IIT Kharagpur’s Annual Global Business Model Competition, Empresario Launched

This year, Entrepreneurship Cell IIT Kharagpur is proud to present Empresario 2019 in association with the prestigious International Business Model Competition (IBMC) which is co-hosted by Stanford, Harvard and Brigham University. Empresario is the official qualifier to IBMC from India. The best entries in all categories will get a sponsored trip &direct entry in the quarter-finals of IBMC 2019, which will be conducted abroad.

The shortlisted entries are provided help in terms of mentorship and the winners also get a much sought-after chance to pitch their ideas in front of some of India’s biggest VCs and investors. Empresario participants are mentored and supported by organisations like TiE, NEN(National Entrepreneurship Network) etc. Startup Services like legal advice, taxation, financial, technical aspects of running a startup, co-working space, HR needs, incubation opportunities, etc. are provided. Empresario accepts business ideas in all fields which include Product and Service, Product Design and Social categories. Each of the entries gets equal opportunity to win the prize of INR 25 Lakhs and incubation money to the tune of INR 2.5 crore. Previously, Empresario has been launched in association with Calcutta Angels, Villgro, Indian angel Network and many more.

For the first round of Empresario, we will require participants to fill up a questionnaire about their Business idea and submit it. This questionnaire can be found on the website – www.ecell-iitkgp.org/empresario If participants register now, they can avail the Early Bird privileges, which include extended mentoring and offline mentoring session during Entrepreneurship Awareness Drive ( EAD ) 2018.

Some of the past student startups who were winners of Empresario are:-

• Swagene – Swagene is transforming healthcare by pioneering personalized medicine. If you’re a doctor or patient, you stand to benefit enormously in terms of time, money and precious health!
• JANCH Healthcare – Janch is a mission to provide personalized, high-quality diagnosis solution on an as-needed or preventative basis
• Gamezop – It lets you play more than 100 games by installing just one app. It also uses HTML5 to allow users to play offline. It recently raised a seed funding of $350,000.

The flagship event – Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), is the largest collegiate entrepreneurial summit in India and takes place every year in January. The final rounds of Empresario 2018-2019 will be held during GES’19.