It's been more than 6 years that we've been organizing entrepreneurial programs at eChai - but last 1 year or so has been amazing as we expanded it beyond Gujarat and out side of India as well.
One of the thing we did last year during our flagship program - eChai Demo Day - in association with MICA Incubator is to recognize some of the entrepreneurs from the community who've shown the remarkable progress in their startups and are making us proud with - The Rising Sun awards.
Five phenomenal companies to get The Rising Sun award from eChai Ventures were :
Gridbots, AllEvents.in, Space-O Technologies, Menstrupedia and Chai Wai.
Aditi Gupta & Tuhin Paul, Co-Founders, Menstrupedia - The pioneering initiative to explain menstruation and all issues surrounding it in the most friendly manner.
Menstrupedia is a resourceful guide about menstruation which helps girls and women to stay healthy and active during their menstruation. With a team of dynamic and passionate people with complementary skills, Menstrupedia aims at delivering informative and entertaining content through different media. Menstrupedia is a small but definitive step to shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding menstruation for ages.
Pulkit Gaur, Founder, Gridbots - a technology and Innovation company - Manufacturing Robots for Nuclear - Space and Defense Agencies. They develop state of art robotic systems and technologies which redefine how to solve a problem in an innovative way.
Founded in August 2007 by young and passionate innovator Mr. Pulkit Gaur [TED Fellow and MIT Young Innovator of the year]. Gridbots today is team of more than 30 people - Head quartered in Ahmedabad, having sales and support offices in Jaipur - Meerut and Faridabad - India. Since inception the company has been growing exponentially both in terms of market share and technological capabilities day by day.
They envision making robotics a part of one’s day to day life - building machines which are more intelligent - More efficient and can save time !
Amit Panchal & Ruchit Patel, Co-Founders, AllEvents.in - one of the world's largest event discovery and promotion platform.
All Events in City helps you discover events happening in your city. All Events in City is world’s fastest growing event discovery platform with more than 22 million events from 20,000 cities of the world.
Rakesh Patel & Atit Purani, Space-O Technologies - one of the fastest growing innovative mobile app development company from Gujarat.
Space-O Technologies is a Leading Mobile App Development Company and having been awarded by the GESIA, the 8th Annual Award 2015 for the “Best Mobile Application Development Company in Gujarat, India” and being certified with ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013, Space-O has taken command of the iPhone App Development niche.
Devendra Khuman & Kandarp Upadhyay, Co-Founders, Chai Wai - One of Ahmedabad's best Chai Chain expanding to all over city.
Chai wai - ethnic chai chain being built on pillars like Health, Freshness, variety and "efficient on pocket". Chai wai is a way to Say HI with CHAI to Chai Buddies. Spoilt 4 choices of Quality Chai range with indo-western snacking options @ an attractive "value pricing", determined to raise d bar of Chai Experience with freshness n health as primary objective.
Bhagyesh Soneji, MD, Elegant India & Chairperson, Assocham Gujarat State Council also received 'The Pioneer' award for her pioneering work in the filed of healthcare and women empowerment.
This time also we will recognize some of the entrepreneurs from the community who've shown the remarkable progress in their startups and are making us proud with - The Rising Sun - awards.
Join us for eChai Demo Day in association with MICA Incubator on 5th July from 1.30 pm on wards to connect, share and collaborate with some of the best entrepreneurs from Gujarat.
About eChai Ventures :
eChai is an offline-online social network of entrepreneurs who believe in Co.Rise. — Collaboratively rising together. eChai helps entrepreneurs to connect with each other with offline events and online co.rise social network. It’s a platform to share insights, have discussions, to collaborate with fellow entrepreneurs, and help each other to grow and succeed in their ventures.
Offline Social Network part :
- We host quarterly eChai Demo Days - which is the quarterly showcase of innovative products & ventures in front of the large entrepreneurial community. eChai Demo Day provides an opportunity to entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, professionals, and students to share, connect and collaborate with each other. We also host eChai Women In Business n eChai Business For Good programs. All these programs do 3 things well - they provide an opportunity to young entrepreneurs to showcase what are they upto, platform for experienced/successful entrepreneurs share their experiences and insights and it gives a feel of being part of the community.
- Theme-based knowledge/insights sharing sessions - Team Building, Growth Hacking, UI/UX, Sales, Communications, Digital Media, Legal & IP & many others.
- Skill-based challenges/hackathons - eChai App Challenge, Marketing Challenge, Content Challenge, UI/UX Challenge, Business Model Challenge, Business Case Challenge etc.
- Sector specific eChai RoundTables - Agriculture, Cleantech, Healthcare, Internet of Things, Food & Beverages, Sports, Media & Entertainment, Education, Arts & Culture, SMAC & many others.
