Come January, mobile payments and commerce platform Paytm will offer a #StartInCollege scholarship programme to engineering students who have enrolled on digital incubator startup village or SV.CO’s website.
The #StartInCollege programme will select students as teams from engineering colleges through a coding and video challenge. The company will have a preliminary and a final round to select a group of students, who will then be taken through a six-month programme involving ideation, prototyping and customer validation.
The company hopes to foster upcoming entrepreneurs looking to launch their startups in Silicon Valley along with SV.CO, which is a guided target-based system for learning to create great startups.
“Once enrolled in the programme, students can interact with customers and use insights to build great products and prototypes. For university certification, there are partnerships with university boards that offer a degree on completion of the six-month SV.CO programme. Founders of the companies will receive targets that they either complete individually or as a team,” Shankar Nath, Senior Vice President, Paytm, told.
Scholarships will be offered to those who need financial assistance. Besides that, as part of the programme, they will offer on-demand assistance over real-time messaging.
It will also give a specialisation certificate in association with Gujarat Technological University (GTU) upon successful completion of the course. It will facilitate access to industry leaders over the Office Hour (video chat) platform; launch the product in Facebook’s Silicon Valley headwaters.
“The programme actively looks out for teams involving women, but doesn’t have special schemes that provide monetary encouragement for female startup heads. Of the total batch strength, close to 40 per cent constituted female entrepreneurs,” said Nath.
The course begins in January 2017 and will conclude by June. Each Paytm scholarship will include the entire course fee of Rs 37,500 for the six-month programme.
Source: The Economic Times
