Startup Street: An Incubator For Non-Profit Startups
Here’s all that’s new on Startup Street.
An incubator backed by the likes of MakeMyTrip’s Deep Kalra and Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma has chosen non-profit startups, basketball legend Michael Jordan invested in a next-gen technology projects startup and Lendingkart got a new chief technological officer. All this and more on this week’s Startup Street.
Incubating For A Cause
An incubator for non-profit startups, backed by big names like MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra and Paytm chief Vijay Shekhar Sharma, has picked 10 early-stage startups for a six-month programme.
N/Core selected the ventures from a pool of 1,032 applications from 19 countries, it said in a media statement. The applicants include non-profit startups by graduates from top institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, the statement said.
The selected non-profits are solving some of the most impending challenges in India related to poverty in diverse sectors and through varied innovative approaches.N/Core Media Statement
“Its an exciting phase in India where some of the best young innovators are readily entering the social sector and providing out-of-the-box solutions to age-old challenges,” said Atul Satija, founder of N/Core, said in the statement.
N/Core will offer a grant of Rs 10 lakh to the selected startups, which will be mentored by industry veterans like Maneesh Dhar, the former managing director of Apple India, K R Lakshminarayan of Azim Premji Foundation and Sanjay Purohit, former chairman of Infosys Consulting.
The programme will kick off from September 11 in Bangalore, and N/Core plans to incubate 100 non-profits in the next five years, taking 10 such startups each twice a year.
Michael Jordan And Tech World’s Soldiers Of Fortune
Basketball legend Michael Jordan has backed a startup that gets next-gen technology projects done by assembling a crew of freelance coders and guaranteeing work at a fixed price.
Earlier this week, Gigster raised $20 million in its early-stage funding from a group of investors including Jordan, it said in a media statement. The funding was led by Redpoint Ventures while other investors were Marc Benioff of Salesforce and Adam D'Angelo of Quora.
This new round of funding will accelerate development of our core technology platform, powering better service delivery to clients, and will help us grow our core team by 100 people in the next 12 months.Gigster Media Statement
The startup said it has grown its revenue more than eight times, and expanded client base to 40 enterprises from three since its first funding round in 2016. Gigster boasts of having a network that includes freelance web engineers who’ve previously worked with giants such as Google, Facebook, MIT, Princeton and even NASA.
As for Jordan, this isn’t the first time he’s backed a startup. Bloomberg reported that he had previously invested in Swiss sports data company Sportradar.
Lendingkart Hires New CTO
Online lender Lendingkart hired a new chief technology officer, Mukesh Singh, to strengthen its internal software and programming, the company said in a statement. The company is prioritising automation and data engineering to make loan disbursal “as quick, convenient and accurate as possible”, it said.
Singh, an engineer with over 17 years of experience, was previously the senior vice president at software company SirionLabs.
With Singh’s help, the company will scale up strongly, said Harshvardhan Lunia, chief executive officer and co-founder of Lendingkart Technologies.