Setting the stage for constituency-level start-up meet-ups, Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel on Saturday inaugurated the Vejalpur Startup Festival in Ahmedabad. The initiative has been started at the behest of Vejalpur MLA and BJP leader Amit Thaker. Amid the presence of BJP colleagues and officials at the event, Thaker said that the festival was organised with the idea of it being ‘for the youth of Vejalpur, by the youth of Vejalpur, and of the youth of Vejalpur’. Stressing that after decades of “brain drain”, it is now the time for “brain gain”, he advocated for “local-level incubation centres for start-ups, to facilitate their growth and urging potential mentors to register themselves on the online portal of Vejalpur Startup Festival". “When we started publicising, more than 4,500 youth from Vejalpur registered for the event with more than 1,000 start-ups.We have identified nearly 250 start-ups which have great potential and 45 start-ups are exhibiting in stalls," Thaker said. While the festival was expected to be inaugurated by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, he could not make it “because of passing of Bills in the Lok Sabha”, said organisers. With an address by Software Technology Park of India (STPI) Director General Arvind Kumar, the inaugural event saw live start-up pitching and funding sessions. Exhibitor stalls saw various startups, including the reality show Shark Tank India-funded Ahmedabad-based firm ‘Simply Salad’. Start-ups from the technology, manufacturing, health tech, green energy, internet of things, and fintech sectors were also present. IndieSemic, a semiconductor firm, claiming to be “Gujarat’s 1st semiconductor start-up”, providing services in chip verification, fabrication, and embedded hardware design as well as firmware development, was also among the participants at the exhibition. Agritech domain too found its space at the exhibition, such as with Communifi Technologies LLP, one of the firms, marketing its product which is a wireless soil moisture controller.
