CHICAGO: Indo American Community Services (IACS), a Chicagoland based not for profit organization, has been organizing multiple events across the nation by creating a community platform to foster networking, engagement, mentoring, leadership, women, innovation, job fairs and entrepreneurial related exchanges amongst the South Asian community in general and specially Indian American community.
By organizing multiple events around the year, IACS brings together successful leaders and entrepreneurs and aspiring leaders and entrepreneurs for the mutual benefit of individuals as well as community.
The second IACS Business and Entrepreneurial conference held on July 24 at Marriott Naperville IL was a roaring success. The event was attended by successful and wannabe entrepreneurs, investors and professionals.
This year’s event had a mix of startups pitching to seek funding from potential investor panel and demos by startups with their innovative solutions. There was also a panel discussion providing tips and tricks and guidance to wannabe entrepreneurs.
The review panel consisted of Jai Shekhawat, founder and CEO of Fieldglass, acquired by SAP, Raymond Stanton III, Co-Partner of Savearound, publisher of coupons books for retailers and Lakshmi Shenoy, Director of Business Development for 1871, Chicago based startup incubator. The startups seeking funding were Pranadiabetes, Schoolrush TracknProtect and Symplast.
These four firms were the finalists from a list of multiple startups seeking funding. Runners up from the list were provided with an opportunity to demonstrate their products in a startup expo, where the investor panel and other participants had an opportunity to review the features and functionality of the products by the startups. The firms which participated in expo are Netisen, Occation, Conceptdrop and India Health Link.
Dr Sindhu Rajan, CEO presented Pranadiabetes. Dr Sindhu has devoted last 12 years at Yale and university of Chicago on ways to develop effective solutions to help patients impacted by Type 2 diabetes. Pranadiabetes developed an innovative mobile solution ‘StopSugar’ to engage, guide and enforce compliance on signed up patients to proactively manage diabetes.
Balu Kadiyala, CEO presented SchoolRush. School rush is a smart phone app supported on both iOS and Android operating systems. The app enables communication between teachers and parents so that parents can be on top of all the activities of kids at school.
Ms Parminder Batra, Co-Founder & CEO presented TraknProtect. TraknProtect solutions enable enterprises improve their efficiency and save dollars by helping them track their tools and equipment faster. One of the primary targets of TraknProtect is hospitality industry.
Sashi Kusuma, Co-founder and MD presented symplast. Symplast was founded by a group of plastic surgeons, seeing a need for a complete eHealth solution built specifically for plastic surgeons and medical spas. Symplast is attempting to change the market paradigm in the health care segment.
This firm is bringing a holistic approach to solve the problem by taking an end-to-end approach so that patients, doctors and hospitals can reduce and potentially eliminate the need to use multiple systems, technologies in providing a service to the patient.
The presentations were followed by a talk by Jai Shekhawat on tips and tricks for successful entrepreneurship. Jai is the CEO of Fieldglass, which he co-founded. It was acquired by SAP in 2014 for over 1 billion dollars. He was Ernst & Young’s 2012 Midwest “Entrepreneur of the Year” as well as the 2012 recipient of the Peter Yessne Staffing Innovator Award, recognized for pioneering the Vendor Management Software (VMS) space. Fieldglass was also recognized as the Illinois Venture Capital Association’s 2014 Private Equity Portfolio Company of the Year. All the participants were highly appreciative of the talk.
There were also four other startups that presented in the Startup expo at the event. The first one is Netisen, a SaaS solution that aggregates web/social media feedback based on patent pending natural language processing algorithm for the customers.
The second was by Occation, an online booking solution which allows customers to book their next visit from any location, on any device, at any time. The third presentation was by Conceptdrop, an on-demand graphic design firm which brings designers and firms on a common platform.
The final presentation was by India Health Link, which plans to deploy health check kiosks, similar to the ones we see at Walmart and other retail chains, in India at an affordable price. As the number of doctors available to serve patients in India is low, this concept can bring basic health care to ordinary citizens in India in an easy manner.
Dinner and networking was followed by a panel discussion and Q&A session where participants got a chance to ask questions and panel addressed them. The panel was facilitated by Balu Kadiyala and consisted of Lakshmi Shenoy, Sashi Kusuma, Arnav (CEO of Fitnesscubed).
Sreenivas Katragadda, President of IACS thanked all the sponsors and participants who attended the event and also discussed about upcoming events planned by IACS for the benefit of the community. All the shortlisted startups received gifts worth $2,000 of accounting services from Chawla and Associates, CPA firm from Chicagoland and $60,000 worth of software and support from Microsoft.
India Post News Service
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