American multinational corporation IBM has kicked off this year’s nine-city SmartCamp under its Global Entrepreneurship Programme (GEP) in India with the first camp being held in Kochi.

The IBM-GEP, a start-up initiative of the company, will hold eight such SmartCamps in Ahmedabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Visakhapatnam, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi and at a grand finale to be held in Bengaluru national-level winners will be announced.

The winners will get a lot of benefits, including access to certain facilities of IBM, free cloud credits and tremendous opportunities to make their pitches to angel investors and venture capitalists. At the Kochi event, held at Startup Village, five start-ups were selected.

Nilkanth Iyer, who heads the IBM-GEP initiative in India, told BusinessLine that SmartCamps were start-up challenges for the B2B segment. It provided a platform for start-up entrepreneurs a platform to spread the word about their innovative ideas and also interact with potential financiers, venture capitalists and angel investors. It also facilitated networking and collaborating among the start-ups as well as with the technology fraternity.

Iyer noted that winners at the grand finale would get IBM Cloud credits worth $120,000, access to some of IBM’s technology in the areas of mobility, big data and analytics as well as several other services.

Iyer said that some 280 start-ups had participated in last year’s round of competitions. Of them 30 were shortlisted who could pitch their ideas before venture capitalists and senior IBM executives. Six of them were selected to present their concept before a select audience of venture capitalists and top tech geniuses. Stelae Technologies went on to present at the global competition held in Las Vegas, US, in March last year.

He said that this year IBM-GEP expected a higher turnout. The number cities where SmartCamp would be held was raised to nine, thus giving opportunities to young people from more parts of the country. The city winners would get a great chance to present before eminent people in the smartup space their ideas and get suggestions and feedback from them.

Iyer said IBM-GEP chose Kochi to kick off this year’s round of competitions as the city had the country’s first startup incubator on the PPP mode and also because Kerala was an exciting place for start-ups.

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