 So Anupam will you introduce the speakers. Yes, I will do that. Can you please keep a check, people are joining, please let them in. I hope my screen is visible, I am visible and I am audible. Okay, so let's get started guys. Hi beautiful people, hope everyone is doing good. I would like to welcome on behalf of my whole team, I would like to welcome all of you to the day two of Misfits mega pitch event. We have successfully covered 12 regions, 12 regional pitch events and the day one of the mega pitch event and have got our top 30 startups in the 2021 cohort. And yes, we started the Misfits cohort with the aim to find the most impactful change makers across South Asia. It's an initiative by Ruksh Ecosystem Foundation and we also would like to thank Manimpact to be the global co-host, will grow to be the knowledge partner and the event is powered by E-Cell, Ayaan, Trichy, Crowdera and Impact Board. As I said that Misfits is an initiative by Ruksh Ecosystem Foundation. Ruksh is an innovation, think tank, building a cohesive innovation, incubation, mentoring, maker and entrepreneurship ecosystem, we work with startups and help them scale up. We believe that it's not about ideas, it's about making ideas happen. And that's why we aim to build this ecosystem for entrepreneurs for startups. And that is why we started Misfits community, a community for social entrepreneurs and the Misfits pitch event cohort. Now you all are already aware but let me tell you again that Misfits is talking about Misfits. So Misfits is a virtual pitch event happening across various regions in Southeast Asian countries. And we are doing this to create a common ecosystem, to create a common platform for all these stakeholders. By stakeholders, I mean all the social startup founders, community people, mentors, investors, incubators, everyone on a common platform. This is what the agenda is and this is why we always say that it's not just another pitch event. We are ensuring that we build a community out of this. These are the focus regions, the Indian regions as well as the Southeast Asian cities. These are the global partners, we are glad that we are connected with 80 plus partnerships. And yeah, so this is about Rukhs and Misfits. I would now like to request my colleague Muskan to take over from here and introduce our panelists. Muskan, are you there? Yeah, please go ahead. Hi, good morning everyone. Welcome to today two of the Misfits mega pitch event. I am Muskan Tiwari, your co-host for today and also a member of Rukhs Ecosystem Foundation. Allow me to introduce you all to the panelists for today's panel discussion on the agenda entrepreneurship ecosystem in India. They are a bunch of incredibly outstanding individuals and I'm sure that there will be a lot for you to learn. On the first panel we have Mr. Muhammad Azar, who is the leader of incubating incubators program at Willgrow. He's a development professional with over 150 social company investments under his belt. He previously worked on various development initiatives with the governments of India and the UK, focusing on MFIs and banks. He's also mentored and invested in over 500 female micro entrepreneurs. Thank you so much for joining in, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Muskan. Looking forward. Okay, next up we have Mr. Rahul Singh, who is the deal flow manager at Microsoft for startups. He is a management professional with experience in ICT research and public policy. He has worked in KPMG advisory services to drive entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem and has also served as the chapter director for startup Brian Jaipur. Thank you so much, sir, for joining me. My pleasure to be here on this panel. Thank you for having me. Okay, so lastly we have Mr. Kishan Karunakaran, the CEO of BioFuel, which acts as a highly secured platform connecting buyers and sellers of BioFuel. He has experience in all aspects of biodiesel value chain, including technology development, commercialization, sourcing, supply chain and market access. Mr. Kishan was also a part of our Misfits 2020 cohort. Thank you so much, sir, for joining. Thanks for having me and I look forward to add value to everyone here. Thanks. We are honored to be among such talented individuals and I on behalf of my team extend a hearty greeting to all of you. The panel will be hosted by Mr. Prasanjit Debroy, the associate director operations at Brooks Ecosystem Foundation. Let's make this a fun and engaging session if you have any queries or questions that you have you can drop them in the chat box it simply raise your hands that we can unmute you. I'm confident that you will enjoy yourself and gain a lot from the session, handing it over to the host. Thank you, Muskan for the lovely introduction. So to begin with members, I would like to ask a general question. What do you think has been the major shift happening in the startup ecosystem due to the pandemic over the last 18 months? Any one of you can begin the panel there. Let me start off. So I think a lot has been discussed since the last 18 months about the shift and what the new changes have happened in the pandemic. So I think it's a more cliche topic now. I think we should move forward. I think we should move ahead and look at the good things that have happened. I think the major change that we see now is the benchmark of the startup ecosystem. So till recently, the milestone was to achieve fundraising, closing a funding round, the shift then slowly became to moving towards becoming a unicorn. And now the new benchmark is to reach the stock market with an IPO. So the shift has been tremendous and I think that's the major thing that has happened. I see a lot of people around me who have nothing to do with startups. I read a Hindi newspaper every morning. Everywhere now people are talking about startups. So this wasn't there even last year in the usual conversation of people. So with so much visibility and so much vibrancy, which we already have achieved and people like Vikrusha just adding value to all of it. So this has been my own personal opinion of how this shift has happened. People are moving towards making more sustainable businesses, changing milestones from not just getting fundraising, but also being aggressive about how they become a unicorn, then a Decacon and then eventually reaching the stock market. So that's my personal take. Great. Thank you, Rahul. Kishan, why don't you... So just adding to him, what I see actually, the good part is that before Corona you can say there are dryness in the seed funding in the ecosystem. Very rare programs and projects were going on before Corona, specifically on the seed investment for the startups. Seed investment means institutional enterprise specifically. Approximately tickers have 20,000 to 50,000 something like that. But what we have seen after the Corona, there are a lot of government initiative has taken forward and a lot of other foundations also becoming for Kim. And they started a lot of good programs, which can be pulling this lot of seed funding into the ecosystem. So if you see the Government of India initiative called SISF, Startup India Seed Fund scheme. So they have came up immediately after the Corona and they filled the gap actually. They filled the gap tremendously. They had around 50 plus incubators, most probably are part of that scheme. And every incubator has to invest in 15 system companies in a year. So you assume that using the quantity of the startups that you supported in the seed funding scheme to different initiatives by government. So such initiatives that would take him a lot of foundation also. Seed will grow has taken, if I compare will grow before Corona and after Corona shift, you can say. So before Corona, our strike rate, you can say to investment in the startup is 20 or 22 startup in a year. But in the last one and a half year, we invested around 35 companies, more than 35 companies I think we are looking for. So that has changed happened now because of funding availability, seed funding availability for the startups and capacity building funding availability in the ecosystem. That really brings to the startup more effectively in the scenario. So that I am saying, it has changed, I am saying and I hope this will continue. I hope the dryness of the fund will not be the part of the ecosystem. So all such startups like Biofuel and other startups in ecosystem will get the benefit from this. Sure. Yeah. Thanks. Kishan, would you like to hear your thoughts on this? Yeah, I think I'm not sure if I take it right from 18 months. I think as when I start my first factory, that was in 2008. From then the startup ecosystem has seen a phase shift. At that time, people would ask me, you didn't get job and so you became an entrepreneur. From there, the discussion now with people from the most elite universities wanting to be entrepreneurs. And as Rahul rightly said, it's become a dining room discussion today. But you just need to see a cricket match to see from the days that Saharas and Reliance sponsored. You see the Baiju and the Kreds sponsoring the entire game. That's a major shift that we've seen in the startup space of India. The startups have evolved as what I would say the flag bearers of brand India today. Investment houses from across the world are looking at India as a tremendous startup destination. Just like Azhar and Rahul said, seed funds have become much more easily accessible. Startups have started aspiring to reach the IPO right from raising the fund to IPO. And another major shift is had it not been for Corona or had it not been for digital digitization of this entire ecosystem. I'm not sure if I would have been part of Misfits at all. I wouldn't have known about Misfits. I wouldn't have seen about this event. I would have probably looked to participate in local events or local pitching competitions and tried to pitch myself or reference myself back across startups and that. I think that way Corona has helped a lot in the sense that I'm not sorry to use that term of Corona having helped but that phase having helped where platforms like Misfits and other platforms could reach a much wider area across India into tier 2, tier 3 cities and being able to absorb startups even from these tier 2, tier 3 cities. And today I think startup ecosystem is prevalent across India. The digital divide does not exist. I think the one, the team which won the 2020 cohort was someone from Jagdaltur in Chattisgarh which tells you how much penetrated the startup ecosystem in India has been. And I think the digitization post COVID has helped that pretty much. Just adding here one point. If you see the one of the biggest investment happen in the social enterprise ecosystem, social enterprise startup which is Diharth. Maybe people know. So Diharth has raised $110 million just one month before. And in the period of that Corona they have raised two round of funding. One round I think 50 million something round and second is 110 million. So this is one of the biggest investment happened in the ecosystem specifically in the social enterprise ecosystem. So that shift actually we have seen. We thought no one will get such investment in the social enterprise space in the Corona period because of the revenue and all. But fortunately we have a lot of startups in the Diharth, like Satshore. Satshore has PE funding. That is something that has shifted I have seen in this Corona period and I wish this will continue so a lot of startups can become investable and move to the IPO towards Diharth. Thank you for your thoughts. My next question is that for today's panel is focused on the agriculture and education technology startups of India. We all know that tech startups thanks to the pandemic has seen a sport of activities right from revenue growth to users to even funding. What do you think are the challenges holding back agri tech startups in India? Because we all know that in India the output is pretty low compared to other developed countries. Your thoughts. It would be good if you would point out who you would want to ask first because it will just keep us thinking. Why don't you start? So I think personally what I have seen speaking with a lot of founders wanting to disrupt the agri space is I think everybody is trying to do a lot. Many of them are trying to build a super app of their own where they are building a marketplace. They are improving the fund accessibility to farmers. They want to improve the supply chain so that farmers are directly getting in touch with customers with end consumers. So I think many of the startups are trying to do everything. The big picture that any ecosystem is built upon multiple stakeholders, multiple value chains and having a centered approach around a farmer. I think that is the main problem. They are not looking at targeting one problem area and improving it, improvising on it or even disrupting it. So my personal advice to some of the founders which I have seen their pictures and all I have told them to focus on one or two things improve it or add value to it because a number of founders are looking at the agri space and they want to either involve a deep tech innovation into it or they want to use the cloud platform or they simply want to do some innovation in the processes in the way in which things are happening at the moment. So I think the focus is not there with many of the founders as to which problem area they should be targeting and that has been my personal advice to many of them to just pick one or two issues which they think they are capable of solving or improving and just focusing on that. If they still have a vision of building a super app why not go towards a collaboration with other folks. There is somebody who is building a fintech platform somebody has built a good marketplace platform so why not collaborate with all of them rather than doing everything on their own. That has been I think my challenge in terms of the founder perspective of how they look at the agri space. Thanks, Kishan would like to go next. Sure Prasanchit, we are slightly connected in the agri space we are not an agri tech as such but we source waste from agri for conversion into biofield also we are into that value chain also. I wouldn't have a macro view like Rahul or other in terms of the entire agri tech space but yeah I kind of agree with Rahul in the sense that I think we kind of follow that advice where we only focus on what you know only the waste part of the agri value chain and help them earn better revenues out of it. At this point of time yeah I think a lot of agri tech startups and tech startups are there I think only time will say whether they are actually adding value to the farmers and the agri space, agri tech sector that will depend on actual results like what you said farm producing per capita income of farmers increasing and you know yeah those two and actually without affecting inflation because I think most of them focus on directly farmer to table or farm to consumer and cutting the middle man which is a major factor in agri space including the value chain where we are but there's a plus, plus to and minus to it as in it's good to see that wastes are becoming more and more of a value people are no longer seeing these as waste there are buyers for it which is a good thing because the farmers are earning revenue out of their waste also but again Amesh Chankar said goes to the trader who still seems to be the primary financial of farmers at least in the sectors that we've gone in the areas that we've gone we still see a significant trader nexus and control over the farm and agri market I'm not sure if many of these agri tech sector have been able to solve it micro level to the farmer but yeah I think it will time will say I think it's still early stages to say whether these will be able to solve the problems and increase per capita income and the farm produce of the country so there are some startups which are actually taking care of the entire supply chain plus farm to fork model is what they are following Azhar would like to hear your thoughts as well on this yeah so actually as per my experience after seeing a lot of pictures for our funds what we have seen that a lot of founders and no their ideas are copied with the big start of the successful has been in the market so what I'm suggesting to all the founder for solution is that you copying is fine because India is this country where everyone is copying to the ideas but if you're copying and you don't have knowledge in the sector then there's a disaster for your startup so what I'm seeing the founder apparently they have they are in the rush or to pitch to the investor without having the proper knowledge in the place okay they don't have if I asked just example I asked a question to one of the picture for the my fund he why you have why you are not targeting the why you're not targeting the mid-level or you can say two acre land off type of farmers no they are saying they cannot buy my product so but the product price is very cheap it's a 20 rupees of product price so such gap actually I have seen in the knowledge perspective in this entrepreneur that need to be that need to be catered by the capital builders capital city builders institutions incubators and all to fulfill this otherwise everyone will going to start the because it's a hard space for everyone it is very easy to start because most of the people belongs to tier two tier three cities they are anyhow they are in touch with their space okay so they know you can start easily but ultimately it's a disaster for the ecosystem if the knowledge is not be catered clearly this is my take thanks for that we'll now focus we'll now shift to some specific questions with all of you so for Rahul as you are part of the Microsoft for startups how do you feel Microsoft startups is engaging with impact entrepreneurs in India especially so I think our program largely focuses on providing tech plus business acceleration and the same goes for even social impact startups so at a global level we do have a program known as GSEP which is a global social entrepreneurship program so we have a very strong focus on providing support to social impact entrepreneurs and we look at startups that are having technology as a co-focus of their business model so we won't be omnipresent like most of the other programs are when it comes to social impact because technology is the strong collaboration which Microsoft brings in and if there is a good fitment there we are happy to support startups in that space we have done that we have good success stories as well and we are slowly ramping up our social impact program also at an impact level so we have a program which is a part of the GSEP initiative known as Project Amplify so we