Hyderabad, India, March 26, 2018: TiE ( The Indus Entrepreneurs) today announced the TiE GRAD Finalist WCB of BITS Pilani – Hyderabad has won the spot to compete in one of the largest Global University Challenge, Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) at Houston, Texas, USA, along with the likes of MIT, Harvard, UCLA-Berkley, Cornell, Northwestern, YALE, Carnegie Mellon etc. This is the 17th year of RBPC around 42 university teams from across the world are competing for more than $1.5 Mn in cash and prizes https://rbpc.rice.edu/about-rbpc
TiE Hyderabad also announced the launch of its 2nd Edition of TiE GRAD. The objective of the program is to help engineering & management colleges to build/scale a world-class Entrepreneurship Development Zones within their campuses through a structured program to guide and mentor students on Entrepreneurship.
In 2017 – 10 leading colleges participated in the TiE Grad competition and the winning teams, WCB (Windows Cleaning Bot) from BITS Pilani-Hyderabad, along with Law School 101 from NALSAR University, Hyderabad campus jointly shared the prize money of Rs.5 lacs.
BITS Pilani Student, Ujjawal Aggarwal, the founder of WCB Robotics and the winner said, “It is a great privilege to be selected for RBPC at Rice Univ. Thank you, TiE for providing the best platform at the right time to validate our model. I thank BiTS TBI labs for allowing me to pursue my dream.”
Congratulating the winners, Pradeep Mittal, The Past President of TiE Hyderabad & CEO of GreatFour Systems Inc. said “We wish the young entrepreneurs a great success in the Global Challenge. We are glad that TiE Hyderabad Chapter did a thorough job to mentor this team reach this level through a series of selection rounds. I must say, it is a fabulous platform for WCB team to fine-tune their model. We congratulate the BiTS Pilani Hyderabad faculty for creating the right environment through their Technology Business Incubator.”
Revealing the details and the plans for the 2018 edition of TiE GRAD, Kali Prasad Gadiraju, The President of TiE Hyderabad & Office Managing Partner of Ernst & Young said, “This year we have expanded the scope and the students will get the best opportunity to solve real world use cases through a world class platform. Our aim is to extend this opportunity to more students by having meaningful Institutional partnerships.”
TiE has created an immersive learning platform for students through continuous mentoring to transform their own ideas into feasible business ventures. The college teams with handpicked business models will compete with each other in TiE IDEA TOURNAMENT in August.
In order to stretch their imagination beyond what an academic curriculum can teach and provide industry-relevant exposure, this program will pave a way for the students, to work with successful entrepreneurs and solve real-world customer problems, curated under the guidance of business leaders and subject matter experts via a hackathon called TiE GRAD PREMIERE LEAGUE.
To participate in TiE GRAD 2018 the college must become a TiE-Hyderabad Institutional Member. This year long partnership entails colleges several tangible benefits from TiE, like Privileged Membership of TiE Hyderabad to the Dean/ Secretary and 5 free student memberships, apart from enrolled students receiving unlimited mentor support to nurture their entrepreneurial skills through various talks, workshops, and Seminars and 50+ events that TiE hosts annually events such as Idea Bootcamps, Startup Schools, Immersive Learning Programs, National & International Business Plan competitions, Hackathon Challenges, to name a few.
“With big prize money riding on these challenges, TiE GRAD is a great platform for winning, learning, networking with best Entrepreneurs from our ecosystem.” said Phani Pattamatta, Executive Director at TiE Hyderabad.
