InnovationQore’s Turbostart Brings Funding, Mentorship For Startups Ready To Hit The Market

Even with the heavy tech startup push in India, fledgeling startups with working proofs-of-concept and prototypes often get overlooked amid the rush to embrace innovation from unicorn-level startups. While the government is providing support, incentives and incubation to promote the startups’ growth in the country, there are other organisations who have taken it upon themselves to help these startups scale in India. One clear example is InnovationQore which recently launched its Turbostart programme.

A pan-India, sector agnostic programme, Turbostart will identify ten most promising startups and help them create a strong network in the industry and get funding, market validation, business support and more.

The Team Behind Turbostart

The team at Turbostart comprises names that have decades of experience of working with startups from early-stage to late-stage and understanding on how to plug market gaps to achieve scale.

The Core Team

Meet the core team of Turbostart:

Ganesh Raju

The founding partner and CEO of Turbostart, Raju brings 19 years of experience as head of entrepreneurial and private business at PwC. He has expertise in areas ranging from mergers-acquisitions, startups, inbound-outbound investments, fundraising and more.

With Turbostart, Raju will look to get startups to focus on their core operations while providing cost-effective and scalable solutions for funding, legal compliances, and strategy.

Saikat Bhattacharya

The chief operating officer (COO) at Turbostart, Bhattacharya has over 30 years of experience as a part of the leadership teams at MNCs such as Fidelity Investments, Motorola and PagePoint.

Arun Bellary

The chief technology officer (CTO) and senior advisor at Turbostart, Bellary comes with over 30 years of management experience at MNCs and tech startups such as AT&T, Fujitsu, Pirelli and Ericsson.

Advisory Board For Startup Selection

The programme has brought on board the following names as the members of the advisory board, who would decide the top ten startups and the winner amongst them:

• CS Sunder Raju, founder, Atria Power and Atria Convergence Technologies
• Ullas Kamath, joint managing director, Jyothy Labs
• John C Sharp, managing partner, Hatcher+
• PM Murali, founder, Jananom Pvt. Ltd.
• Nirankar Saxena, deputy secretary-general, FICCI

Who Can Apply?

The programme has set the below-mentioned criteria for startups to apply and benefit from it:

• Startups founded less than 10 years ago
• Startups having a minimum viable product or POC (proof of concept) with a scalable business model
• The startup should be working towards innovation and development or improvement of products, processes or services

What’s In It For Startups?

Created by industry veterans for today’s entrepreneurs, this programme is conducted in a competition format every six months. With the objective of investing in the growth of 100 startups over a period of five years, Turbostart is providing the selected startups with benefits such as:

• Funding – Up to INR 2 Cr
• Strategy – Product validation, business modelling, capital structure and more
• Services – From legal to marketing, this encompasses almost everything that a founder needs to take into consideration

The programme has three stages of selection for every applicant after which the top 10 startups will be chosen and awarded at a grand finale in January 2020. The first batch of the programme opened applications in October 2019, and the applications will close on November 30. Apply now before you miss your chance to work with some of the sharpest minds guiding startups today.

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