recently have opened up for a lot of social impact entrepreneurs across the APAC region and we are in the process of onboarding some of them and looking at bringing this value addition support of technology enablement that's what we do with social impact entrepreneurs as Microsoft startups thanks Rahul so we have a question in the chat box from Dinta she asks is it okay to remain bootstrapped because everyone is talking about funding investor or external funding nowadays to judge venture growth and scale yes I will take sir yes of course you have to be bootstrapped till now till the date when you are not will not satisfy to yourself because ultimately the VC funding or angel funding maybe come early but VC funding other things will come if you are sustainable at least at the moment so I suggest you to go for bootstrapped till you are not profitable at least okay thanks Adar so I think we can share some examples of Zerodha and Zoho where these companies have essentially been bootstrapped till they actually wanted to scale up rapidly and then that's when they reach out to VCs and raise investment from the market yeah I think apart from being bootstrapped I think the main understanding is that do you even need external funding to drive your business I think that's the fundamental question which entrepreneurs must analyze so you did speak about Zerodha you know I will take another example everybody has heard of MailChimp so MailChimp as an enterprise is completely bootstrapped and they got a 12 billion valuation recently everybody has used MailChimp at some point of time in their lives so they were a two founder company slowly slowly grown into a billion dollar enterprise without any external funding so if it suits your business model you don't need external funding and you are able to scale you are able to build a good product these people are ready to pay for I don't see any reason why you should even go for external funding if it's not required you just go ahead and build it on your own yeah most of the companies you see most of the sustainable company you see in startup space as well which is very small company like SadShop it's very small company but they are bootstrapped and they are profitable now after getting profitable after putting the success business model in the place which is scalable model in the place now they are going into the external funding this is something startup can analyze with the existing smaller startup as well bigger startup as well you can read the case study of LALT use the case study of DHAT SadShop lot of other startups I have a multiple startup to give the name who cannot go into the market to raise funding only they have first proved themselves proved the business model proved the business model that should be scalable then they enter into the VC funding and investment and now you can see they have very big funds in a single shot this is something you I prefer to the entrepreneur to follow this Kishan any thoughts from your side as well yeah it pretty much depends like Rahul and as I said pretty much depends on what business they are into what kind of scaling that they are looking at and I think as Rahul said the entrepreneur should be able to evaluate that best to themselves as in does their business require external funding or like a mail chip if the product is great and then you just build can you scale it up to a particular point with just being bootstrapped I think it completely depends on the type of business and the scale that you want to reach at what pace and each type of business needs to run at a particular speed that particular sector or that particular business demand and that's what we decide whether a founder needs to go for external funding or bootstrap it should neither be a fashion statement to raise funding nor should it be a fashion statement to remain bootstrap I think it should completely be objectively depending upon and what type of business or what scale of business at what speed you want to reach sure thanks so my next question is to you specifically you have been on both sides of the table now you joined us as a misfit participant last year and we've been lucky enough that you've grown tremendously and today you joined us on the panel for the final misfits of this year so my first question is can you share some feedback about misfits and about your own journey so far sure sure sure I will try to keep it short yeah so from a misfit's part of you I think I'm not saying this just because this is a misfit platform but yeah I think the first big event that we even pitched to be you know to be validating our idea to refine it to evolve it was misfit and yeah it is my suggestion to everyone that it's a great platform because you tend to compete with people from across India or in terms of you and people across South Asia they tend to you know validate your idea at a much larger scale because the people who are evaluating you are evaluating so many ideas from different regions and all of them in the social impact space so it's a great platform to challenge your own idea to challenge your own business model and refine it and evolve it to the next level I think from the time that we did misfits to the time where we got selected to a head start or a tan seat we did evolve or refine significantly and the misfit's experience played a very big part you know in that transition so I think it's my suggestion to any entrepreneur at a very early stage to challenge their own idea, challenge their own business model last many number of times and last many number of competitions which would not have been possible pre-COVID where they could you know pitch digitally to competitions or challenges happening elsewhere which is possible today so that's a great thing to happen and I think I'm glad that happened to us at that stage but for AI series I wouldn't have known about misfits as a platform I think being part of that ecosystem helped us so yeah I think I'd suggest that for everyone my entrepreneurship journey started way back in 2008 when I started my first biodiesel plant it was a very top-seater the roller coaster ride right from you know rise to fall, rise to fall kind of thing so yeah I think it's that process that I think it's more like a wine that the longer it stays and the more it gets fermented I think it tends to get taste but the process of fermenting is transformation is very painful it's like I think Osho says right so only the butterfly knows the process of changing from pupa to a butterfly it could be painful we never know it looks beautiful externally I think that every entrepreneur should be willing to undergo failure I think failure is part and parcel of this process so I think that process ferments you and yeah I think I went through that process organically through nature great excellent question my second question is what support have you received from the startup community specifically and how would you like to contribute back to the ecosystem now so I think I benefited a lot of the ecosystem I think one of the things that I always tell people students whom I address is the first startup that I had I never had an ecosystem didn't have an incubation center I think being part of an incubation center right from getting in touch with the head start in touch with Microsoft or startup or even startup PNN any connects has been through that incubator and through that ecosystem but for that I think if I would have been my own silo silo has just worked individually I wouldn't have known about this wouldn't have challenged my idea so much wouldn't have evolved or refined the idea so much forward in fact so every connect that I got or every step of growth or movement progress has been with the support of the ecosystem so currently we are partnering with ecosystems and trying to take a lot of interns and train them both in terms of part of our company if they are interested in the social impact and their environment space we are even open to them being autonomous by themselves but I think we become a training ground or an education ground for them to understand that being in the climate space might be really sounding fancy but there is a lot of pain and challenge on the field that you go through for a business idea to become fruitful we are also in AIC race we are also mentoring a couple of startups in the current cohort so in whichever possible way that we can give back to the ecosystem we try to engage and I think with our duty and it is only then the ecosystem tends to grow much faster only if the startups who benefit out of the ecosystem tend to give back sure Kishan thank you very much so for closing thoughts I would like to ask Azhar a last question so Azhar having trained with you for the incubator program and now heard from you that you have increased your cohort intake this year to 35 what new challenges or new kind of entrepreneurs have you seen in your cohort this year so because of you we have seen a lot of service sector startups know but there is a dryness you can see in the product base or you know patent oriented startups specifically in the agri space health sector is also towards going to the service base but I think we have to work on more on developing the product which can be patentable which can be IP proven and all service sector is now growing very fast and we have seen the 90% application coming in the service base in all sector we will go is working with three major sector agriculture healthcare and climate action and we are working with a lot of donors and a lot of corporates like Amazon, Intel and all the ministry of agriculture and all so the huge application that we have seen is service segment and the bi-rack and the people are continuously working on getting more product base startups but unfortunately we are not getting such pipeline for our investment so we are working more closely for such things with fellows with new innovators and all but I hope India moving towards the service base mostly and depending on the product in other countries like Israel and all but I request to the entrepreneurs and all think towards the product development and all more so we can build the asset for our country as well as the incubation as well So any closing thoughts from Rahul I think these are great times to be in as an entrepreneur because since we all know what has happened the last one and a half years the entire world has come to a level playing field so anybody wanting to pursue to solve problems around them this is a good time the community is active the people around supporting startups are very active be it the government sector be it the incubations, the the academicians and a lot of form of I mean a lot of people who have run their own startups are also coming forward as investors themselves so a lot of opportunities available I think people should pick this up if they wish to make a change and you know and I think Vikru should be the best platform that they can approach to get all those initial thoughts in place and pursue their dreams and you know make a change around them all of us are available at all times to support these people Sure great, thanks Rahul Kishan, last closing thoughts from you Not sure but yeah as Rahul said these are exciting times for entrepreneurship the society by itself also needs to evolve to accept entrepreneurship which has happened now I think Kishor Bihani has said long back that only a society that accepts failure becomes entrepreneurial and yeah I think India has become that kind of society where we as a society have started accepting failure accepting that entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial startups go through that process so it's the right time and I'm seeing as Rahul said the level playing field not only globally a level playing field within India also entrepreneurs and startups coming from villages to tier 3 tier 4 cities, tier 2 cities everywhere might be not as much as a tier 1 city but I think it's the digital divide has decreased significantly and more and more startups coming from these area and more and more ecosystems are also there to support in these close in these small places to support entrepreneurs around that area so right time I think would love to see more and more again like Azhar said more and more product based startups more and more IP based product based startups coming through in India which will create more Great, thank you Kishor Thank you once again to all of you Rahul, Azhar and Kishor for your time I would now hand over the forum back to Muskan Yes, thank you so much I think that was a really insightful session thank you so much to all the panelists for joining in, I'm sure all the attendees learned so much from the discussion and also thank you so much Mr. Prasimjit for hosting the panel so now we'll move forward to the second panel of the day the discussions agenda remains the same entrepreneurship ecosystem in India this panel also has some excellent minds on it and I'll begin by introducing them first we have Mr. H. K. Bora managing partner of the newly founded consulting firm the PAN IIM Consulting Organization he was also the chief investment officer for the IIM Calcutta Innovation Park where he was in charge of raising funds for startups so we're delighted to have you here it's all mine looking forward next up is Mr. B. P. Patnaik the current CEO of CGU incubators in Odisha he began his professional career in 2004 with engine and generator tycoons like humans and perkins and has always had a diverse interest so thank you so much for joining in so finally we have Mr. Vishay Sharma the founder and CEO of Ledgerx India's fastest growing tech enabled full service law company which assists businesses around the world with compliance taxation, financial and legal services in a more efficient and cost effective manner than ever before we're glad to have you on board sir thanks Muskan for having me here so the host for this panel is Ms. Anupriya Agarwal vice curator global shaper at Lucknow hub again let's make this a very interactive session you can drop down all your comments and questions in the chat box and simply raise your hands if you want to be unmuted I'm certain you'll gain a lot from this discussion over to you the host over to the host hi Muskan thank you so much for that introduction good morning everybody I think we've already had a very interesting discussion in the first panel today and I'm really elated with all the good work that Roksha and Misfits is doing and I'm really happy and glad that you know today I can host this and also get on panel such amazing minds and entrepreneurs and mentors that can help us with so without any any further delay I would like to start this session by a thought and I would like all my all my guests all my speakers for this panel to you know put in their sense about it so you know this is an era of digital transformation this is an era where digital information is available everywhere you know we Google a word and you get it online so everybody seems to know everything about everybody and when we say entrepreneurs when we say the entrepreneur ecosystem in India I think we don't find anybody who would not say I don't know who an entrepreneur is so my question to you is that do you really think we know who an entrepreneur is do you really think that concept of entrepreneurship is clear in the ecosystem and you know what is it that will bring us closer if it is not and what is it that will bring us closer to being an entrepreneur I would like all my panellists one by one we can start with HK probably yeah thank you so much see the word ecosystem is probably the second most abused word in this planet after the word start up alright and you know as somebody who's you know worked on developing ecosystems in a green field environment you know we wanted to create a definition of an ecosystem typically if you know in nature you know any object that you interact with is a part of your ecosystem and for entrepreneurs and startups it's no different right so you know I was trying to you know when I got your mail yesterday I was trying to list down what all we consider as an ecosystem and this is by no means an exhaustive list so you know every entrepreneur you know interacts and you know let's not talk about communication let's just talk about interaction you interact with local markets global markets you interact with intermediaries they will all be part of your ecosystem you interact with you know human resources skilled and unskilled that is part of your ecosystem you interact with knowledge resources and these could be universities these could be training modules this could be anywhere that is part of your ecosystem as an entrepreneur obviously you know there are certain you know when you're building a product you interact with organizations universities that's part of an eco that's part of ecosystem you interact with mentors you interact with experts you interact with advisors that's part of your ecosystem there are support groups they could be various you know they could be various networking events they could be WhatsApp groups all that forms part of your ecosystem the financial ecosystem right the banks the angels the venture capital firm the firms all of that forms part of your ecosystem the government of course is a big you know influencer in how you interact with you know in society right so you'll have the do's and don'ts and if you have a do's you'll have which way to do stuff right so the policies and procedures of the government the schemes of the government the subsidies the grants you know the various special features that in facilities the government gets you all that is part of your ecosystem it could be you know something as varied as you know the culture of the geography in which you operate that is also part of your ecosystem you need to know the culture for you to you know get to know your customer very well anything you do on social media you know that'll also form part of your ecosystem and to be successful you interact to you need to interact with all of them and to be very successful you need to have the right amount of interaction with them I'd rather say interact optimally with all of them as an entrepreneur it's up to you to pick and choose what to interact with without letting the other people feel bad that you don't you don't interact with them these are all tools and resources that you have to make your business more successful the better you can utilize the ecosystem the better you can leverage your ecosystem the higher the probability of your success so in a way I see the role of entrepreneur I believe if you watch Avengers I see the role of the entrepreneur is being Nick Fury's role you know you have all these superheroes doing all their stuff you need to