Startup Village, which completed two successful years, is bolstering its incubation support system with an industry startup connect leadership programme for entrepreneur business mentoring.
Some of the world's leading technology companies are expected to come on board the mentoring programme, which will be guided by Infosys' executive vice chairman and Startup Village chief mentor Kris Gopalakrishnan.
The roadmap for the new project will be announced at the technology business incubator's second anniversary celebrations to be inaugurated by chief minister Oommen Chandy on April 26.
Minister for industries and IT PK Kunhalikutty, and Kris Gopalakrishnan will also address young entrepreneurs at Startup Village.
"It has been a wonderful two years for the incubator. We started with just two companies and are today supporting around 600," said Sijo Kuruvilla George, CEO of Startup Village. Our goal is to make Kerala one of the top five startup destinations in the world and to that end we are constantly looking to improve the ecosystem here, he added.
"Having identified a gap in business mentoring, we are now trying to get the most successful global technology companies to advice entrepreneurs here on strategy and leadership," he said.
Startup Village was set up on April 15, 2012, as India's first business incubator focusing on mobile-internet technology and funded jointly in public private partnership.
In two years, it has received more than 2,200 applications.
More than 200 of the 600 companies it supports currently are student start-ups.
"Student entrepreneurship, backed by the Kerala government's policies and incentives, has been the biggest driver of social and cultural change in the recent times," said Sanjay Vijayakumar, chairman of Startup Village.
The wave of entrepreneurship and the demand for incubation support is so strong that we are planning to expand beyond our core area of mobile and internet technology to allied sectors such as electronics and hardware.
Some of the major initiatives of Startup Village for entrepreneurs include SV Square, a government-backed programme to give students the chance to go to Silicon Valley and experience it first-hand; the Develop programme to build a community of 1,000 plus mobile application developers spread across engineering colleges.
