On the second day of the 25th edition of Bengaluru Tech Summit 2022, tech giant Google Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the government of Karnataka to support their vision to promote innovation and spur the growth of startups across the state.
Google, in collaboration with the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society (KITS), will work with woman-led founders and startups across tier 2 and tier 3 cities to offer them essential training, access to partners, expertise on Google’s suite of tools and technologies, along with knowledge and mentorship sessions in areas such as Cloud, User Experience, Android, Web, Product Strategy, Leadership and Marketing.
Under the MoU, Google will also boost digital literacy and promote digital payments in the state by collaborating with Karnataka Fintech Task Group to educate users on the benefits of making digital payments and increase its adoption.
The tech giant will also extend scholarships for Google Career Certificate programme to youth and job seekers in high-demand digital skills and support local schools to promote the fundamentals of online safety and digital citizenship to children through the ‘Be Internet Awesome’ programme. The certificate programme will support qualified applicants to pursue Google Career Certificates in most sought after fields such as IT Support, IT Automation, Project Management, Data Analytics, UX Design and Digital Marketing and Ecommerce.
Karthik Padmanabhan, Developer Relations Lead, Google India, said, “India has a flourishing startup community. Yet not all founders have equal access to capital, support networks or mentorship. These are critical resources that can help the startup ecosystem to continuously learn, innovate and evolve. Through our collaboration with KITS, we want to strengthen the support for the local startup ecosystem, enable equal representation for women and level the playing field across the state.”
Besides, Google has already made efforts to support emerging startups and nurture the thriving startup ecosystem of India with the Google for Startup Accelerator programme.
Since 2015, the programme has had six batches in India, accelerating 116 startups and mentoring over 1,500 startups. So far, the mentored startups have collectively raised over $2 billion and created over 12,000 jobs. In June this year, Google also launched Google for Startups Accelerator – India Women Founders, designed to help women founders address challenges that are unique to their experience, including fundraising, hiring and many others. It also launched Startup School India in July 2022, aimed at nurturing 10,000 startups in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.
