Telangana: Innovation Cell’s ‘Rejig 2.0’ to help Covid-hit startups

Rejig.Hydstartup 2.0 - a virtual micro-accelerator initiative of the Telangana State Innovation Cell.

Hyderabad: After successfully helping over 125 Covid-affected startups refine their go-to market strategy last year, the Telangana government will soon launch a new version – Rejig.Hydstartup 2.0 – a virtual micro-accelerator initiative of the Telangana State Innovation Cell. Startups were badly impacted in the second wave of the pandemic as well, and the effort will aim to help them find early success with customers.

“It is time to do a second round of Rejig. Rejig 2.0 will focus on the path to early customer success,” Ramesh Loganathan, Professor Co-Innovation, IIIT-H, who was actively involved in the first round of the startup nurturing, told Telangana Today. About 30 incubators and startup enablers, including The Indus Entrepreneurs, TSIC, T-Hub, CIE-IIIT-H and RICH, and several others were part of the initiative last year.

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“This will be a community initiative like last year. A core group has already been formed for this purpose,” he said. T-Hub Chief Executive Officer Ravi Narayan too hinted about the initiative taking shape shortly. In the last session, interventions were offered over three weeks when 42 mentors held 375 mentoring sessions.

On the impact of the effort last year, Loganathan said Rejig had received about 300 applications and 125 startups were shortlisted with 80 plus for investor access and more than 40 for corporate connections.

The selected startups belonged to technology, healthcare and pharma, foodtech, fintech, enterprise, energy, consumer and agritech, and other domains. For those seeking investor access, about 50 per cent of the startups were in the idea and seed stage, 35 per cent in early stage, 14 per cent in the growth stage, and one per cent in mature phase.

About 30 investor networks and venture capitalists including Aavishkar, Accel, Arali Ventures, Ankur Capital, Artha Ventures, BASF Venture capital, Beenext, Beyond next ventures, Bharat Innovation fund, Endiya Partners, Hyderabad Angels, IAN, and the likes were part of the first batch of Rejig. Microsoft, Infosys, SAP, Cognizant, Apollo, Qualcomm, Deloitte, and other companies offered the corporate connect then.

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