Google's Launchpad Accelerator Program Aims for Mentoring 1K Startups in India in 2019

Tech giant Google is planning to expand its India-focused Launchpad Accelerator programme to mentor 1,000 startups in the country in 2019. To scale the programme in India, Google is said to be currently looking for incubators and accelerator partners.

Although Google’s Launchpad has had supported plenty of startups from India, the company had launched the India-focused Launchpad Accelerator in July this year only. About 30 Indian startups have benefitted from our global Launchpad Accelerator program, helping them collectively raise over $70M and drive revenue increases of almost 500%.

According to Paul Ravindranath G, programme manager of Launchpad Accelerator at Google India, the company will be working with several incubators and accelerators in the counttry to add the launchpad’s mentor network, design sprint methodology, Machine Learning bootcamps, objectives & key results, and scale these proven engagement tools across all partners.

Globally, Google already has 10 partners for Launchpad Accelerator mentorship and these are a part of the ‘Powered by’ programme where Google Launchpad supports accelerators and incubators.

A total of 10 startups were shortlisted from thousands of applicants for the inaugural edition of the three-month accelerator programme in India.

The startups underwent two weeks of training offering them mentorship, opening up Google’s network, experts and technologies.

To recall, in September two Indian startups - m.Paani and Aye Finance have been shortlisted in 10 companies selected globally by Google for its flagship development acceleration programme "Launchpad Studio".

Source - Economic Times

Google Launches Accelerator for Gaming Startups, Developers in India, SE Asia

Tech giant Google is launching a new four-month training programme for gaming startups and developers in South-East Asia including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, to successfully build, scale, launch and market the next generation of hit mobile games.

In a blog post, the company announced that the initiative called Indie Games Accelerator, which will be a four-month programme for independent game developers. The new programme will provide an opportunity to work with mentors from Google and the gaming industry.

In its blog post, Google said that emerging markets like India contribute more than 40% of game installs on Google Play - the app store for Android devices. It also said that there is “rapid smartphone adoption” in these areas.

This four month program is a special edition of Launchpad Accelerator, designed in close collaboration with Google Play, featuring a comprehensive gaming curriculum and mentorship from top mobile gaming experts, said the blog post.

Successful participants will be invited to attend two all-expense-paid gaming bootcamps at the Google Asia-Pacific office in Singapore, where they will receive personalized mentorship from Google teams and industry experts. Additional benefits include Google Cloud Platform credits, invites to exclusive Google and industry events, and more.

Interested startups and developers can apply here by 31 July and the results will be announced on 8 August.

As part of the programme, the developers would get two all-expenses-paid gaming bootcamps at the tech giant's Asia-Pacific office in Singapore.

They will also get access to Google Cloud Platform credits and invites to exclusive company and industry events, as well as the opportunity to be showcased on Google Play, the company said.

Meet 4 Indian Startups Selected for Google Launchpad Accelerator Programme in San Francisco

Google today announced the four shortlisted Indian startups for its hands-on mentorship programme 'Launchpad Accelerator'. With this batch, a total of 30 Indian startups have so far joined the Google's Launchpad programme since its launch.

Launchpad Accelerator is Google's six-month programme that includes an intensive two-week boot camp in San Francisco and mentoring from over 30 teams across Google and expert mentors from top technology companies in Silicon Valley and globally.

The four shortlisted Indian startups will join a group of startups shortlisted from all over the world at the Google Developers' Launchpad Space in San Francisco in the US.

The four shortlisted Indian startups are:

BabyChakra is a Mumbai based startup which is essentially an online marketplace for maternity and childcare products. It claims to be a trusted care companion to Indian parents, from pregnancy to parenting.

m.Paani is also Mumbai based startup which is founded in 2013 by Akanksha Hazari and backed by IDG Ventures. It powers real-time, direct to consumer engagement, marketing, loyalty and insights for mass market consumers and retailers.

NIRAMAI is a Bengaluru based healthtech startup which was founded in 2016 by Geetha Manjunath and Nidhi Mathur. The startup has developed a novel software to detect breast cancer at a much earlier stage than traditional methods or self-examination.

SocialCops is a Delhi based startup founded in 2013 by Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka. It is essentially a data intelligence company that empowers organizations to make better decisions through data. Their platform aims to bring the entire decision-making process to one place — collecting primary data, accessing secondary data, layering internal data, transforming and merging all the data, and visualizing relevant insights through dashboards.

