Hyderabad: The T-Bridge programme, which is part of T-Hub and is supposed to exchange start-ups with other countries and create market access, has remained unidirectional. Over the past three years, start-ups have been coming to India from US, Canada, UK, South Korea, Australia and other countries, but no start-up from Hyderabad went to another country for market access.
T-Bridge is the umbrella for all international programmes and was supposed to make Hyderabad the start-up capital of world. Officials associated with the programme said that home-grown start-ups have been sent abroad through other initiatives and awards but not T-Bridge.
Srinivas Kollipara, interim CEO of T-Hub, said, “We have not sent any start-ups through T-Bridge but have sent start-ups through our own interventions individually.”
Start-ups were sent to the UK Tech Rocketship Awards and some went to Finland through the Slush programme, he said.
“We are still learning how to make T-Bridge better. First we did it multi-country, then we changed it to country to country. It is a process that we are learning and we have to keep getting better,” he said.
Last year about six start-ups from various countries participated in the T-Bridge programme. This year nine start-ups from Canada Communitech incubator are in India as part of the programme.
“International start-ups want to come to India,” Mr Kollipara said. “We talk about cultural differences, consumer thinking, localise the content, find the right sales channel for them.”
Mr Kollipara added that two more programmes as part of the T-Bridge will commence in 2019, of which one is with the UK in March-April and the other is with Australia. Governments pay for this programme.
Mr Kollipara said, “If we work with one country at a time it is more effective. As the culture of each country varies and teaching them about India would be easy.”
