WE Hub, India's first and only state-led incubator, an initiative by Telangana Government has launched ‘UPSurge,’ 12-week pre-incubation program in collaboration with the Australian government. The aim of the initiative is to start-up, scale-up, and accelerate with the global market it.
The financial support for the initiative will come from Australia’s “Direct Aid Program”. The objective of the program is to help women entrepreneurs across India achieve financial independence.
WE Hub was set up to foster and promote women's entrepreneurship primarily works in the fields of providing access to technical, financial, government, and policy support required to start-up, scale-up, and accelerate with global market access, to all women entrepreneurs in the country.
It has been working extensively in terms of enabling market access, credit facilitation to women entrepreneurs.
This is the second WE-Hub/Australia collaboration, and the first was 'Community Slate' that concluded in 2020. The program was designed as a mentoring program to support five women-led social enterprises to cross through the difficulties and scale up their ideas. Australia was WE-Hub's first International partner.
Barry O’Farrell AO, Australian High Commissioner to India, Australian Consul-General to South India, Sarah Kirlew, and WE Hub CEO, DeepthiRavula launched the program in the presence of Telangana’s Minister for Industry and Information Technology, K.T.Rama Rao, and Principal Secretary Jayesh Ranjan.
By instilling entrepreneurship in the participants, the program will provide the skills to help them systematically gauge the viability of their ideas and turn them into a successful business. The conclusion of this program will be a pitch day, followed by graduation.
"Australia is proud to have been WE-Hub’s first international partner. We are pleased to continue our support for their impactful work with women-led start-ups,” says, Sarah Kirlew.
The partnership minimizes financial risk, and assists in selling the pilot products and risk mitigation. It is said that it has received 549 applications across 14 cities around the country.
“Three years ago, on the same platform, we have taken that first step in the country to establish a dedicated incubator to foster women entrepreneurship. Today, WE Hub has emerged as the role model in India to enable women entrepreneurs and increased participation of women in Workforce,” says, Rama Rao.
Barry O’Farrell also said, “Encouraging women and girls to STEM, and providing an environment for them to thrive and progress, is an objective of the Australian Government under our Academy of Science’s Women in STEM Decadal Plan.”
Deepthi Ravula, CEO, WE HUB, said, “Our association with Australian High Commission has kicked off with an acceleration program and has successfully supported five social enterprises in 2019. We look forward to enabling more women through the ‘UPSurge’ pre-incubation program where we will be supporting close to 240 aspiring women entrepreneurs.’’
