Investors Connect with IT Innovators

Government of West Bengal is committed to encourage local young IT ventures that are constantly pushing the technology frontier. The State has made great strides in developing a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem. City of Kolkata itself accounts for 2% of new ventures in India as per NASSCOM report. State has observed that SMEs, new ventures are great medium for employment generation.

Investors Connect with IT Innovators was yet another initiative taken by Department of IT & Electronics, Govt. of West Bengal in collaboration with ASSOCHAM with knowledge support by PwC PMU team, to encourage the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation among youth. Organized in the beautiful facility of Biswa Bangla Convention Center on 1^st Dec 2017, this one-day event provided a platform for young IT ventures of the State to establish connect with Investor Community and raise Venture Capital /seed funding for their business. Twenty five new tech ventures made investment pitch to five eminent investors invited in the event.

The investors in attendance were Mr. Ajay Maniar, Partner Avishkar, Mr. Ashish Kumar, Co-Founder The Fundamentum Partnership, Mr. Vijay Sharma, Individual Investor from Middle East, Mr Prasenjit Chaudhuri, Founder & CEO, ArcInsight Partners LLP, Silicon Valley and Ms Vidhi Bansal, TRIBE - Intellecap Impact Investment Network (I3N) and Mr. Debashis Basu from Grant Thorton Networks. All these investors have invested in tech ventures before and had expressed their interest in meeting the participating ventures.

Participating ventures were a diverse group working in sectors ranging from healthcare to media leveraging new age technologies such as analytics, mobility, blockchain etc. Quite a few of them are already operational having proven business models and products. The CEOs/Co-Founders of participating ventures can look forward to raise capital as well as get guidance on how to make their businesses more investor friendly and scale up.

Mr. Debashis Sen (IAS), Additional Chief Secretary, Dept. of IT & Electronics, Govt. of West Bengal inaugurated the event and delivered key note address emphasizing on need of break-through innovation and State Government’s role in supporting such endeavors. This will be followed by a round of interaction between CEOs/Co-founders of ventures and the investors. Through the course of the day the interactions intensified with Investors cherry picking ventures of their choice and the ventures giving detailed presentations to interested investors. The event drew to close with quite a few ventures having secured a second meeting with investors.