Know why Indore is becoming an entrepreneur’s delight

Ankit Gulliya, a student at IIM-Indore, is very busy these days — he is the coordinator of the second annual i5 Summit scheduled for August 20 and 21, a joint event of IIT and IIM in Indore, the only city in India that hosts both the premier institutions.

i5 is aimed at fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship among students and connecting young entrepreneurs with investors and mentors. “The e-Cell at IIM-I has been mentoring 15 startups, which are at various stages of development. And two of them have reached a stage wherein they will be pitching at the GetFunded! event at the i5 Summit,” says an excited Gulliya, adding that some startups currently being mentored on campus include unbraille, a startup that provides techbased solutions for visually challenged people, KrigerCampus, a network that helps connect students with their seniors, and xpressomat, a free online laundry service.

Overcoming Small-Town Mindset
Indore has long been the commercial capital of Madhya Pradesh and a centre for manufacturing. Now it seems keen to play catch-up with the tech-enabled startup wave too. While one of the biggest challenges for Gulliya and other budding entrepreneurs on the IIT and IIM campuses is accessing capital, there are investors such as Anand Govindaluri, founder of the Singapore-based Govin Capital, who sees an early bird advantage in funding startups in a tier-2 city in the heart of India.

“We are an accelerator looking at tier-2 cities and towns to identify startups with scalable business plans in the healthcare, edutech and social entrepreneurship sectors,” Govindaluri says. And it’s with this aim that Govin will be at the i5 Summit to shortlist the top three student business plans for incubation.

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Being headquartered in Indore has its advantages, as Vinay Singhal, cofounder of WittyFeed, a two-year-old viral content platform for charticles and listicles, will enthusiastically tell you. “My brother Parveen Singhal, friend Shashank Vaishnav and I were at an engineering college in Chennai where we founded the company.

We moved our startup to Indore because we were all more comfortable with the language and culture here,” recalls Singhal. He acknowledges that the challenge was in overcoming the small-town mindset and the lack of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. But the latter challenge also presented with an opportunity to build the ecosystem. “We have pioneered the setting up of a startup community network along with a few others,” adds Singhal.



The advantages of starting up in Indore include low operation costs — rentals are half of those in the metros — and talent on tap. Armed with these twin advantages, WittyFeed is now scouting for Series A funding for overseas expansion.

Some of the entrepreneur and investor networks that have sprung up in the city include Indore Entrepreneurship Network, Startup Ignition, Indore Startup Community, Jain Social Group, Swan Angel Network and eChai. Aditi Chaurasia, one of the founders of Indore Startup Community, feels that since it was started in 2014 as a monthly meet-up group of entrepreneurs, it has come a long way; the forum holds events where local entrepreneurs get an opportunity to pitch their ideas to invited investors.

“There are weekly meet-ups of entrepreneurs, mentors, angel funds and venture capitalists, which help energise the entrepreneurial and investor community in the city,” says Sawan Laddha, CEO of Splash Group, an Indore-based staffing and infrastructure company. Laddha, who along with 30 other investors started the Madhya Pradesh Angel Network, is scouting for startups for seedfunding and mentorship.

Vinayak Kalani, 24, founder of ecommerce startup BollyWoo, wanted to combine the logistical advantage of being located in the heart of India with his passion for Bollywood when he started his venture that allows Hindi movie fans to shop online for outfits sported by their favourite stars.

“We now have tie-ups with all major production houses and are expanding into new areas such as Bollywood-related tourism,” says Kalani. While BollyWoo is funded by the promoter so far, Kalani is in talks with two major VCs for Series A funding. Sonam Jain and husband Pranjal decided to give up their jobs in Mumbai and start their own big data intelligence product company Ideata Analytics in 2013. Indore was the best option for the couple because both grew up in the city and graduated from engineering colleges there.

While Sonam is upbeat about the lower cost of living and the ease of acquiring early talent from the many engineering colleges, she is also concerned about the inability to access quality mentors. “But there are many advantages, including no language barriers, good infrastructure and good connectivity,” she quickly adds. Jain points out that Indore is seeing the emergence of a number of location-specific startups such as goods delivery apps (grocery, food) and service aggregators (cabs, events, doctors, household works).