Creating a global arena: Ravi Narayanan, CEO, T-Hub

Ravi Narayanan, CEO, T-Hub, an incubator for Startups in Hyderabad, Telangana, takes us through the organization’s contribution to the Startup community and its future plans.

Based in Hyderabad, T-Hub was set up to enable and empower an ecosystem that is hungry for innovation. It uses the Triple Helix model of innovation based on interaction and collaboration between industry, academia, and the government. Incorporated in 2015, it has provided over 1100 national and international startups with access to better technology, talent, mentors, customers, corporates, investors, and government agencies.

T-Hub also provides thought leadership for Telangana and other state and central government organizations to build innovation ecosystems. So far, over 450 startups have been incubated at T-Hub. Currently, there are more than 170 startups working in T-Hub. T-Hub has multiple partnerships with leading corporates globally, such as HDFC, BOEING, HSBC, Facebook, OTIS, YES Bank, and MERCK, amongst several others. It is a pioneering effort in India to build an entire innovation ecosystem from the ground up.

They need the help of corporate partners and government and other institutions to make this happen. That’s how we have created this innovation ecosystem. In this interview with Jaleel Rawther, Ravi Narayanan, CEO, T-Hub takes us through the organization’s contributions to the startup community and its future plans. I am responsible for bringing an innovation ecosystem together in the state of Telangana, centered in Hyderabad.

This requires me to work with the government both State and Central, research institutions, almost 41 institutions of national repute in Hyderabad, and work with academia and top educational institutions, and bringing them to work with innovators and the innovation ecosystem is another responsibility. I also have to ensure that the startups have one place to go; during their early days, middle of the journey, or when they are looking at scaling globally.

I am responsible for creating supplier innovation through startups and research labs and demand for this innovation from the Government and Corporations. One, we directly work with startups, and we have different programs for them – incubation, acceleration, and scaling programs. We are doing capacity building so that other startups also benefit from us indirectly through the work that we do with institutions that they are a part of.

We also create demand for startups by talking to Government and corporations and encouraging them to work with startups. T-Hub recently launched T-Angel, a three-month investment acceleration program, a joint venture with the Telangana state government. As the next step of maturity in this ecosystem, we are planning to put together a T- Fund next year, so that we can start investing in companies at the seed level. It is a six-month-long comprehensive incubation program designed for early-stage technology product startups.

In 2018, 70+ startups were selected for the program, and for the second batch of Lab32, T-Hub selected 45 cutting-edge technology startups. When we put T-Hub together, it was not just for Startups, but also meant for Government Institutions and Corporations. We are creating demand for Startups, at the same time helping them evolve and scale. So from a co-working space, we have evolved into a mixed space and now help them create practices and capacity-building measures so that several different parts of the ecosystem can grow faster.

As far as Health tech goes, Hyderabad has a large Biopharma sector, and we are leveraging the natural ecosystem and helping Startups participate in that innovation ecosystem. We are trying to get them to work closely with Startups so that we can build leading Fintech companies. Two, help with investment capabilities in a much larger way by getting large VCs and PEs to participate in this ecosystem. Three put Startups and the entire Hyderabad ecosystem on a global stage and internationalize things in a much more significant way.

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