23.1.12

Startup Village

India's first public-private partnership (PPP) telecom business incubator, ‘Startup Village’, is being set up on a 15,000 square feet space at the Kinfra Park in nearby Kalamassery and the first phase of the project will be inaugurated in February this year. An agreement in this regard was signed between MobME CEO Sanjay Vijayakumar and Kerala Infrastructure Development Authority (Kinfra) managing director S Ramanath.
Startup Village will focus primarily on student start-ups from college campuses and would be modelled on the technology incubators in Silicon Valley. Itaims to incubate 1,000 product start-ups over 10 years and start the search for a billion-dollar company from a college campus by the turn of the decade.
The National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), department of science and technology (DST), Technopark and MobME Wireless have joined hands to set up the country’s first telecom business incubator, Startup Village, an Indian telecom innovation hub, Kinfra said in a press release in Kochi. The village will create a vibrant ecosystem for start-ups to create breakthrough technologies for the global telecommunications industry. This would be made possible through association with leading companies in the telecom sector by setting up telecom innovation zones that bring the latest technology platforms and products to the start-ups in the incubator before their release in commercial markets, Ramanath said.
Sanjay Vijaykumar said they were planning to take in 10 start-ups under a first batch by April this year, with about 30 entrepreneurs. The incubator park will have a 4G network, advanced telecom labs and provide all services related to legal and intellectual property issues and accounting, besides full-furnished office spaces, video conference rooms, computers, phone lines, internet, server space and virtual office services required for a student to start a company even while in college, according to Startup Village CEO Sijo Kuruvilla.
“With this initiative, we aim to create a platform for the next generation of entrepreneurs to create enterprises and be job creators rather than job seekers.
We aim to market the Start-up Village aggressively to Non-Resident Keralites and high net worth individuals for extending their support to the start-up ecosystem in Kerala,” he added.
Infosys co-founder and cochairman Kris Gopalakrishnan is the chief mentor of the Telecom Innovation Hub and his mentoring would be the biggest value we can provide to budding entrepreneurs, who can interact with Kris to learn as well as imbibe the art of building a billion dollar enterprise, Sanjay Vijayakumar said.

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