- eChai After Hours aims to engage entrepreneurs, professionals and students to find solutions for other's businesses challenges in a collaborative way. At eChai After Hours entrepreneurs present their business model, their work culture and couple of significant challenges they are facing / struggling with or want to have people come up with better solutions for that. It can be anything – design challenge, business challenge, tech challenge, people challenge.
eChai After Hours is an amazing way to foster the collaboration among entrepreneurs, as they would be spending significant time and energy to help the fellow entrepreneurs.
Online social network part :
- Explore the sector wise list of entrepreneurs from the community
- Find people with same interest areas and skills set. Now that we will be hosting offline eChai programs across 100 Cities and all over the world - it will be interesting to get connected with people from the community across the world.
- Write insightful posts on eChai.in & your recommendations i.e. from where I get my business card printed, from where I get travel service provider for our group travel for eChai Diaries, our preferred hosting provider, our preferred CA and many others.
- eChai Interviews where you can ask a public question to any entrepreneur just like the QnA at eChai programs.
- Talent and Offers section where you can post your talent requirement and offers for the community.
- Featuring entrepreneurs daily with their detailed interview and what kind of support they seek from the community.
- You can follow particular entrepreneurs and get regular updates.
- We are working on a #CoRiseWall where once in a week you can post a significant update from your side which you really want to share with large number of people from the community i.e. Product Update, Hiring Requirement, Company Culture etc. - #CoRiseWall will be prominently displayed in eChai.in and showcased at eChai programs for more visibility.
- Online eChai Skills Challenges - App Challenge, Marketing Challenge, Business Model Challenge, Content Challenge etc.
- An online eChai Demo Day - where we will have 10 entrepreneurs building interesting and innovative businesses from 10 different cities/countries presenting their ventures in front of the community. We will select these 10 demo companies who will present about their ventures online ( 5 mins ) which will be followed by an interactive dialogue ( 10 Mins ) and also each of these company will will have other 20+ people from their city who'll be physically participating the program along with the demo company of the respective city. Basically they can have the good conversations after the online demos get over. This one will be broadcasted online at http://YouTube.com/eChaiTV and we'll build an interesting thing for Co.Rise. at http://eChai.in/ for better engagement among participants.
- Better integration with online-offline eChai programs.
Along with the Online social network part and offline social network part we have 3 initiatives as part of eChai Ventures.
Sweetly - where we enable 50+ rural women living in Dangs District, Gujarat to make hand-made jewelry and market these products in US & Canada. These 50+ Rural women get some sort of economic benefits from this venture and we run it as full fledged for-profit venture.
Design You City/Village - aims to to bring together Entrepreneurs, developers , designers, professionals, academicians and concerned citizens to build solutions for the society. There can be wide ranging solutions for various problems existing in the society - education, civic issues, healthcare, employment, sanitation and many others. The city has several issues that need immediate intervention. And there are budding entrepreneurs and concerned citizens with ideas that can solve these problems.With Design Your City/Village programs n online platform we aim to share and collaborate with communities to come up with ideas and sustainable solutions for the problems faced by different communities.
The Loo Project - helps you find clean loo around you by creating digital public toilet map. It Includes public toilets and shops, cafes, institutions which can let anyone use their facilities. The Information is gathered by Municipal Corporations, Village Councils, Open Government Data, Partner organizations, and citizens.
Mapping of data is just the beginning and there are many amazing things can be done once we have that data. 'Design Your Loo' initiative to bring people together to build affordable toilets and coming up with actionable data insights to build solutions for public toilets and sanitation.
eChaiTV : A web television featuring inspiring entrepreneurs.
Initially when we started up six years back, we used to eChai meetups at roadside Tea Stalls. When we started getting momentum we started hosting eChai programs at friends' office premises. They were pretty generous to extend their resources for our programs. After some time we started collaborating with educational institutions, industry associations and incubators to host our programs. earlier collaborated with some of India’s most prestigious educational institutions ( MICA, IIM Ahmedabad, S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Vivekanand Education Society, Entrepreneurship Development Institute, Ahmedabad ( EDI ), CEPT University, icreate, Nirma University, NID and many others ) and industry associations & accelerators ( Assocham, CII, GCCI, FICCI, Startup Oasis, TLabs, IAMAI, Sankalp Forum, and many others ) for various entrepreneurial programs.
If we count the number of cities where we have a presence ( 30+) and the cities where we will be launching eChai chapters in upcoming couple of months ( 20+) - we'll have presence in 50 Cities in India.
In last 6 months we've also led a delegation of entrepreneurs to Singapore, Sri Lanka and Bhutan to explore the possible collaboration opportunities and connect with the entrepreneurs from all over the world.
We are pretty hopeful to have #eChai100Cities by the end of the year 2015 to spread the idea of doing good things.
eChai more like a gSchool - A School of Doing Good Things which has #CoRise - Collaboratively Rising Together in it's DNA.
As we move forward we are introducing the new series of eChai program - which is like more of how we started 6 years back and combination of some of the most interesting things from other eChai formats. Introducing the #CoRise format which we will host on every friday in Ahmedabad at different offices of entrepreneurs from the community. Going forward we will take #CoRise in other cities as well.