"These startups have been shortlisted based on their unique value proposition and use of latest technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence," Roy Glasberg, Global Lead, Google Developers Launchpad, said in a statement.

Class 5 of the mentorship will kick off on January 29 and will include two weeks of all-expenses paid training, as part of the the full six-month programme.

Google Launches 'Solve for India' Program To Inspire Startups and Entrepreneurs

Aiming to support and mentor new initiatives in the field of technology, Google on Friday announced its "Solve for India" program to inspire the new wave of entrepreneurs and startups in emerging cities like Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi, Indore, Nagpur, Nashik, Madurai, Kanpur and Chennai.

Through this initiative, Google aims to expand and energize the startup ecosystem in these 11 tier II cities and inspire the budding entrepreneurs to solve for India and its underserved user needs, says the company.

The internet today provides an opportunity to everyone to pursue their passion and create solutions to solve for the real problems of India.

The program will provide a platform for developers and entrepreneurs in tier II cities to hear from experts and learn about the latest Google technologies and get access to direct mentoring and support from Google.

Entrepreneurs will get an opportunity to learn directly from Google engineers who will share product usage insights, how to develop mobile first solutions with strong offline and language capabilities and help them build solutions across areas like agri-tech, healthcare, transportation, education, sanitation and more.

"Majority of India's Internet users are Indian language users and over 80 percent of them access the Internet from their mobile phones. However, the current Indian startup ecosystem is building products for English speaking audience and caters only to 15 percent of the population," said Karthik Padmanabhan, Program Manager Lead for Google India.

"Through this initiative we want to bring the best of Google under one program and join forces with them to help create solutions that serve the needs of a billion Indians," he added.

Developers and entrepreneurs will gain from a variety of Google's programs starting with the Google Launchpad mentoring program which will help them to build, scale and accelerate product ideas into category leaders.

Launchpad includes a six-month mentorship program covering all aspects of product design, business models, technology support to build for scale and go to market strategies along with USD 50,000 equity free investments. For startups looking to build scalable solutions, Google will provide over USD 20,000 of cloud credits.

Developers can also look forward to build on their skills and learn from experts on latest in Android, Firebase, Machine learning, Cloud API s, progressive web apps and Indian language translation solutions.

[Top Image - Shutterstock]

Google Launch Startup Mentorship Programme 'Launchpad' in 2015

There's good news in store for Indian startups. Google, the search giant, has selected India for kick starting its startup mentorship programme Launchpad. The programme was successfully tested in Israel. Google's selection of India signals the company’s ever increasing interest in Indian startups.

The search giant launched the first of four such week long programmes on Monday. The programme will see mentors from Google and other companies coaching Indian startups who are looking to grow and become successful.

Launchpad - which was started two-and-a half years ago - is run by Google's developer team. They examined more than 1,450 ventures and shortlisted 20 startups from it. Half of the startups in the curated list are in the B2B space while rest of them cater to businesses. Last year, Google had selected 10 startups from Bangalore and Chennai.

While the California based tech giant has an interest in India’s growing digital economy, its startup programme could also act as a pipeline for the company’s investment arm. Google’s venture capital arm had recently bought a stake in a Chennai based customer support tool called Freshdesk and a real estate portal called Commonfloor.

Google has plans of mentoring close to hundred startups in India through the launchpad programme. The programme was launched three years ago in Israel on a small scale. It was conducted in twenty different cities last year.

The search giant has an interest in growing India’s digital economy as Google gets benefitted whenever companies splurge on it in order to acquire customers. In the financial year that ended March 2014, the company’s revenue crossed Rs. 3,000 crore. The figure is up 47 percent on year-on-year basis. This phenomenal growth in Google’s revenue can be attributed to the increasing online advertising expenditure by ecommerce companies.

Google has plans of consolidating all the “bits and pieces” of its startup programmes under its Launchpad programme. “It will be like one offering to the developer from a startup perspective,” said Sunil Rao, country head, startup ecosystem at Google India.

The search giant wants to take the Launchpad programme to over 50 cities all over the world this year but in India, the focus will be on Bengaluru.

Rao, also the head of developer relations team for Google in India, has been successful in growing the biggest Google Developer community in India with over 45 chapters spread across the country. Google Developer Relations was set up five years ago in Hyderabad.

