India’s 1st college-incubated company now a listed entity | India News

MUMBAI: Amidst a slew of IPOs that hit the Indian stock markets last month was one that had a rather different birthing. Ideaforge is the country’s first college campus-incubated company that has gone on to become a listed entity.

From its initial product of a hand-cracking charger for electronic devices to a high-tech drone manufacturing organisation, the business has seen days of extreme excitement to the lows of limited capital. But the founders kept going.
“It all started with an idea in 2004 to float a hovercraft over the Powai lake,” said Ankit Mehta, CEO and one of the co-founders who completed his mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay in 2005. “We were going to gather a lot of bike engines lying around the campus for this. We collected all of it and built it in the lab. But soon realised this was not a patentable idea.” Rahul Singh, a mechanical engineer, and Ashish Bhat, a electrical engineer, from IIT-B were all “partners in what they thought was a break-through innovation”.

From that to a small helicopter for hobby flying to a quad-copter and finally drones, the co-founders tried their hand at several “flying objects”. “They were flying drones on campus when no one knew what they were. We would look out of the window and see some flying objects; some people were scared they thought these would break the windows and attack us,” IIT-B deputy director S Sudarshan said jokingly at an event on the day Ideaforge was listed.
A company that is in the hardware space, a product that has no retail customers was already a challenge. But there were many reasons why the co-founders knew they would ultimately succeed. “We had not spent a penny on ideas but had filed about eight patents on original ideas and that boosted our confidence to enter into any space and we as a team were not the ones who would give up,” added Mehta.
“Long hair and an idea to develop a hand-cranking mobile charger was all that they entered Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) with. But like many early-stage startups that require space to work and experiment, need access to market, capital, advisors and a lot of soft support too, we extended all that we could to Ideaforge. Our start to scale-up programme tries to cater to various needs of startups at different stages. SINE provides the milieu where startups come together and work together and leverage each other’s learnings and network,” said SINE CEO Poyni Bhatt.
A total of 220 companies have been incubated at SINE, IIT Bombay. To date, the valuation of these start-ups is approximately Rs 20,959 crore ($2.99 billion).