Dispatch #1 - 20th May 2022
News from the land of sun, sea, sand & startups 🌊
Hi friends, it’s been a while!
We began this project more than 11 years ago, but over the past 3 to 5 years, we lost a bit of steam as we got caught up with our own projects. Surprisingly, the community and especially the job board continued to power on.
We’re happy to share that we now have a young set of volunteers, taking over the reins of our little community project. We are joined by Dave Paiva, Enrich Braz, Shriram Parab and Yesh Surve working on various functions at StartupGoa. We will be relaunching our Webfolks meetups (now Web3 folks ;)) as well as kicking off a mentorship program (in which we already have two startups onboarded).
Our original vision was grounded in the belief that entrepreneurs can change society, and need not wait for government or institutional intervention. We continue with that mindset, working collaboratively at the grassroots level, to sprout world-class startups from Goan soil.
This newsletter is a work in progress so please get in touch with your feedback.
Much love and warm regards from team 1.0; Caslino, Aprup, Siddharth & Luke. Now over to team 3.0!
Goan tech/projects in the spotlight
🥥 Konkani added to Google translate
Konkani is now one of 133 languages around the globe supported by Google Translate. This gives our mother tongue and its speakers a significant boost & would definitely be helpful for translators and language learners. The addition was made possible by Sanjeet Hegde Desai, Senior Manager of Business Systems at Google and Konkani activist Chetan Acharya.
🌱Goan agro-biotech startup raises 4.3 crore funding
Goan startup GreenPod Labs has raised a pre-seed round of 4.3 crores. It aims at solving the food waste in India which amounts to a loss of $12 billion by extending the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables. The funds will be used for research and development as well as scaling operations.
💳These Goa-based entrepreneurs are simplifying credit for retailers and distributors
Founded by Sanket and Sanmati Shendure, Goa-based startup Minko has over 10,000 retailers and aims to expedite its growth in the offline retail space. They also target to lessen the credit gap by addressing the credit bottleneck through a full-stack Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) led payment product for independent distributors in the Indian retail market.
Made with ♥️ in Goa or by Goans
🛠 The super creator Louis Pereira from Porvorim has built Nicheless, a platform for sub-300-word essays. It has no public likes or comments 😌 and is aimed at first time writers. Louis’ goal is to take away the cognitive and social load off of writing and let thinkers get their thoughts out clearly. Give it a try: nicheless.blog
✨[EXCLUSIVE] We interviewed Salil Naik to learn more about his work. Salil Naik works at Socket helping build a cross-blockchain fund transfer app called Bungee. Here’s an excerpt and you can read the full interview on our blog.
“When building a unique solution, you will always be challenged. There are few to absolutely no apps you can take inspiration from, but that also puts us in a sort of unique position. We are the ones to set the path, be it with our infrastructure, our product or our design.
Though my work is limited to Bungee at the moment, I’m trying to step into the unknown and try a few things that will make socket integration even easier. Imagine integrating Socket into your application in a few hours. How about a few minutes?”
Upcoming events & meetups
🤝Startup Saturday by Headstart
Inviting aspiring founders and startups for a meetup and listen to Sandeep, Cofounder of BLive on "How Blive built in Goa? " at Headstart Startup Saturday on 21 May 2022 afternoon 3 PM at build3 villa, Candolim
RSVP at https://bit.ly/ss_goa
Upskill yourself
✍🏽Writing is an important skill to develop while working at a startup. Whether you are an engineer documenting a feature or writing an article on something you just learned or a Product Manager planning something new, documentation helps focus on your thoughts and make them clearer. Here’s a good place to learn writing for folks in tech.
📋Featured Jobs from the StartupGoa job board
Head over to the StartupGoa job board to post or apply for jobs
The StartupGoa.org community is grateful for the support from our partners
Passbolt
Passbolt is the best password manager for teams and collaboration. Secure, flexible, and automation-ready. Trusted by over 10,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, governments and defence forces. Passbolt is partially built in Goa.
Numadic
Numadic is on a mission to undisrupt movement by enabling automated vehicle payment applications and infrastructure. Numadic’s vehicle payments platform supports several major banks in India. Proudly built almost entirely in Goa.
Grandworks
GrandWorks is a full-stack web design and development agency working for clients such as Spotify, OnePlus, OPPO, The Indian Government, UpCloud, Borosil, Hidesign, etc.
Contact mail@startupgoa.org if you’d like to support the community or volunteer.