Coimbatore is well-known as a education and startup hub. The TiE Education and Entrepreneurship summit 2016 that has been running from the 28th July, saw 33 startups participating in its three-day boot camp. This boot camp ended with a pitchfest to select three winners among the six selected for the final Pitch about their startup at Coimbatore's new Forge Accelerator.
Here are the winners of the Pitchfest:
SKAAS
Skaas wants to provide skills as a cloud-based service. Its co-founder Vinoudini Boj explains that real-world skills, such as cloud computing, are sorely lacking in the hundreds of thousands of engineers that India churns out each year. Vinoudini, who is a bioscience grad from the Keck Institute in California, saw the disconnect while working at Biocon and Ascent.
She became an entrepreneur to tackle this problem. Her startup connects learners with industry professionals for job-oriented courses. Learning labs and projects on the cloud provide a real world feel. And Skaas aims to complete the loop by helping organizations find tech talent with work-ready skills.
SchoolSaamaan
It’s a marketplace for everything related to school, from uniforms and books to stationery and lunch boxes. Amit, who worked at Accenture, VMWare, and TCS earlier, felt the need for it when it came to sending his own kids to school. Schoolkart is a rival in this space, but SchoolSaamaan hopes to go one up by tying up with schools to meet their specific requirements.
Practise
Practise is a test prep site focusing on aptitude tests for MBA college entrance. It uses gamification and analytics to personalize the test prep for users. The two co-founders Pranav Upadhyay and Yudhir Agrawal are both management grads themselves, and felt the one-size-fits-all approach of most MBA entrance test prep support wasn’t adequate for many. It uses a freemium model with a limited number of practice questions and solutions available for free, and unlimited access with payment.
Here are the winners of the Pitchfest:
SKAAS
Skaas wants to provide skills as a cloud-based service. Its co-founder Vinoudini Boj explains that real-world skills, such as cloud computing, are sorely lacking in the hundreds of thousands of engineers that India churns out each year. Vinoudini, who is a bioscience grad from the Keck Institute in California, saw the disconnect while working at Biocon and Ascent.
She became an entrepreneur to tackle this problem. Her startup connects learners with industry professionals for job-oriented courses. Learning labs and projects on the cloud provide a real world feel. And Skaas aims to complete the loop by helping organizations find tech talent with work-ready skills.
SchoolSaamaan
It’s a marketplace for everything related to school, from uniforms and books to stationery and lunch boxes. Amit, who worked at Accenture, VMWare, and TCS earlier, felt the need for it when it came to sending his own kids to school. Schoolkart is a rival in this space, but SchoolSaamaan hopes to go one up by tying up with schools to meet their specific requirements.
Practise
Practise is a test prep site focusing on aptitude tests for MBA college entrance. It uses gamification and analytics to personalize the test prep for users. The two co-founders Pranav Upadhyay and Yudhir Agrawal are both management grads themselves, and felt the one-size-fits-all approach of most MBA entrance test prep support wasn’t adequate for many. It uses a freemium model with a limited number of practice questions and solutions available for free, and unlimited access with payment.