IIT Incubator :KReSIT

Venkatesh Hariharan writes on TR : Can India Plug Its Brain Drain? : IIT Bombay is using its technology incubator to counter the exodus of its brightest graduates to the West


About KReSIT:

The Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology (KReSIT) aims at moulding the future leaders of the Indian IT industry by imparting world class IT education to them. The school formally started operations with the first batch of M.Tech students on July 19, 1999.

Background :

The Indian IT industry is expanding rapidly and is expected to grow tremendously over the next few years. While the current education in India has been producing high quality 'workers' for the IT industry, there is a distinct lack of people who are trained to be leaders in this industry: people who will shape its future. There is also the disturbing trend of extreme compartmentalization that has gradually crept into the engineering sciences, especially in academic circles. While this may promote research in each of those fields themselves, it must be acknowledged that there are hardly any real problems that can be dealt with in isolation by any one 'compartment' of engineering. These were some of the issues noticed by Prof. D.B. Phatak (the current head of the school) and others, and a proposal was made in March 1998 to start a School of IT in IIT Bombay. The focus of the school was to be a close interaction with the industry, research with focus on integration of the various 'compartments', and entrepreneurship. The proposal was accepted and funding for starting the School came from two alumni of IIT Bombay, Nandan Nilekhani and Kanwal Rekhi, both of whom made generous contributions. Read more on this here.

The successful companies who have now moved out of the incubation are :



* Herald Logic : Develops products in enterprise information, rule-based engines.

* Voyager2 Infotech : Raised USD 250K, built a .creative ideas. portal, and was bought out by Purple Yogi in an all-stock deal.

* Myzus : Raised USD 600K, develops products and services in the areas of wireless gateways and connectivity bridges. It moved out into its own premises and is looking for a second round of funding.

* eInfinitus :Raised Rupees 1.2 crore, develops products in network operations: real-time bandwidth provisioning and specialized router software.


Related Links :

* Turning IITians from workers to leaders

* What does KReSIT Offer

* How to be a part of Business Incubator

* Companies currenlty at KReSIT