KOCHI:
In an initiative that would put Kerala’s vibrant startup ecosystem at full throttle, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan will inaugurate the country’s largest innovation hub, Integrated Startup Complex, at Kalamassery in Kochi on January 13, which promises to provide top quality infrastructure for incubation and acceleration.
Set up by Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM), the sprawling complex, spread over 1.80 lakh sq.ft in Technology Innovation Zone(TIZ), will house Maker Village; Bionest, BRINC, country’s first international accelerator for Hardware startups; BRIC, an incubator dedicated for developing solutions for cancer diagnosis care; and a Centre of Excellence set up by industry majors like UNITY and CERA.
Vijayan will inaugurate the complex at a function at 11 am in the presence of dignitaries from the Central and state governments.
Spread over 13.5 acres, KSUM’s TIZ will host incubators, accelerators, centres of excellence in emerging technologies and provide high quality infrastructure for the development and growth of startups.
Once fully developed into a full-fledged campus having over half-a-million sqft built up area, TIZ would become the largest Work-Live-Play space exclusively dedicated to startups in the country.
Over a 100 startup companies in various stages of growth are already operating in the three incubators functioning within the facility. The Electronics Incubator Maker Village, set up by the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IIITM-K) in association with KSUM and supported by MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), houses 65 startups working in electronics hardware technologies.
BIONEST, a biotech startup set up by KSUM in association with Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology (RGCB) with financial aid from BIRAC, Department of Bio Tech, Govt. of India, has 20 companies involved in deep research in biotechnology and allied fields.
The facility also has a general purpose incubator with more than 20 companies and provides with over 10,000 sqft of dedicated space for startups in scale-up stage. During the last 12 months of operation, the startup companies operating in TIZ have filed over 30 patent applications, making this as one of the largest IP-based (intellectual property) incubation space in the country.
TIZ also has a full-fledged Fab Lab set up in association with MIT, USA and a large ESDM facility for supporting electronics startups working out of Maker Village. For more details, visit: www.innovationzone.in.
KSUM is the nodal agency of the Kerala Government for entrepreneurship development and incubation activities in the state.
