies along with USD 50,000 equity free investments. For startups looking to build scalable solutions, Google will provide over USD 20,000 of cloud credits.

Developers can also look forward to build on their skills and learn from experts on latest in Android, Firebase, Machine learning, Cloud APIs, progressive web apps and Indian language translation solutions.