As part of T-Hub’s third anniversary, TNM will be featuring five startups that have been with T-Hub, India's largest incubator for startups, since its inception and that have grown into success stories.
It started with Charan Lakkaraju wanting to find a way to bring out hidden talents of undiscovered students in colleges. Sure, most colleges have an in-house magazine, but to reach a larger audience, a digital platform that formed something like an intranet of colleges was required.
He then teamed up with his co-founder Frederick Devarampati, who was running a college newspaper to launch StuMagz. It started as a digital magazine for college where students generated content.
StuMagz, which is a part of startup engine T-Hub in Hyderabad, interestingly also launched its operations at the same time as T-Hub, inaugurated by Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, Ratan Tata. A lot of mentorship and support, and even connections the startup has received in the past year, it attributes to T-Hub.
It started with BV Raju Institute of Technology Hyderabad (BVRITH), where students used this digital magazine to tell stories from the college, and has today grown into a digital Campus Ecosystem to engage prospects, students, faculty, staff and alumni. It has created a digital platform that is offered to colleges as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. It also has an app that it launched 18 months ago.
Simply put, StuMagz is like a social networking platform for colleges. It enables communication and collaboration for educational institutions on one platform.
“We are everything that makes a college digital. Students can write stories, create events, do event ticketing, look for job and internship opportunities. We also have an innovation platform,” Frederick says.
StuMagz is also a platform for brands and companies to run campaigns to reach students. Its first big campaign was with SBI, where it did a campaign for the bank’s mobile wallet ‘SBI Buddy’ around the time of demonetization. At the same time, it also organized a massive talent hunt called ‘Telangana got talent’ in five zones with over 3.5 lakh students participating from across the state. It has also done a campaign for Uber.
Last year, it launched a premium version where it now charges colleges for digitizing their entire campus. It has also launched an accreditation platform for colleges, which also helps colleges generate various reports. StuMagz also recently forayed into New Zealand, marking its first international foray.
Today, it has over 400 colleges from across the country on its platform with profiles of over 2 lakh students. The rapid adoption of StuMagz amidst colleges and students has also helped it grow exponentially, finding its founders Frederick and Charan, a place in Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list 2018. It was also awarded the best emerging startup StartAP Awards in Visakhapatnam in May this year.
StuMagz is also one of the 10 startups chosen by the Telangana State Innovation Cell for its ‘Government Mentorship Program’ in Hyderabad, which looks to build familiarity between startups and Government officials. The program has been rolled out for the ITE&C Department focusing on Big Data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, Media, Content and several other emerging technologies, which could potentially be useful to solve various problems for the Government.
Frederick says that there has not been any platform till date that has created a network of colleges the way StuMagz has. Having expanded its presence in India, it now wants to be the first platform to create an intranet of campuses globally form India.