Google India has hosted a four-day workshop which is a mentorship boot camp for around ten Indian startups this week. This initiative was launched last year and was initially aimed at an India-only pilot for mentorship and engagement by Google Developers Launchpad team.
The ‘Solve for India’ mainly focuses on bringing the best of Google expertise across product, UX/UI and latest technologies including machine learning and AI that will help the emerging startups who are focusing on building solutions that serve’s needs of India.
At the Boot camp, founders and teams of the ten startups spent four days in one-on-one consults with experts from Google and external mentors from the industry with a goal to solve the critical product and growth challenges of the startups. The ten startups that participated in the first boot camp include Nebulaa, Slang Labs, PregBuddy, LegalDesk, PaySack, Vokal, FarMart, Meesho, Pratilipi, and M-Indicator.
Speaking about the initiative, Karthik Padmanabhan, Developer Relations Lead, Google India said:
In the last few years, we have seen the growth in entrepreneurial and startup activity that goes beyond the big metros. We’re seeing a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and founders who’re innovating to solve for real challenges across Agriculture, Healthcare, Environment, Retail, Education, MicroFinance and the Indian language web. With this program, our objective is to build a bridge between startups and the industry ecosystem and provide them with the right technology support and mentorship to help them succeed. We shortlisted 10 startups from 160 homegrown startups by traveling across 15 cities in India, and are now ready to scale this pilot as a dedicated program for India.
Paul Ravindranath G, Program Manager, Launchpad Accelerator, Google India, said:
We have been very active in India with our global flagship mentoring program Launchpad Accelerator and our shorter format Launchpad events, but we realised that we needed a very local, high touch engagement program for a growing number of Indian startups that are building solutions to solve for critical challenges of India. Through the last ten months, we have focused on building the right mentorship network to support the challenges faced by these startups. And we’re delighted to share that we will be expanding the mentoring support beyond this bootcamp, by launching a structured mentorship program for startups who are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to Solve for India, and run this as an ongoing effort