Bengaluru: Google India will launch an India-focused mentorship and boot camp program for start-ups building both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) tech products, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

The mentorship initiative named ‘Solve For India’ was initially launched in pilot mode in India last year along with participation from Google Developers’ Launchpad Accelerator team.

Launchpad Accelerator is a global project that helps start-ups build and scale their products through mentorship from Google network of investors, mentors, industry professionals and representatives from Google Inc.

Around 10 Indian tech start-ups working on products around Indic languages, healthcare, fintech, agritech and online content among others took part in its first boot camp hosted on Thursday in Bengaluru.

Participating in the first boot camp, were founders of start-ups, including Nebulaa, SlangLabs, PregBuddy, LegalDesk, PaySack, Vokal, FarMart, Meesho, Pratilipi and M-Indicator.

Google’s new mentorship project will focus primarily on start-up products that demonstrate expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The Google team will mentor these start-ups across various product and business level challenges.

For example, Google’s network of top UI/UX designers will mentor start-ups on user interface challenges, and its network of business experts will focus on building better monetization models for start-ups.

According to Karthik Padmanabhan, developer relations lead, ‎Google India, in the last few years, India has seen growth in entrepreneurial and start-up activity, especially in non-metro cities.

“We’re seeing a whole new generation of entrepreneurs and founders who’re innovating to solve challenges across Agriculture, Healthcare, Environment, Retail, Education, MicroFinance and the Indian language web…We shortlisted 10 startups from 160 homegrown startups by traveling across 15 cities in India, and are now ready to scale this pilot as a dedicated program for India," added Padmanabhan.

“We have been very active in India with our global flagship mentoring program Launchpad Accelerator and our shorter format Launchpad events, but we realised that we needed a very local, high touch engagement program for a growing number of Indian startups…Through the last ten months, we have focused on building the right mentorship network to support the challenges faced by these startups," added Paul Ravindranath G, program manager, Launchpad Accelerator, Google India.

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