By Kalpana Shah

Vegayan, Infozech, and 6d Technologies were the three finalists chosen by a jury of venture capitalists and business executives to win the TiE-Canaan Entrepreneurial Challenge on Monday at an annual event held by TiE in Mumbai, India.

Mumbai, India

TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), a nonprofit organization focused on promoting entrepreneurship, teamed on the challenge with Canaan Partners, a Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm with an office in New Delhi.

When it was announced in October 2006, the TiE-Canaan Challenge attracted several hundred applications.

Eleven applications were short-listed during the first round of eliminations, and three were declared finalists on Monday.

Professor Phil Andersen of Insead, a business school based in Fontainebleau, France, will host the winners at the institute’s Singapore campus. A workshop at the school will focus on the global potential of their businesses.

FontainebleauSingapore

“This will bring unparalleled benefits to the entrepreneurs in scaling their businesses with a global perspective,” said Alok Mittal, executive director of Canaan in India.

India

“It has been my experience that most business plan events end on the day the competition ends,” he added. “By bringing the right partners in place, we will attempt to provide mentorship and capital support to businesses, and try and make the event finals a starting point rather than a culmination.”

Encouraging Mobile Development

All three winners are in some way connected to mobile telephony, a rapidly growing sector in India.

India

Infozech, founded in 1999, is a profitable company building products for mobile carriers. While the company had traditionally focused on markets in developed countries, the company has decided to change its offerings.

“We are looking to serve emerging markets such as Asia and Africa with our new products,” said Infozech CEO Ankur Lal. The new products will be in areas such as IPTV deployment, WiMAX high-speed mobile Internet, and 3G (third generation wireless) networks.

Africa

Winning the TiE Canaan Challenge validates the recent approach Infozech has been taking, according to Mr. Lal. “I think it will also give us a better choice of venture capitalists,” he said.

Cell Phone Creditworthiness

Another winner, 6d Technologies, began in 2002. The company has focused up to now on adding extra services for mobile phones but has recently decided it can do more.

“We want to enable the mobile phone as a financial entity,” said CEO Abhishek Sinha.

His new vision is to help build the credit-worthiness of millions of daily wage earners in India who don’t have access to the banking system. It’s a complicated task involving micro-credit institutions and banks but piggybacks on the established system of pre-paid cards that most mobile phone customers in India already use to buy talk time.

India

The third winner, Vegayan Systems, received $75,000 in seed funding in February 2006 from DFJ Ventures after a business plan competition.

Incubated at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, Vegayan is developing a set of networking software tools that will help telecommunications service providers improve the performance of their networks.

The eight companies that made the semi-finals but won’t make it to Singapore are Anyasoft, Athena Info, Bonobo Exchange, Cariosa Technologies, D'Roms, Pradot, Surya International, and Zendle Learning.