know with superhero to deploy at what point of time and ensure that your own mission right the purpose of your organization gets fulfilled so you know that's that's how it that's how it probably put the entrepreneur ecosystem relationship very interestingly put I think all of us would take back the Avengers example I'm very sure I would like to hear what Vishesh wants to say about this so Anupriya you know I feel that when we talk about entrepreneur ecosystem and the way HK has put it is really amazing but you know one thing that I see always missing is that knowledge today with Google being all of these things Wikipedia we have it all around us but still you know most of us approximately I would say 90 percent of us do not know how to get it right people you know I still see my mom you know searching that you know bhajan super super and that is you know a very peculiar example that she knows exactly what she is looking for but most of the time when I see that you know when I talk about my aunt she always scrolling YouTube thinking that she will get a video where she can have that kind of bhajan now this is a very peculiar difference that what is available and what we really you know exactly need to know and you know as HK said that you need to know that with whom you need to interact and then how much amount with how much energy efficiency and that is you know the key point that I see when we talk about ecosystem and in general you know all the culture around us that is one particular thing which is very much missing and I don't think that you know educational institutions or even professional organization they are putting much stress on to it which is you know a gap that I think which needs to be fulfilled and I know I think HK would be you know much more suitable to tell that you know when HK you told us about ecosystem that you know there are different kind but you know I also see that it doesn't matter that you know where we are there is a single thread which passes all through the ecosystem which you know of course is you who is traversing through it so how do you make sure that you know the right amount of knowledge get dissipated at you know right amount of spaces I wish there was a standard scripted answer I could give you to it I cannot give you a correct answer but I'll try my best to give you a good answer right so as an entrepreneur you know the business in anybody else you know the problem that you're solving and who you're solving it for so the short answer to it is whatever is relevant do it right and there is no such thing as you know too much of too much of effort right as an entrepreneur no matter how much effort you put in it's always going to be too little and you know everybody knows that and you rightly put it you know the thread is the journey of the entrepreneur right and everybody has their own journeys so it's not the same thread everybody walks by so I think an entrepreneur has the right maturity and he has the right visibility visibility is very important because only when you know where you're going you'll be following the right path right so you need to be very clear about your purpose you need to be very clear of your organization goals and whatever is needed for the success of your business you need to go ahead and do it so that's why you know the role of an entrepreneur is very critical and there's there's no right way to choose okay bb what do you have to say about this I think all the points which defines an ecosystem but I would say ecosystem is not a single universal thumb that you know cut and paste everywhere where you want to have a similar setup of innovation entrepreneurship and startups you know having India into a case study you see you see Delhi you see Mumbai and Pune you see Bangalore and Chennai but this is the part of India is not as active as an ecosystem to accommodate all the thoughts of you know a startup of your system what you say so again there is a perspective of looking at the ecosystem as an entrepreneur as an enabler and as an incubator as an investor all the thoughts that both of the analysts have talked about you know so when we operate as an incubator we see a lot of things to come together and as an entrepreneur we see this maybe just looking at who that's there at me or who give minting you properly or who would give me you know Angela Viji kind of funds and all that but when you start as an incubator we see it both the often both the line of like first time can be catchments to the investment you know post graduation kind of networking and all that to happen around us so in a city like the tier 2, tier 3 or in a state like Odisha is not used in all that there is cultural taboos their mindsets are different you know compared to Rajasthan, Delhi, Mumbai, Pune Bangalore and all so you know even though the regulatory, the so called regulatory is there for Prime India equal always and you say the basic pillars of the ecosystem you say it's an incubator, it's an angel you know syndicate or you know investment circles or there are a lot of acceleration hubs and kind of that there's nothing in this part of India so you know beyond these we have a lot of other things to do there is no proper education, there is no proper exposure to this side of thought as a carrier to the young states you know so the catchments when we define you know like when I'm running an incubator CG you got two incubators you know we luckily got DST as well as Nithya so nothing to be happy you know I have to prove the sustainability for both the centres in couple years, two or three years so the amount of work that I supposed to do for one centre now it's going to two centre, double the efforts because this sector focus is that different because the ask is different and the need is different and the look out is different from the incubator from the young states so setting up catchments is very important because otherwise we don't be having any pipeline for the innovators to back here so if you want to you know the distribution of the incubators are very reasonably and geographically it happens from the end of government so you cannot be in recognition and forget completely and not this and just talk about bringing in as a tool of standard innovators and not to them here though you have proper set up here for technology development for I have connected to Bangalore for investment and so but you have been able to have a reasonable development that your existence there in a particular part of the country has to bring in all those dots to be very active you know so you know maybe initially we bring in all those association from rest of the power of India but we have to also build in reasonable that how to tag the institutions how to look at what are their forte in terms of technology and sector and bringing them into the main thinking to be an entrepreneur as a part of the career thought process institutional support for those kind of people so we are working in five sector focuses so we are looking at 20, 30, 50 institutions how they come into those sector focuses how they can be brought in as a mentioned thought of innovation and development in the institutions then we can see you know innovators coming into your incubator basic things also we are going to do as a creative ecosystem and no doubt being in Odisha we are taking help of rest of India who are already very experienced and know how to bring in all those thoughts so we bring them into the state and we talk to people on different concepts different what is different things so we run kind of we also simultaneously we have to match with the I mean that's the competition way AIM is now coming up with where you have to get you will be evaluated like your performance is good or not as an incubator so how AIM is being taken either or AIC somewhere in Bombay Pune Pune let's say Pune Engineering Palace and let's say in Odisha or let's say there is one in you know Manipal so you know how this can be equally weighted and performance can be calculated it's very very absurd you know the similar thought process, similar set of parameters we cannot take to compare the performance of these incubators so there should be a normalization of the incubator you know ecosystem parameters, ecosystem thoughts which can be aware to all or there should be you know kind of the efforts that I am taking to bring X into place whereas in other place X is well defined and active in the ecosystem so these efforts should also be calculated you know as a performance before somebody is getting invested before somebody is getting started to the very basic level of startups okay so ecosystem has a lot of these you know issues to be encrypted so it's not a single universal thumb but it can be definitely connected from all the other parts and bring in a very unanimous ecosystem which wrap it up you know the gates and bring in a pretty good startup ecosystem in India that would be my side of in fact I would rather take segue from where you left off and you talked about you know efforts in you know backward states so I myself hail from Assam and I've been part of building the ecosystem in the northeast India and I speak a lot from my work done with I am Calcutta Innovation Park so when I got in right so my my desk bed was Assam it was easy for me to get job done because I hail from this park so when I joined in the state program so we run state incubation we run the state startup program for almost all the states in east and north east India starting from West Bengal going eastwards and so tier two tier three guy is not the same as someone in the more developed ecosystems and that has got primarily to do with the exposure he has now if you take an average Joe from Assam and average Joe from Bangalore the mindsets are going to be very different but also if you take an average Joe in the same class a guy from this region and a guy from a business family their mindsets are going to be very different so it's just the exposure it is what he's been exposed to and the problem that I'm going to tell you a story of how we build this ecosystem so when I joined the state startup program in Assam had a so this was my I'm going to talk about Assam in particular in this story so this is state startup program at a capacity of 50 and we had to draw the line at 25 because anything beyond we could not call them a startup as well and we knew at that point of time that we had to work on creating our own pipe so what do we do we knew that we were at a relative disadvantage but we also said okay fine let's not work to our disadvantages let's work on our strengths now we research among all the northeastern states where we run operations Assam had a grant of about 50 lakh so the first thing that we did was go college by college telling people that you know what you always go after a government job why don't you look at this 50 lakh it's going to pay you way more than an entry level job why don't you think about entrepreneurship easier said than done then of course when we had started getting momentum then covid hit so what do you do initially we thought okay fine but very soon we realized that covid was an advantage for us if we could reach out physically to two colleges a week now we could reach four colleges a day and we had an entire group of people interacting with colleges and just telling them about it now the ethics of telling people there is money and going about it is debatable but at point of time that's the only lever you have to play with very soon once we started hammering we started getting okay fine I'm interested in entrepreneurship but I don't know how alright and we then realized that not just in the northeast there is nowhere a forum in the country where people could just walk up to you with an idea you know get feedback on whether the idea is good or bad and if the idea has any probability of success you'd be connected to a proper technical institute where your idea could get converted to a product very soon we started setting up those relationships as well then we realized that you know the people we set up a special program called an idea clinic I still do that I did one you know a couple of days back as well and hopefully this is something I'll continue to do so we look at people come up to us with ideas if they are not worth it the best justice you could do to them is tell them that you know this is not going to work out because of XYZ this is where you need to work on if it has any probability of success connect them with any technical institute it could be an IIT it could be an ICMR it could be you know it could be anyone then we started realizing that these people are you know products are actually being developed alright and I had no way to support them other than by proxy so what we did we motivated a lot of colleges to set up incubators the first college incubator we set up was one day before the second lockdown and by the end of the financial year we had 10 incubators 10 colleges with incubators these entrepreneurs supported by those incubators the result was when we took in our third cohort the capacity was 50 we took in 103 so if all of this can happen in the peak of COVID with a zero budget in the most underdeveloped ecosystem in the country it can happen anywhere and I am very positive and it can happen in a very short period of time one year right when everything was locked down so in developing an ecosystem in develop so yes we can always say people from the North-East are you know they don't have an equal advantage but look at the advantages you have you can only play to your opportunities of course there are thousand things going against you but at least two or three things are going right capitalize on them so HK with this story of yours as you said that you know the opportunities that you have can we also say that networking was something that helped you in the school story you know because that is the kind of ecosystem that you created people to come and approach and communicate and you know talk how important is networking in this entire system I would say it is compulsory it is not an option for you right and you know I'll go back to my Nick Fury example right in order to get an even an ecosystem going there are enough people with you know different skill sets right universities have their own skill sets college have their own skill sets you know entrepreneurs need a few things you know government needs a few things so everybody's motivations are different all you need to find is the common agenda and you know the common agenda being creating a pipeline for entrepreneurs and that has happened networking is very important it is not optional it is compulsory it is the only way you will succeed and you know there is no point competing with others they are doing something let them do great work there is enough opportunity for you also to do great work and shine so you know competition is not necessary and this applies not just for you know people who are running or who are building ecosystems this applies even for you know entrepreneurs this applies to everybody you need to collaborate to succeed you will not have all the skill sets you never have all the skill sets right for us we used to run so many incubators but you know the way we define incubation is also very different let's say that you know a technical institute will run incubation their focus is going to be on product development we are management institutes we have no clue how to develop products right and unless products are developed unless we have POCs we cannot commercialize them commercialization is our forte so we have to help a lot of people come up with products so that we can commercialize them so it's all one big chain and you know if you are finding that the input is low you need to work on the upstream processes so it's not an option I can conveniently say sorry Vishesh I just wanted to say that I can conveniently say that if I want to take away the closing remark or take away the last remark from HK it will be that one is take the opportunity two is collaborate and three is that you know you wouldn't have everything but you need to know what you want and where you are going and then your journey will be smooth right so coming to you Vishesh as HK said and as BP said you know what I feel is that while we talk about the ecosystem entrepreneurship is it important to have the strategy right at the beginning or is it important to build that strategy bit by bit in the entire process as you also mentioned that you know we are all going through a threat the journey the threat is our journey so what would you want to say about this and what is that one thought that you would want us to take back from you so Anupri when I talk to a lot of startups there's one thing that I always tell them that just go out there and experiment out there will be 100 ways by which we are going to fail this is not going to work out at the very beginning even when we started as a compliance company over the time we started with taxation we started with you know providing them some consulting and we realized that you know our role as a facilitator in this particular ecosystem is more of telling them that you know how to make the most efficient decisions that they are going to make and one thing you know that is surely not guaranteed to fail is to go out in the market and start talking to people which is one thing which I feel that you know startups miss out a lot they always say that you know we are going to take it in a perfect market condition and then execute it in the perfect way that I can assure you is never going to happen you have to go out there test out a few alterations see that you know what is working what is not you have a few assumptions that you know how the market is going to respond to you and trust me it's not going to respond to the same there will be you know if you have 100 assumptions I'm sure one is going to be the perfect assumption that you have but 99 will surely have you know something to reiterate on that's why it's most important to not have you know all the set tools all the set right things right at the beginning just have an idea that you know I might be needing this at this point of time and then start executing once you start executing that one point will itself start you know accumulating and those will be 10 points by the time you reach over there and by the time you reach over there you will be way ahead than you would ever be if you are starting right away it will be starting six months from now so that is one thing that start right away do not put much time strategizing put more efforts into execution and see that you know whether this can be commercialized in a very rapid pace or not because when we talk about startups when we talk about SM