In 2012, Dhruv Kumar shifted the base of his online medical advice platform, iCliniq, to Coimbatore after operating it out of Bengaluru for two years. The reason: He didn’t want to be overwhelmed or distracted by the hoopla around startups in the tech capital.
“I wanted to be out of all the noise and focus on building a quality product,” he said during a recent interview. “There are events all the time and the place is flooded with funding stories. Those days, we thought we were a tech startup and did not focus enough on the health and business side.”
Several young entrepreneurs like Kumar, who started up in Bengaluru are shifting to Coimbatore. Do-PartTime, a part-time job discovery portal, is another example and one of the reasons for the shift was talent retention. “Every company has a dynamic workforce, which frequently shifts, and a static workforce with loyalty. In a place like Coimbatore, the teams stick around,” said Kumar.
Coimbatore, which has pleasant weather conditions like Bengaluru, is seeing its fair share of startup activity. The Coimbatore chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a non-profit consortium that promotes entrepreneurship, has identified 47 active startups.
There are five incubation centres in and around the city, almost all of them set up by a technical education institution. PSG STEP, the incubation arm of PSG Institute of Technology, was established in 1998, much before any other college, including IIM Ahmedabad, did so.
source- Economics times