Gopi Krishna Lakkepuram, founder-CEO of HyperLeap.ai, was pleasantly surprised when he received a call from T-Hub, the country’s biggest startup incubator, in Hyderabad.
The gist of the call was: “Since you are an AI startup, would you like to join our exclusive AI space?”
“I immediately jumped at the idea and moved my four-member team there. Though my startup had moved past the handholding stage, the enormous network of T-Hub is a big attraction,” Lakkepuram says.
“I could talk to Rajan Anandan, Managing Director of Peak XV, and the top Nissan team one-on-one and was able to present to them my GenAI-based no-code solution platform,” he says.
As you walk across the 10 floors of the T-Hub, divided into thematic segments, you hear several similar stories — ranging from those just starting up with one or two people to those who have outgrown the startup phase and are planning to move out.
T-Hub stands out among the several dozen swanky buildings housing global and Indian multinational companies in the Madhapur-Raidurg IT hub.
The 5.72-lakh sq ft T-shaped facility is 1.5 times larger than Station F in Paris and twice the size of Guanghua SOHO II in Beijing, making it the largest startup facility in the world. The space is designed to serve founders at scale — with capacity for over 1,000 startups.
Version 2.0 of T-Hub — with hardware incubator T-Works and the upcoming IMAGE (Innovation in multimedia, animation, gaming and entertainment) Towers — in the neighbourhood is to Cyberabad what the historic Charminar is to the 434-year-old city of Hyderabad.
A poster child of the country’s startup ecosystem, T-Hub is invariably on the bucket list of the IT pros and officials of various governments who are on a visit to Hyderabad. From Ratan Tata (who inaugurated T-Hub 1.0) to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the who’s who of the corporate world have visited the two facilities over the last nine years.
All-round support
Within weeks of its launch in 2015, T-Hub caught the imagination of startups with its varied and innovative offerings. Unlike conventional incubators, which offer only mentorship and funding, T-Hub has become, as former T-Hub CEO Mahankali Srinivas Rao describes it, a microcosm of a startup ecosystem.
“It is a platform for innovators to ideate and incubate,” says former Telangana IT minister KT Rama Rao, who was instrumental in allowing T-Hub to work independently, giving the board the freedom to run the organisation as they deemed fit.
T-Hub has till date worked with more than 2,000 startups, 600 corporates, and 100 investors, and collaborated with leading academic institutions and government partners. It houses the centres of excellence set up by Apollo Tyres (mobility), NPCI (digital payments), Hexagon (geospatial intelligence), Epiroc (mining equipment), and Drishti — the Indo–Israel initiative to promote innovation across the defence and technology sectors.
T-Hub also has the CII Centre of Innovation and serves as an ‘incubator of incubators’. The Atal Incubation Centre focuses on startups in the field of healthcare, sustainability, space-tech, mobility/ electric vehicles, and semiconductors.
MATH (machine learning artificial intelligence technology hub) CoE, incubated by T-Hub, supports over 183 startups with deep-tech infrastructure, mentorship, and a platform to scale up AI-driven innovation across industries.
Over a cup of coffee
“The T-Hub building was designed as a kind of microcosm of the ecosystem needed for startups... a diverse range of entities and players brought together to create a comprehensive environment, including corporate centres of excellence, funding entities, industry associations like CII, and overseas organisations,” says Srinivas Rao, who helmed the T-Hub during 2021-24.
“It all happened over a cup of coffee,” reminisces BVR Mohan Reddy, founder of Cyient and former chairman of Nasscom, on his meeting with the then IT and industries minister Rama Rao, which led to the formation of T-Hub.
“A few days before the new government was even sworn-in in 2014, we two had a meeting to discuss a few ideas for economic development, and I proposed to build an ecosystem for startups that has the potential to create jobs and wealth,” he says.
They decided that the best way forward would be to build something through a public-private partnership. “A board was formed with five industry representatives and four government nominees, including Jayesh Ranjan, the current CEO of Industry & Investment Cell in the Chief Minister’s Office, as well as of the SPEED (Proactive Efficient and Effective Delivery) initiative , to conceive, build, and manage the project,” he says.
While the State government agreed to take care of the capex, the board members pooled a ₹9-crore corpus to get the ball rolling. T-Hub began operations at a temporary facility at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-Hyderabad), with Jay Krishnan and Srini Kollipara as the maiden CEO and COO, respectively.
What next?
Reddy, who has not skipped a single board meeting till date, says the city deserves to have more venture capital. “Deep-technology requires patient capital for a longer time, before returns are seen. It calls for extracting intellectual property (IP) from educational and research institutions and making it available to startups, possibly at a price, to help technology flourish,” he points out. He also calls for efforts to improve market access for startups.
As T-Hub cruises through its decennial year, its board has roped in Kavikrut, ex-CXO of OYO, as the fourth CEO to steer it through the 3.0 phase.