 "India's first start-up village to expand nationwide")
According to its 1000-Day Impact Report, 533 incubated start-ups have created a total of 2889 new jobs.
Now, the vision of the team behind the village is to take it to other states, mainly through digital
Gopalakrishnan, a Kerala native who is chief mentor of the Incubator, said that the interest shown in SV has brought about a cultural change in the state towards entrepreneurship.
"This was the first goal of SV. More and more of the start-ups in Kerala are getting funded and over the time, there will be several success stories out of Kerala. This is the next goal of SV," he said.
Besides Gopalakrishnan, the other mentors are Abhishek Goyal, Founder & CEO, Traxcn Labs, Nishant Verman, Head of Acquisitions at Flipkart, Kiran Karnik, former NASSCOM chief, Rajan Mathews, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), Sharad Sharma, former Yahoo India R&D CEO, Ganesh Lakshminarayan, former Dell India CEO, K K Natarajan, CEO, Mindtree; and Nandakumar, CEO, SunTec.
In The Beginning, There Was One
The idea of Start-Up Village came about when Sanjay Vijaykumar and his engineering collegemates in Trivandrum wanted to do something different. While still in college, they started a new company MobMe Wireless, but did not have any mentors or infrastructure.
In 2005, he met Gopalkrishnan, who turned role-model and mentor. "From then onwards, there was no looking back," VIjaykumar says, noting that one of the key ingredients for success is having good mentor and getting incubated well.
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This paved way for the formation and growth of SV. The founders bootstrapped the company to over Rs 100 crore in revenue and Rs 25 crore in profits.
SV is India's first PPP model technology business incubator (TBI), whose initial products were in the telecom sector. It was started in April 2012 as a joint partnership with the Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Technopark (Govt of Kerala owned IT Park) and the Host Institute, MobME Wireless. What started as a small venture in a 5,000 sq.ft. of space in 2012, is today spread across in an area of 240-acre (IN) Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (KINFRA) Hi-Tech Park at Kalamassery near Kochi.
The host institute, MobME Wireless, was responsible for the vision and execution of the incubator.
The commitments to DST, which has to be fulfilled in 5-year period, was achieved in 3 years itself, said Vijaykumar, CEO, MobME Wireless.
The incubator has steadily garnered more than 150 applications for incubation every month, taking the tally to more than 6000 applications. Apart from offering physical infrastructure, SV ensures that entrepreneurs receive all the key tools including training, networks, mentorship and connect to angel investors or seed fund support.
For instance, RHL Vision, which makes FIN, a wearable tech device that turns finger gestures into commands went in for crowd funding campaign at Indiegogo & raised $202K from over 1610 customers. They later went on to raise Series A funding.
Exploride developed a heads-up-display that can convert any automobile into a smart car, by bundling phone, navigation, music, vehicle diagnostic, and app functionality. They have raised $5,12,718 from Indiegogo campaign, which was the largest hit by an Indian startup in a crowdfunding platform.
Mindhelix's Rico turns used smartphone into smart home security device. They successfully raised $100,000 + in crowd funding.
The Way Ahead
SV aims to launch 1,000 start-ups over the next 10 years and start the search for the next billion-dollar Indian company.
Vijaykumar said like any great startup, this Public Private Partnership project was also a remarkable experimentation, with significant learning and outcome, meeting all the deliverables.
It is now time to think much bigger and time for Central:State and Private sector to come and create larger world-class incubators for creating an entrepreneurial culture in the nation.
The focus will now sharply be on student entrepreneurship and for graduates within three years of passing out. This is because, it would take atleast 3-4 attempts before a first time founder becomes successful and starting the journey early means lesser personal risk because of less responsibilities.
SV is also pioneering the minors in entrepreneurship programme so that Student's can learn entrepreneurship as part of engineering degree.
Gujarat Technological University has signed a MoU with the SV to identify the best ventures, following which Kerala Technological University included SV as its partner.
MobME is also building a digital learning platform called SV.CO to scale up across the country virtually and have physical centres on ground as hubs. The digital platform will be common across india and will also be a record of the learning milestones by a startup, which effectively becomes the university certified academic transcript.
This marks a key revolution for the SV journey from a purely physical incubator to a scalable an edTech platform, he said.
The vision is to finally reach 100,000 out of the 1million engineering students who join college every year and create 20,000 startups per year.
"After graduation, we expect 1-2% to be commercially successful and rest 98 per cent to join accelerator programmes, get acquired, go for higher studies, get great jobs or become small but sustainable business(s). All options leads to faster economic progress of the nation from a developing economy to a developed economy," he said.
States like Andhra Pradesh which have created scheme for creating world class incubators. The SV team in Kerala has been working with Andhra Administration.
Each incubator project is a Rs 150 crore project, said Vijaykumar.