there is a one big difference and that only difference is about the scalability and if your startup is going to be that kind of startup it will be scalable at a very great pace okay thank you Vishesh so I think the two cents for everybody is that it's okay to start now even if you don't have a strategy you are collaborating you know where you want to go start now and your strategy will be built now you know with all these conversations I think there is another interesting word called innovation whether it's with the incubators that you have to work with whether it's the strategy whether it's your product whether it's the process I think I would like BP to put some light and you know some thoughts into what he thinks or how he defines innovation and what he thinks plays a role in that entrepreneurship ecosystem in India and how important and what kind of innovation prevails for all of us yeah so you know innovation is now kind of we are thinking just it's there in our product most of the startups come with that yes I'm with an innovative idea of innovative product and developing now but you know innovation has been a very inception to you know kind of you are going up to IPO or close to your education innovation has to be a very integral part of your team part of your thought process part of your model you know all the time so it's not just something ends with your innovation and innovative idea and then you're pitching and raising a lot of funds and then you're not successful you know so something that takes you to be very sustainable is innovation and there are a lot of parameters has been given you now to the sector of respect to the market with respect to global registrations and all that there are a lot of parameters defined you know so that also you have to see what kind of challenge you are getting in all those sectors and parameters and how to be very optimal in that and create or inter barrier in all the all that approaches that you have for your business so the challenges when you see day on day and when you have a very product development plan and business execution plan you see day on day you will be seeing some sort of challenges some sort of parametrical changes some sort of landscape changes if you monitor the day on day you will be definitely bringing in a lot of very constructive innovation into the canvas so innovation is nothing got to be very thought of and you know and incubator or accelerator or investable you know it's not nothing like that you know anything that we can see basics that yeah either it can go into market it's an extensive and sustainable product of need then you can go on and when you see on the canvas day on day you can definitely come in with a lot of innovations and a lot of problem challenges basics of solution gives you next level innovation so nothing can be you know kind of certifying that yeah you are innovative and you can go for life nothing can also even say that innovation is the only thing that it can get in a success for you so we have to understand the nuances of innovation in various verticals of the business that's very important okay when you come to an incubator when you come to when you come to an incubator what we see is mostly the second bit the various parallel verticals that a startup should approach and what timeline there should be you know pitching in various hotspots and who should be the right stakeholder to construct and help these startups to you know get a quicker success we normally are racing now the timeline of product development timeline of getting into market should know will be 18 months 3 years 24 months and like that 6 months 9 months has become the recent timeline for a startup to come up to the market and validate and go so in that go an incubator becomes very crucial or the ecosystem also you know kind of very crucial to bring in those aspects of thought process and the right evaluation of the various verticals which can let you into market very successfully and also optimize day on day you know time on time how to compete in the market as a sustainable enterprise also we know when we talk about innovation I think you know as I said ecosystem the second most abusive word I think you know that innovation is going to be the third one because a lot of startups and a lot of people think that features is equivalent to innovation they say that in our product they had these two things we are going to add three more this is going to be an innovative product and I think that is you know where a lot of things get into conflict that features and innovation are often related but they are not exactly the same well people think that you know it's going to add more and more features it will be more innovative yeah yeah absolutely right so you know HK, Vishay, HBP I think this conversation has become very interesting but it's an ever-ending conversation and we are running short on time so if I tell you today we have to take one word from each of you as a closing thought to exist in this system then what would it be like for me today I think the word that I take back is threat I have to accept the threat and start my journey as an entrepreneur so what would be that one word from all three of you that you know we should take back today HK cease the day cease the day I think perseverance perseverance be very vigilant vigilance okay so these three words to make a sentence which is going to be the quote of the day quote of the day perfect perfect thank you so much I think everybody who's listening to us today I think you've all got your sense you all know now that it is your journey as an entrepreneur you have to accept it you have to walk on the threats you have to start now not think and just be there and network and collaborate I'm sure that the ecosystem is so helpful and so huge that I'm sure that everybody is going to come out with something or the other so thank you so much to all of you for being here on the panel and over to Anupam for taking us ahead with the day today thanks a lot thank you thank you Anupriya, thanks a lot Vishesh Mr. Patanayak, Mr. Bora thanks a lot for joining in yeah with this I would like to end this panel discussion here and we'll move towards the pit session and I would like to invite my colleague Muskan to take over from here and introduce our jury panel yeah so the jury members for today are Dr. Satish Bhavankar director open innovation and experience design at Aavas Digitech International Private Limited he has 23 years of digital he has 23 years of digital strategy and innovation experience and is the founder of a corporation with Pride he is a firm believer in corporate and social innovation thank you so much for joining in sir thank you next up on the jury we have Mr. Ravi Shankar who brings over 17 years of experience in social enterprise he is part of acceleration core industry consulting and business research delivering actionable market insights and enabling clients to make informed business decisions he has been working in the social impact space since 2015 and led operations at search impact foundation a social enterprise enterprise accelerator and currently leads the program and innovation efforts at AIC IIT edge foundation we are glad to have you sir thank you and good luck to the finalists looking forward lastly we have Dr. Aparna Rao program anchor DSSE's women in entrepreneurship at IIT Bombay she is a visiting faculty at TIS and has over a decade of experience in building capacities in social science aspirants to successfully pursue professional opportunities in social development she has trained 100 plus aspirants till now thank you so much for joining in ma'am thank you congratulations to all the finalists so moving on to the pitch event each participant will have 3 minutes to present their pitches followed by a Q&A session please keep in mind that there is a hard stop at 3 minutes so you have to be under that limit I believe you have been granted those screen share rights so let's start with our very first participant Dinda from ecotera bio design please go ahead with your pitch hello to the members hello everyone good morning good morning Dinda all the best thank you so much I am just sharing my screen just a second is it visible? yes it is and muskan I hope you are on the timer and whenever Dinda starts you can start the timer okay so should I go? yes please hello everyone my name is Dinda I am a founder of ecotera bio design basically I am a mushroom and enthusiast since I was 21 years and I am in this field since last 7 years and she is my cousin she handles the technical technicality ecotera bio design so in my research I came across one article that is about a plastic center a very first evidence of micro plastic in human placenta can you believe this a human placenta this is supposed to be a human internal organ so I assumed that how micro plastic make their way to this this is really a huge matter of concern so as I come up with that idea that is about a single I use styrofoam and the plastic packaging industry so during lockdown I come up with the 13 potential industrialists in Andhraba GID I talk with them personally and I come up with this problem that is about a styrofoam packaging they know this this styrofoam packaging cause pollution and it is costly but they continue using this material just because there isn't any alternative available in market to protect their product while shipping so no matter what we are selling in the world of e-commerce packaging plays a vital role in showing grand values so we come up with a solution that is 100% biodegradable packaging material made out of renewable resources like agriculture waste and the mushroom mycelium so talking about the global and social impact one kg of mushroom mycelium compost removes 2 kg of CO2 from environment and currently we do have 600 kg compost capacity so it will equivalent to 1200 kg of CO2 removal from the environment so protecting nature and using its power to do so is our main reason our product is a lightweight, high strength and fire resistance product for packaging like fragile glass, ceramics, electronics items we have developed new technology that is mushroom packaging and it is 100% biodegradable so the Indian market for mushroom packaging stolen US dollar 42 million in 2018 expected to reach 118 million by 2025 and we do not have any direct competition in India because it is a new technology so we have first mover advantage and we are expecting to generate to million Indian national rupees at the end of one year currently we are at MVP stage and it has been only 8 months so we do have 2 plans to go to market that is pro plan and the enterprise plan in pro plan you will get mushroom packaging in general and in enterprise plan as you can see in image your logo or the brand embossed on the material so revenue streams will be B2B with sales of the mushroom materials and the government grants for prototype development and as I said my research is patent subject so we are in process of filing the provisional patent so before 8 months it was just an idea we validate our idea we perform more than 60 series of experiment and we come up with prototype our venture is notified 2-3 big platforms that is GCC MTABAR so these are the prototypes and I am very much open for questions so who are your primary customers so my primary customer is the fragile product that are in luxury segment okay okay so what impact do you want to create in next 2 years with your packaging so talking about the environmental impact we would like to reduce the CO2 level in the environment and talking about the social impact that we are planning to create a job opportunities for women because my start up is subject to biotechnology and it requires so many sophisticated handling so women are I believe this women they can handle more sophisticated works rather than men so we will create a social impact by creating a job opportunities for women so what is the cost of producing a minimal packaging for a glass cup for glass cup it requires 400g of agricultural mushroom it costs around 72 rupees for glass packing cost yes packaging cost packaging cost so compared to whatever the conventional way now it is there what is the price price depends on the 10% higher than the conventional shadow form but if we are talking about the sustainable solution people are willing to pay the 10% while they are exporting to such countries where shadow form and plastic is being used to pay extra charge for using shadow form so they can afford this green solution that is only 10% higher in cost thank you thank you so much have you spoken to any potential customers yes we do have 3 users at our end it's been just one month we are supplying them corner blocks for packaging to others so are they testing the product yes they are testing my product could you tell us a little bit about your team and your background sir currently when I was in my master degree I started cultivation of mushroom I cultivated mushroom for 3 years and during this lockdown I was quite our factory was shut and people are coming to work and then this idea came to my mind that if I can't make something out of this mushroom waste to eco-friendly material so I come up with an idea and it's been 8 months since I am working in this idea so this is my background I am a graduate and have done my master's in microbiology and I am a part of incubation of I am Bangalore and Bhujati University and are you working with any labs or institutes not of labs but I used to go to Bhujati University microbiology lab to develop this prototype thank you sir very interesting project that you have started of I wanted to understand the end to end so you spoke about how this product would be eco-friendly how about the disposal once it goes to the customer the customer is just going to dump it yes so ma'am my product is totally home compostable once the product reaches to you you can break it down into small pieces and you can throw it in your garden it will act as a to your plant so it is fully home compostable need not require any treatment for decomposing that is our advantage is this messaging going along with you know so the clients who are taking it from you are using it for different products yes message that this particular packaging can be used for home composting is this going up to the end user so currently as I said we are at MVP stage but once we finalize our product and then we launch our product at that time we will put that note that you can break it down into small pieces and you can add into your garden okay and what's your revenue model is it going to be free? so we are targeting the B2B sales and we are expecting to have at least two customers per month and we are focusing more on retention of the customers rather than having new customers each and every time because we have to sustain in this environment by retaining the customers so revenue will be a sales of the mushroom materials okay so what about planning for scales higher scales in scaling so ma'am currently as I said my research is subject to patent I do need to perform few parameters in composition of the agriculture wish and then I will file for provisional patent so once I file for provisional patent we will launch our product and then we scale our ventures thank you Dinda wish you all the very best I will be tracking your start up sure ma'am thanks a lot Dinda and thank you jury members thank you so much should I stop sharing nicely yes please yes so next up we have Rikashu Raj from smart micro garden system please go ahead with your pitch so Rikashu will be presenting with one of his team members yes ma'am Abhishek Sarkar my partner is also there cool just let us know once you are ready we will start the demo shall I start yes please go ahead so good afternoon everyone my name is Rikashu Rajseka and with my partner Abhishek Sarkar today we are going to pitch about a product which is named as smart micro garden system so I am also an ADR fellow under venture center so our problem statement revolves around the fresh food unavailability so food can be the best medicine so it's not like a marketing punchline so it's a fact so there are various conventional farming limitations also and there are like overpriced organic food also and also like there are unevenness among millenials and generation that about agriculture so they don't know means like how to grow their plants and how to grow their own food so coming up the problem statement we have come up with this proposed solution so our proposed solution consists of in like in we can categorize it in two ways so we are producing and delivering fresh organic microgreens in Guwahati Assam so in the left hand side you can see a state of the art large scale vertical farm in the right hand side you can see a smart micro garden system so we will be talking about this smart micro garden system today so this system smart micro system which has like specification for material irrigation it will have specifications like smart monitoring by IoT and also it will have like cooling and de-mediification things also set up and like microgreens special herbs and material vegetables can be produced in this for like users so first of all the smart micro garden which will start in which will have pricing starting around like 36,000 so it will have specification on both hardware and software level you can see like it there has been like automated irrigation you can apply nutrient film technique deep water culture even flow all this irrigation systems can be applied in the system and that intensity can be varied and there will be automated cooling also and also there will be organic completely organic bioneutrient solution available and this my smart micro garden has a special seconds left and this micro garden and micro micro plant the main difference is that the smart micro garden has its own nutrient generation unit and this micro planter doesn't have it so this is for like households and our target customer segmentation if we go to like the we are focusing upon urban population and the smart micro garden is for like business purposes for like this to be schools or like restaurants hotels something like that and the smart micro planter is for like general households so it will be like a smaller scale growing planter system and also we have a competitive landscape if we see like we are like producing completely organic so the remaining like growth smart brands or the agrio to a pin fresh or like urban also also providing they are not completely organic you can say so we are completely organic and there are like various specifications also involved in our smart micro garden system so these are the team leaders I'm the founder and Abhishek is in the core team we have also an advisor which is assistant