25 Startups awarded pre-seed funding by Gujarat University (GUSEC)

By shubhamagarwal

Posted on April 16, 2017

The Gujarat University Startup and Entrepreneurship Council (GUSEC) in association with Gujarat Corporate Social Responsibility Authority and Entrepreneurship Development Institute, recently on March 2017, has started a start-up policy facilitating the students to develop their start-ups, innovative and entrepreneurial ideas. According to GU, the selected applicants will receive a financial help of Rs. 40,000, incubation support, guidance, mentorship, further financial assistance along with all other support from GUSEC.

“Our students are working at facilities of other institutes to further their startups or innovation. So, we decided to have our own facility,” said GU vice chancellor, MN Patel.

A few days ago, GUSEC has announced the names of 25 shortlisted start-ups whom it is going to support this year- App-based Ambulance Calling & Tracking, BrainyBottle, CashBasket, Campusyaari, Chemsol, D.A.C.H., Funkaar Gigs, ieacon, Infin24, Kollegians, Lutalica, Luminati, MyClassCampus, Planet Earthlings, PreBOO, Resource Center for Actuarial Mathematics, Salubrious Gujarat, SciTech, StudentDesk, SUDAKSH, Synbiotic Foods, sports-werable, Tractor Sodho, WeHear, Wittybrowns.

GU Vice Chancellor M N Patel personally met over 25 student entrepreneurs in an interactive session to understand the challenges faced by start-ups while being a student, after which he decided to form GUSEC. “After we announced our intentions to support student entrepreneurs and startups, my office got several calls from entrepreneurs inquiring about the project. We decided to meet entrepreneurs in order to understand their needs and involve them in the decision making process,” said Patel.

GUSEC set a target for supporting 1,000 student’s startups in the state in a year. Gujarat University is the first university of India providing such type of facility and motivation to the student’s start-ups.

The university is also planning to bring together all the existing startup promotion agencies, central institutes, and policy makers to help it expand these initiatives across the state. “We want students to become job givers instead of remaining to be job seekers. Hence, we are coming up with initiatives which will generate more jobs and boost the economy,” added Patel.

GU VC M N Patel said “It did not take much to support start­ups because universities and technical colleges already had enough infrastructure to do that. What was needed was to make institute’s infrastructure accessible to start­ups so that they got a place to work and a lab to experiment at low or no cost”.

25 Startups awarded pre-seed funding by Gujarat University (GUSEC)