StartupCentral

Tomorrow are the global finals of the 2009 DFJ-Cisco Global Business Plan competition. One out of 16 finalists — list here — will take home $250,000 in seed funding as well as mentorship from DFJ and Cisco. Two Indian companies are among the 16 finalists — Husk Power Systems and Innoz Technologies.

Husk Power Systems: This cleantech company, headquartered in the US and Patna, India, is a great example of young students with their heads screwed on right. Husk Power Systems is a next generation energy company. It has developed a proprietary generator that runs on gas released by heating rice husk. The company currently provides electricity using its generators to five Indian villages, as a pay-for-use service,  and plans to expand to a 100 soon – New York Times article. The team is an interesting bunch. Three – Manoj Sinha, Gyanesh Pandey and Ratnesh Yadav – are natives of Bihar and in their early thirties. Sinha started exploring the idea — turning farm waste into electricity — while working with Intel in the US as a microprocessor designer. In 2007, he later teamed up with a fellow student, Charles Ransler at the University of Virginia, and Pandey, who was in India, to set up the company. Pandey now handles operations on the ground here with Yadav.

Innoz Technologies: Last year this Trivandrum-based startup launched SMSGyan, a text messaging interface for trivia. The company started up in August 2008 as an incubatee at the Technopark Technology Business Incubator in Trivandrum. It has also received some funding from Upstart.in and CIIE, Ahmedabad, through the iAccelerator programme. The founders — Deepak Ravindran, Abhinav Shree, Ashwin Nath and Mohammed Hisamuddin — are students from LBS College of Engineering — and are all in their twenties.

Of the two, my vote goes to Husk Power Systems, which addresses a real problem in India and already has a fairly successful track record to show. All the best.