Social-media major Facebook is expanding its scope of engagement with start-ups in the country. To build an ecosystem for start-ups working in emerging technologies, the company has announced an exclusive six-month accelerator programme and a School of Innovation for engineering students.

The accelerator is being launched in association with the tech incubator T-Hub, the biggest start-up incubator in the country.

T-Hub It launched the India Innovation Hub at the T-Hub, marking the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which will begin on Tuesday here.

“For now, we are starting off with Virtual Reality. We will later cover other emerging technologies. The short-listed 10 start-ups will get tools developed by us,” Satyajeet Singh, Head of Platform Partnerships, Facebook India and South Asia, told BusinessLine.

“We will shortlist about 20 start-ups and then pick the final 10 for the accelerator programme. They will get mentorship and access to VR Innovation lab to test their products.

Applications for the Innovation Hub programme will be open from January 2018,” he said. Facebook has about 21.7-crore users in the country, including 40-lakh pages for small businesses.

Over 60,000 small businesses were trained by Facebook in tapping the social media potential.

School of Innovation “We are also setting up a School of Innovation in association with Start-up Village to build talent in various emerging technologies. We will pick 10 student teams to help them work on their ideas in Virtual Reality,” he said.

The 10 teams will undergo a 20-week programme, where they will be taught how to translate their ideas into products and to find customers.

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