The BITS-75 Charitable Trust (Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, class of 1975) has mentored and provided seed-funding to three start-ups from BITS – Phyzok, Sattva Medtech and Mudra Annie.

The BITS-75 Trust provided these ventures a generous grant of Rs 10 lakh each, along with mentorship guidance from a team of BITS alumni drawn from BITSAA, and also project management help.

Phyzok Learning Solutions is today a successful venture and has won several national and international awards.

'SattvaMeditech' has developed cutting-edge, inexpensive, easy-to-use, diagnostic equipment to monitor neo-natal heartbeats from the 26th week of pregnancy. This would help reduce India’s neo-natal mortality rate. The project has made substantial progress and prototype development work is complete.

The third venture sponsored by the Trust, 'Mudra,' is a start-up developing technology-assisted devices to teach visually impaired youngsters Braille. The device has embedded software, speech synthesis and recognition and an active Braille cell display.

The Trust founded by students of the BITS Pilani campus who studied in the 70s, when it was a trend-setter in science and engineering education in India, recently held a Gurudakshina programme to honour 10 teachers.

Among those recognised for their services was Dr C R Mitra, the second Director of BITS, who during a period of over two decades, transformed the institution from a local engineering college into a reputed university. Others who were honoured were Prof J. S. Verma, Prof S. S. Gupta, Prof Kamal Kumar, Prof H. P. Tiwari, Prof Rup Dutta, A. N. Bhargava, Prof Aditya Mathur, Prof K. Gopalan, and Prof S. C. Rastogi.