It is the story of our lives – study, graduate, get a job, earn.
But what if someone wanted to write a different script?
What if a student wanted to work on an innovative idea right after college, instead of settling for a 9-5?
IIT Delhi’s Endowment Nurture Fund supports such students by giving them a grant that allows them to follow their dream and work on their ideas.
Four start-ups have got 50 lakhs each as a grant. These startups were selected by a jury that included:
Mr. Alok Mittal, Co-founder and CEO, Indifi Tech;
Mr. Alok Goyal, Partner, Stellaris Venture Partners, and
Mr. Parag Dhol, General Partner, Athera Venture Partners
Let’s know a little more about each of these start-ups.
Circle
Circle, founded by IIT Delhi students Ankur Yadav and Navan Jaiswal, is a financial wellness product for organisations to provide daily salary & low-cost retirement to their employees. According to the LinkedIn profile of the founder, the company is in stealth mode and will start operations soon.
The website of the company is at https://circleit.in/.
Bag-it
Bag-It, founded by Madhukar Ranka and Dipanshu Verma, is an on-demand platform for wholesalers that digitizes the jewellery supply chain for the benefit of retailers.
The LinkedIn bio of Madhukar Ranka lists him as the owner of a gold jewelry manufacturing firm called Vardhaman Gold. The bio also mentions that he is working on creating an end-to-end B2B (Business to Business) ordering website for jewelry.
We could not find a website for this company.
Onpery
Onpery (Care Form Labs Pvt. Ltd.), founded by Pramod Priya Ranjan and Nachiket Thakur, is a menstrual health startup. It aims to make green menstruation adaptable and accessible to the masses.
Onpery’s About us page mentions that they are the first brand globally to have IP-protected technologies on the entire range of reusable menstrual products.
The company was incubated under the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) and already has a website that has an online store.
I-Stem
I-Stem, founded by Akashdeep Bansal, Kartik Sawhney, Shakul Raj Sonker, and Sunil Choudhary, provides digital content accessibility solutions, through which universities and enterprises are making their digital infrastructure (Documents and Website/Mobile Apps) accessible (compatible with assistive technologies used by persons with disability for accessing the digital content) for persons with disability.
Simply put, this technology allows even those who are print disabled or who cannot see, to use these written/printed documents.
They use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to read content that cannot be read by normal screen readers.
Their website is here: https://www.istemai.com/index.html.
The website mentions that they have done two pilots – one with IIT Delhi, and another with Asoka University.
The website also lists Microsoft, UNICEF, and GSMA as some of the investors.
Why the Endowment Nurture Fund is important
Speaking about the Endowment Nurture Fund initiative, Prof PVM Rao, Dean, Alumni Relations, IIT Delhi, said, “Many students are relinquishing placement option to start ventures immediately after their graduation. The Endowment Nurture Fund will encourage such students to pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions”.
“The grant provides a cushion to IIT Delhi’s student teams to take risk and experiment with innovative ideas, products, and/or business models; that in turn helps spread the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among the student community”, said Mr. Anurag Rastogi, CEO, IIT Delhi Endowment Management Foundation, while speaking about this great initiative to promote entrepreneurship.