Venture Engine’s Impact Award opened many doors – IgniterSpace founder

Sri Lanka’s pioneering entrepreneurship program Venture Engine has, to date, assisted hundreds of Sri Lankan startups in fine-tuning and accelerating their entrepreneurial efforts. Submissions for the seventh consecutive Venture Engine are currently being accepted via www.ventureengine.lk until December 10, 2018.

Recently, one of these startups, IgniterSpace, a Top Fundable Company at Venture Engine 2017, and that year’s Impact Award winner, leveraged its success within this program into a movement that promotes STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education across Sri Lanka.

A creative education company with a mission to ‘inspire creativity to empower new destinies’ among young people, it does this by developing their cognitive skills and empathy to bring about positive change. This unorthodox approach to education, where students learn through experiments instead of being taught, is a hallmark of the social innovation that Venture Engine’s Impact Award is promoting. The Impact Award recognizes early-stage, for-profit ventures that foster positive social or environmental change, either directly or indirectly as part of its business operations. The first Impact Award winner was Venture Engine 2016’s top-ranked Hire 1.

According to IgniterSpace’s Co-Founder and CEO Jehan Wijesinghe, “Venture Engine’s Impact Award opened many doors for us. Before the program, we were a startup executing outside the limelight. And although we were highly successful in the growth of the number of customers served, we did not have the attention of the Startup community including fellow Entrepreneurs, Mentors, Investors, etc. Throughout the workshops and other events conducted, we were able to network with many parties who have ever since brought many benefits to our growth as a startup. Further, all the mentoring sessions were very beneficial in shaping our company as a whole. Many mentors that we had in the program are still involved in our startup journey today in some ways.”

Additionally, the winners and runners-up of Venture Engine 2017, comprising Roar, IgniterSpace and Pregbuddy, also benefited immensely from a sponsored excursion to the Sankalp Forum, Asia’s leading platform for impact investing and entrepreneurship, which allowed many opportunities to interact with global stakeholders in this space.

Being awarded once again at the 2018-2019 cycle of Venture Engine, the Impact Award is presented by Indian Venture Capital firm Aavishkaar, which is also the title sponsor for the seventh edition of Venture Engine. The latest edition of Venture Engine is Aavishkaar’s third consecutive association with the program. Further, Aavishkaar has also invested in the local market by providing funding for Sri Lankan companies like Dulith Herath’s Grasshopper and popular spice brand MA’s.

Aavishkaar is joined by local startup incubation and acceleration platform HATCH and Sri Lanka’s largest telecommunications services provider Dialog Axiata PLC as sponsors for the Venture Engine program’s newest edition.

“A 2014 honoree at the Asia Responsible Entrepreneurship Awards (AREA) in Macau, Venture Engine continues to look at ways to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. It is in line with this mission that we partnered with social impact investor Aavishkaar to introduce the Impact Award for entrepreneurs in 2016, which recognizes high-potential, for-profit ventures that promote social innovation,” commented Mr. Prajeeth Balasubramaniam, a Founder of Venture Engine and the Lankan Angel Network, and General Partner at BOV Capital.

And IgniterSpace? It’s doing great. “We have more than 10+ MakerSpaces around the country where kids get together to identify real world problems and develop innovations to solve them using technology. Technology exposure is a core part of the program, including Electronics, Computer Programming, Robotics, Mechanics, etc. While practically exploring the usage of these technologies, the kids also empathize with and identify real world problems. In addition to our own MakerSpaces, we have also implemented our Innovation and Engineering curriculum across a constantly expanding number of schools island-wide where it has been adopted it as a part of the curriculum. Major cities such as Colombo, Kandy, Galle, Kurunegala, Negombo, Gampaha and Wattala have already been covered,” revealed Mr. Wijesinghe.

Since its beginnings in 2012, Venture Engine has been Sri Lanka’s most successful platform for accelerating and expanding the country’s most promising entrepreneurial ideas. The main organizer of Venture Engine, the Lankan Angel Network is Sri Lanka’s pioneering Business Angel Network. It has collectively invested over Rs. 2.2 billion in 30 + startups. Venture Engine was founded by BOV Capital and the Indian Angel Network.