StartupCentral

Girish Saraph has a knack for winning entrepreneurship challenges — these are typically structured as business plan contests where venture capitalists or successful entrepreneurs test the commercial viability of your idea or business plan. Saraph’s two-year old networking startup Vegayan Systems has won three such contests so far. It started with the DFJ India Venture Challenge in February 2006 where it got $75,000 seed funding. This January it won the TiE Canaan Entrepreneurship Challenge — the win got it to pitch its business plan to an angel investor in India and spend time with Professor Philip Anderson at the INSEAD campus in Singapore. In between it was also second runner up at the India Innovation Pioneers Challenge last year (organized by the government of India and Intel Corp). Whew!

So what has all this winning added up to? Well, Saraph wrote in a couple of days ago to say that Vegayan is about to release its beta product and has a large telecom service provider lined up for testing. He’s promised a demonstration at the IIT campus in Mumbai’s Powai suburb (where Vegayan is located) over a cup of canteen chai.

A bit about Vegayan: It is developing a set of networking software tools that will help telecom service operators optimize the efficiency of their networks. Essentially, make things work faster. Vegayan is derived from ‘veg’, the Sanskrit word for speed. It has over a dozen people on its rolls right now and is still more of an on-campus incubation project than a full-fledged corporate setup.

A bit on Saraph: After a 14-year stint in the US in the defence communications space, Saraph came back to teach at IIT. Vegayan was born after three years of research. He also mans a day job as associate professor at the IIT’s Electrical Engineering department.

Also catch a PodTech interview with Saraph by Kamla Bhatt