CHENNAI: Guidance Tamil Nadu and Tamil Nadu Startup and Innovation Mission (Startup TN) launched an Automotive, Electric Vehicle and Smart Mobility Forum on Monday, which aims at supporting companies working in electric and smart mobility space to raise funds and collaborate in research and development.
“This has been done to improve synergy and bring government organisations and multiple stakeholders under one umbrella,” said Vishnu Venugopal, managing director and CEO of Guidance. “There are large players in the startup ecosystem. Startups are playing an important role in research in batteries, technologies such as motors among others.
While startups are not eligible for research and development incentives and other incentives from state government, it makes sense for them to leverage these policies when they pitch to investors at an early stage. When a large investor looks at Tamil Nadu, it would look at local partners. So, it makes sense for startups to form joint ventures and tap these benefits. Startup TN can handhold them in initial stages and Guidance TN can come in later,” Venugopal said.
Sivarajah Ramanathan, CEO of Startup TN, said it is essential to connect various stakeholders like large corporates, incubators, academia, R&D centres, investors and government departments with startups.
Startup TN plans to form 45 vertical forums across industries starting from a circular economy forum and followed by new verticals every month.
Startup TN also plans to launch TANFUND, an aggregator of venture capital funds. “Tamil Nadu lacks presence of venture capitalist. So we are trying to bring in investors,” Sivarajah added. Memorandums of Understanding was signed with Startup TN and Bosch and Mahindra & Mahindra to enable Corporate-Startup connects for mentoring, product validation and testing.
Vadiraj Krishnamurthy CTO and vice-president of Bosch Global Technologies, said a few large companies alone cannot solve major problems like road fatalities, smart mobility and sustainability and collaboration with startups is essential.