Announcing the 1st Build India Cohort

We announced the Build India Fellowship on November 21, 2020, and from day one itself, we were overwhelmed at the interest it received. We always thought something like this was missing in India, but boy did we underestimate how much young builders wanted something like this.

Announcing the 1st Build India Cohort

In the six weeks until December 31, we received over 2500 applications for the Build India Fellowship! With so many applications, and more importantly, so many really good ones, we each had to move around our timeline to do justice to each application. Our team read every application and shortlisted the top 10%ile, out of which the top 20 teams were invited for an interview. After a week or so of back and forth, we ended up with our top teams.

And here they are:

Bake Cloud

OS and kernel development is notoriously inefficient. It takes up too many hours and too much space on your SSD. Though it’s a good experience in winters, it’s not ideal. Larger and larger OS files have taken up the minimum requirements bar you need to meet to build kernels effectively, and that doesn’t sit well with Kanav, Vaibhav, and Supratik. Final year students at IIT Roorkee, and serial FOSS contributors, they’ve decided to tackle this problem with an open-source cloud-based cache management tool. With already 3 years of experience in distributed systems, systems architecture, and OS development, we don’t think there’s any young builder who’s a better fit to launch this!

Modfy

Figma changed design and left incumbents behind by a long margin. With web assembly, FFmpeg, and some hard work, this won’t be limited to images. There is no version of the future where something like Figma doesn’t come to video-editing as well. It’s just a question of who will make it, and we think Rahul is already getting there. He’s already seen some support on Product Hunt and Pioneer, but we think this fellowship will give him the much-required push to take Modfy to market. If you'd want to help Rahul build and grow Modfy, read more here.

SevaShop

E-commerce has been around for decades now, but COVID finally changed a lot of it for good. Rohan, Royal, and Srijan already shipped an MVP at InOut 7.0 late last year with a specific focus on service-based businesses. They saw a lot of traction and even raised over ₹1,00,000 via quadratic funding! During the six months of the fellowship, they plan to refine their product, pick a small market, and take SevaShop to market. They’re great builders, driven, and very hard working, making them a perfect fit for the grant! The team is also looking for interns proficient with JavaScript, GraphQL and React, so if you fit the bill and would want to contribute, get in touch with them ASAP!

Stealth Blockchain Project

Anudit Nagar is one of the most energetic and ambitious builders in the Devfolio Web3 Community. A consistent ETHIndia Online winner over the past few seasons, very few BUIDLers have explored the hidden corners of the ecosystem as much as he has. Currently dabbling with health records, social, and other public-good infrastructure, he’s working with experts in the blockchain ecosystem to build out his moonshot project, which we’ll announce very soon!

In the process we also discovered a bunch of great hidden builders in the Indian dev ecosystem that we couldn't support due to the teams either not being free for the next few months or them being over 22 years of age. Even though we couldn't accept them as part of this fellowship (Yes, you know who you are), we love what you're building, and a big shout out to you!

Help them out!

If any of these projects are of special interest to you, and you’d want to help them, with mentorship, as an intern, partner, with office hours, or with grants, or in any other way imaginable, do reach out to us and we’ll be sure to put you in touch!

Let’s build, India.