Cochin Shipyard Limited and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras have signed an agreement to support maritime start-ups, which will provide a platform for young and talented entrepreneurs to develop marine products and services with financial support from CSL.
Under this initiative, start-ups can receive up to Rs 50 lakh in seed grants, Rs 1 crore in prototyping grants, and equity funding for scale-ups.
Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, and Deepu Surendran, General Manager (C-SAS), CSL, signed the agreement. IIT Madras will be one of the initiative’s implementation partners, providing incubation, mentorship, and training to start-ups selected through this initiative. The Institute will issue an online call for applications twice a year to identify start-ups for funding through seed funds, pilot grants, and equity investment schemes.
This is part of CSL’s start-up engagement program Ushus, which was launched to supplement the government’s initiatives to encourage and develop an ecosystem for supporting maritime start-ups from technical, regulatory, financial, and marketing perspectives by bringing stakeholders together.
Startups chosen under the scheme must be committed to innovation, the improvement of products, processes, or services, and the presentation of a scalable business model with a high potential for job and wealth creation.
“Management of the maritime sector is increasingly becoming automated,” said Kamakoti, “posing interesting challenges to creative minds.” The current collaboration will undoubtedly result in many innovative Atmanirbhar solutions.
“We are confident that this initiative by CSL, in collaboration with IIT Madras, will help spark the growth of marine start-ups in the country, as we move forward aiming at onboarding new and emerging technologies in this space,” said CSL CMD Madhu S. Nair. CSL has already declared a corpus of ₹50crorese for our start-up engagement program ‘Ushus’ as an initial step.
