With a mission to put all Indian startups, incubators and venture capitalists on one map, Sandeep Maderametla, an entrepreneur and postgraduate student of electrical engineering at IIT-M, Chennai, started www.mappedindia.com on June 7. Within nine days of launch, 90 organisations and about 25 events from across India have registered. “Mappedindia hopes to be a crowd-sourced address book for startups. The startup ecosystem in India can do with a bit more discovering and proximity — many countries including Isreal and Dubai have already explored this space ,” says the 23-year-old.
The services are many — startups can discover lawyers/accountants/incubators and other service providers nearby, find startups working on similar technologies nearby and connect with them and also discover related events; hackers can make use of the site to land jobs or internship opportunities and get updates on upcoming hackathons, events, etc; service providers can target startups for business and similarly, VCs can also look for prospective clients.
Mappedindia was the outcome of the IITian’s web and app development hobbies. He has also co-founded Desto Creative Solutions, in November 2011. Desto is into graphic designs and web development.
In awe of the internet space that requires little money to start, Maderametla is hopeful of his college’s support in taking things further at Mappedindia. His future plans include improving user interface design, splitting the map into cities, categorising startups under industry, e-commerce, social, bio and such, and developing density maps of startups — making the map more structured.
shilpa.vasudevan@newindianexpress.com