Hyderabad, Oct 18 (IANS): T-Hub, India's largest technology incubator, on Monday announced its growth plans under its new Chief Executive Officer, Mahankali Srinivas Rao.

T-Hub's new campus coming up at Raidurgam in the information technology cluster of HITEC City, is spread over 5,82,689 square feet.

The second phase, which is nearing completion, is likely to be inaugurated this year. It was scheduled to be operational last year but the work was delayed due to Covid-19 pandemic.

According to earlier reports, the campus is coming up at a cost of Rs 276 crore and this is expected to make T-Hub the largest incubation centre in the world.

With more than 1,800 domestic and international start-ups that received support to scale, various corporate partnerships and international organisational tie-ups, T-Hub will work towards a stronger growth trajectory, the technology incubator said on Monday.

T-Hub, the start-up catalyst established in November 2015, is a public private partnership between the Telangana government and three premier academic institutes - the International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad (IIIT-H), the Indian School of Business (ISB), and the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) University of Law.

Housed in a 70,000 square feet space within IIIT-H campus, it transformed as the largest and the best technology incubator in the country over the last six years.

New CEO Mahankali Srinivas Rao said their focus will be to build on current strengths and continually improve, further elevating T-Hub's capability as an innovation ecosystem enabler.

"We have some interesting projects, partnerships and programme launches in the pipeline in coming months and the aim is to hit on ground with it as planned," he said.

Rao will focus on fund-raising initiatives, higher valuations, robust employment generation, and building scale through active community engagement. He wants to raise the bar on innovation to ensure T-Hub transforms Telangana into a leader in innovation across India and globally.

In the last six years, T-Hub has evolved from being a start-up incubator to an innovation hub. It has helped to contribute immensely to the Indian innovation ecosystem by institutionalising innovation programmes for start-ups, corporations and more, and building a global innovation hub.

"Due to this robust innovation ecosystem that T-Hub has built, we have seen a rise in the number of start-ups from 400 then to about 2,000 now, and phase 2 will further boost this growth," it said.

T-Hub has touched more than 1,800 start-ups through various programmes and initiatives. It has enabled start-ups to raise significant funding during these challenging times. Start-ups from various programmes have gor more than Rs 2,269 crore funding to date like Zenoti, MyGate, WhistleDrive, Outplay, DrinkPrime and AdOnMo.

It has evolved from prototyping programmes to crafting institutionalised programmes to support the innovation journey of more than 600 corporates like Facebook, Uber, HCL, Boeing, Microsoft and Qualcomm with more than 26 corporate innovation programmes. It has received over 4,100 applications from the start-ups for these programmes.

T-Hub has partnered with 75 service providers like Paytm, RBL Bank, Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean and Google Cloud, enabling start-ups to advance their daily operational tasks.

It has achieved notable success in introducing an innovation ecosystem in the academic field through its initiative, T-Tribe. The initiative has connected with more than 24 colleges, 800+ students and incubated over 10 idea-stage start-ups.

It has helped over 300 Indian start-ups and more than 200 international start-ups scale globally through various 10+ market access programs and 18+ international interventions in partnership with global ecosystem players across over 42 countries. T-Hub has partnered with international ecosystem enablers and governments like Korea SMEs and Startups Agency (KOSME), FalconX, the Australian Consulate, the Japan Investment and Cooperation Agency (JICA), La Trobe University and others to help the foreign start-ups to scale up in the Indian market and Indian start-ups to explore international markets.

Meanwhile, Telangana Industries and Information Technology Minister K.T. Rama Rao welcomed Rao as the new CEO of T-Hub. "It is a homecoming for MSR, and we welcome and congratulate him on his new journey with the Telangana innovation ecosystem. Given MSR's rich experience in this industry, we believe he is best placed to lead T-Hub and its operations," he said.

Telangana's Principal Secretary, Industries & IT, Jayesh Ranjan said: "Visionary leadership comes naturally to MSR, and it only gets better with his deep understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem nuances. The Board is happy to have him on board and we wish him to achieve amazing milestones at T-Hub."