New Delhi: The faculty members at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras (IIT-M) founded as many as 94 enterprises with a total valuation of more than Rs 1,400 crore. The start-ups ranged from hybrid aerial vehicles to the ones working on converting waste to crude oil and efficient water transport solutions, reported news agency PTI.
The officials said that IIT faculty members have founded, mentored or advised more than 240 start-ups in the past decade, the combined valuation of which is Rs 11,500 crore. A total of 94 companies were founded by the IIT-Madras faculty members in October this year.
The data shared by the IIT-Madras Incubation Cell (IITMIC) showed the number of faculty-founded start-ups increased sharply from 37 in April 2017 to 69 in June 2019 and 80 in 2020 before touching 94 by October 2021, the agency reported.
IIT Madras Incubation Cell incubated these start-ups. A total of 77 faculty members from various departments of the institute were engaged in setting up the start-ups. This figure is close to 13 per cent of the total institute faculty strength of around 600, which is considered on par with the best universities in the world, claimed the IITMIC.
Chief Executive Officer, IIT-Madras Incubation Cell, Tamaswati Ghosh, said, “over 12 per cent of institute faculty are co-founders in our incubated start-ups working across a breadth of globally critical domains. This underlines our ability to translate cutting-edge scientific innovations to the field.”
Chief Executive Officer, Gopalakrishnan-Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (GDC), Raghuttama Rao, called this a tough task.
“Setting up a deep tech start-up is a hard task, and the gestation time from idea to reaching the market can be as much as 4-5 years. Even getting from the Lab (post research stage) to an incubator can take 2-3 years. There is a ‘valley of death’ that a start-up faces between the lab and the incubator and first investor. Most academicians find it difficult to make the jump from the lab to the incubator,” Rao was quoted as saying by the agency.
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