over to jury members enough your team member have experience in agriculture for a background in agriculture so we do not have direct background in agriculture but we are like our mentor is guiding us for like various like agricultural perspectives and also he has some students under his supervision the PhD students also and the master students also so they are also working as a test university we have also talked with a school regarding with the research facilities available there and also we have talked with Niper Guwahati so they also are providing services to us for like agricultural perspective so we do not have directly involved our our funders are not directly involved with agriculture but with the institute that are involved with us okay so can you throw some light on the segments you are targeting so the target segmentation is like for the smart micro garden system if you see this larger one so this is for like B2B segmentation so restaurants, hotels first of all these are the early adapters and the late majority will be like schools, hospitals something like that and the smart plant is for like households general households so it will be like general households only do you have customers now or have you tried this product is in a prototyping level actually we are producing micro beans and delivering micro beans in Guwahati so we are like since first of all I explained this proposed solution we have like two proposed solutions one is like we will be a manufacturer of micro beans or special herbs or that is something like that so we are delivering we will be delivering it and this is our like this will be our like flagship product which will be which is in the prototyping test we are doing our patentability assessment also on this product and also after filing the IP then we will go for like market commercialization okay is the customers ready to pay the price yes sir actually means like the idea came when we started delivering micro beans so like our customer segmentation from micro beans also consists of B2B and B2C both hotels and households so they means like most of the customers they have a query why can we have a system that we can grow from ourselves we can grow our own food so from that point of time we started developing this idea why can't we so we also surveyed how much means like for like a customer segmentation belonging to households like rich upper means like income level so 10000 is like a very means like it's a affordable product for a system which will be like means like because growing our own food gives us like a therapeutic experience it's a very like psychological experience also for the customers so like obviously this will be it's like they are very interested in it so they are all in contact with us and like they are so after filing the IP we will go for like commercial addition and something like that okay thank you thank you sir so Rikash, have you spoken to any potential customers to understand the requirements and the willingness to pay let's say for a household are they willing to pay and if so do you have a sense like how long will it take for them to recover the cost of trend they have to set up a micro nutrient setup yes sir so we have talked with various customers and they have like a very positive review so we first of all we provided our means like the models we developed and also the models that we have shown to them and like the price these things also how much can be the price so they are very interested upon it so first of all means like they are already interested upon buying it but we are not giving it because we have not filed for IP the provisional IP since we if we file for provisional IP then we can give it so like for that IP filing process so we are means like delaying the commercialization part and also we are applying for grants also for like we have just applied for Bayrak big also recently there is some review coming upon so like after means like for like scaling up obviously we will need some funds also so after that means like our means we have seen customers from like households from like upper income level so they are very much interested upon it so like they are very interested to grow their own food so they are means like very means like excited to have their means like how means like they have they will have their own app application they will monitor the plant systems for like the data also so this is like a smart farming and also for like for the kids also they they are saying like they are kids so that is something like a very unique aspect of it means like so they are willing to pay for it so majority of like we have already we are 15 to 20 customers they are already in the line to buy it from like range to 10,000 to 20,000 and what type of tops can one grow first of all we are focusing upon microgins for households then special herbs and some matured vegetables can I come in yes so Rikashu it's a great vision great vision definitely and a very interesting proposition and there is value in what you are trying to achieve my question however is related to the system itself so first of all I got I got logged off for a couple of minutes because of internet maybe I missed it when you were talking are you selling microgreens or are you selling the system we at present ma'am we are selling we are producing and selling microgins special organic microgins but this is a product micro garden system as you can see our proposed solution consists of two parts one is like we want to be a state of the art we want to build a state of the art large scale which will produce in a large scale special herbs and matured vegetables and we want to deliver it so in this pitch I am focusing upon this smart micro garden system so which is in the prototyping not in the commercialization we have developed the raw prototypes and we are doing our patentability assessment and after the filing of the provision patent we will go for like commercialization of this product flagship product so eventually when you are actually commercializing your systems will you be continuing the supply of microgreens also yes ma'am because like yes ma'am because like since the microgreens since we will produce microgreens in a large scale the production costs means like the selling price will be reduced means like for so we will be producing and delivering microgreens also and this will be our like flagship which will be like for like households which who can who wants to go their own for something like that so your currently when you produce microgreens at large scale at scale at the scale that you are currently doing how many what kind of a geographical area can it service ma'am we are operating from right now at the IIT city which is Guwahati we are operating from right now here only if we talk about the state of the art large and vertical farm business model so in this model also we will have an IP related to like large scale something like centralized system which will be like centralized monitoring will be there so after this concept is like a developed little bit more so we will have we want to implement some franchise farmers from like our entire one city which will use our technology and support and like all the things and software level and they can we can move to other tier one cities also from in this model state of the art large scale vertical farm model alright so I'll tell you what I am hearing when as you speak I'm hearing that there are two business models one is a model where you are actually supplying fresh microgreens to a certain segment and on the other side you are looking at supplying these systems to a different segment or maybe right now when and you are looking at selling these systems to B2B as well as B2C yes right so then I suggest that you actually sit down and work out your costing the cost structure a plan for scale and a plan for the revenue generation keeping two of these things in mind you know and the second thing is I would meaning we can take this offline also I can talk to you separately and hear some more if I have misunderstood anything the microgreens supposing you are selling the system in a B2C segment and you are selling it to households where enthusiastic you want to I am sorry to interrupt but in trust of time we can take this offline and let's move towards the next participant as well thank you so much for your insights and thank you Rikasho and Abhishek for presenting it moving on to the next participant the next startup we have is a stimulus represented by Akshay hello this is Akshay Ayakar am I clearly audible yes, if you are audible please present your screen yeah see my screen just let me know also requesting the Judy members please score the participants like score the startups as soon as they finish their pitch and if you are facing any issues while editing the scorecard please let me know you can also download it and then share it with us Akshay please let us know if you are any yeah I just want to confirm again if I am clearly audible and visible yes yes you are so I will just time myself just to be sure so I will start now hello everyone so since this is a short period of time I will keep this interaction what are we building why is that going to change the world and why are we the ones best suited to build it so what are we building we are building a speech improvement product and by this the problem is pretty straight forward 3 out of all 4 people in India struggle to speak fluently and due to this a lot of people lose and that is what we are solving here and obviously the impact is maximum on students who lose out on their career and jobs and that is why our speech solution is targeted for students where students get a bunch of tools to improve their speaking so that is the entire summary now let me just explore 2 of those to speak it right the first one is our own developed analytics model how it looks like is clear in the diagram so what happens is that you get a you speak and that speech is converted to text passed through our algorithm and then you get a speech report as zone in the diagram so you get analysis on which parts of the speech for example confidence, voice modulation, fluency filler words or awkward pauses do you struggle it and how you could improve that to give tips on that as well so pointing out the gray areas and then helping you recover that that is our analytics model the second model is assistive speech model again something which has not been done in India before so how does this work is so you might like remember how when you type on google keyboard you get recommendations on what you need to type so we convert that experience to a speech so we provide students of course you have given an impromptu topic now if you are not a good speaker chances are you will get stuck so we provide you personalized recommendation using our ML recommendation algorithm and word cloud model and will allow you to complete that once you have completed a speech we will tell you to speak on the same topic this time without recommendations so you could recollect your thoughts and fame sentences which sort of simulates how you experience that in the real world or all these tools package so we have these tech models and we also package it along with jams, debates as well as live games so as to make this a complete mix of practical and theoretical so that is our solution this is a unique solution so we can price it easily we can scale it as well easily moving ahead so what is the impact the impact is clear we allow students to speak better we allow students to get more opportunities but also tier 2, tier 3 students I come from a background like that myself I understand how difficult it is for them to pick up this language and that is why they lose a lot of opportunities so our maximum impact is for those people the business model is particularly getting traction through schools and data strategy finally why are we the ones building it so in a speech AI product you need a speech experience I have been to world championship as an inverted debater you need AI experience Ankit and Akshath have built AI games they have one international hack at us and you get product experience me and Ani's have that so this is the perfect solution 40 million parents to be proud of their children when they are able to speak freely we invite you to join us thank you at what stage is your product yes so we want to launch our analytics model we discussed by December and we want to launch the entire subscription by February we have already developed our analytics model and we are working on the design so have you working with any schools currently we have talked with six schools for pre-registration but since we are launching on December so we want to take the registration so we want to launch the analytics product as a free tool just to gauze feedback and audience and once we are launching the subscription then we will convert those pre-registration into registration in February so whatever you are launching on December 15th that would be a pilot yeah that would be a pilot run so we will create a beta cohort of people and we will let them experience the product for free and just get feedback with them as well as like create a customer pipeline where we can convert them into our early customers as well so yeah that's the plan so what would be the sample size so we are planning yeah please what would be the sample size so we are planning for approximately 500 to 750 people in the analytics cohort as well as we are talking about beta cohort not depending upon the response we might want to continue this to more people or we might want to just hold it down if we have got a decent response we might want to hold it down and wait till the final subscription so what age groups for the sample so we are focusing on school students I mean class 9 and ever and we are focusing on college students mostly TLC courses I mean first and second year students okay fine thank you so actually we are focusing on English as of now what's the plan so as I said I have been in English debating for the last two years and that's common for my co-founders as well so we have experienced in English ours we are starting with English but as we scale up we also plan to bring on vernacular experts we actually know about that language so that we could tackle those as well so that's our end plan but now we just want to deal with what we know and in your view how big is the market so I think this market is about like all 40 million school students but if we are just talking of the age group I mentioned earlier the kind we believe that is in the most need of this product that would come on to approximately 2 million as of now and further on going I think we could find other use cases of this product as well so that could extend the market but in terms of raw size I think it would be 2 million right now how will you work on the content what exactly do you have I didn't see that part somehow that's not clear yeah and so what I mean content is that like suppose here in this say we are saying your energy is 10% now what we could do is so here we could link them to a few youtube videos or few content channels which works our energy and we are also planning so once we launch this in subscription in February since we also have our initial experience in English we plan to create a sort of a content pipeline by ourselves as well so just a few videos on each of these stylistic aspects so that's our content so the validity of the content for the school children that you are targeting that will need to be curated I think you have to be able to level more according to the level of the target audience that you are looking at secondly you also will need to figure out who's going to pay for it right definitely the school children would not pay so how are you looking at your revenue generation yes ma'am I was going to take a point in the first question taken I just want to address the second question quickly so I think when we talk of school students the ones paying other parents and the schools in most cases when we talk of college students especially in those in second and third years the ones paying are often these college students to start with so as we build this audience so if we want to take focus on these college students to start with the first and second year students because those would be easy to acquire and we want to focus our marketing efforts on that as far as school students is considered we are just reaching schools directly and trying to see what conversion can we get from there we want to sort of design a separate strategy for the school's team so we were thinking of a dedicated sales team but yeah also look at a competitor analysis I didn't really hear that part here there is competition so this is there definitely but there is other competition specifically related to language and the target audience that you are talking about the techniques may be different the technology may be different the content may be different but definitely there is competition so how are you going to carve your niche think about it you don't have to answer it immediately I am taking this opportunity to put in as much thought as possible that's all I am not challenging any of your promises it's just that I am trying to draw ideas as I said there are a lot of tools as speech has to say every one of them is our competition yes now you will need to do some number crunching the 2 million that you said will have to be you know you will have to really qualify the 2 million that you are talking about and the time taken there is a lot of math there I am sure you will do it definitely wish you all the best thank you thank you Akshay and thanks a ton to Julie members next start up that we have is Uttarang represented by Aditi Aditi are you there yes Anubhav can I start let us know whenever you are ready we will start the time you can start now so hi everyone I am Aditi and we present to you Uttarang so now imagine a situation where you are a class 1 child and you lack the motor skills to hold a pencil like this or you simply cannot recognize letters and now imagine that this is the reality with currently 135 million children of India that they are not school ready or simply class 1 ready and they begin their life at a disadvantage so we at Barefoot are trying to solve this problem by coming up with a fellowship for leaders in the field of early childhood education who can look at this problem holistically and drive the change that is required so through the 2 year fellowship journey that our fellow will go through they will develop a strong theoretical background through the multiple training sessions that we will conduct for them through the reflective circles peer learning circles post which they