Startups are heading to Coimbatore, away from the hustle of Chennai and Bengaluru

When Dhruv Suyamprakasam was 24 years old, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Barely two years out of Chennai’s College of Engineering in Guindy and armed with a degree in mechanical engineering, he quit his job at the Bank of New York and Mellon, determined to become his own boss.

Bengaluru beckoned. But the big city did not live up to its promise for Suyamprakasam. He returned home to Coimbatore, and began working out of a garage. “Failure is still not accepted in Bengaluru,” says the 28-year-old founder of iCliniq, a global online medical consultation platform. “In Silicon Valley and Coimbatore, failing and trying again is accepted. Failure is, in fact, celebrated in Coimbatore, because people here understand that to succeed you have to fail. Now we have a small team in Bengaluru as well. It is important for a startup to have a small facility in the big cities but that doesn’t mean you have to relocate there completely.”



Peace of mind is on everybody’s lips in Coimbatore, nestled on the foothills of the Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu. Entrepreneurs, especially, are loving it. It helps that Coimbatore is a mere four-hour drive from Bengaluru, close enough to commute for a couple of days a week.

“A lot of people put you down when you are in a tier-2 city but that criticism is not valid,” says Suyamprakasam. “In Coimbatore, entrepreneurship is celebrated because people here have traditionally been entrepreneurs.” He has built iCliniq into a thriving business since he moved here. His revenues, he claims, have grown 380% in the past year, and he has a user base across 160 countries, with patients having access to 1,300 doctors across 80 specialities.

PlacementSeason’s founder TP Senthil Kumar too moved from Bengaluru to Coimbatore for the same reason — peace of mind. Kumar, a native of the neighbouring textile town of Tirupur, decided to move to Coimbatore, his wife and cofounder Swaroopa Krishnamoorthy’s birthplace.

“Productivity here is higher than in Bengaluru because there are fewer distractions,” says Senthil. “Bengaluru has its own advantages with regard to eventshappening around startups. There are always meetings and seminars, which are good for networking. We couldn’t focus on business in Bengaluru but we are doing pretty well after moving to Coimbatore,” he says.

PlacementSeason is an online portal service that prepares graduates for campus recruitment tests and interview. The training is tailormade for specific companies. If Cognizant Technologies is scheduled to meet students in a particular college, for instance, PlacementSeason will tell the students what exactly to expect and give them practice tests. Kumar says his business has grown in leaps and bounds in just two years since he moved to Coimbatore. Back in 2014, PlacementSeason had a total of three colleges as clients and 5,000 students using their service. Today, 53 institutions from across the country are paying for the service, along with 70,000 students. The proud entrepreneur projects his revenues at `1 crore this fiscal, more than double the Rs 40 lakh he made last year.

The Right Instincts
The entrepreneurial instincts of the natives of Coimbatore appear to have played a key role in encouraging people to start up confidently.

Vishwanathan Sahasranamam is a cofounder of the Coimbatore Innovation and Business Incubator, funded jointly by the Union department of science and technology and the city’s Shakti Group. The Centre put in Rs 5 crore and the Shakti Group, through its charitable trust, pumped in `8 crore to set up a 10,000 sq ft startup hub, which opened in February. “There are only 12-15 companies that qualify as startups in the real sense,” says Vishwanathan. “Startups are ideas that can scale in a nonlinear fashion. Small businesses that can scale in a linear manner are many here.

We wanted to encourage and help the startups grow.” Forge Factory was born out of that idea, providing subsidised office space on a shared basis at around `3,000 a month. High-speed internet, food and beverages and uninterrupted power supply are part of the package: a plug-and-play office. Now Vishwanathan and his team have set up a state-of-the-art internet of things lab to help startups create prototypes of their product and test it.

“We don’t want to be just an office space provider,” explains Vishwanathan. “We conduct three-day bootcamps for startups all over the country, mentoring them and helping them with the basics of building a business. We help with pricing, tracking the market, profitability and a structured process of decision-making.” In the past nine months, Forge Factory has conducted 500 bootcamps in the country. On the cards is what Vishwanathan calls an accelerator programme to directly connect startups in the education sector with venture capitalists.

While corporates like the Shakti Group have taken it upon themselves to help new entrepreneurs, the state government lags behind. A similar space in Coimbatore’s Tidel Park, the hub for IT companies, is content with remaining a plug-and-play centre at nominal cost. Mentoring and access to investors and venture capitalists are a distant dream here. While Start Up India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project, is aimed at encouraging entrepreneurs, the reality on the ground is that the rules are confusing and cumbersome. “It’s not very clear how to go through the Start Up India process both for Forge as well as for startups,” says Vishwanathan.

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“First, there is confusion regarding how to get empanelled on the portal and access the tax benefits. Second is what does it mean for us incubators?” Despite the government’s lack of attention to this growing section of young business population, Coimbatore has decided to do its bit. Forge Factory and other such incubators have helped the likes of 35-year-old Raju Kandaswamy, a founder of VRNext, a startup that plans to provide virtual reality and augmented reality tech products like cost-effective hologram displays for retail stores. VRNext, launched in February this year, has begun testing prototypes of its products.

“I met a like-minded freelancer when I was working independently at Forge Factory and we decided to launch VRNext,” said Kandaswamy. “Coimbatore is the right place to grow a startup of this nature. The entire industry segment is concentrated here. Customers are readily available. There are many colleges — you can get engineering graduates with the right skill-set. So from a resource point of view, it works for us. It is also cost-effective. Operational costs are at least 30% cheaper than in Chennai or Bengaluru.” These, believe startup evangelists, are the first of many success stories to come out of the foothills of the Western Ghats.