BITS Pilani’s conquest looks to bag early-stage startups in its 18th edition
- ByStartupStory | May 28, 2022
Conquest, the BITS Pilani-hosted accelerator programme, is back for its 18th edition. On April 3, 2022, the student-run accelerator programme began accepting applications with a virtual launch event. The accelerator will go through a funnelling process that will span numerous rounds during the programme, based on the 1,500+ applications it receives each year. The event is targeted at two types of businesses: early-stage firms in the pre-funding stage and startups with a working prototype.
Every startup will go through the same shortlisting, selection, and mentoring process, and the former will be awarded a prize. As a business plan competition, it was founded in 2004 by 30 students from BITS Pilani. Conquest is an initiative of BITS Pilani’s entrepreneurial cell, which began as a Business Plan competition in 2004 with 30 students from BITS Pilani. It has gone through two pivots since then first, into a conclave model, and then, in 2015, into a student-run accelerator.
Ritesh Malik, CEO of Innov8, was the keynote speaker at the virtual launch event. A panel discussion on the evolution of Conquest’s accelerator model was also held at the event. Arnav Sahu of Y Combinator and Rahul Seth of Antler were among the speakers. The top 100 startups are chosen in the first step of the shortlisting process. Thirty businesses will be chosen from this group based on criteria such as the authenticity of the idea, the team, the USP, market fit, and competitiveness.
These 30 startups will be mentored in a variety of areas, including customer acquisition, product development, growth, technology, fundraising, design, and sales and marketing. Based on the input from the mentors, 15 top-performing startups will be chosen from among these 30. Over the course of six weeks, these businesses will be mentored online. Each session focuses on a different component of company growth, such as pitching, funding, MVP development, GTM strategy, and product-market fit. The best 10 startups from these 15 will be selected for a week-long offline workshop in Bengaluru.
The winning firms will get a guaranteed equity-free grant from the Conquest team, which could total over Rs 35 lakhs. The investor jury has the option of giving the featured firms additional money. Startups like Thinkerbell Labs, Social Cops, and IppoPay have won previous competitions.
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