The driving spirit behind the founding of Silicon University (formerly Silicon Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar), of fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, lies at the heart of the Silicon’s Business Incubator (BI).
First established in 2009 as the Innovation and Incubation Center, the BI carries forward the founders’ commitment to promoting entrepreneurship and innovation in Odisha. It motivates and trains students to take up entrepreneurship as a viable career alternative.
In 2015, the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), Government of India, approved it as a ‘Business Incubator’, under the scheme, ‘Support for Entrepreneurial and Managerial Development of MSMEs through Incubator’.
In 2021, Silicon incorporated Switchtech Incubator Foundation as a non-profit Section (8) company to exclusively manage all the business incubator activities. It offers a unique model of combining technology partnership, incubation, and domain and tech acceleration capabilities for founders.
In 2022, Startup Odisha recognized Switchtech Incubator Foundation as an “Incubator”.
Entrepreneurs find support from Silicon’s Business Incubator to identify and develop business ideas, products, or services, raise early-stage Seed and Pre-Series A funding, gain expert mentorship, find anchor clients and engage with a network of venture funders.
The Silicon ecosystem has helped me to turn my idea into reality with mentoring, guidance, and investor connections. It is very important to have experienced mentors for a young mind. They help you navigate through the difficult challenges which entrepreneurship throws in front of you. The expertise of the mentors helped us in designing an effective business model and product flows. I am glad to be a part of the Silicon BI
Founder, LectureNotes
Silicon’s Business Incubator has successfully incubated 14 startups bringing technology products and services to the marketplace.
Crores funding received
Crores current revenue
Projected revenue in two years
People employed
Crores funding received
Crores current revenue
Projected revenue in two years
People employed
Silicon’s BI builds the capacities of entrepreneurs and startups to innovate, develop and deploy solutions to solve critical customer and business needs. Start-ups benefit in the following ways from the incubator.
As a Business Incubator, we support budding entrepreneurs without being partial to any particular domain or sector. We encourage all entrepreneurs and ideas driven by passion, visibility, newness of opportunities, revenues, and a willingness to put in the hard work to take the venture to success.
Faculty In-Charge (FIC), Business Incubator
The business incubator leverages its deep connections with entrepreneur networks in Odisha, linkages to global venture funders and firms, and the wide network of Silicon’s entrepreneur founders, to successfully raise Seed and Pre-Series A funding for the incubatees.
The ticket size for seed funding ranges between ₹50 lakh to 3 crores. Silicon’s Business Incubator (BI) is set up with a corpus fund of ₹2 crores.
The BI organizes ‘Investor Meets’ that bring potential, interested investors to listen to the business pitches of the startups. The Business Incubator supports startups to prepare and finalize the pitch decks. The investors vet the business ideas of the incubatees to identify interesting startups for potential investments before these events.
Angel and Pre-Series A investors attend these meets, which feature both the incubatees from the Silicon Business Incubator and aspiring entrepreneurs from Odisha.
The Business Incubator’s thrust areas are IoT, information and communication technologies, data science, electronics, embedded systems and VLSI. The overall portfolio spans technology development in IoT, chip design, healthcare, EduTech, business consulting, business process outsourcing, renewable energy, hospitality and knowledge process outsourcing.
DATOMS is an Industrial IoT platform for OEMs and System Integrators founded by Amiya Kumar Samantaray in 2015. It brings in technologies such as network-IoT and Big Data to build a comprehensive ecosystem for smart cities empowering governments, administrations and decision makers to make better data driven decisions, making cities smart, safe and sustainable.
SwitchTech incubator understands the challenges of startups and provides essential support with mentorship from industry professionals, seed funding and customer connect opportunities for early-stage product validation. The incubator has also helped us in raising the Pre-Series A round of funding.
Founder, DATOMS
An e-learning and note-sharing platform for engineering students and lecturers, Lecture Notes was founded in 2017 by Ayush Agarwal, a SiliconTech alumnus. It has since then grown to be a comprehensive platform with virtual classrooms, practice problems for the semester, information about jobs, and study resources from various universities.
Silicon Tech Lab offers a suite of productized service solutions to serve businesses in healthcare, education, and e-government services. Founded in 2009 by Suresh Chandra Nayak, STL’s platforms use cloud computing, mobility, IoT, AI and data analytics technologies to transform businesses
Silicon’s business incubation enterprise offers three incubation spaces. The on-campus facility at Silicon is a 10,000 sq.ft. built up area with 300 desktops, 10 servers and a dedicated 50 Mbps broadband speed. Startups can also use two other off-campus incubation spaces in DLF Cybercity Tower and iHub, Infocity in Bhubaneswar.
The Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), Government of India, recognition makes it possible for incubatees to get the following.
The following is a list of the MSME funded ideas.
| Idea | Funding Amount (INR) | Founder |
|---|---|---|
Slick Account ” Next Generation Profitability Software tool |
6,25,000 |
Bibhudatta Dash |
RFID & IoT based Monitoring & Tracking Systems |
5,95,000 |
Snighdha Rani Swain |
Raspberry PI & Asterisk based GSM Gateway for offices & home |
5,95,000 |
Amrut Mishra |
Swachh Filter |
2,10,000 |
Debasish Kar |
Smart Solar Pump |
2,50,000 |
Sibashisha Mishra |
Bookingjini |
2,00,000 |
Sibasis Mishra |
On Board Diagnostics |
2,55,000 |
Chandra Sekhar Rout |