Google Launch Startup Mentorship Programme 'Launchpad' in 2015

There's good news in store for Indian startups. Google, the search giant, has selected India for kick starting its startup mentorship programme Launchpad. The programme was successfully tested in Israel. Google's selection of India signals the company’s ever increasing interest in Indian startups.

The search giant launched the first of four such week long programmes on Monday. The programme will see mentors from Google and other companies coaching Indian startups who are looking to grow and become successful.

Launchpad - which was started two-and-a half years ago - is run by Google's developer team. They examined more than 1,450 ventures and shortlisted 20 startups from it. Half of the startups in the curated list are in the B2B space while rest of them cater to businesses. Last year, Google had selected 10 startups from Bangalore and Chennai.

While the California based tech giant has an interest in India’s growing digital economy, its startup programme could also act as a pipeline for the company’s investment arm. Google’s venture capital arm had recently bought a stake in a Chennai based customer support tool called Freshdesk and a real estate portal called Commonfloor.

Google has plans of mentoring close to hundred startups in India through the launchpad programme. The programme was launched three years ago in Israel on a small scale. It was conducted in twenty different cities last year.

The search giant has an interest in growing India’s digital economy as Google gets benefitted whenever companies splurge on it in order to acquire customers. In the financial year that ended March 2014, the company’s revenue crossed Rs. 3,000 crore. The figure is up 47 percent on year-on-year basis. This phenomenal growth in Google’s revenue can be attributed to the increasing online advertising expenditure by ecommerce companies.

Google has plans of consolidating all the “bits and pieces” of its startup programmes under its Launchpad programme. “It will be like one offering to the developer from a startup perspective,” said Sunil Rao, country head, startup ecosystem at Google India.

The search giant wants to take the Launchpad programme to over 50 cities all over the world this year but in India, the focus will be on Bengaluru.

Rao, also the head of developer relations team for Google in India, has been successful in growing the biggest Google Developer community in India with over 45 chapters spread across the country. Google Developer Relations was set up five years ago in Hyderabad.

Google Launchpad India selects 10 Indian startups for Incubation

 

In July this year we reported that Google will be mentoring 25 startups in India under its startup incubation program called Google Launchpad, this Wednesday Google has identified 10 startups from Bangalore and Chennai, and will now go to Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad for rest 15 startups to choose.

Google Launchpad is a one-week pre-incubation program for early stage startups focused on subjects including user interface, product strategy & technology, marketing, business development and presentation skills.

The 10 shortlisted startups for Google Launchpad program are:

Cosight (Bangalore)

CoSight offers a mobile-first intelligent user experience for sales people who use existing CRM solutions like Salesforce.com. It integrate into an existing CRM application, and use its data as well as unstructured data (drawn from Web sources such as news, reports, databases, etc.) to automate some of the painfully repetitive data-entry processes (e.g. changing stage conversion probability after each call), as well as provide very specific context-dependent information summaries that add value to a sales user's client relationships.

IReff Technologies (Coimbatore)

IReff Technologies was incorporated on 28 June 2013 by Mohideen. The founder and chief executive of the company graduated from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore. IReff helps prepaid mobile users find the ideal recharge product. A user can search for the best offering by selecting the operator, the telecom circle, and then, the appropriate plan.

Findulum Techlabs Pvt. Ltd (Bangalore)

Findulum focuses on enabling retail commerce and payments through mobile devices. Smartpocket, its flagship product, can convert a mobile device into a singular channel for all card transactions, managing all your loyalty cards on the phone.

AdWyze (Secunderabad)

The online marketing agency was one of the winners at the MIT Global Startup Labs Demo Day held in August. It works across a range of industries like finance and education. AdWyze has developed in-house tools and capabilities to use analytics to improve the returns on online campaigns.

Wazzat Labs (Hyderabad)

The company, another winner at the MIT Global Startup Labs Demo Day, delivers image processing, computer vision and graphics solutions on mobile platforms. Its product, Wazzat Mobile Vision SDK, can be trained to recognize real world objects ranging from printed materials to places and buildings, though it is yet to support objects like faces, plants, food, animals and some medical imagery objects.