will be teaching in pre primary classrooms and also realizing the grassroots realities and challenges then they will be interning in organizations who have strong ECE or community based models and finally we want our Uttarang fellow to come up with their own project which is again targeted at early childhood education once the fellow completes the fellow the journey they will be working on self, school and system and this they will be able to do through the 2 year journey that they spend with us by self we mean that the fellow will be able to work on their personal vision and by school we mean that the fellow will be able to implement innovative classroom pedagogies in schools and by system we mean that the fellow while they begin with their projects they will also be able to document it and will be able to which will be used by schools and organizations at a local level we plan to scale our fellowship by 2023 with 80 fellows currently it's in its pilot phase with 15 fellows in Mumbai right now we have a team of 12 members who out of which 6 people create the magic for Uttarang fellowship we have been recognized at various platforms and lastly I would like to say thank you so much for supporting our vision and it's a wonderful opportunity for us to share about Uttarang over here thank you that's it open to questions this is in line with the teachers training how is it different so sir when we talk about the teacher training program we've often seen it that the teacher training program is for a short time but this fellowship is a full to your emissive fellowship for our fellows through which they will be going through various trajectories one is of course the teaching part then they will be interning and lastly they will be coming up with their own project so this is how we are imagining it so what would be the age group targeting the students the age group that we are targeting is 20 to 35 years old okay so this can be implemented in what type of schools so currently we are targeting at the affordable private schools in Mumbai and in Jaipur mostly the semi urban areas okay thank you are the fellows paid yeah thank you ma'am for asking that question currently we are giving them a monthly stipend okay and what are the terms and conditions for identifying your fellow how do you take that so we have application round for our fellows where they have to sort of do they have to first write down an application form they have to submit it post which then we sort of conduct interviews for our fellows to understand their perspective and where at which level is the fellow currently so this is how we enroll the fellows in the fellowship program and when you say belongs to a low income community what exactly are you yeah so when we say low income community ma'am we are currently targeting the semi urban regions of Mumbai so you can call the local slums in Mumbai that's where we are targeting at so yeah that's why the word has been written so the fellows come from that community correct correct and they drive that change within that community that's what we are aiming at so you are looking like sort of ambassadors from within the community for taking this process of education in the community is that you are absolutely right ma'am yes yes all the best to you thank you so is this the first batch of fellows yes sir this is the pilot phase okay and what's your plan after they complete the fellowship how do you plan to engage with them so we are currently in the process of making our alumina impact a bit stronger so what we've planned is that by January onwards when our fellows are almost near to coming to the end of the fellowship we are also going to get them placed in schools or in the organizations and here our target organizations will be the organizations they've been turned with or the schools they are currently working in so that's how we are trying to get them placed thank you sir thank you Aditi and team Uttarang thank you to the jury members next we have team project Rangit like Simran along with his team member Karishma will be presenting yes let me know once you're ready I'll start the timer I'll just give us a couple of seconds can everyone see my screen I can start we are waiting for stories so Albert Einstein said everyone is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid I was that fish in school I felt judged based on my inability to cope academically and in a classroom of friends I was lost and alone and to this day I am scarred with feelings of inadequacy this is what my inequitable classroom left me with and I co-founded project Rangit to fill children with hope children like 13 year old me the 6c skills are a departure from what school has looked like for years centuries ago learning happened through play and exploration schools as we know them are now based on rigid curriculums with no attention to personal growth the science of learning says that we are the best through play and that the 6c and social emotional competencies are the foundation that children need to become better learners and leaders regardless of academic systems in 1962 US President Kennedy proclaimed as a species we choose to go to the moon and in 7 years this dream was realized but 50 years later we haven't changed our classrooms and learners continue to struggle now we are faced with the greater challenge Covid has changed our world of parents, teachers and children world bank estimates that the impact of Covid represents a $10 trillion loss of lifetime earnings deep problems are prevalent isolation, anxiety, loss of primary caregivers experts state that before learning can happen parents, teachers and children need to be ready to teach and learn we support any curriculum with a framework that helps children excel our app supports facilitators to promote the overall well-being and development of a child with social and emotional and ecological knowledge or C curriculum we teach in the way different brains think and learn as a species our capacity to thrive has been fueled by our ability to feel empathy we connect the common strand of empathy for self with those around us in our societies and to all life on earth in our ecological systems this connection is what will change our relationship with each other and planet there's never been a more important time to act the app contains training modules to deliver the content and tools to monitor and measure impact on children and teachers one device is needed per class which sits in the hands of facilitators technology will not replace teachers but technology in the hands of teachers is transformational children have shown improved understanding of their emotions, mindsets rights, attitudes and behavior bullying, gender and discrimination and knowledge of the climate crisis and how they can take action teachers report improved pedagogy and better attitudes towards learning today's revenues of USD 350,000 and aim to scale through our expanding team that has deep expertise in the education sector and in developing markets we've been recognized by large education institutions and work across South Asia and Peru with large NGO schools and the government we feature a diverse team with a breadth and depth across a wide array of relevant sectors two of our three founders and one executive are women thank you very much amazing wow over to jury members so who are your competitors there's a variety so there's a variety there are NGOs and there are some social enterprises within the NGOs you could say there's an organization called Dreamer Dream in New Delhi that works with the developed happiness curriculum with the Delhi government there's an organization called Slam Out Loud there's an organization in the in the for profit sector called Kutiki another one called the Labia Foundation so there are a bunch which actually is a good thing because it shows a growing interest in the space of social emotional learning and I think across that I'll try to answer a little bit further we've done a kind of a really detailed competitive analysis the usage of technology is most relevant in our platform and the inclusion of ecology which is becoming a growing clarion call globally is actually a big part of what we do there's this whole idea of common empathy across ourselves which leads to empathy to other people and then to the planet which then in turn is a virtual cycle it then leads back to our own well-being okay can a student with who is a slow learner can you use your app okay so very clear we don't we don't interact with kids we empower facilitators we give them lesson plans, resources and an entire curriculum and the teacher will teach Karishma I think you should take this question about how the teacher you know essentially goes at the pace of the class so the way we've laid out a curriculum is and we call it a curriculum because it's not just a bunch of activities that we get the kids to do it is an actual curriculum but we're not trying to deviate from core curriculum we think our curriculum can supplement the core curriculum and the way it works is we've detailed everything so a facilitator whether it's a you know a teacher who's had many years of experience or it's a teacher whose 8th grade passed and we have worked with teachers in Bangladesh who are just 8th grade in fact we've worked with children 15-16 year olds who have taught younger kids as part of social service in their schools and the way it works is it's all through play it's play based music art, storytelling games, role play so the children and the teachers have a lot of fun you don't require some massive degrees to be able to deliver this content the idea is to make it so simple available so that we are fully inclusive everyone can be a part of this everyone can teach it and everyone can learn from it so this would be a layer over any board like it can be a CBC ICAC a state board this would be an add-on or this is a separate thing so if I can just take that curriculums change from country to country and within countries Project Rangit is a set of principles and it's a framework to support any curriculum it can be taught in any language currently we're in English, Hindi Bengali, Spanish and we're just getting into Tamil so it supports any language any culture any context okay thank you thank you so much so what is the procedure that you follow for impact assessment I saw the numbers there but how exactly do you do it sure nice to meet you again so the way we do this is in our app what Karishma described our entire curriculum and it has training modules so the teacher, the facilitator whoever that may be will actually just familiarize themselves with how to teach and also how to run impact we do many different kinds of data gathering we gather data at every classroom so the teacher will take in data of who's in the class, how many kids and we do iterative feedback at the classroom level so every time a class is taught we actually capture data which the teacher will ask a question and enter data into the app which then gets zapped into like our databases the way anti classes are done is we create tests so each of our umbrella has multiple choice tests with pictures things like attitudes, behavior on one of the slides I talked about attitudes, behavior how kids look at themselves through a lens of mindfulness, gratitude, courage and also an understanding of climate so we do the baseline test the teacher gives out the test to the class collects the test after they're done we do the data, how many kids answered 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D that data then goes into a database when we do the end line at the end of the umbrella so there's three tests, one for each umbrella so there's three baselines, three end lines at the end we capture the data again and then we do all the statistical analysis we also run teacher feedback but how has Project Rangit impacted their pedagogy so that's much more qualitative so there's qualitative and qualitative data in the app but I'd like to point out really clearly that this is what we have put in but if we may work with an organization that wants to change the test completely so it's completely flexible it's all done through our back end and do you have any idea about how the confidence levels have increased have you assessed that sure so Param, essentially we have both qualitative and quantitative data so through the qualitative data I will tell you that as yet things like academic change will take a while to establish but things like behavior, confidence levels a lot of that we're getting through teacher evaluations so the teachers are evaluating the kids they're talking about the kids which is an attitude towards each other towards their families towards the teachers themselves and their attitudes towards learning so all of that is taken into account and so we have seen market improvements we've worked with over 22,000 children right now and to keep in mind as Karishma said these are not 22,000 kids who have attended workshops these are 22,000 kids that have attended entire curricula so it's a deep impact and large sustained connections to these children okay, thank you thank you so much so for how long is your curriculum spread over Karishma please take this we have 75 hours of content so if taught at once a week and considering regular school holidays etc if taught at once a week it can span two academic years but there have been cases where NGOs would like to finish it in shorter periods of time it can even be taught to twice a week we prescribe 15 minutes but for example if a facilitator doesn't have 15 minutes they can do it for 30 minutes 20 minutes if they don't want to teach it in the way that it's been prescribed by us they can pull out resources so that can be games, stories, the songs and compliment the core curriculum that they might be teaching with all this for example if a teacher in a science class is teaching children about air pollution they can go into ecology umbrella and pull out a game we have called hidden culprits where the children have to identify culprits that are hiding in an environment that are causing climate issues and they have to identify them and figure out how they replace them to make this earth negative scenery earth positive so that's a really fun way to teach air pollution or water pollution in a core curriculum science class May I just add one thing sir for us personally the most gratifying thing has been recently in connection with Karishma saying we are teaching village children in Alwar and in Nagar in Rajasthan there have been 200 odd children who have gone through our ecology umbrella doing the kinds of things that Karishma has been talking about in Hindi and we are now going to be doing this in Madurai in Tamil and that's just been the most gratifying part to be able to build agency amongst these children over a sustained period of time so that's what gives us the joy of doing this every day. Just to follow so I'm sure it must be very tough to convince schools how do you what's your strategy to go to market and how do you convince I think it's getting better I think it's getting better like I said around social and emotional learning is really growing COP26 has talked so much about the connections between climate and social issues for example every time there is every time there's a flood girls get affected girls get pulled out of school and people are realizing you can't just think about the core curriculum anymore girls are getting disadvantaged and we all know the evidence around how well economies do when girls go to school and women are employed the evidence is very clear so we cannot ignore this anymore and COP26 and the pandemic have clearly laid out to us that we can't put kids in this box the Karishmas who went to school and hated school because they just couldn't do those particular subjects and had years of self esteem issues these things have to change and as this slide says we're living in schools that are solving the problems of 25 years ago we need to look forward and we need to redesign the way we transact with children it's one comment please see how this aligns with the NAP we are so we've just a very senior education professional has joined our team Aparna ma'am after the last conversation the last time we spoke he has 15 years of experience with store education and central square foundation and we are hiring experts to do the mapping between what we do and the national education program and actually we're going to take this outside in there too and like I said I was answering Satish sir's question you know the curriculum change from country to country we need to be that framework that allows that jumps out of the phone and impacts the kindness and the generosity of children and their willingness to learn and that's what we're doing by doing the mapping so it's a very good point and we've started that process great thank you Simran and Karishma for presenting it and thank you to the jury members in the interest of time we would like to move to the next team thank you very much yes so we have team lead by design represented by Soumya Soumya please go ahead you're on mute I hope you can see my screen good afternoon everyone I'm Soumya Laxminarayanan and I'm here to share the story of my student Adya 9 year old Adya is one amongst 120 million young children in India who goes through schooling where she learns her subjects does not get a chance to apply what she has learnt in real life and finds school education less engaging if not boring and by the time Adya reaches her workforce the mainstream education that she has acquired already becomes irrelevant 2 out of 3 kids in primary school today will grow up to do work that does not even exist today and road learning based education is failing that and why should we care because Adya represents half of India's population entering the workforce by 2030 impacting our economy we are lead by design and we have a mission to see that all children get a chance to go through education that is actively engaging meaningful, suits the 21st century and makes them lifelong learners we work with NGOs and schools of diverse backgrounds and develop products such as the I2I box that enables children to unlock their creativity and services such as the let's take action that empowers children to utilize their creativity to build local solutions for global challenges we have so far partnered with 8 different NGOs and 2 educational institutions in bringing joyful learning experiences have witnessed 4x increased engagement among children using our product and as a non-profit we were able to set up a sustainable revenue stream other than grants and crowdfunding we have directly reached 450 children developed 5 student ambassadors and built nurtured 50 students