India's largest start-up incubator T-Hub to be launched on Thursday

T-Hub, being billed by the Telangana Government as the country's largest start-up incubator, will be officially launched on Thursday.

This one-of-its-kind start up incubator in the country, will be housed in state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot building called CatalysT and will be entirely dedicated to entrepreneurship.

T-Hub is a public/private partnership between the Government of Telangana and  three premier academic institutes -- IIIT-Hyderabad, Indian School of Business and National Academy of Legal Studies and Research.

According to Jay Krishnan, CEO of T-Hub, about 150 technology-based startups, have already been shortlisted and will be moving in to the building from 9-15 November.  Some of these are involved in e-commerce, cloud, analytics, while there are product and health technology companies also, Krishnan said

"Without doing a deep dive into analysing the breakup of the companies, my gut feeling is that most would be in the digital commerce space - mobile and web commerce included," he added.

Explaining what T-Hub can offer to a start up, Krishnan said, it will provide three crucial elements that start ups need -- access to infrastructure, access to mentors and finally, access to capital.

For the infrastructure, the five floor building has a capacity for 800 seats and these 150 odd start-ups with bring in around 450 people, he said.

In addition, there are accelerator programmes that would be run by entities like Microsoft or Nasscom and which again will bring in additional people. Put together, the facility will be seating around 700 people at the moment.

While T-Hub is a not-for-profit entity and all funds are ploughed back into growing T-Hub and maintaining it, Krishnan said there are different space-occupying offerings available for a start ups and they will charged for it.

The building has co-working spaces and individual cabins that can seat upto 14 people. There are in all 20 such cabins - four per floor across the five floor building.

The CatalysT building does not house start ups that have more than 14 people each. Any start up that has more than 14 people probably will not need to be part of the building as it already grown to a certain size.

The startups will be charged Rs 5,000 per month for a seat and up to Rs 50,000 per month for a cabin.  

Typically, the start ups are likely to spend around six months at T-Hub.

The CEO said they are also putting together structured programmes for the start ups by mentors, defined as people who have either established start ups or are working in large companies like Microsoft or Google.

They will also do "customer validation" and the first level of screening of the business plans of the start ups.

On the access to capital, Krishnan said, "we are putting together an innovation fund which will be professionally run venture capital fund" and being a public-private initiative, its corpus would include a small stake by the government and the rest from financial institutions.

The immediate goal, said Krishnan, is to have at least three success stories from T-Hub in the next two to three years; with success being measured in terms of how quickly it can scale up, how quickly it has been able to raise funds and how quickly it can offer exits.

Welcoming the launch of T-Hub, Pranav Suresh, CEO of Startup Village in Kochi and Vizag, said, "every state should have this as there is so much talent out there in the country."

Startup Village was set up in Kochi in 2012 and in Vizag this year in Jaunary and has incubated 100 start ups so far, Suresh said.

"Our model is slightly different and while we cater to college students with bright ideas and also college graduates, we are moving towards a completely college student-focussed model."

Accordingly, he said, Start-up Village, which is also a public-private initiative tends to keep its charges low. "We charge Rs 1,000 per seat per month, which also at times can be a challenge for college students."

In fact, at Vizag, he said, the start ups need not pay anything as it is all subsidised by the state government.

Startup Village is a technology business incubator, India's first incubator that is funded jointly by the public and private sector. The promoters of Startup Village are Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Technopark Trivandrum and MobME Wireless. Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys, is the chief mentor at Startup Village.