Startup Mission Reserves 50% Seats for Women at Kerala's Fab Academy Program

By: WE Staff | Tuesday, 26 December 2023

Kerala Startup Mission reserves five out of 10 seats for the annual six-month learning programme in Fab Academy for women, promoting robotics, machine learning, 3D printing, and IoT in a six-month learning program.

Since 2016, the Startup Mission has not allocated five seats specifically for women in the certification program. The most recent one, conducted in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professors, is scheduled to start in January. The innovators can create their prototypes in the fab labs while their sessions are conducted virtually. They will receive training from the academy at Kochi's Super Fab Lab. Thiruvananthapuram also has a fab lab in operation, and twenty smaller fab labs are operating throughout the state's engineering colleges.

Karthik Parasuram, Director of the Kerala Startup Mission project, reports positive responses from women applying for a course, with five seats reserved through scholarships or corporate CSR funds, whereas in MIT screening applicants will be held soon. He further stated, the programme, which offers no age barrier for youngsters to pursue hardware or non-IT startups, emphasizes talent and has seen a 14-year-old boy graduate in 2019.

The Startup Mission, a scholarship-funded course for women entrepreneurs, aims to double the number of hardware startups in the state by providing a platform to showcase their talents and products.

Hardware startup registrations in Kerala have increased, with a growing number of women interested in hardware development. Over the past four-and-a-half years, 1,694 out of over 4,000 startups are non-IT ventures.