Hyderabad, India, December 18, 2017: TiE Hyderabad declared 2 student run startups, Law School 101 from NALSAR-Hyderabad and WCB from BITS Pilani-Hyderabad as winners today. These 2 teams won the inaugural edition of the TiE GRAD Business Plan Competition. Students from 9 prestigious colleges of Telangana participated and competed in the 1st Edition of TiE GRAD: Education to Entrepreneurship – inter college competition finale held in city today.
Mr. Pradeep Mittal President of TiE Hyderabad and Mr Kali Prasad Gadiraju Vice President of TiE Hyderabad presented awards to the winning teams WCB by Mr Ujjawal Aggarwal from BITS Pilani-Hyderabad, along with Law School 101 by Ms Vennela Krishna and Mr. Abhishek Anirudhan of NALSAR University in Hyderabad, each winner was presented with a cheque of Rs. 2,50,000 to translate their idea into a rewarding business model.
The winning team from BITS Pilani Hyderabad intends to make the next generation of robots to clean the façade of tall sky scraper avoiding risk to human life. The other startup from Nalsar University was Law School 101 that focused on making law education accessible to everyone.
The jury members included prominent entrepreneurs and venture capitalists of Hyderabad ecosystem namely Dr. Sanatanu Paul – MD & CEO of TalentSprint, Mr. Jagannath Samavedam – Partner at Ventureast, Mr. Sanjay Jesrani – Founder & CEO of Go North Ventures, Mr. Sachin Tummala – CEO of Corpus Media Labs Mr. Srini Chandupatla – Co-Founder of Manjeera Digital Systems and Mr. Sharlin Thayil – Co-Founder & CEO of VU360 Technologies.
Announcing the successful debut of TiE GRAD 2017 and applauding participants Pradeep Mittal, CEO of GreatFour Systems Inc said,” Since the start of this decade students have chosen alternative careers and always tried to break the norms and use unconventional ways to boost the economy. The need for sustainable start-ups will not perish until the end of this century as problem based startups are required for the nation of a billion. Opportunities to fail and succeed is what defines the mettle of an entrepreneur and starting young is the key.”
Congratulating the victorious students and their zeal for walking on the path of entrepreneurship, Executive Director of TiE Hyderabad Ms. Sreedevi Devireddy, said,” This was a humble beginning to nurture Innovation and Entrepreneurship for college goers. We intend to make this more rigorous in the coming years and take it to the next level. Student Entrepreneurs have an unfair advantage over others as they have all the time in the world to learn, fail and relearn to evolve.” She added.
Through TiE GRAD, TiE Hyderabad conducted in-house knowledge sessions/ speaker series with all its partnered institutions followed by a business plan competition throughout the year. The selected winners from each college were later given the opportunity to pitch at the TiE GRAD Finale on 18th December 2017.
This program facilitated students pursuing their graduation/ post-graduation with an intent of starting up, from colleges such as BITSH, IPE, SREC, Woxsen, IIT-H, IIIT, SIBM, CBIT and Nalsar. The selected students came up with practical and scalable ideas which made the task of selecting winners tough for the judges.