Entrepreneur Alert: PayPal Brings Startup Weekend Back to Chennai

Building on the creative energy that Startup Weekend 2014 brought to the city, global leader in online payments, PayPal, announced today that it will host Startup Weekend in Chennai for the second consecutive year at the PayPal India Technology Center, Chennai, from June 5 - 7, 2015.

Startup Weekend is a 54-hour event where aspiring entrepreneurs come together to form teams, build products and try to develop viable startup ideas. The global grassroots movement, which promotes creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, is the largest community of entrepreneurs in the world, with over 1,800 events organized in 120 countries in 2014. At Startup Weekend, participants get to meet, brainstorm and form groups based on their interests. They will also have the chance to work with mentors from technology and business fields, as well as angel investors to discuss and get insights on coding, designing, business model creation and market validation to help their idea development. At the end of the weekend, the teams will present their final plans to a panel of expert judges from across the industry.

“We are thrilled to be hosting Startup Weekend in India for a second time. Through such events, we hope to be able to create a community for technology and startup enthusiasts to come together and collaborate on great ideas. As a leader in online payments and one of the world’s largest startups, we hope that the technology mentorship PayPal can provide will help enable and drive innovation within the technology ecosystem in India.” said Anupam Pahuja, General Manager, Technology, PayPal Asia Pacific.

Startup Weekend Chennai will focus on solving challenges in the financial technology space, encompassing areas related to credit, payments, security, asset management, currencies, etc. The contest is open to developers, designers, product managers, marketers and startup enthusiasts – anyone with a creative idea and the desire to learn. Interested applicants can register for this year’s Startup Weekend at http://www.swchennai.in. The registration closes at 12 p.m. on June 4, 2015.

Participants will have the opportunity to interact with technology leaders from PayPal, including Anupam Pahuja, General Manager, Technology, PayPal Asia Pacific, as well as renowned industry experts such as Deepak Krishnan, Associate Vice President of Growth, FreeCharge.in and Ashwini Asokan, CEO and Co-founder, Mad Street Den & Mad Street Labs, and Ramanan RV, Co-Founder at Juspay.in who will be mentors and conduct workshops during the event.

The top three teams who will be crowned at the end of the 54-hours will have a chance to enter the Start Tank Incubation Challenge organized by PayPal, which provides early-stage startups a world-class incubation space and access to global mentors, angel investors and venture capitalists.  

In 2014, the Startup Weekend witnessed participation from over 100 startup enthusiasts, well-established CEOs, and a network of angel investors. The winning teams of 2014 were CloudPLAY and Smart Dev. CloudPLAY developed a concept to bring entertainment to boring travel journeys, and Smart Dev, created a single platform created for recruiters to choose from the best of developers across the country.

About PayPal

At PayPal, we put people at the center of everything we do. Founded in 1998, we continue to be at the forefront of the digital payments revolution, processing almost 11.6 million payments for our customers per day. PayPal gives people better ways to connect to their money and to each other, helping them send money without sharing financial information and with the flexibility to pay using their PayPal account balances, bank accounts, PayPal Credit and credit cards. With our 165 million active customer accounts, we have created an open and secure payments ecosystem people and businesses choose to securely transact with each other online, in stores and on mobile devices. PayPal is a truly global payments platform that is available to people in 203 markets, allowing customers to get paid in more than 100 currencies, withdraw funds to their bank accounts in 57 currencies and hold balances in their PayPal accounts in 26 currencies. PayPal is an eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY) company. In September 2014, eBay Inc. announced the planned separation of eBay and PayPal into independent publicly traded companies in 2015. More information about PayPal can be found at www.paypal.com and www.paypal-media.com. More information about the planned separation of eBay and PayPal can be found at update.ebayinc.com.

About PayPal India Technology Centers

PayPal’s technology centers in India (Chennai & Bangalore) have over 1,200 engineers who support the PayPal business globally. These talented technologists are part of a global team that is constantly innovating and driving software development initiatives that enhance and expand PayPal’s global payments platform. The India technology centers house a best-in-class team of software developers, architects, user experience engineers, web developers, data analytics & project managers.

About Startup Weekend

Startup Weekend is a global movement to promote entrepreneurship, which takes place in over 550 cities. Many existing companies have also raised angel funding as well as gone onto accelerators like The Morpheus, 500 Startups, Y Combinator, Microsoft Accelerator, etc. They are supported in their efforts by Google for Entrepreneurs, NASSCOM and 500 Startups. It is also the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 1800 past events in 120 countries around the world in 2014.

In the past 3 years, 500+ startups have started & 15,000+ entrepreneurs have been inspired. Teams have even started to generate revenue during the 54hr event, and others have even gone on to raise funds from Business Angels or Venture Capitalists. None of these numbers take into account the networking, on‐going professional relationships, and amazing experience that take place at every event. Startup Weekend’s motto: Build Community. Start Companies. No Talk. All Action.