Reliance Venture Asset Management Strikes Exclusive India Alliance with MIT $100k and Stanford Business Competition

Mumbai, India, April 17, 2010 --(PR.com)-- The aim of this partnership is to strengthen the entrepreneurship collaboration between India and MIT and Stanford University, in line with Late Mr Dhirubhai Ambani’s vision of seeing a thousand Dhirbubhai’s emerge from India.

Reliance Venture Asset Management’s association with MIT is to sponsor their annual MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which makes it the first Indian venture capital to forge a partnership of this nature. With a legacy of 20 glorious years, the legendary competition awards $100k for business startup services to outstanding student entrepreneurs. Through the years the competition has facilitated the birth of over 120 companies with aggregate exit values of over $15 billion captured. The winning companies have generated over 2,500 jobs and received $700 million dollars in venture capital funding.

On similar lines, Reliance Venture Asset Management has also collaborated with Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES), one of the largest student entrepreneurship organizations in the US; institutionalized under the aegis of Stanford University. As their sole Indian venture capital partner, the company will associate with ‘e-challenge’- their business plan competition and will play a pivotal role as a jury member to decide its winners. The company will also participate in one of BASES’ flagship programs titled e-Bootcamp; a 3 day intensive entrepreneurship workshop. Stanford BASES has helped create a number of innovative and successful companies over the last few years, such as LightBit [acquired by Arasor], Ingenuity, Gigabeat, Pandao, Penguin Computing, T-RAM, Scalable Life, Xagros, Epitrope, and Voltage Security (formerly IdentiCrypt).

Commenting on the association, Mr. Harshal J. Shah, Chief Executive Officer & Board Member, Reliance Venture Asset Management Ltd said, “As a company philosophy, we have believed in being patrons of initiatives aimed at promoting collaborative Indo-US investments. Our recent association with MIT $100k entrepreneurship competition and now with Stanford BASES is a testament to this approach. Over the years, we have witnessed some exemplary ideas emerge from the student community at Stanford as a result of the Stanford BASES platform and are excited to partner with MIT and Stanford to discover the next generation of budding entrepreneurs. We look forward to nurturing this talent through our ‘summer incubation program’ in India.”

With entrepreneurship now assuming a global flavor, Reliance Venture Asset Management looks forward to nurturing these participants to explore entrepreneurial prospects in the Indian market, thereby leveraging cross border synergies.

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