Bengaluru has now become the true start-up hub of the country. It is now a location where start-up talent, academia, research, and business combine perfectly to ensure an environment for growth and innovation, which remains Cisco’s ultimate aim.
Technology giant Cisco has announced LaunchPad, an open innovation initiative to accelerate start-ups and support growth in India’s developer community.
Cisco’s finest teams will mentor on how to help create digital solutions to enable enterprise customers, service providers and other enablers in the public and private sphere to connect the next three billion people and 50 billion devices through digitisation, matching appealing ideas with business expertise and connecting engineering talent with investors and customers.
Start-ups will go through a rigorous selection process based on the viability of their business plans, the strength of their teams and their alignment with Cisco’s digitisation vision.With the finalists within their fold, the LaunchPad will get direct access to the Cisco supplier network, and also some of the select customers as well, so that scaling becomes possible for these innovators.
Through LaunchPad, start-ups will get an opportunity to work on solving business relevant problems by working on cases identified and validated by Cisco’s go-to-market teams, with an initial focus on manufacturing, retail, transportation, education and healthcare.
Cisco will also provide a space at its Bengaluru campus with access to a suite of Cisco technologies and free grants to start-ups chosen to work at its campus.