The second edition of TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge witnessed great enthusiasm from 140 early-stage startup teams that sent in their plans. Out of those, three took home the prize
If entrepreneurship is about that “lunatic belief” that one can find one’s way despite all odds, then the winners at
the TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge are brimming with confidence. The second edition of the contest culminated into an award ceremony on July 5 in New Delhi.
Out of the 140 business plans that landed after the contest went live in April this year, eight teams were distilled for the final round. These were Dhruvaa Software, Ginni Systems, Infogile, Equitas, GoodMorningResearch.com, iKen Solutions, HealthcareMagic.com and 11rupees.com. The uniqueness of the contest lies in the mentoring that the short-listed teams received from veteran entrepreneurs before the final round presentations to the jury. Most of the teams praised the mentoring sessions as “valuable”, and some even polished their business plans to include minute details that they would have otherwise missed out.
The jury that vetted the business plans of the eight finalists to choose the three winners included Mahesh Murthy, Founder and CEO, Pinstorm, Pramod Bhasin, CEO and President, Genpact, Saurabh Srivastava, President, TiE Delhi, Raman Roy, Chairman, Quattro BPO Solutions, Sanjeev Bhikchandani, CEO, Infoedge, and Alok Mittal, MD, Canaan Partners. Many of them confessed that selecting three winners was not an easy task as several business plans were neck-and-neck. But being a contest, they had to zero in on three of the very best. One of the jury members felt that “Each of those 100-plus business plans were good and there is a strong likelihood that they will succeed.”
 | The Winners
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| Jaspreet Singh, Co-founder, Dhruvaa Software | Siddharth Goel, Co-founder, iKen Solutions | |
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| (L-R) Alok Mittal, MD, Canaan Partners; Saurabh Srivastava, President, TiE Delhi; Raman Roy, Chairman, Quattro BPO Solutions; Sanjeev Bhikchandani, CEO, Infoedge; Mahesh Murthy, Founder & CEO, Pinstorm | P N Vasudevan, Co-founder, Equitas Micro Finance |
The winners—Equitas Micro Finance, Dhruvaa Software, iKen Solutions—will now get further mentoring from Nasscom, Canaan Partners and the jury members. They also get access to investors such as The Indian Angel Network. The icing on the cake is a course at the Center for Executive Education at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. A representative of each of the winning teams will get to attend the course, which typically costs Rs 3 lac, which will be waived for these participants.
Equitas Micro Finance is a Chennai-based microfinance startup. The firm was co-founded by PN Vasudevan jointly with M Anandan and P Nandakumar. Vasudevan has prior experience in the NBFC business, as he has been a vice president with Cholamandalam Investment and Finance.
iKen Solutions is a software product company that specializes in intelligent business systems backed by hybrid artificial intelligence techniques (expert system, case-based reasoning, neural networks and genetic algorithms). It is an IIT-Mumbai research spin-off. The founders—Rajendra M Sonar, Aditya Goel and Siddharth Goel—want to make every software product and solution intelligence-enabled and add intelligence in every business process.
Dhruvaa Software was founded in 2007 in Pune. It is in the business of data protection and business continuity products. The company aims to target the US market in a big way.
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