Telecom Incubator 'Startup Village' To Take Off In Kerala

India's first public-private partnership telecom incubator, Startup Village, will be launched in Kochi, Kerala in the second week of April. The incubator aims to nurture over 1,000 student startups and intends to invest about Rs 100 crore in the startups engaged in various businesses surrounding value added services and products in telecom sector.

The incubator is looking at emulating the famed Silicon Valley incubators and transform Kerala into 'Silicon Coast'.

The incubator would deal with anything related to telecom, be it VAS, IVRs or other related things. It will encourage startups to come up with futuristic stuff and bring in the technology element in their projects.  Startup Village is also in talks with various handset makers, mobile service providers, tablet makers, operating system updaters to partner with.

"Incubators are the catalysts of change and growth in any sector. The Startup Village is definitely India's most ambitious project that will have a pan-India impact in the coming years. The combined experience of veteran industry players, along with the support facilities and funding opportunities, should help local start-ups emerge as global winners and the game-changers of tomorrow,'' said Kiran Karnik.

Former NASSCOM chief Kiran Karnik, UrbanTouch's CEO Abhishek Goyal, former CEO of Yahoo India R&D Sharad Sharma, Dell India's MD Ganesh Lakshminarayan, KK Natarajan of Mindtree; Arun Kumar, global board member of KPMG besides Ravi Pillai and Nanda Kumar of SunTec are among those joining the project as mentors and investors.

The Startup Village campus will have full 4G network and advanced telecom labs. It will also provide services, including legal, intellectual property and accounting in addition to fully furnished office space, video conference rooms and virtual office services.

The hub will extend a host of perks, like three-year service tax exemption up to Rs 50 lakh revenues. The incubator companies can, by default, make a pitch presentation to Startup Village Angel Fund.