Healthcare start-up Swagene wins BITS Pilani's International Conclave

Health care start-up Swagene, which offers genetic diagnostics, was adjudged the winner at Conquest 2015, BITS Pilani’s International Start-up Conclave held in New Delhi on Sunday. Gamezop, a social network for casual games that allows users to play games without downloading them, stood second in a group of ten finalists.

Truck Suvidha, an online marketplace for transporters, was adjudged as the marketing pioneer at the eleventh edition of the event which was started by a group of enterprising students to enable the most innovative start-ups network with potential investors.

The winners were picked up by a jury which included Dev Khare, managing director, Lightspeed Ventures; Nilesh Kothari, co-founder, Trifecta Capital; Murali Natarajan, managing director and chief executive, DCB Bank; Bharat Shankar and Ankit Arora from Accel Partners and Anant Vidhuri of Bessemer Venture Partners, Mathieu Morand, investment associate at Bessemer Venture Partners, Tarun Davda, director, Matrix Partners and Rajat Tandon, vice-president, Nasscom.

Ten start-ups made detailed presentations spread across two sessions.

Fifty start-ups were shortlisted from 1400 registrations after a month-long period of evolution. These 50 got mentors from leading start-ups, who advise them on further fine-tuning their business models. The top ten finalists were then selected by the jury members to be part of the finale.

The pitching sessions by start-ups were followed by an interaction of investors with start-up founders, who wanted to know when should a start-up approach investors for money, if it was okay to focus on profits and raise money at a later stage. The investors said start-ups should approach friends and family, seed and angel investors before going to a venture capital firm. This session was followed by two panel discussions between VCs, founders, accelerators and incubators. The event culminated with the announcement of the winners for Conquest 2015.

---