Hyderabad student team Finder wins 10th edition

Hyderabad: TiE Hyderabad announced today the winners of the 10th edition of TYE (TiE Young Entrepreneurs) challenge held for 3 categories, B-Plan, 1 Minute Elevator Pitch and Maker Faire Prototype. The finale was held at the auditorium of Dr. B R Ambedkar Open University in the city on Saturday.

In the TYE challenge, 36 students from 23 schools formed 7 teams and pitched their ideas under the B-Plan, 1 Minute Elevator Pitch and Maker Faire Prototype competition.

The top prize winner in the B-Plan category was Findr, a Hyderabad student team which came up with a LinkedIn-like solution for blue-collar jobs including the provision of maids, cleaners, drivers for customers. The runner up team was Flobal, a business idea where flower-flavored ice creams are made of organic ingredients had bagged the runner-up position.

In the Maker Faire category for best prototypes, RewardBox, a mobile application that unifies all the loyalty points a customer earns through his purchases at several stores across the country and alerts the user of their expiry, emerged as the winner.

It was a close contest in 1-minute elevator pitch as two teams Comfee and PuriFloat were declared joint winners held using an online voting method. Comfee is a power conservation solution regulated by an IoT device that controls the speed of fans and air conditioners based through measurement of ambient temperature in the room, while PuriFloat, is an automated device that helps clean lakes using an Electric motor run boat/conveyor were declared joint winners.

Congratulating the winners, and their scalable business models President of the TiE Hyderabad Chapter, Sridhar Pinnapureddy, (CEO of CtrlS Datacenters and Cloud4C Services) said, "It took me a couple of failed ventures to actualise my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. The business ideas of these young minds are nothing short of billion-dollar proposals with the potential to emerge as mega enterprises. It is for them to now leverage on the networks such as TiE to reach their pinnacle. These children are the future of our entrepreneur ecosystem and it is heartening these children have the backing of their family to pursue entrepreneurial dreams."

"We were genuinely surprised by the professionalism of the teams and the relevance of the ideas. They surpassed our expectations and reaffirms our faith in our young generation potential to create a promising future" the jury members had expressed.

The jury members at the TYE Finale were Deepthi Ravula (CEO, Telangana Government-run Women Entrepreneurship Incubator We Hub), Kishore Uppalapati (Director-Operations, Microsoft Services), Rakesh Munnanooru (Founder, CEO, Whistle Drive, a corporate ride-share company) besides Prof. Vijaya Kumari (Director, JNTU run incubator, J Hub) and Vineel Reddy Pindi (CEO, Collab House an innovation hub).

The winners had faced a stiff challenge, as there were a series of interesting pitches, such as Enviros Amigos, a device that could recycle plastic waste into oil through a chemical procedure called pyrolysis, Idenico, an affordably priced paper strip to test for adulteration, contamination or chemical presence in milk.

The Executive Director of TIE Hyderabad Phani Pattamatta said "The winner of the TYE Regional Finals would now compete at TYE Global Finals title against 35+ teams coming from 14 countries at Microsoft campus in Seattle, USA in June Month. He also recalled; Hyderabad chapter of TiE holds a record of consecutively winning at this global competition for the past 3 years in a row."