KOCHI: One startup’s product is nearly dead; no one has heard of the second and a third one’s name throws up ‘scam’ when Googled. Call it sheer incompetence, a rush job or whatever, the latest report on Indian startup ecosystem by Nasscom, India’s premier trade body for IT/BPO, which lists some of the promising startups in the country, has listed three unknown or failed startups, drawing flak from the state’s industry veterans.
Nasscom report titled Indian Startup Ecosystem-2018, released on October 25, chose to list Keleno, Exploride, and RideBlock from Kerala, as more high-profile and promising start-ups were given the skip. What has got the Kerala IT industry’s goat is Nasscom’s decision to ignore Thiruvananthapuram among the start-up hubs even as cities such as Ahmedabad and Indore were named as ‘emerging start-up hubs’.
Only Kochi figured in the list as an ‘emerging’ startup hub. Thiruvananthapuram, which has spawned a clutch of highly reputed startups such as Gen Robotics, which attracted international attention for designing the spider-shaped robot to clean the manholes and CareStack, which is racing to become Kerala’s first unicorn, was surprisingly ignored by India’s top IT body.
Though Nasscom admitted the mistake and replaced the three startups with another three including Gen Robotics in a revised report released the other day, the damage had already been done. The corrected report also replaced Kochi with Kerala (listed as a city) to avoid criticism for exclusion of Thiruvananthapuram.
Robin Alex Panicker, a keen startup watcher and early investor in some highly successful startups from the state, was the first to point out the error in the Nasscom report in a Facebook post. “If Nasscom wanted to profile Kochi, there are other startups in the city, which are much more promising,” Panicker told Express.
Sujith Unni M S, regional head of Nasscom, who is based in Kochi, explained the three startups named in the first report were only ‘illustrative’ and they were not in anyway listed based on their potential. In the revised report, Nasscom has replaced Keleno, Exploride and Ride Block with Clap Research, FTL Technology, and Gen Robotics.
Panicker points out two startups --- Clap Research and Gen Robotics --- are from Thiruvananthapuram. “We want both Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi to figure in the list of ‘growing’ or ‘emerging’ startup hubs in the country,” he said.
Kerala is now slotted with Jaipur and Chandigarh as an ‘emerging’ startup hub. “Only the names have been changed. All other things remain the same in the new report. Emerging startup hubs are those, which have less than two per cent of startups in India,” he said. Anthony Thomas, Global CIO, Nissan Motor, which is setting up its first global digital hub in Thiruvananthapuram, commented it has been the same story almost every year. “I think it’s time Nasscom gave up their office at Technopark and moved on. Kerala should develop outside of Nasscom as that’s how it has always been,” he commented in a Facebook post.