Infosys cofounder SD Shibulal has set up EduMentum, an incubator being launched in partnership between his Advaith Foundation and Mantra4Change, a Bengaluru-based NGO. The incubator will work for early-stage startups in offline education transformation space.
EduMentum will offer $11.7K (INR 7.5 Lakh) per annum to the selected startups along with a series of workshops. It will also guide the incubated startups in networking in the ecosystem.
Shibulal was quoted as saying, “EduMentum is designed to promote social entrepreneurs who are working to transform the education ecosystem. EduMentum will encourage development and use of the indigenous body of knowledge in the area of school education through ShikshaLokam.”
ShikshaLokam is a platform for education leadership under Advaith Foundation. The foundation was set up by Kumari Shibulal and SD Shibulal to promote philanthropic ventures in the field of education and research.
The first five startups in the programme, which started in September 2017, include Loop Education Foundation, Vidhya Vidhai, Samarthya, Sanjhi Sikhiya and i-Saksham. While the next batch of the incubator has been scheduled to commence in June 2018.
At the end of the programme, the startups will also be given an opportunity to pitch to investors. The aim of the programme is to incubate 50 startups across the country by 2022.
In the recent times, India has witnessed an increase in the number of startup accelerators and incubators being launched. In December 2017, Paytm launched an incubator for startups, Build for India. Under this initiative, the digital wallet will assist developers in designing open source-based solutions and sharing these projects with the global tech community.
As the number of incubators/accelerators focusing on a specific sector of startups’ growth multiply, it will be interesting to see what revolution does EduMentum bring in the education space.
