Conquest, BITS Pilani [earlier coverage here], in association with Accel and Canbank VC recently concluded its Top 50 Online Mentoring Sessions, despite the challenges faced by them during today’s extraordinary situation caused by COVID-19.
The sessions, that were initially supposed to be held in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, were conducted online due to the unprecedented circumstances and yielded great results. For the 1st time in 16 years, Conquest also decided to kickstart BITSian Track, a special program tailored exclusively for BITSian startups.
The sessions were held over two days on the 6th and 7th of June. The sessions were interactive and had the participation of eminent personalities like Saptarshi Prakash [Design – Swiggy], Vedanarayanan Vedantham [SME Business Head – Razorpay], Raghu Ramanujam [Director of Products (Payments) – Flipkart], Mitesh Shah [Head of Finance – BookMyShow], Suhas Khuller [Strategy Head & CFO – Shuttl]. Based on their feedback, fifteen startups from diverse fields qualified for the next stage.
The startups were mentored individually by mentors in the categories of Strategy, Technology, Fundraising, UI/UX Design, Growth and Operations, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Acquisition and Product.
Top fifteen Startups Shortlisted from Pan India Track
- Autointelli Inc – An AIOps company that provides modern solutions that handle modern IT Operations [IT Ops] with a duo of automation and machine learning.
- Community farm – An online marketplace for farmers and Agri/food startups solving the problem of traceability and transparency in the food sector.
- Credlo – Provides a payment method that allows its partnered retail merchant to offer their end-customers the ability to buy goods and services on a ‘Buy now, pay later’ basis.
- DARWYN – A B2B Electric vehicle company, helping businesses electrify their last and first-mile fleet.
- EasyKrishi – A technology startup working in the field of agriculture, allowing Indian farmers to directly communicate with the buyers.
- Elear Solutions Tech Pvt. Ltd. – Provide an edge intelligence-enabled Smart Home Platform as a service to Telecom and Internet Service Providers.
- Emote Electric – Designs, engineers and develops smart electric vehicles to compete with and displace petrol counterparts by surpassing them in price and convenience.
- HiPER Automotive – Building embedded hardware [IoT device] for vehicles to analyze, personalize, and improve the engine performance to cut fuel usage by 15% and reduce emissions by 10%.
- Kashware – Links all cards, wallets, banks, etc. into one single payment card that works on all card machines and websites
- Lincode – Uses 2D camera built-in IoT and artificial intelligence to identify visual defects in manufacturing lines and use robotics to eliminate defective products from the lines.
- OroPocket – A universal investment platform on the blockchain, enabling users to be able to invest in digital assets and be able to use them as real money in real-time.
- Sonant Technologies Pvt. Ltd. – Vision to empower specially-abled people through sustainable and affordable technology.
- Sova Health – A precision nutrition platform that uses science and technology to simplify healthy eating.
- Spathion Labs – Building an e-invoicing network platform based on blockchain technology for automating indirect tax reporting, auditing and building financial applications.
- Vadoo – A Peer to Peer enabling users to simultaneously consume and deliver the stream.
Top four startups shortlisted from BITSian Track
- ATHVed Innovation Labs – Provides a physical and virtual card that will handle all cards in a single card.
- BiteSpeed – Helps e-commerce brands build their own Facebook Messenger Chatbots to engage website visitors and recover lost revenue.
- Dataxi – A B2B Data Marketplace to facilitate end-to-end data exchange between organizations.
- SolarGridX – Provides a crowd investing platform that lets people invest in Solar Panels and earn returns from users who use their funding to put up Solar Panels.
The shortlisted startups will now be having online coaching sessions starting from the second week of July till the first week of September. Design, Pitching, Sales, Product, Hiring, and Legal are some of the domains that are going to be covered in these sessions. There will also be frequent networking sessions for the startups, with the Conquest finalists of previous years joining in as well to share their wonderful experiences.
The program ends with the Grand Finale, with the Startups getting an opportunity to pitch in front of India’s leading investment firms. Prominent entrepreneurs, top investors, policymakers and various other stakeholders of the startup ecosystem will be attending the Finale.