J Satyanarayana, IT advisor to the Andhra state government, Ajay Sawhney, principal secretary to Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, and Sanjay Jaju, information technology and communications secretary, interact with Startup Village CEO Pranav Suresh Kumar.

 

By Ashraf Padanna/Kochi

 

Andhra Pradesh will soon have a clone of Startup Village, India’s first telecom business incubator located in this Kerala port city where hundreds of young technocrats and students flock with innovative ideas.

A high-level team of officials led by J Satyanarayana, the information technology advisor to the AP government, visited the Silicon Valley-modelled Startup Village here this weekend to have a firsthand understanding on the working of the exclusive zone of innovators.

The government of Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu is reportedly planning to set up the startup zone in the coastal city of Vishakhapatnam. It also plans to set up “innovation fund” for creating an innovative ecosystem.

The new government, which came to power two months back, aims at IT investments worth US$2bn in three years besides US$5bn in electronics. It plans gigabit broadband connectivity to all villages by 2020 and IT parks in Kakinada, Anantapur, Chittoor and Vijayawada.

“It is a sign that the success of India’s first public-private partnership technology business incubator is beginning to make other states sit up and take notice,” the Startup Village said in a statement yesterday. “It has transformed IT entrepreneurship in Kerala.”

The team held discussions with its chief executive officer Pranav Kumar Suresh and Hrishikesh Nair, who heads the state-run IT industry destination in the city, Infopark, seeking their support and expertise for a similar facility.

“We are really impressed. We want to set up an incubation facility of similar kind and we are in consultation with the team here,” Satyanarayana said after the visit. “We are gearing up our IT policy to attract more investors, entrepreneurs and startups”.

Ajay Sawhney, the principal secretary to the chief minister; Sanjay Jaju, the information technology and communications secretary, and experts from the consultancy firm Ernst & Young were also part of the AP delegation.

They also discussed Kerala’s Student Entrepreneurship Policy, a pet project of Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy inspired by the success of the Startup Village to promote entrepreneurship culture among the youth.

Pranav said the delegation was excited about the facilities and the kind of ecosystem created for the youngsters. They discussed the support provided by the state government, the different levels of mentoring it provides to the startups and how they reach the student community on the campuses.

“We want to create a similar ecosystem in Andhra particularly by recommending to device a policy on the lines of the one in Kerala,” Sawhney said.

More than 500 youngsters have already set up their enterprises based out of the Startup Village within just two years and the number is going as against the target of 1,000 in 10 years set by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, its chief mentor and Kerala’s most successful IT entrepreneur.

The Startup Village also selects promising entrepreneurs and send them on all-expense-paid trip to the US with an aim to “expose the youngsters to the legendary startup environment in Silicon Valley”. This year it plans to groom 1000 app developers.

“It’s a dream to create abn-dollar campus and our idea has become a trendsetter,” said Sanjay Vijayakumar, its chairman. “The fact that a state like Andhra, which got on relatively early on the IT bandwagon when compared to Kerala, should look to the Startup Village for inspiration shows just how far we have come”.

In 2006, Vijayakumar and his friends launched India’s first campus startup, MobME Wireless Solutions, which boasts of clients like Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and Aircel.

Last year, it received the approval from the National Stock Exchange to go public.

It recently bagged the exclusive technology rights to roll out public key infrastructure-based mobile signatures for secure log-ins and transactions.

 

 

 

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