IIM Udaipur’s start-up fest Prarambh ’20 ends on a high note

More than 200 innovative ideas were pitched during the fest

IIM Udaipur organised its first ever e-summit and start-up fest – Prarambh 2020, on 8th and 9th February, 2020 respectively. Aiming at fostering the entrepreneurship spirit, the e-summit’s theme was ‘the Last 67 strides’ which signifies the way forward for India to top the Global Entrepreneurship Index wherein Prarambh is a mentorship-cum-competition for existing startups with minimum viable products and new ideas.

The Keynote speakers at the e-summit – Siddharth Rajhans(Principal Policy Officer, United Nations | Founder, Spacify Inc.), Nirmala Sankaran (Co-founder HeyMath), Pankaj Thakar (Founder of Padup Ventures and an Angel Investor) encouraged the students to pursue entrepreneurial dreams and discussed the way forward for India’s startup landscape.

This year, Prarambh spread its wings wider by receiving over 200+ applications. 24 teams with diverse ideas like nano anticancer solution for cancer side effects in healthcare, wealth management solution in fintech, economic cold storage solution in agriculture, smart and renewable energy and other IoT based solutions were shortlisted for further consideration. Mentors included Mr. Deepesh Goel who worked with Atal innovation Mission and Mr. Akhilesh Trivedi who is a global mentor and strategist for start-ups.

The shortlisted teams pitched their ideas to an investor cum judge panel which included V Srinivasan, Ex CEO of Multinationals; Sridhar Rallabandi, Ex-President and Chief Risk Officer of Lakshmi Vilas Bank and others. The winner team was awarded Rs. 60,000/- cash prizes and winner from new enterprise category was awarded Rs. 40,000/- for their innovation. The winning teams were also awarded flight tickets to Singapore for the ISET 2020 conference sponsored by Learning while travelling. This year with the support of its startup ecosystem partners Saksham- The E-cell of IIMU is also offering various startup exclusive cloud and IT services worth $50,000.

The event was supported by various industry leaders such as Secure Meters, Yes Bank, TiE Udaipur, IIMU Incubation Center, Startup Oasis, Rajasthan Venture Capital Fund, Headstart Network, Applied Information Sciences, Learning While Travelling, Easy to Pitch, and Choudhary Offset printers.

About IIM Udaipur: –
The IIMs have a proud record of quality and accomplishment. IIM Udaipur is positioned to carry forward this illustrious legacy and is breaking ground by focusing on world-class research and transforming the learning of students who will be managers and leaders of tomorrow. The Institute has arrived on the global education stage by getting accreditation from the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) in merely eight years of its establishment. With this accreditation, IIM Udaipur is now counted in the same league of global institutes like Harvard Business School, Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the MIT Sloan School. IIMU has recently been listed on the QS 2020 Masters in Management (MIM) Rankings as well as the Financial Times (FT) MIM Ranking 2019. IIMU is the youngest B-school in the world on both these rankings. According to the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), IIM Udaipur is ranked 13th in the Management category and 1st among the second-generation IIMs. IIMU is currently ranked 4th in India for research in the field of management according to the methodology used by UT Dallas which tracks publications in the leading global journals.