Dhaval Kaku (@dhaval-kaku)

Dhaval Kaku

Program Curation Manager, IMPunjab

Mohali

Mr. Dhaval Kaku is an Entrepreneur-turned-Startup Ecosystem enabler.

He began his entrepreneurial journey by starting a music-tech venture, GrungeTech, in 2015. The hardware venture won multiple Business plan competitions including one at CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad.

Later in 2018, he took Program Management roles, and joined GTU Innovation Council and Startup Centre for 2 years assisting the SSIP(Student Startup Innovation Policy Program). SSIP, was a seed grant (supported by the Education Dept., Government of Gujarat), that supported more than 300 early-stage innovations and startups for developing their first PoC/ Prototype. The program supported with a financial incentive (of more than 3 Crore in total), provided holistic support including Mentorship, Network Access, IPR, connecting them with government agencies to help them deploy their products/services in the market. He also devised a unique flagship program that sensitised and trained startups towards being funding ready titled, “Pitch It Right”.

Further in 2020, he assisted the AISEA - a Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator program setup by iTIC Foundation, IIT Hyderabad and Action For India supported by the Dept. of Science and Technology. Through the 2 cohorts at the accelerator program, funding of more than 25 Crore was raised by the startups, along with 3x revenues and 1.6x team size in the latter cohort.

He has been a strong supporter of multiple emerging tech startups as well as being a guest lecturer and mentor to institute incubation centres. He has also been an advisor to a national think tank, Centre for Cyber and Information Security along with being Operations Head at The Hackers Meetup, a community with around 20 chapters across India and beyond.

Currently, he is working as an Program Curator with Innovation Mission Punjab, which is a state supported organization to facilitate the entrepreneurial ecosystem at large. Through various interventions aligned towards awareness, capacity building and accelerating their businesses, more than 1500 initiatives have been catalyzed.

In his free time he can be found finding mind boggling use cases on GPT platforms.

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