Venture Engine’s Impact Award opened many doors – IgniterSpace founder
View(s):Sri Lanka’s pioneering entrepreneurship programme Venture Engine has, to date, assisted hundreds of Sri Lankan start-ups in fine-tuning and accelerating their entrepreneurial efforts. Submissions for the seventh consecutive Venture Engine are currently being accepted via www.ventureengine.lk until December 10.
The 2017 winner
Recently, one of these start-ups, IgniterSpace, a top fundable company at Venture Engine 2017, and that year’s Impact Award winner, leveraged its success within this programme into a movement that promotes STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education across Sri Lanka, according to a media release from the organisers.
A creative education company with a mission to ‘inspire creativity to empower new destinies’ among young people, it does this by developing their cognitive skills and empathy to bring about positive change. This unorthodox approach to education, where students learn through experiments instead of being taught, is a hallmark of the social innovation that Venture Engine’s Impact Award is promoting.
According to IgniterSpace’s Co-Founder and CEO Jehan Wijesinghe, “Venture Engine’s Impact Award opened many doors for us. Before the programme, we were a start-up executing outside the limelight. And although we were highly successful in the growth of the number of customers served, we did not have the attention of the start-up community including fellow Entrepreneurs, Mentors, Investors, etc. Throughout the workshops and other events conducted, we were able to network with many parties who have ever since brought many benefits to our growth as a startup.”
Additionally, the winners and runners-up of Venture Engine 2017, comprising Roar, IgniterSpace and Pregbuddy, also benefited immensely from a sponsored excursion to the Sankalp Forum, Asia’s leading platform for impact investing and entrepreneurship, which allowed many opportunities to interact with global stakeholders in this space.