OxFounders x Bengaluru

OxFounders Global comes to Bengaluru on 3rd May (10am-5pm) for a full-day startup summit, showcasing the talent of the innovation ecosystem. We're hosting this event in collaboration with International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). 🌏

We hosted a full-day startup summit at the IIIT-Bangalore, one of India's top universities, in partnership with Microsoft for Startups, Azure Society of Excellence, and NVIDIA. We brought together some of the country’s leading innovators, including founders, investors, and leading international organisations like the World Bank, the Commonwealth, the EU Commission, Entrepreneur First, and the India Innovation Fund. Three out of eight startups from the pitching competition are now in talks for investment. Here is the event write-up:

We opened with speeches by Dr.Lakshmi Jagannathan, CEO of IIIT-B's Innovation Centre, Hari Krishnan Govindarajan, Lead Advisor on Sustainability at The World Bank, Aditya Kumar, 1st India employee of Plug and Play Tech Center, and Nidhi Vadhera, COO at trailblazing incubator The GAIN .

We had two panels - the first  'Escape velocity: transitioning from startup to scaleup', where we were  joined by AJ - Anubhav Jain, Asia Pacific Dealmaker at the UK Govt Global Entrepreneurship Programme, Lov Loothra, Senior Vice President at Credit Saison India, Arundhati Banerjee, Inception Partner at NVIDIA, and Satish Grampurohit, Founder and CEO at Cogniquest AI. 🌏

Our second panel narrowed in on the focus of the day - 'Economy of the future: the role of Deeptech and Sustainability in shaping tomorrow's innovation' and we were joined by Ashwin Raguraman, Founder and Partner at the Bharat Innovation Fund, Akash Shukla, Co-Chair of The Commonwealth AI Consortium, Suresh Narasimha, angel investor and CoCreator at CoCreate Ventures, and Hari Krishnan Govindarajan.

Last but certainly not least, eight brilliant early-stage startups, with a focus on deeptech and sustainability, pitched to our audience, showcasing their high-growth projects. We were joined by an esteemed jury, consisting of AJ - Anubhav Jain, Dr.Lakshmi Jagannathan, Varada Rajan Krishna, Co-Founder of 100 Open Startups, and Dhruv Tyagi, Investor at Entrepreneur First.

HUGE congratulations to our winners:

🏆 1st Place - Breathe ESG, pitched by Karantaj Singh

🥈 2nd Place - Agent Analytics, pitched by Ranjan Relan (who came all the way from Hyderabad)

🥉 3rd Place - Dorje Teas, pitched by Sparsh Agarwal

❤️ Audience Favourite - GoPool, pitched by Akash Jadhav

And an honourable mention to our other pitching startups, Vozi (Rajat Hegde), Newcycl (Anu Khandelwal), Monet (Abhay Tandon), and Joly AI (Jaya Bharadwaj).