The National Bio Entrepreneurship Competition (NBEC), a nationwide platform to showcase India’s most promising bio innovations with high impact potential in the life sciences and biotech domain, wrapped up with 11 bio entrepreneurs and three student-led teams announced as winners of NBEC 2020, fourth edition of this prestigious competition.

Winning start-ups will take home a cumulative of over Rs 7 crore in cash prizes and investment opportunities, while student-led teams stand to receive Rs 10 lakh in cash prizes.

Among the winning start-ups is Dr Sugandhi Gopal, Carditek Medical Devices who received the Aurigene cash prize of Rs 5 lakh in healthcare domain. Niranjan, Cyclops Medtech has won the Biocon cash prize of Rs 5 lakh in healthcare. Ravi Adgulwar, Avisa received the L’Oreal sponsored cash prize of Rs 5 lakh in personal care domain. Nikhil Das, Agdhi Tech swooped up the Ankur Seeds cash prize of Rs 5 lakh in agritech domain. Dilip Shankar, Accord Innovations won the Pfizer cash prize of Rs 3.5 lakh in healthcare.

Geethanjali Radhakrishnan of Adiuvo Diagnostics won both the Anthem Biosciences and IQVIA sponsored cash prizes of Rs 3 lakh each. Dr Prerana Tomke, Nanopearl received both Novozymes and Win Foundation sponsored cash prizes worth Rs 3 lakh each, in sustainability, clean-tech and water & sanitation domain. Dr Subhash Narayanan, Sascan Meditech won the Win Foundation cash prize of Rs 3 lakh in the crucial domain of maternal and child health.

Sanjiv Sambandan won the Health Venture Digital Health Boot Camp participation award and also took home the surprise C-CAMP special prize as a cutting-edge, emergent technology.

Winners in the student-team innovation category were Tanish T Sridhar won the Persistent Systems sponsored cash prize of Rs 5 lakh, Chandan Kumar Jha won the BIRAC cash prize of Rs 3 lakh, and Abduljabbar Khan won Rs 2 lakh in a pooled prize by K&S partners, Bioneeds and Ideaspring Capital.

NBEC is organized every year by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms under the BIRAC Regional Entrepreneurship Centre (BREC), a C-CAMP – BIRAC joint initiative, to attract, identify and nurture year game-changing deep science driven ideas with business
potential.