Hyderabad :
It’s always a major problem for the startups to attract investors and get some funding, but it was not so on Saturday.
Six out of the 11 startups which have pitched their ideas at ‘Startup-a-thon 1.0’ have been able to attract investors and are now just a step away from getting some funding ranging between Rs 30 lakh and Rs 1.50 crore.
Out of the six, four startups will directly go for negotiations with investors and the remaining two need to pass through another round and will be allowed to have negotiations only if they clear this particular round. Besides, the event has also provided an opportunity to all the other startups (30) to get some mentorship opportunity.
“Mentoring and funding are the two major problems the startups face and, in order to solve these issues, we have organised this problem. Although only six startups have got short-listed, the main advantage of this programme is that every startup that participated in the event got some mentorship. Now, they know exactly what they are lacking and, by working on their weakness in future, they will be in a better state to pitch,” Maj. Sunil Shetty (retd), CEO and founder of Ask Mentor, said.
The two-day event also witnessed the inauguration of college-specific incubation centre at St Martin Engineering College (SMEC), Kompally. On day one, a mentoring workshop and preliminary round of startup pitches was held and eleven students were selected and were given a chance to pitch to the investors.
“Generally, a student takes at least five years’ time after graduation to become a entrepreneur. Our main aim is to reduce this gap by providing mentorship programme. In order to provide support to the youngsters, we started an incubator at SMEC college. This will be made available even to the outside students so that every student gets benefit from this,” said Rajiv Lulla, director (strategy) of askfunding.in.
“The initiative taken by askmentor and askfunding is commendable. In order to show our support for the event, we are introducing our developer platform to students so that they can make use of it. It is same as the in-house site we use and anyone can register freely and make use of the basic services,” Manoj Sharma, CTO of Quikr.com, said.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Telangana / by Express News Service / January 31st, 2016