User:Indianstartups/IAccelerator

iAccelerator is a start up program launched on May 18th, 2008 by the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship ([CIIE]) located in Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad ([IIMA]), India. The aim of this program is to foster Entrepreneurship by providing some mentoring and financial support to young Entrepreneurs.

In the first batch of iAccelerator, total five ideas were selected out of approximately 50 applications received. The first batch participants were mix of young college students, graduates and professionals. Some of them took sabbatical from their studies and regular job and came to CIIE to attend this program and try to fulfill the dream of starting a venture.

First batch ideas and teams:

1) Lypas - a mobile based social calender cum event notifier. Team of 3 students from IIT Madras and Pune University student. 2) BuyMantra - an online portal for buying Electronic gadgets. Team of 3 Indian students from University of Florida, USA. 3) DeMaZi - a platform for developing custom made database driven applications on SaS model for SMEs. Team of 3 professionals, ex students of IIT Kharagpur. 4) Voice Pitara - a platform for developing IVR, ASR and TTS based mobile phone applications for emerging regions. Team of 3 professionals, ex students of IIT Bombay, University of Edinburgh and VTU Karnataka. 5) BoHoo - a platform for writing comments on Websites which can be followed by friends on Social Networks. Team of professionals from Yahoo, Sunnyvale, and Borland Singapore.

At the end of the program in August, CIIE decided to incubate only one team out of five teams. Though iAccelerator has been much hyped in print media and electronic media because of the reputation of the Institute it is located in and the Industry connections it has due to IIMA alumani network but, according to few people in the Industry, the first iAccelerator was not a well thought and well run program. On the record, CIIE internal sources says that iAccelerator 2008 was an experiment and learning. .

"... At the end of three months, one team - Voice Pitara - was offered incubation support after consultation with the executive committee. The team is doing well. Out of the remaining four, one has started up in Mumbai, another team is waiting to get out of college and the other two are fiddling around with their concepts.

One learning for us from this experience was that startups need angel investment to kickoff. Also, we realized that selecting teams only on the basis of concepts was too ambitious a target. Hence the failure at not being able to convert all five teams into companies in the first edition. Therefore, iAccelerator 2009 promises to a much better platform than the first edition."

Second batch of iAccelerator was started on May 1st, 2009.

iAccelerator has its inspirational roots in the highly successful [Y-Combinator] start up program run by the well known Entrepreneur Paul Grahm in USA.