After spending 15 years in the US, Deepthi Ravula returned to India three years ago. With an engineering degree in electronics and communications, Deepthi had gone to the US for higher studies and later took up jobs with multinational firms such as Nokia, Qualcomm and Palm Inc there.

Having been part of the Telangana movement, she decided to come back from the US “to do something for the State” that had just begun to find its feet after the creation of the separate Telangana in 2014. “I wanted to be part of the growth story,” she told BusinessLine .

Govt service

Deepthi joined the Telangana government service as a Joint Director in Electronics Department as the State wanted to set up an exclusive start-up incubator for women entrepreneurs.

Launched during the Global Entrepreneur Summit last year, WeHub just celebrated its first anniversary, showcasing the start-ups from its first cohort. The first incubator for women techies in the country is moving to a 50-seater facility in a few days.

“We are going to start our second cohort. We will call for entries in June-July. Besides using our facility, the start-ups we select can use the space and capacities of other incubators in the city,” Deepthi, CEO of the State-led incubator, said.

Huge response

Deepthi insists she talk more on WeHub, her new baby, and its future plans rather than discussing her own journey as a hardware engineer. She is elated by the response to the maiden cohort that it started last year.

“We received 245 applications despite the fact that we are a new entity. Of this, we picked 26 for the 12-month incubation programmme that started in August, 2018,” she said.

The idea, Deepthi says, has caught the imagination of women entrepreneurs in varied verticals such as fintech, tech, agritech, social enterprises, meditech, biotech and healthcare. Besides offering basic services that every incubator provides, WeHub focuses more on helping the start-ups in scaling up their activities as many other initiatives are already working on skilling.

“What we want to do is to create an ecosystem and not to reinvent the wheel. Our objective is to give them access to mentorship, the market and exposure to various policies available to them,” she said.

Deepthi, who works with a small team of six people, attributes the success to the team. “It’s because of the team and help from everyone in the IT E&C Department and the State government that we could reach here. Now that we’ve made a mark, we would like to take this to the next level,” she said, when asked about the future plans of WeHub. “We are going to have pan-India presence by entering into co-incubation agreements with players like us across the country. We would like to focus on self-help groups in rural areas. We will work on building leadership and teach them to build teams,” Deepthi said.

In Hyderabad, for example, there are 37 incubators, including in the public and private sectors. “We have already tied up with some of them. We would like to be associated with all of them so that our start-ups have a vibrant ecosystem,” she said.

“The composition of start-ups selected for the maiden cohort reflected our aims. We have a start-up called Architude that promises reduction of cost and time in building design and construction by preparing economically viable building information models (BIM),” she added.

While Feminance is a one-stop solution firm for financial planning and investment advisory services, The Star In Me is a professional networking platform for women. Virosphere, a mobile application, digitises medical prescriptions.

Balancing act

It, however, involves sacrifices. She had to quit a promising career in the US, to take up the government assignment. Her husband still works there.

“But I have no regrets,” she said. “I thought my services are required in the State. I was in my own small way a part of the movement that strived for a separate State. Now that it has been achieved, I believe I should be there in its growth story.”

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