Chandramita Bora
The IIMAvericks program provides mentoring & financial support to graduating students to take the road less traveled and start-up. The program helps entrepreneurs sustain during the initial period of their venture and help them focus more on the business.
The most critical period for any entrepreneur is the first two years of the business. It is during this time that most businesses fail due to operational and budgetary constraints. The IIMAvericks program provides prototyping grants, stipends, acceleration support, and training workshops to startups. The program has also been extended to recent alumni in the form of an Entrepreneurship in Residence grant.
The program is offered to graduating IIMA students & recent alumni who are starting up or already have a functional startup anywhere in India. CIIE follows a virtual incubation model and it is not necessary for the startup to be stationed in Ahmedabad. Over the last 5 years, CIIE has supported around 60 alumni with a fellowship and another 35 students with an ‘idea validation summer internship’.
As a part of the overall objective of IIMAvericks to support IIMA student and alumni entrepreneurs, we organized the WIMWI Accelerator.
WIMWI Accelerator
The WIMWI Accelerator was crafted as an intensive solution-based experience for POC stage IIM-A startups. The targeted startups for the accelerator program were from the field of Healthcare, Technology, Fintech, Education, and Sustainable Energy.
The program was organized over a period of 5 months starting from problem identification, followed by solution-based clinics in their cities, mentoring, and network
Furthering the intensive on-campus bootcamp, deep dive sessions were conducted in their respective cities of Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi. The flexibility in location helped startups in dodging a break from their businesses. During the clinics, a detailed solution was identified and networks were leveraged.
The cohort consisted of startups which are solving the issues of the millennial – skill development and job search, scarcity of reading time, and helping employees make quick extra cash on work travel. A few of these are listed here:
Crash Course
Crash Course, founded by two dorm mates at IIMA – Ganeshram and Sreyantha Chary, trains engineering students for various roles in the Technology Industry to help them find their first job.
They started out by conducting programming workshops and
They then get a dedicated mentor and all the resources required to complete the project. They also help learners learn specific skills required by the industry, showcase their work, build their resume, and prepare for interviews.
They are bridging that gap by helping candidates build real-world projects and gain the required coding experience. This helps students to better understand what they have learned and bag the jobs of their choice and companies benefit with coders.
BookBhook
‘Bookbhook – know more without reading’, re-looks books in a totally refreshing way by handcrafting summaries of life-changing, non-fiction books into short reads that take not more than 10-12 minutes of a reader’s time.
The ‘Bookbhook App’ with more than 60,000 downloads, carries all the summaries on a reader’s smartphone. The platform also offers audio versions of the summaries. The startup plans on introducing vernacular language versions of the book summaries.
Readers can also purchase the original copy from the link provided. For the non-readers, it promises to inculcate the ‘reading habit’ by spending just 10-15 minutes on a book summary each day.
Itilite
By giving employees a trip-specific cost prediction and letting them keep half of the savings if they travel cheaper than the predicted cost, they incentivize employees to save money for the company. This leads to a win-win situation for both the parties.
Other start-ups in the cohort include Schrocken Intelligent Machines, Vendour, VocIQ & SqFit. The Demo Day would mark the final stage of the program wherein all startups will pitch in front of potential investors.