28th August, 2015: With an aim to encourage the start up and entrepreneurial landscape in the country, students of two of India’s most prestigious institutions IIT & IIM Indore, collaborated to successfully execute the first ever start-up summit of this magnitude, called the i5-Summit-‘Ideate.Innovate.
The event witnessed panel discussions and workshops on M-commerce vs E-commerce, GROWTH Hacking, Walk with the Entrepreneur, Digital Media Marketing, App Development, Product Engineering, 360 degree on funding, Customer Acquisition, Business model Canvas, NASSCOM panel discussion and more such interesting topics. There was a staggering count of over 800 attendees at the event. All discussions and workshops witnessed great enthusiasm from successful and established entrepreneurs. To add to this, there were angel investors and venture capitalists who spoke about the promising startup ecosystem and what they look forward to in the prospective startups.
Jury and Participants during Venture- i
Left to Right (Jury): T C Meenakshisundaram-Director- iCreate; Neeraj Ghutghutia- Founder & CEO Guts Unlimited; Pramod Taparia- Chairman at Wintech Taparia Ltd.; Akshay Jain, CEO, Vinfotech
Some prominent speakers and attendees were- Kris Gopalakrishnan, Co-Founder, INFOSYS, Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, CEO, Zensar, Ronnie Screwala, Entrepreneur, Raghunandan G, Founder, Taxi For Sure, Kunal Shah, Founder, Freecharge, Srikanth Sundararajan, Venture Partner with Helion Venture Partners, Pankhuri Shrivastava, Co-founder, Grabhouse.com, Anubhav Sonthalia, Co-founder and COO, Sokrati Inc, Sameer Pitalwalla, Co-founder, Culture Machine, Rohit Chadda, Tanmay Bhat, All India Bakchod, Krishnan K, Amazon Web Services, Ritesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, Oyo Rooms, Sameer Pitalwalla, CEO, Culture Machine to name a few. NASSCOM was also a part of panel discussion on “Business Development with an Enterprise.
Having worked with a lot of exciting startups across the globe and being closely associated with the i5 Summit, Akshay Jain, CEO, Vinfotech shares, “We were thrilled to collaborate with the i5 Summit team and to be a part of an event like this. It is the first of its kind happening in Indore, and it turned out to be a grand success. It was really exciting to see more than 800 attendees including some of the most promising startups of the nation and to build connections with them. Thought leaders and visionaries like Ronnie Screwvala, Kunal Shah etc. spoke about some exceptionally interesting insights about the startup space. Indeed, an entrepreneurial extravaganza! It was a pleasure to be celebrating and contributing to this spirit of entrepreneurship.”
Soumyadeep Chakraborty, Overall Coordinator, i5 Summit (IIM Indore) said, “We are glad to announce the closure of the first i5 Summit. At first, getting the entire startup ecosystem on one platform in a city like Indore seemed like a herculean task, however it gives me immense pleasure to have been able to pull it off successfully. The entire onus goes to the IIM & IIT team, esteem speakers and all the budding entrepreneurs who travelled from across the country for this event.”
Panel Discussion on 360 Degree Funding
Left to Right- Moderator- Varun Doval, Digvijay Gagneja- Investment Professional- Matrix Partners, Neeraj Kumar Singhal- Director- SEMCO, Srikanth Sundarajan- Venture Partner- Helion Ventures, Agam Khare- Director & Chief Executive at Vertex Group of Companies, Vijay Nair- Founder & CEO-OML
A special feature of the event was Venture-I, an angel funding competition that was open to start-ups from all over the country. The startups that received funding in Venture-I were Bingage, Hate2Wait, Planmyad, SponsifyMe and Gamezop. Moreover, NASSCOM will be considering one of the participating startups for the Silicon Valley INNOTREK batch of 2016.