who built 50 plus local solutions impacting 1000 community members we have been acknowledged by national and global social design forums for our products and services including UNICEF DFC all this in the last one year imagine how many more children we could reach if we are not limited by the economics of operation today I am not pitching you a non-profit for quality education I am pitching you the way we are transforming classrooms to become inclusive and develop lifelong learners Lead by Design is a human-centered design-based product and service developers that revolutionizes the way students learn inside and outside the classroom Lead by Design's solutions are the current missing link in creating meaningful learning experiences for young children in India at an affordable pricing we are a team of young dynamic women from research and design background with experience in directly educating children from marginalized communities supported by pioneers in the field of design and social impact space our goal is to reach 1 million children in 2025 I would like to connect with you, Aparna to get your expert opinion on our products and connect us with the school ecosystems with Satish to get your expertise on strengthening our go to market time is up and Ravi to get your support in establishing and strengthening our corporate partnerships thank you how is your product different from other boxes available in the market so Satish so thank you for asking that question firstly our product is self-guided it's easy to use for 6-10 year old children so if a facilitator is present or not present a child can actually go ahead to access the materials in the product as well as the activities in the product and go ahead to do so the second thing is it's affordable pricing so we have it's not just one type of activity alone because 6-10 year old children have the product is supposed to enable children to explore experiment and express which means that they must be able to go through a range of different types of activities and not just one type alone so the product has 8 themes today ranging from storytelling story writing all the way up to building things all the way up to making and breaking things and including sustainability part where they would go ahead to collect materials from outside and go ahead to build things thereby enhancing their sustainability enhancing their ideas of sustainability itself right from young age onwards is it that month on month the theme changes no it's all in one product you have to buy one product that can be utilized yes currently like flint or box or any other boxes no so that's the reason so we to reach to the market that we are talking to Satish that is children from lower economic backgrounds we cannot have a product which is like a split up and which has different kinds of activities from different places itself so we want to the current product that we have has all of these together combined so at any given point of time let's say today the child picks up the box he or she wants to go ahead and explore something to build with her hands then they can go ahead to do so tomorrow I don't feel like building but I actually feel like writing a story I can actually go ahead to do that okay when I'm not interested in any of these I just want to express myself in the form of art activities I go ahead to do that so in your deck you had mentioned local 50 solution what does that mean that is the second type so at Lead by Design we have one is to unlock creativity by this products for 6 to 10 year old children and the second is once you unlock that creativity like once the child understands that you know like the creative potential how can he or she go ahead to use that creative potential to build solutions for local challenges itself say for example in one of the schools that we interviewed in the global challenge that they were facing was food based and if we think about food based it's a global challenge but if we think about the reason why food based is happening in that particular school it's a local challenge itself it then becomes a local challenge go ahead to identify why food is getting wasted in that particular community go ahead to identify solutions work along with the community members to identify solution and implement those solutions as well so one of the solutions that they went ahead to implement was actually gathering up a systemic change itself where they decided that a sort of an attendance card system where every child will know how much of food he or she has taken itself so forming like children actually engaging along with their community adults in that community to go ahead to create solutions so this is the second part of it and that is where children have gone ahead to create 50 local solutions okay thank you I think we can connect offline because we also work with a lot of schools and children okay so yeah thank you thank you thank you Satish so now Somya when you said that there is this that these solutions are designed by the children based on the local challenges how many boxes are purchased by any given school so Apanna just to clarify one part of you know like lead by design is actually bringing the products right like so the product the I2I box itself is designed by lead by design members then we have a service which is you know like the let's take action wherein you know like children go into their local community itself and look for you know like challenges so you are selling it to the schools directly or are you also selling it to NGOs who are working with schools currently the product we have we have reached out to both schools as well as NGOs we have eight different NGOs that are you know like currently our early adopters for the product itself and two different educational institutions both in you know like Bangalore and Chennai perfect sounds good so I still think that you will need to work on the business model per se because there are certain things which I was looking for I didn't really find this is not the platform to bring up all that for the time in interest of time so we can talk about it offline thank you check out another solution called Jump to PC which is an app that's not nothing to do with the content that's more the hardware but maybe you can look at that alright thank you companies jump stream technologies you can look that up so swamiya do you have a for profit entity also not at the moment Ravi this is lead by design is currently registered as a non-profit section 8 company so just wanted to understand how do you measure impact and currently what to do so for our product itself Ravi one of the ways that we measure so the product like the I2I box when we bring it to schools the teacher also essentially gets if there is a facilitator the facilitator also goes ahead to get a certain type of activity book which means where she or she can go ahead to note down observations of how children are actually utilizing the box itself what are the kind of activities that they do what kind of new activities that they are coming up with what kind of new games they are coming up with itself and at the same time you know like how children are collaborating with each other and all that so we have currently monthly interactions with the facilitators or the people who go ahead to facilitate if there is a facilitator present otherwise along with the product there is a service attached to it where every month we actually meet up children where we give monthly challenges, creative challenges for children then you consulted all these observations and feedback yes yes thank you thank you so much Somya and jury members we will move ahead with the next participant team Techno Shala represented by Rameshwar thank you, thank you folks am I audible? yes Rameshwar are you able to see this team? yes yes hello I am Rameshwar and I am an engineering student along with this I have worked with Rajasthan's government to increase the education of schools so when I was working with Rajasthan's schools there was a thought that quality education is a social economic application so the purpose of Techno Shala is how to learn from the help of technology so Rameshwar you are on mute Rameshwar you are on mute ok so when I was working with Algo the problem was that children are not interested in education along with this there is a lack of technology education and the lack of motivation so to provide education in Gujarat the government has made it better so through our solution we will make people, processors and technology better so in schools learning outcomes and making experience better can build a positive ecosystem so the program of Techno Shala is divided into three parts one is the development of LED TV and digital content the third is the protection of teaching and unfiltered support and third is the development of leadership courses so now we are working with the 6 government schools of Maharashtra so to fulfill this we have collaborated with the education department and the impact of this program is that there will be a lot of students among the students along with this it will be very helpful along with this our teachers can take this program to other students so we hope that you can join us with the help of technology to make children better they are interested in the outcome thank you so is your organization a profit or non profit non profit is a section as a registered okay so what do you teach in Techno Shala you teach only computers or other languages subjects also okay fine so initially the beginning of Techno Shala was in March 2020 how we can compare these skills but when we started this on-field work we got feedback from the schools that why should we integrate these things with existing subjects so now we are working with the teachers and specifically with the teachers in Science and Math so how many schools you are working now six schools from every district from six blocks from every block six schools so how old is your organization one and a half year okay thank you thank you is there any demonstration or anything in fact I don't have a classroom demonstration but I am planning an integration with you how we are integrating in the classroom that's okay so also what kind of competition are you up against and why haven't you done any other product you will have to think through all those who else is doing what look at this okay so in the market there are other organizations which we do but one thing which we do from personal experience if we enable then we can deal with larger impact this is a very unique in recent years as much as the teachers and the school students can listen to they can get a lot of things they can get a lot of points and we can handle things so this is one thing in relation to what we are doing and the third thing in the training program in which we use the intellectual tools which are used in the teaching learning process we will utilize them as a training expert and we have around 37 teachers from 7 states so we will channelize them for this program so this team is taking the program so Ramesh are you able to you can hear me yes how do you work with the schools this is a government school and this is a remote school any other questions alright thank you Ramesh moving on to the next participant so we have team exam hub presented by Dilanka am I audible can you see my screen your screen is visible let me know once you start I will start I am Dilanka Sanja I am from Sri Lanka this is my startup exam hub in Sri Lanka only 60% of students did pass papers before they are advanced level exams only 30% of students checked right and wrong answers only 10% of students check why that question is right or wrong that is the main question I look at in Sri Lanka have 1.6 million students in grades 6 to 9 and totally 2.6 million in Sri Lankan this is my target market in Sri Lanka this is launched for Sri Lankan first of all and I go to global in next years in 2020 I am targeting 1 million students of this group only 37% of total market in this situation my big idea is exam hub exam hub is an innovative online education gamified mobile application for Sri Lankan students in using this application they can do their exams like a game they can take a play quiz battle quiz, daily weeks and exam self challenge when do play quiz they can do their papers they can battle with friends and daily quiz we are giving some wrong answers they are the wrong answers we are giving daily quiz and we are giving contestant they can do self challenge they can do extreme shots they can do like a game they can select subject they can select year and they can select level they can do and this is the protection level and when you get 30% of marks they can go to next level if they get below 30% of marks they need to trade their level this is my battle quiz extreme shots they can create a trade room this is my new feature 10 of students 10 of students can join this game and play their exams and this is my revenue model I use mobile subscription model I charge 3 rupees per day from my students and now it help 5000 students are online daily active and every month I get 1500 dollars per income from this application and why we different of our competitors in traditional system we are using gamified solution and we are giving some before our Sri Lanka experience this is my growth I am 2 years research application and I am launched this application last year but I market this application this year October and now 4000 students are registered this application and this is my expansion plan in 2020 December I will target reach 1 million experience in Sri Lanka and I got 90 million rupees in my expected income this is my data in this year it's okay that is my solution thank you and I am sorry for my English yeah it's okay who are your competitors in Sri Lanka we have some competitors but they have used traditional exam system when we looking at exam papers it have 40 actions of 50 actions most of all application use 50 actions per same time so then students are tired students are do 15 to 20 actions they are complete that application or close that application in my application I use 10 actions per level so they are not tired and they are decided to do their exams so in Sri Lanka not yet good competitors now because when I doing marketing I got only dollar 0.01 for per registration dollar 0.001 in Sri Lanka rupees 1 rupees okay fine so if you require any support in Sri Lankan ecosystem you can get in touch with me so I can connect you thank you so when did you launch your product I am launching this application in 2020 in May but it have some bugs and it have some issues and I will fix and I will research again in this year and I will launch successful complete product in this year October in this one month I registered 40,000 now in yesterday it's in play console shows 50,000 downloads my applications now so how did the pandemic impact your subscriptions yeah it's very good because I am not using credit card or debit card payment system I am using mobile subscription method it's value added services method when students download this application they have mobile number it's in Sri Lanka dialogue it's a lot anything they got a pin number and they can register I will charge in Sri Lankan rupees 3 rupees per day using this application so most of this in per month 90 rupees per they can't buy half it's a 4 sheets even 3 rupees they can do 10 years back past papers using this application and I will upload many many papers for this application so is this kind of a one time subscription model or how does the subscription work no this is a daily subscription model per day they charge 3 rupees if they not using this application they can unsubscribe the application in 50,000 downloads but registered account is 35,000 and daily subscription account is 7,000 7,000 expenses are paying for this application now within 2 months how are you ensuring the stickability of your users to ensure that they continue on your platform and that they do not migrate to any other platform or is it okay for them to do other platforms and yours do you have any analysis or data on that in Sri Lanka they haven't any other gamified platform any other gamified education platform in Sri Lanka now but I am at some AR and VR things for this application I am my owner of company so I am creating AR and VR things for this application in next 3 years I am planning and I am developing these days now and I am getting my bootstrapping money for this earning revenue and I made AR magazine for advanced level education okay so just one kind of alert not really I would like to question you on the tech the use of tech which is fine the use of tech is fine but then you know it is not easy to assess the impact on the learning for students because of the use of AR or meaning how do you know that the students learned more because you used this technology or how do you assess that so you will have to think about it I don't think it is readily available and another thing is it the glamour of the tech that is drawing the students to the platform or is it the genuine learning which is so that is an analysis that you will have to actually work on and ensure that the learning is solid you know whether it is just a luxury whether it is a good to have or whether it is a need to have the AR or VR is something you will have to analyse when I made it 500 students in last last two months and I got to analyse from that students most of students are using that now smartphone in this situation and most of students are using smartphone for do their games play games and watch YouTube videos many many things and most of students are not using now papers papers like physical papers in newspapers so like any papers they did not use but I am launching a trial magazine I am launching trial magazine within 10 pages for Sri Lankan Institute it was science in science one lesson most of students are very very like to that I am creating AR applications for them using mobile phone they can open that book and they need to scan using their mobile then it shows AR system then I am developing hard system they are in our heart using that mobile phone they can use fully hard details from AR technology so 500 students 99% are like that education system and I will get some survey I am asked some questions they didn't know I asked questions I am asked suddenly some questions from that listen then most of students are correct when I give a book and treat that listen and give a paper then most of students are wrong in AR system AR system and video and give a fight solution most impact for Sri Lankan Institute most of global students okay so another thing is the expenses that you have added there maybe you will have to look at those numbers again as you see there