After Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had sold Swoosh, his second startup, he and five-six others hopped on a flight and headed to Varkala, a beach town in south Kerala, to code. The reasoning was simple: to spend less than he would have on renting an office in San Francisco, which also meant they had to be more productive in those few weeks in January 2008.The result, he told reporters, was amazing. Though Kerala might not have produced another Uber, the cities of Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram have been home to 14 funded startups. Two years ago, when Rohildev N, decided to launch Fin Robotics, he opted for Startup Village in Kochi as the base of his operations.Startup Village was a pioneering effort in India when it was launched in 2012 as a public-private partnership incubator. “The ecosystem that Startup Village offered was conducive for startups,” says the 26-year-old. His company has shipped a few thousand pieces of its product Neyya since it rolled out last November. Though Rohildev faced challenges in reaching the global market from Kochi and in raising funds, he has decided not to move out.The young startup community in the city and the hardware talent available were its advantages, says the founder, who has raised $3.2 million. Mini Balaraman, COO of Purple-Health, a digital health innovator based in Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram, says there are enough opportunities to succeed in Kerala. “The most important factor for us to start from Kerala was that there are many educated and talented people here.We didn’t need to go to a major metro to succeed.” Initiatives like Startup Village can help in connecting founders to mentors and potential clients, she adds. From its origins as an experiment, Startup Village has now been ranked India’s No. 1 Incubator, says Sanjay Vijayakumar, its chairman. Kerala Startup Village moved ahead quickly, supported by some new schemes that the incubator launched along with the Kerala Startup Mission like the Learn to Code scheme where 10,000 school students were given Raspberry PIs (small, singleboard computers) to learn how to code.“Kerala now has over 600 active startups. The task now is to benchmark with a world-class ecosystem like Silicon Valley and fill the gaps,” says Vijayakumar. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan launched Startup Village Phase 2 on July 13 and announced `300 crore for startups in this year’s budget , higher than the department of science and technology’s allocation for the entire country.There are entrepreneurs who feel more needs to be done. “Having an office space is not enough. Startup Village lacks mentorship and an execution plan,’’ says Sunil Vallath, founder of Exploride Technologies, which has raised $70,000.He launched in Kochi because it was cheaper to bootstrap from there but has relocated to Bengaluru . While he expects more startups to emerge from Kerala, they might not stay on: “I’m afraid they won’t be operating from the state once they reach angel investment stage. Kerala needs a strong mentorship network and visionaries who can add value to the ecosystem.”