In a major achievement for Kerala’s startup community, Techgentsia has been announced as the winner of the innovation challenge organized by the government of India.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Thursday announced the winners of the innovation challenge to find an Indian video conferencing solution.

‘Vconsol’ a video conferencing product developed by Kerala-based Techgentsia Software Technologies won the award. The company is headquartered in Alappuzha, known for its backwaters.

The winners were announced by the Union Minister for Communications, Electronics & IT and Law & Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad.

“I am delighted that Indian entrepreneurs and innovators have responded to the clarion call for AatmaNirbhar Bharat given by the Prime Minister of India and have come up with some world-class video conferencing solutions in a short span of four months. We are committed to develop India’s software product and mobile app economy in a big way and efforts like this will go a long way in that direction,” he said.

India product

The winner of the challenge will be provided financial support of Rs. 1 crore with additional Rs.10 Lakh towards operation and maintenance for the next three years and will be adopted for use by the government through a contract.

“We have been officially declared the winners of innovation challenge for video conferencing,” wrote Joy Sebastian, CEO & Co-founder of Techgentsia on Facebook.

Earlier in April, the MeitY under the digital India initiative had launched the innovation challenger to find the best homemade video conferencing solution. The programme which started on April 13, 2020,  was open for participation from industry, start-ups and individual experts. Out of 1983 entries received five companies were selected for the final round.

The five shortlisted applicants were provided financial support of Rs. 20 lakh (for three) and Rs. 15 lakh (for two), mentorship, testing and onboarding onto NIC cloud.

Support for winners

Apart from Vconsol the jury also selected products developed by three applicants as potential products and decided to offer a developmental contract to be supported by Rs. 25 lakh each for further maturing their product within a period of three months. These products are developed by Jaipur-based Sarv Webs, Hyderabad-based PeopleLink Unified Communication and Chennai-based Instrive Softlabs.

The three products will be further analyzed by a technical committee and subsequently, the MeitYwill recommend to onboard all selected four products on Government e Marketplace (GeM).