KOCHI: Startup Village, the country’s first PPP-model business incubator, will to launch a digital incubator for students in Thiruvananthapuram on July 13.
SV.CO., the digital avatar of Startup Village, will be launched by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, Infosys co-founder and Startup Village chief mentor Kris Gopalakrishnan and National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board head H K Mittal.
“The incubator will focus on creating entrepreneurial culture amongst the country’s five million engineering students by providing them a fully digital incubation framework, with applications for admission, teaching, mentoring and graduation,” said a press statement here on Thursday.
The digital incubator, which was built over the last 12 months, has already received more than 1,000 applications from students in its beta stage, from across Kerala and cities like Vadodara and Vishakhapatnam.
“Students can form teams and apply on www.sv.co for admission to the digital incubator. Once selected, they will be guided right from selecting the idea to building the prototype and launching it to early customers within six months. Based on whether customers like the product, or not, teams can then graduate to incubators/accelerators and raise ‘angel funding.’ They could also get acqui-hired as teams, hired by other startups or go for higher studies,” said Startup Village chairman Sanjay Vijayakumar.
“The 20 teams which completed incubation in the beta phase of SV.CO saw huge success in getting admitted to the Zone Accelerator in Mumbai, getting acqui-hired by Tally or landing handsome jobs in leading startups like Ola and Free Charge,” he added.