Events

Joined by Chief Guest, Mr. Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande, Founder of Deshpande Foundation , Sycamore Networks, and the Sparta Group.
Meet our graduating teams, as they receive their certificates and appreciation from our Chief Advisors, Board Members Prof. Chintan Vaishnav, Prof. PVM Rao and our very esteemed network. Hear the entrepreneurs share their experience of Manush Labs Sustainability Accelerator and their plans ahead!

The final show of Manush Labs Sustainability Accelerator 2020 showcased the 25 most promising impact startups from across India. The Manush Labs Demo Day premiered the best and brightest young inventors from across India from 30+ Indian cities, presenting innovative and sustainable solutions to pressing issues in the Indian food and agritech sector.

A graduate of Harvard Business School and senior advisor at Manush Labs, Mark co-founded Omnivore in 2010. Previously, Mark was the executive VP at one of India’s foremost diversified agribusiness companies. Mark is a member of the Confederation of Indian Industry, National Council of Agriculture, Governing Council of the Maharashtra State Innovation Society and EMPEA’s Venture Capital Council.

This is a Hands-On Session with our Budding Track participants on Value Proposition. All participating teams prepare 1 slide on Value Propositions and bring it to the session for a one-on-one deconstruction workshop with our core team.

We would like to invite budding entrepreneurs, successful startup founders from and social impact leaders from India to join us in our first webinar series entitled ‘Saṃlāpa’. The theme for our first dialogue is “Importance of entrepreneurial ecosystem building in the tier 2 cities of India”. It aims to focus on the current socio-economic crisis and what India must do to boost its entrepreneurial ecosystem in order to overcome the setback posed by the covid crisis. Also, we would like to address new policies and measures that are necessary to accommodate and prioritize entrepreneurship in tier 2 cities of India. We are very excited to have Mr.Ramanan Ramanathan join us as our panelist. He is the Mission Director of the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) Additional Secretary at NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India) - a flagship national Innovation and entrepreneurship initiative launched by the Prime Minister Govt of India.

We at Manush Labs believe that peer learning is a crucial component of becoming investment ready.

Format: Each startup will become an investor (hypothetically) with $500k that they have to invest wisely. You have to convince your peers that you are the best startup to get funded. For each team, we shall track and measure peer investment received and compile a leaderboard.

This helps in a relative understanding of pitches in a competitive environment.

In addition to your peers, Manush Labs team will invite senior investors and investment partners to give you feedback and judge you.

Having a great pitchdeck and a robust financial model is not enough to close investment. Founders also need to have a good understanding of their shareholding and relevant rights given to investors. Additionally, an often overlooked aspect of a startup in the early stages is compliance and captable readiness. Any lapses in your cap table could either delay the fundraise process by a couple of months or in some cases could lead to the investor pulling out as well. What should founders be thinking about before they begin the fundraising process? Join this masterclass to know mor

Understanding the pain-points of startups in Manush Labs' cohort and mapping their roadmap. Anjani is Deputy Director for Strategy in India Country Office of the Gates Foundation with past experience in investments in India and Africa across multiple sectors such as technology, agriculture, finance and education. He worked in commercial and investment banking in North America for several years and then made a shift to apply his skills and experience to drive innovations at scale across multiple sectors. He has an MBA from ISB, Hyderabad and has studied computer science and mechanical engineering.

This session will focus on providing legal guidance to Manush Labs' cohort.
LexStart specializes in providing support on all aspects of starting and running a business in the early stage ecosystem. Their team of lawyers and company secretaries diligently work with startups, incubators, accelerators and investors, helping them navigate through the various legal and regulatory challenges to structure deals. Entrepreneur looking to start a business, or A start-up wondering what to do next when it comes to hiring employees, offering ESOPs or even executing Term Sheet for fundraising, or An incubator or accelerator looking at creating incubation service agreements or startup package for your incubates, or An investor looking at conducting due diligence, fundraising documentation for your portfolio companies,

