Google is emulating the concept of Launchpad Accelerator program for the entrepreneurs and developers in India. Today, it has unveiled “Solve for India” program to inspire the new wave of entrepreneurs and startups in emerging cities of the nation.
With the program, it aims to expand and energize the startup ecosystem in Tier II cities. The internet giant wants to encourage budding entrepreneurs to come up with solutions that address the real-life problems faced in India and its underserved user needs.
Google India, via this program, is targeting entrepreneurs and developers hailing from cities like Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kochi, Indore, Nagpur, Nashik, Madurai, Kanpur, and Chennai.
Solve for India will provide individuals or businesses from these cities a platform to get insights from experts and learn about latest Google technologies. They will also gain access to direct mentoring and support from the search giant.
Entrepreneurs will get an opportunity to learn directly from Google engineers who will share product usage insights, how to develop mobile first solutions with strong offline and language capabilities and help them develop solutions across categories like healthcare, agri-tech, transportation, education, sanitation and more.
Statistics reveal that majority of internet users in India are Indian language users. Also, 80% of the populace uses the Internet from their mobile phones. However, the Indian startup ecosystem is developing products and services for English speaking audience and caters only to 15% of the population. Karthik Padmanabhan, Program Manager Lead for Google India, said,
There are growing number of entrepreneurs in smaller Indian cities who are focusing on building solutions that caters to the real needs of India. Through this initiative we want to bring the best of Google under one program and join forces with them to help create solutions that serves the needs of a billion Indians.
Various Google’s programs such as Google Launchpad mentoring program will help developers and entrepreneurs to build, scale and accelerate early-stage product ideas into category leaders. The Launchpad accelerator program provides six-month mentorship that covers different aspects of product design, business models & technology support to build for scale and go to market strategies along with $50K equity free investments.
Developers can also look forward to building their skills and learning from experts on latest in Android, Firebase, machine learning, Cloud APIs, progressive web apps and Indian language translation solutions.
