South India has a new startup hub. Meet the 3 winners of its first edtech pitchfest

He who has imagination without learning, has wings and no feet, said Joseph Joubert. Photo credit: Pixabay.

Coimbatore is a relatively prosperous second-tier city, sometimes referred to as the Manchester of South India because of its manufacturing, especially textiles and pumps. It is also an education hub, with a number of engineering colleges located there.

Today it has aspirations to become a tech startup hub, taking advantage of its industrial and educational base as well as its proximity to India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore, which is 350 kilometers away by road and a short hop by air.

“Coimbatore missed the arrival of a new generation of tech entrepreneurs that we saw in Bangalore,” A Selvakumar, president of the Coimbatore chapter of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), tells Tech in Asia. He arrived in Coimbatore last year from the neighboring tech hub of Chennai, as local industrialists wanted to catalyze tech entrepreneurship in the city.

One such initiative was an education entrepreneurship summit over the weekend at Coimbatore’s new Forge accelerator. It included a bootcamp for 33 edtech startups followed by a pitchfest. Here are the three winners who emerged at the end:

Skaas

Photo credit: Forge accelerator.

Skaas wants to provide skills as a cloud-based service. Its co-founder Vinoudini Boj explains to me that real-world skills, such as cloud computing, are sorely lacking in the hundreds of thousands of engineers that India churns out each year. Vinoudini, who is a bioscience grad from the Keck Institute in California, saw the disconnect while working at Biocon and Ascent.

She became an entrepreneur to tackle this problem. Her startup connects learners with industry professionals for job-oriented courses. Learning labs and projects on the cloud provide a real world feel. And Skaas aims to complete the loop by helping organizations find tech talent with work-ready skills. It’s a work in progress and the SaaS product will be good to go in a couple of months, says Vinoudini, whose home is Coimbatore, although she’s now based in Bangalore.

SchoolSaamaan

Photo credit: Forge accelerator.

Your daughter has an event coming up at her school for which you need a Mother Teresa fancy dress? No problem. SchoolSaamaan can get it for you, says its founder Amit Mishra.

It’s a marketplace for everything related to school, from uniforms and books to stationery and lunch boxes. Amit, who worked at Accenture, VMWare, and TCS earlier, felt the need for it when it came to sending his own kids to school. Schoolkart is a rival in this space, but SchoolSaamaan hopes to go one up by tying up with schools to meet their specific requirements.

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