Its been a gratifying first Pecha Kucha session for our cohorts! We're glad to share a remarkable response from our investment and program partners, and mentors like 100X.VC, Ankur Capital Fund, Acumen Bharat Innovation Fund, Caspian, 3i Partners, SeaLink Capital Partners, Omnivore, Social Alpha, Upaya Social Ventures, Qapita, She Capital (SC), CIIE. CO, SourceTrace, LexStart!
Thanks to Rubby Pratap Singh Durva Mathure, Hasti Vora, Shashank Randev, Paraag Sabhlok, Chetan Krishna, Aashi Garg, Srikanth Prabhu, Shalini Chhabra, Visalakshmi Ray, Hemendra Mathur, Sunanda Madan, Emmanuel Murray, Nandini Singh , Heramb Hajarnavis, Sruthi Shanmugam, Suhail Shaikh, Onkar Pandey, Shruti Srivastava, Venkat Maroju, Abhilash Sethi, Rahul Agarwal, Soniya Sadhnani, ACA, CFA, Sonali Goel, Anisha Singh!

The efforts of our teams were well appreciated by all, with some valuable feedback!

Manohar is currently Director, Facebook AI and leads the computer vision efforts Applied Machine Learning group at Facebook. His experience in pushing for a state of the art computer vision with an eye towards forwarding Facebook's mission to connect people, is remarkable. He sits at the intersection of research and product and building experiences for billions of people.

Sudhindra is the Chief Design Officer at IBM iX India. As an Experience Strategist, he helps craft vision for partners to see their worlds in action. As a Design Leader, he designs environments conducive to creating meaningful design that connects with people. He creates order from chaos through design.

We're excited to share our next Expert Talk by Ruchi Mahajan, Design Principal at ThoughtWorks! Ruchi has 8 years of design experience across media (textiles, graphics, book publishing, online, interactive, information technology & services). She has extensively focused on digital products for 13 years. She is a domain expert in facilitation, User Research, User experience design, Experience strategy, and Client engagement.

Dr. Chintan Vaishnav is an engineer trained to understand human as well as technological complexity in large systems — a socio-technologist. He is interested in creating socio-technical systems for improving lives in underserved communities, and in analyzing the implications of promoting and managing such technologies for policymakers, managers, and society at large. He teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and is a member of the founding team of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design.

P. V. Madhusudhan Rao is professor in departments of mechanical engineering and design at IIT Delhi. He also serves as head of the department of design. He is a co-founder of Assistech lab in Khosla school of information technology, which works towards development of assistive technologies for empowerment of visually challenged. As a coordinator of IIT Delhi Design Innovation Center (DIC), he is also responsible for initiating and driving multiple programs in design, innovation & entrepreneurship.

He obtained his bachelors in mechanical engineering from college of engineering, Osmania university, masters in mechanical engineering from IIT BHU and his Ph.D from IIT Kanpur. He was a guest researcher to US government's National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), USA Five times between 1996-2007. He was visiting scientist to Massachusetts Institute of Technology during summer 2005 and visiting faculty to Stanford University during Spring 2012.

Sorin is a former entrepreneur-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship where he brought the experience of starting and scaling a hardware business in a developing economy. Sorin is co-founder and CEO of Transaero, which has developed a hybrid cooling solution designed to operate a high-efficiency room air conditioner in parallel with a moisture storage battery (MSB) to provide cooling and dehumidification while using dramatically less energy than typical room air conditioners sold today.
Sorin also co-founded and served as CEO/CTO of Promethean Power Systems, a manufacturer of thermal energy storage systems for refrigeration and cold-storage applications.

Part of the founding team of Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog (AIM), Ishita has been working at the intersection of policy, technology innovation and entrepreneurship. She has been a part of AIM’s journey as it progressed, creating impact at scale. She has been directly responsible for design and implementation of institution-building programs that nurture tech entrepreneurs with a view to democratise innovation and entrepreneurship in the country. Prior to AIM, she has worked with several business incubators in the public and private sector. Ishita has over fourteen years of experience focused on the early stage start-up ecosystem. She has been involved with multi-disciplinary responsibilities including program design and management, policy planning and implementation, developing collaborations, consulting, operations, and monitoring.