are other things that will kick in some of the expense items are not expenses I got only servers and content developers but content developers are in my sister and my younger brother and it is not cost for me and for servers I have Google Firebase and AWS server for AWS server in 50,000 students I got only $2 per day most of the time I got expenses $100 per month all things for marketing I am spending Google ads and Facebook ads for introduction sorry sorry to interrupt but I humbly request the jury to please move forward with the other participant thank you so much Dilla and the jury next up we have Sonali representing Coytopedia hi everyone so I will quickly start can we move to the next slide basically Coytopedia is trying to be a holistic sex education and sexual wellness platform in the country the problem that we are trying to solve is very simple we do not feel that sex education in India is still considered a legal route we have a very taboo topic in this country which is where when we conducted our survey we realized that 65% people did not have any regular authentic information on anything related to sex education 71% of Indian girls do not know anything about periods till the time they get their first period so out of two kids one child has been abused in some form or the other 15 every 15 minutes I would say women gets raped in this country and 6 crore teenage pregnancies are happening moving on to next so the key is that I feel that people have got a lot of access to the internet so information is readily available but how to process that information is something which is not clear to people and which is why we are seeing such huge problematic numbers so the solution that we are trying to offer is to come up with a sex education workshop which would be primarily targeting school and college kids information about sex, consent, puberty etc then we are coming up with sexual wellness services which is basically therapy and doctor consultation to help people with anything related to their sexual life or mental health if they have any queries they can come up to us and then eventually in the long run we are planning to come up with sexual health products as well for instance if I have to give you condom is the most common contraception which is available in this country that people know of but apart from condom there are more than 60 contraceptions that are available highly effective but which people do not know and do not use. Moving on to next please. So when we talk of traction currently our focus has been to build a community because we know it is very difficult to penetrate into the market with the kind of mindset people have. We are creating that community we have more than close to 13 thousand users on different social media platforms. We have created more than 60 blogs we have conducted more than 50 plus medical and therapy sessions for people conducted couple of workshops as well. Next please. We are in the process of creating our own comic series which will be targeting pre-teens and educate them in a very fun and informational manner. Next please. Move on to next. Next. So when we talk of the target market size we have 40 million people who are aged between 13 to 40 who can be our potential users in the long run and we have more than 100 thousand schools and colleges in this country that we can target. So this is the plan we want to reach out to these people in the eventual five year growth phase. Next please. Moving on to next. So our progress so far we launched last year in October after that we launched our website we went ahead with our social media platforms and today as we speak we are conducting our social media Your time is up. What is your strategy when you go and discuss this program with the schools or the colleges what is their mindset how do they react? So very nice questions Sadeesh. Actually we tried speaking to couple of tier one schools in India in tier one cities and the response wasn't that great. People were very skeptical because they thought kids won't support them for the standard of education for the kids which is where we thought instead of going for the kids through the school route we will probably come up with a comic series we will try to educate parents as well and that is why we are focusing on creating that kind of community at the moment wherein we get a lot of response in fact you know I got last week couple of response from parents also who wanted to understand how can we make our kids more aware about sex education about puberty about peer pressure navigation through all those phases so that is something that is happening and when it comes to college kids we try to conduct workshops using the communities at colleges there are different social clubs in colleges wherein we go talk to them then we conduct workshops and these are all consenting adults so once they give the consent we can conduct workshops typically in our workshop 50 to 60 kids participate and they ask very relevant questions and it really really helps them. Okay thank you. So what is the medium of communication for you meaning when you are taking these sessions is it only going to be face to face sessions or like you said there are some magazines, comic strips etc we use other tools for spreading awareness So Aparna we actually wanted to do on you know face to face sessions but thanks to covid we couldn't so we decided that you know this should not impact our work which is why we started doing sessions on zoom and let people you know ask their queries directly to us and solve them. Also like I said you know reaching out to kids is not that easy like pre-teens and teens because most people do not approve of sex education in this country so which is why when we are thinking of so there is a comic series not a comic educational series I would say it's called Menstrupedia which is basically focused on menstruation so that particular book has got quite a huge response in this country and we thought that okay why not come up with our own comic series it's not comic it's an animated series covering different topics like puberty we are talking about night falls we are talking about sexuality like you know people have different sexuality how to be comfortable with it how to navigate through the peer pressure how to not fall for it how can parents be more understanding of the kids today like you know generations today are much more forward so the entire series is going to be built around these topics we are planning to launch this comic next year march and we would ensure that you know we go heavy on marketing at that point in time try to reach out to as many parents so that they can gift this to their kids and you know reach out to kids directly as well so that if in case you know they are interested in this kind of information we will try to monetize this as much possible and we will try to cover it on social media platforms wherein we have decent following at the moment and people do you know come up to us on a regular basis every day I get at least 10-15 questions from different users with different different topics different concerns so I think it will be very helpful for these people and users so that will there be advertising revenue too eventually this is not something that I have of you know implants immediately but yes definitely we would want to monetize through Google ads etc on the platform so in fact the website today if you go Aparna it's a very complete holistic website where anybody asking any kind of question or has any kind of doubt can find all with free information so we will ensure that the data that is there on the website has been vetted through various research paper government you know information of you on government of UK and US have quite a huge information available on these topics and then we've got this vetted through doctors as well so all with free information has been put there our current objective is that you know we make it a topic which is comfortable for people to talk and you know understand to open up a little that is the first objective and then obviously there is there are a lot of ways we can monetize this therapies are definitely something that we are monetizing at the moment people ask us very relevant questions and we wanted to give them exact right information which is why we onboarded doctors and you know clinical therapists who will answer their queries who will conduct sessions for them and I would say I'm really happy with the kind of response you've got considering the fact that when I initiated this conversation I went for you know market research started doing some cohort analysis people were extremely apprehensive but now I'm really getting good response on that and I'm really happy with the brand collaboration so like we've done a collaboration with core condoms in the past and now we have upcoming three or four collaborations in next month with again score imbue and other such brands who are into sexual wellness or reproductive wellness products when I said advertising maybe you can kind of tie up with certain brands which look at sustainability and sending out your message in a manner rather in your face advertising yeah we're doing that yes ma'am yes yes we're doing that sorry I didn't get it correctly yes we're doing it absolutely any other questions please Ravi is there any question from your side I guess he's facing some network issues and he dropped off anyways thank you Sonali thank you team quite a bit here so let's move to the next participant definitely thank you so much everyone Muskan so the last participant from today is team walls of the people association represented by prafulla and ratuja hi thank you is my screen visible and my audio audible yeah okay shall I start yes yes you can start okay hello good afternoon everybody my name is Prafulla and I am representing walls of the people association section 8 not for profit company so let us begin with the story this is story of Muskan school girl who belongs to underprivileged family before covid her study was going well in a normal and underprivileged school as well but because of covid everything went online and online classes became buzz words now the schools are started again but these buzz words are around and she feels that she is missing something her confidence is withering away if she will achieve whatever in her life or not same as the case with her teachers they were barely managing to teach in the classroom with their knowledge and skills and now they are interested with the new responsibilities of teaching online and using new technologies to address these problems we came up with this solution we kept the chapters in the textbook from government syllabus at the center post and decided to create a curriculum which would be interconnected and that would be for students and for teachers as well if we go in depth how does it work so zilla parisha teachers from government teachers they create the content they curate the content that content is freely accessible to the students the same content is accessible to all the thousands and lakhs of teachers who can use that for online or offline teaching to the same children so in a way students are targeted in both ways through self-study and by their teachers as well our approach is here we collaborate with the government structures we use the existing government modules and structures we engage with zilla parisha teachers because they are already qualified and appointed for the job we collaborate with different engineering colleges student and teacher organizations to get this project flowing and lastly the system we have built is highly scalable and it is highly customizable second set local level as well the uniqueness is not just in the system but on the pedagogy as well the platform does not just show videos but a lot more than that this is our journey till now in the last year we could reach up to 18 lakh users and in the last four months this is our output the app is downloaded for around 5 lakh times and it has good retention rate the play store rating is good around 1200 teachers have collaborated and contributed on this application here are the main features of our application which are highly contextual to the rural students particularly these are our budgets for the next three years and current year of students as estimated in the next one year we would be focusing to reach 25 lakh students and 30,000 teachers we use this system and content and we would also like to scale to other states these are our mentors who are guiding us in this endeavor yes and thank you we are open for any questions so how are you onboarding the teachers government teachers are they allowed to do such be part of such initiatives yes we actually officially collaborate with the education department of particular districts we are currently collaborated with three districts in Maharashtra and the best teachers according to those zilapuriches are contributing on this project okay so you go by state syllabus yes we go by state syllabus right now we are working for Marathi, same in English and Urdu Medium syllabus okay so what is your target in fact you want to create for this year we have targeted that we would reach up to 10 lakh unique users who will be using this app and strong monitoring is there so we can identify the unique users and same way we are going to target 10,000 teachers who will be using this content to teach online and offline thank you so thank you Prafulla again and here your presentation again which districts in Maharashtra are you going to yes we started with big district because it is one of the most backward districts and we launched our pilot there then we have collaborated with Jalgao, Ahmad Nagar and Usmanabad district okay so what has been your finding so far about the reception to your program is there what kind of challenges have you faced and how will you tackle just name one challenge right now the most important challenge in front of us is the financial challenge because on technology front on collaborations with the government or training the teachers that went well we could create a lot of content in a very short time span the downloads and the retention rate is also good the feedbacks are good what we are struggling is how do we sustain this because till now we were funded mainly through crowdfunding but as the scale is going up we will need more funds and we are looking for CSR funds now let's take kind of have a discussion offline maybe I can connect you to some educational institutes in Jalgao might be able to fund this at all maybe work out something like that so I'd like to talk to you separately on that thank you ma'am very much could you tell us a little bit about your team yes right now there are 7 core team members full time members in our team nearly half of them have been working in education or development sector since last 8 to 10 years with different NGOs and since last 3 years we have collaborated came together and started this venture so by education half of the team is engineers few of them are from social work and mass media as well are you present outside of Maharashtra correct hello are you present outside of Maharashtra no we haven't yet scaled out of Maharashtra we are still exploring in Maharashtra last year it was a website now just 4 months old so we are just working to make it more stable so after that we would be scaling out of Maharashtra great I guess there are no more questions thank you team Vopa and thank you Praful for the amazing presentation so yes amazing presentations team thank you to the jury members Mr Satish Mr Ravi I would request our jury members to please share a quick closing thought and then we can proceed towards the end of the event we can start with Mr Ravi please go ahead yeah I mean it was wonderful hearing to all the ideas and people are involved and these are the areas that we face a lot of challenges in and we at the AICT polite are also focused on these areas so we would definitely like to connect with all the presenters today and if you could also connect us with others you know we could also help I would be happy to do so and wish everyone good luck thank you Mr Ravi moving ahead with Mr Satish please go ahead firstly thank you for connecting inviting me and so I am being part of Havas Digital Tech we are creating an innovation investment and entrepreneurship ecosystem so we would love to connect with all the startups then connect these startups within India and outside India so looking forward thank you so much great thanks Mr Satish Dr Rappanna please go ahead yes so first of all thank you to team Riksh and Ms Fritz I must congratulate you for the name the name kind of really stands out and and we know that we are looking at startups that are going to be hard to get that they are not going to be the run of the mill who will simply you know so it's just amazing to all the startups and secondly I have a complaint the complaint is that it's been extremely difficult to judge because it's such a tight call each one seems better than the other and then I don't know what am I looking at even the parameters I'm looking at all the wrong parameters to give them marks because each one is needed the work is very much essential and it's not even as if they're competing against each other there is so much of synergy between some of the startups that I was hearing to if they could kind of form a force together they're really a force to reckon with so the complaint is that Ms Fritz made it so difficult for the members to judge so startups please do not look at the winning or the losing of it it's more you know it's simply mind-blowing projects each one of them are amazing whether it's for Sri Lanka or Assam or Chennai or Bangladesh like you know each one of them so yes thank you very much and congratulations to all the teams irrespective of whether you win here or not thank you doctor for these kind words and hoping for the best we are trying to do this particular event offline from next year so let's hope for the best also yes again thank you to all these startups you all were phenomenal and yes to all the Judy members thanks again and we are covering like today we had agree and epic based startups we are covering health and hardware startups on day 3 which is on 23rd of November and then livelihood and environment based startups on 25th November the day 4 basically then we will move towards our day 5 which is the finale of Ms Fritz 2021 cohort and that's happening on 27th of November so yes please stay tuned stay connected and yes please stay connected with us on our social media handles to get more updates about the event about each and every panel so yes with this I would like to end this event here and thanks again to everyone thank you bye