facebook INDIA STARTUP DAY
Facebook announces new initiatives and expands current programs for startups in India with the first ever India Startup Day
Facebook, on 09th October, hosted the first ever edition of its India Startup Day in New Delhi. The initiative sought to bring forth inspiring stories from within India’s dynamic and vibrant startup community. Through its flagship startup programs: India
Innovation Hub, SheLeadsTech and Code for the Next Billion, Facebook has worked with over 200 startups through the course of the last one year and committed to expand its programs to more cities and entrepreneurs in the coming year.
PROGRAMS
• SheLeadsTech - Facebook’s leading program that gives women-founded startups access to a year-long program that provides tools, mentorship and resources to help overcome some of the barriers they face and build a successful business in technology. Currently, SheLeadsTech has over 170 members across 24 cities and 13 verticals with 150 more women founded startups expected to join the program by the end of 2018. WONK, founded by Vidhu Goyal, an ed-tech startup backed by this initiative, is India’s first tutor discovery and tuition booking app.
• Code for Next Billion - Launched in partnership with NASSCOM, the program focuses on supporting startups that employ tech to deliver social good. The 10 selected startups in the current cohort received access to technical, financial and marketing mentoring to develop products that have a positive social impact on our communities and transform the lives of Indians in need. One of startups under this initiative, Helper4U is a job portal for semi-skilled and unskilled workers looking for jobs as housemaids, cooks, drivers, babysitters etc. The platform seeks to connect them directly with employers, enabling immediate, cost-effective and direct hiring.
• India Innovation Hub Accelerator
Program - Launched in partnership with T-Hub, the six-month program provides a series of hands on workshops, mentoring sessions and practical technology sessions to startups building products with emerging technologies- AR, VR. It also saw Facebook setting up an Innovation Hub at the T-Hub facility in Hyderabad to foster and grow these startups. With the help of Facebook’s India Innovation Hub, Innov4sight is building an integrated healthcare ecosystem using a combination of VR, analytics, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering and educational technology. It aims to impact clinical procedures by reducing errors and avoiding second guesses, thus improving fertility and cancer care effectiveness.
• School of Innovation - Facebook is also nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit of students and is encouraging them to think about deep tech and product innovation. The first batch of School of Innovation program, of 10 student teams have built their VR ideas into working product prototypes which will showcased on a demo day, early next year. Besides these programs, 21,000 people have also completed self- training modules via Facebook’s Startup Training Hub, which was launched last year.