Google India launches startup handholding programme in Pune

PUNE: Google India launched its startup handholding programme — “solve for India” — in Pune on Friday. The event was attended by over 1,000 entrepreneurs and developers.

As part of the initiative this year, Google India will focus on tier II cities of the country where it will focus on entrepreneurs who solve ‘real world problems’, and cater largely to the non-English speaking audience.

This will be the fourth phase of Google’s programme for entrepreneurs. The first three focused on Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. As part of this, Google hopes to interact with about 10,000 startups and entrepreneurs across the country.

“In the past 8-10 months, we have seen an increasing trend of entrepreneurship activity in tier II cities. The penetration of internet (due to low cost) has accelerated the pace of internet usage on smartphones,”

Karthik Padmanabhan

, program manager lead for Google India, said.

Padmanabhan said Google India will provide selected startups and entrepreneurs ‘expertise and experience of building products’ across a range of Google platforms, and, at an advanced stage, mentorship will also be provided to scale-up an enterprise.

“Entrepreneurs will get an opportunity to learn directly from Google engineers, who will share product usage insights on how to develop mobile-first solutions with strong offline and language capabilities and help them to build solutions across areas like agri-tech, healthcare, transportation, education, sanitation and more,” the company said in a statement.

Asked why google is participating in the startup ecosystem, Padmanabhan said though internet is growing explosively, local language apps are necessary to engage the audience.

“People have smartphones in India, but they should have apps they can use. Only then will they remain engaged,” he said.

On Friday, Google India said, about 300 entrepreneurs and about 700 developers participated in the solve for India campaign in Pune. Of these, the tech giant will select a few scalable models and put it through its Launchpad programme.

The internet giant will focus on Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi, Indore, Nagpur, Nashik, Madurai, Kanpur and Chennai over the next year.

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