Hyderabad, 28th May 2019: T-Hub, which pioneers India’s leading innovation ecosystem that powers next generation products and new business models, today announced the selection of 45 startups for the second edition of its incubation programme, Lab32. It is a comprehensive incubation programme, which is tailor-made for early-stage tech product startups. The new batch of startups will receive a progressive set of advantages that will help entrepreneurs grow faster.
Lab32 is designed to ensure the strategic growth of startups in India. The programme aims to support the government’s ‘Startup India Initiative’ by directing entrepreneurship, innovation and addressing the challenges faced by startups. The startups are shortlisted after screening more than 500 applications from across India. These startups offer an outstanding set of technology innovations for developing solutions for “Digital India” in industries such as healthtech, fintech, smart mobility, sustainability, social impact, smart cities and ed-tech, amongst others. Some of the key selection criteria were shared in advance with the participants such as startups should have initial market traction, an exceptional founding team, and initial amounts of funding.
Ravi Narayan, the CEO of T-Hub said, “The second batch maintains a high quality as there are great minds behind each team who have the potential to create a digital economy in India based on innovation. We witnessed several startups from the first batch who scaled up exponentially through our programme. We are excited to explore values of this tailor made incubation programme to accelerate growth of startup community in India.”
Startups chosen for the programme will receive a host of benefits to ensure their strategic growth. They will have access to the workshops and seminars from senior corporate executives/CXOs and serial entrepreneurs, besides networking and peer-mentoring opportunities within the batch. The entrepreneurs will get curated playbooks and mentoring by industry experts, one-on-one interactions with T-Hub’s dedicated pool of mentors, investors and partners, and a fully functional world-class office infrastructure.
Sanjay Enishetty, MD and CEO of 50K Ventures, one of T-Hub’s mentor said “Lab32 is a program with the unique mix of tech startups, which is the need of the hour for the growth stage startups. It’s an opportunity for investors to support these handpicked ones and contribute to their growth story.” Panneerselvam Madanagopal, Director & Country Head of Symbiosis Institute of Business Management & Stakeholder Management Consulting said “It is indeed a pleasant surprise to see the balance of sectors in this cohort, it really demonstrates the wide interests of our entrepreneurial talent pool which is more focused on solving the real issues in any sector, than just focusing on the sectors that are sought after at that point in time. To my mind, it is clearly a sign of entrepreneurs and the ecosystem maturing to focus on bigger achievements.” Some of the startups from the current batch are, Param.ai, StaTwig, Cantilever Labs and Augmented
Byte.
Avanish Mundhra founder of Cantilever Labs said, “On the product front, our expectation from Lab32 program is to fine-tune our product for stability, affordability and scalability. On the business front, we expect Lab32 to connect us to a host of colleges, corporates and government bodies. Lab32 is an excellent platform for passionate and motivated first-generation entrepreneurs, guided by a team of champion mentors from whom I expect to learn, un-learn, evolve, network and grow our business.”
This year, T-Hub has onboarded more partners who will act as support pillars for strategic growth of startups. These partners bring in leading technologies for the quick functioning of various arms of any business, like HR, Finance, Legal and Sales & Marketing. They will support startups with world-class tools that will enable them to cut operational costs, become more productive and gain efficiency. For instance, Freshworks, a global innovator in customer engagement software is one of our new premium partners that will provide their solutions for startups to use and host mentor programs. “Freshworks understands the startup journey and believes strongly in giving back to the startup ecosystem. India is all set to become a product nation with a number of thriving startups from the country and T-Hub has one of the credible incubation programmes aiding this charge.” said Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO of Freshworks. “We will continue to support innovative entrepreneurs and help elevate their customer engagement strategies with both our software and through mentorship programmes.”
All the Lab32 second batch startups will also be able to access the services of T-Hub’s existing premium partners like Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, HubSpot, IBM, Microsoft, Zoho, amongst others. The second batch of Lab32 commences in May and applications for the next cohort are tentatively planned for the second half of this year.
