8 Startups from Ahmedabad bag fund of 13.1 Lakh – GTU Innovation Council and Startup Center

Date: 16-01-2020
Recently, an SSIP screening was organised at GTU Innovation Council and Startup Center Ahmedabad, an Incubation Center premises situated near LD College. Startups, Student Startups, Innovators and Researchers working on their innovative products/ solutions participated in the program, which gets evaluated at 3 stages and the best startups are supported.

Student Startup Innovation Policy (SSIP), is a support provided by the Education Department, Government of Gujarat and one of their prime enabler in the state is GTU Innovation and Startup Centre through its 4 regional centers with support extended to more than 240 startups across the state for PoC, Prototype or Product Development along with Patent Support to more than 100 innovators.

42 teams participated in the program from the beginning of December and over series of sensitization program, “Pitch It Right” and screenings and by the end of the month, 11 teams were found eligible for the screening round against the jury consisting of domain experts, established startups and industry experts. Of the 11 teams that pitched, 8 teams got selected for the further support and fund of up to 2 Lakh for their product/ solution development. Startups from domains including Food Tech, Local Convenience, Data Science, Automobile – EV, HRTech, IoT Hardware, Biology presented.

Startups that pitched included Melt Engineering that has developed a 3D Printer for the food industry with decoration purposes; their major clientele includes premium restaurants, cake shops who can use to decorate their dishes and cakes. Founder, Dhruval Contractor says, “With our product in cake shops, you can have your cakes decorated with unique cartoons or any other designs within minutes with high precision. We have started working on prototype and our machines will soon be at major cake shops in Ahmedabad.”

Another Startup, Student Desk is a book sharing platform, with major focus on academic books, after the platform the students will not need to purchase new books unnecessarily in college, nor will they need to go to major 2^nd hand bookselling hubs, rather they can explore the needed books through platform and find their seniors or students from nearby institutes who might have the same book, at no additional charge.

The platform claims to have already more than 15000 users and regular book transactions with Ahmedabad and nearby regions as their major user base. Founder Karan Pujara shared, “Convenience today is very essential, which we wish to bring in book sharing, be it Academic books or Novels, we as a community invite everyone to exchange their novels against the novel of their interest, rather than books being just in the shelves, can be mobilized conveniently through the platform.”

The startup, Blue Hanger is an on-demand laundry and Dry cleaning online service with pickup and delivery facility operating in and near the Bopal area. The startup has created an effective logistics setup as well as aggregation of service on more than 400 different types of clothing and apparel. The startup also helps with the cleaning and processing of multiple household articles. The platform claims to be serving more than 1500 regular customers from more than 6 months.

Founder Aashva Dandawal shared, “Our business opportunity got created when we did a survey across Bopal area and came to know that, the existing clothes service business is highly unorganized and care taken on the clothing articles is weak, to resolve the same we have started Blue Hanger along with assurance on the clothing articles.

We soon plan to expand across Ahmedabad.” If you are a startup and want to take benefit of the SSIP grant; the individual may apply at bit.ly/GTU-SSIP

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