10 start-ups to present their business ideas at Wharton event in Mumbai

These 10 finalists will be judged by Kirthiga Reddy (MD of Facebook India), Ravi Gururaj (Nasscom) and Sasha Mirchandani (Founder and MD of Kae Capital). Through

the competition, Wharton aims to provide a single platform for start-ups to get access to mentors, collaborators, investors and potential customers.

One of the 10 finalists, Sathya Raghu, co-founder of Kheyti, says, “Kheyti is an agri-tech start-up. We create value to farmers using low-cost greenhouse and less water with a bundle of related services. We are an early stage start-up, currently in proof of concept testing stage. We applied for the competition at a stage when we started creating a business model. Creating a small six-page deck covering a snapshot of business seemed extremely exciting. This competition is a phenomenal learning platform.”

Vikram Arumilli, one of the co-chairs of WIEF-2016 and a second-year MBA student from the school, said, “A lot of early-stage innovations fail because they don’t have the ability to scale up due to the right kind of intervention at the right time. If on a single forum, one can get a mentor, collaborator, investor and potential customer corresponding to innovation at different stages, it would not only strengthen the process but also provide a much-needed boost to sustainable, entrepreneurial environment of the country.”

WIEF is a student-run India-focused conference that will be themed around an analysis of India’s start-up landscape. Besides the Mumbai conference, Wharton would also conduct the event at its Philadelphia campus on March 25, 2016.

Some of the 10 start-ups to compete in Mumbai are Acuity, a visual web analytics start-up which has a cloud-based scalable platform that enables minimising web-scale massive visual data sets; Art & Found, a marketplace for artists where they can sell their art for free; Greensole, a start-up that refurbishes discarded sports shoes to comfortable footwear and provide them to the neediest. The start-up also sells carbon and auctions sports shoes of famous personalities to spread awareness about the cause; iFreedom v2, an app that saves users’ internet data. It has an infrastructure that sends and receives compressed data over the internet thereby saving much Mbs and Ketto, a crowdfunding platform.

The conference would also witness keynote addresses and panel discussions by eminent speakers and experts like Ronnie Screwvala (founder of UTV group and Unilazer), Harsh Mariwala (Chairman of Marico) and Haigreve Khaitan (Senior Partner at Khaitan & Co.).