Bluehat Education

The company uses personalization and gamification to aid user motivation and technology, and data to aid online learning. Started with a seed capital of $27,000, it was incorporated on 13 January 2012. Iyer guides business at Bluehat, and calls himself the "resident hustler" - doing whatever is required to move ahead. At InMobi, he helped build the user acquisition business across China, Japan and Korea. Kakkad loves to teach and he manages the curriculum design and its "technologification". He conceptualized the EnglishDost solution after trying to learn Spanish.

Etyacol Technologies (Bangalore)

The company has developed a few mobile applications across areas like location-based tracking and customer profiling. CashKumar, one of its products, provides a personalized foreign exchange platform, with access to reputed money changers for the best exchange rates. Makhija is an alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad, while Kandappan and Joshi are from the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore.

TheRightDoctor

Founded in 2013, the self-funded company is a cloud-based solution that digitizes the engagement between doctors and patients. It helps patients find doctors for their medical condition and enables them to take second opinions from experts, from their homes. The automated system collects real time patient data and experiences after they leave the hospital. These data points help doctors monitor patients remotely. Proprietary algorithms analyse patient data and flag early warning signs.

Turing Research Labs (Ahmedabad)

Chennai-based Turing Research is a technology research firm working on social Web and mobile spaces. One of its latest projects, Frilp, that stands for Friends Help, is powered by an algorithm that assists a user to find recommendations on trusted businesses, shops and services from friends and connections. Frilp was one of the start-ups to be incubated and seed-funded by Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, IIM, Ahmedabad.

Expin.me

Rakesh Agarwal, an Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi graduate has created a story builder application, Expin.me, that provides solutions to bloggers, marketers, teams and companies to write and tell their stories online.

Google to directly mentor 25 startups in India for the first time

Internet giant Google has decided to mentor 25 startups for the very first time in India. The company would mentor the startups on topics like business development, marketing and design thinking. Till now Google has been playing part in Indian startups ecosystem as a sponsor of NASSCOM 10,000 Startups events, but now it will directly nurture and mentor startups in India.

The event will take place in the first week of November this year. The event is called Launchpad and will reportedly be a five day event. November will see numerous Google employees from across the world come to India to share and impart their knowledge, experience and industry expertise to the startups. The event will take place in the search giant’s Bangalore office.

The company has also announced a similar event for Brazil earlier this week.

According to Sunil Rao, who is the country head of startup ecosystem at Google India, this event would be a first of its kind in Asia. The event may then be rolled out in places like Tokyo as well.

The Launchpad is already a famous event in Israel. In Israel, the event is held as a one week pre-incubation program for early stage startups. Each day in the event is kept for a specific subject and includes one on one mentorship, presentation and focused work.

Top executives at the search company have made it very clear that Launchpad doesn’t aim at selecting or picking up companies for future investments.  Till now, the search giant has contributed to the Indian startup scene by sponsoring National Association of Software and Service Companies 10,000 Startups program.

Google ventures has not yet invested in any Indian based company but Google Capital, the growth equity arm of the company has invested in a Chennai based company called Freshdesk, which has its headquarters in San Francisco.

Google to directly mentor 25 startups in India for the first time

Internet giant Google has decided to mentor 25 startups for the very first time in India. The company would mentor the startups on topics like business development, marketing and design thinking. Till now Google has been playing part in Indian startups ecosystem as a sponsor of NASSCOM 10,000 Startups events, but now it will directly nurture and mentor startups in India.

The event will take place in the first week of November this year. The event is called Launchpad and will reportedly be a five day event. November will see numerous Google employees from across the world come to India to share and impart their knowledge, experience and industry expertise to the startups. The event will take place in the search giant’s Bangalore office.

The company has also announced a similar event for Brazil earlier this week.

According to Sunil Rao, who is the country head of startup ecosystem at Google India, this event would be a first of its kind in Asia. The event may then be rolled out in places like Tokyo as well.

The Launchpad is already a famous event in Israel. In Israel, the event is held as a one week pre-incubation program for early stage startups. Each day in the event is kept for a specific subject and includes one on one mentorship, presentation and focused work.

Top executives at the search company have made it very clear that Launchpad doesn’t aim at selecting or picking up companies for future investments.  Till now, the search giant has contributed to the Indian startup scene by sponsoring National Association of Software and Service Companies 10,000 Startups program.

Google ventures has not yet invested in any Indian based company but Google Capital, the growth equity arm of the company has invested in a Chennai based company called Freshdesk, which has its headquarters in San Francisco.