Two-day start-up fest 'August Fest' kicks off in Hyderabad

A two-day start-up festival called August Fest kicked off in Hyderabad on August 30. It has around 1,400 participants, mostly those interested in setting up start-ups as well as students. In addition, around 20 start-ups, filtered down from around 160 applicants, will make a pitch and seek funding, mostly from angel investors. The organisers of the event are a bunch of local entrepreneurs.

Attending the event as an investor, Sharad Sharma, Co-founder and governing council member of iSpirit Foundation, tells Business Today that he is seeing a new trend in start-up festivals, including the one in Hyderabad, with a focus on bringing both the techies and non-techies together.

"We saw this in Goa Project in February this year, in Bangalore Construkt festival in March this year and now in Hyderabad," he says. "Ironically, the understanding now is that if you need to do something in the consumer space it is going to be at the intersection of techies and non-techies."

The investors at the event are mostly angel investors - from entities like the Hyderabad Angels, Mumbai Angels, Chennai Angels, India Angel Networks, Naya Ventures etc. TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) is one of the key partners of the event.

The start-ups are mostly from the technology space with a mix of players in areas like e-commerce , health care, digital marketing, and domain solutions with products designed for specific industries. Adding to the buzz and activity are around 45 stalls put up by early-stage start-ups.

"India is still a very entrepreneur-unfriendly country," said Ashok Rao, Chairman, TiE Global Board of Trustees, while speaking to BT. "It is not me saying it. Look at the World Bank study that rates us at 134 in terms of ease of doing business out of a total of 189 countries," he says.

He feels there is a lot of room to improve as "we rank low in almost every category - from registering property, getting a permit, getting electricity, protecting intellectual property and corruption."