Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM), the nodal government agency for entrepreneurship development and incubation activities in the State, will create a database of techies who are working outside Kerala but keen to return to the home State. The plan is to leverage the State’s talent pool, along with other incentives, to attract investments in the IT/ITES sector into Kerala. The just launched campaign is called “Thirike”, meaning, ‘return’, in Malayalam.

“There is an interesting statistics about IT/ITES. Of the 50 lakh ball park that is working in this field in India, 15-20% are malayalees, of which only 2-3 lakh people are working in Kerala. We have initiated ‘Thirike’ campaign to reach out to them saying, if you are outside Kerala, and if you have any interest at all to return, you can sign up with us, and when a Google or Microsoft is considering a tier II centre, we will have a curated, say 10,000 people talent-pool, to put across to these companies”, says Anoop Ambika, CEO, Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM). “It is up to the company to offer them a job. But we believe quality of talent is an important factor for any company that wants to move out of a very expensive city to a tier II location”, he adds.

The State is also trying to leverage its Diaspora to create new models of investment to Kerala startup ecosystem. Ambika said KSUM is working with IvyCap Ventures to replicate its model to create new venture funds. “Their model is to get IIT alumini contribute 20% of the venture fund. We want to replace that ‘IIT’ component with Diaspora fund. Essentially, we take the same model as IV Cap Venture Capital Fund, take out the IIT equation out of it and replace it with diaspora. That’s what we want to recreate”, Ambika said.

Alongside its efforts to promote deep-tech startups in the State, KSUM is also looking at creating the infrastructure needed to support such startup ecosystem. “We are creating our own Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) system. We want to open it up for startups, so that people do not have to pay. We have prepared an RFP (request for proposal) and I am hoping to see it getting done before March 2026”, Ambika said.

The State is also trying to meet the energy requirements of future as AI and data centres are energy intensive. “Alternate sources of energy could be hydrogen, it could be mini nuclear, ocean, sunlight, battery… We are interested in anything and everything that is related to renewable, sustainable energy”, Ambika added.