By Mohammed Shafeeq
Hyderabad, April 4 (IANS) T-Hub, India’s fastest growing startup ecosystem, on Wednesday announced a new programme, Lab32, which will offer start-ups a tool to track growth and support scaling and a dedicated mentor for each startup.

T-Hub, which completed two years last November, also announced a new admission process — Cohort based system which is almost like a university.

Starting next month, the incubation programme will entail a two-phased admission process — the first phase will be in April every year and the second phase in October.

T-Hub is a unique public private partnership between the government of Telangana, premier academic institutes (IIIT-H, ISB and, NALSAR) and key private sector leaders.

The incubator, which can seat 160 startups, was hitherto admitting incubators as and when the seats fell vacant.

The new programme is expected to ensure strategic growth of start-ups. It aims to support the government’s Startup India Initiative by directing entrepreneurship, innovation and addressing the challenges faced by startups.

Jay Krishnan, CEO, T-Hub, told IANS that the unique aspect of the programme will be playbook, a tool developed in-house by T-Hub’s technology team, which will be used for tracking growth and supporting robust scaling of the startups in the market.

“The current business model adopted in major ecosystems across the world works great but we feel that in Indian context it is not enough. In India we have lot of challenges. We felt that the business model needs to have India flavor,” he said.

He hoped that with this new business model, the success rate of start-ups will jump to 70 or even 90 percent.

Under Startup Buddy, the second component of the programme, a dedicated mentor will be assigned to each startup.

“At the end of the first phase of programme, startups will either graduate or stay back, based on how they measure up to the growth matrix. Accordingly, we will put them in the second phase of the programme for another six months,” Krishnan said.

Every single entrepreneur at will be asked to identify and tell the top 10 things that they want to achieve and T-Hub will help them hit all those before they graduate.

The eligibility criteria for admission will be such that the startups would need to be market ready, should have at least one customer, and be a minimum of one-member team. If any startups miss on the admission once, they can re-apply. The admission can be for physical or virtual incubation, and the startup can be based anywhere in the world while still have access to T-Hub’s Startup Buddy, Playbook, other mentors, workshops, and seminars.

In total, 100 startup admissions are open currently, which brings in seats for 800-1,000 entrepreneurs through physical incubation.

T-Hub’s goal is to promote technology-based startups, primarily focused on HealthTech, FinTech, Smart Cities, Transportation and Sustainability.

Applications are open now https://t-hub.co/incubation/ and close on April 15, 2018.

(Mohammed Shafeeq can be contacted at [email protected])

–IANS
ms/vm