Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Meet the IAN Global Startup Competition Finalists: Anup Gosavi & Spext

This fall, we presented a one-of-a-kind opportunity, the IAN Global Startup Competition, to our community of entrepreneurs. Babson students, alumni, faculty, staff, and parents were invited to apply to pitch their startups ready for angel funding to the Indian Angel Network for a $250,000 equity investment. Started in April 2006, the Indian Angel Network is the world’s largest and India’s first business angel network and is comprised of successful entrepreneurs and CEOs eager to invest in early-stage, high potential businesses. IAN, in addition to funding, provides access to high-quality mentoring, vast networks, and input on strategy and execution. 

Applications came from startups from around the world and from many different industries. The finale too will be global – The finalists will pitch in a virtual finale on Saturday, December 15, bringing together an audience located in different countries eager to see who secures the investment. We invite you to register now to watch the finale and to get to know each of the finalists and their ventures.

Spext, an all-in-one platform that converts voice media into useful content, will be pitched by co-founder Anup Gosavi MBA’13. Using speech to text APIs, Spext quickly creates digital transcripts and, in lieu of complex and time-consuming waveform based editing, enables you to “type in new words in the transcript and change the spoken words of the voice-over,” as Anup explained to us. Bringing text editing, which is second nature to many of us, together with voice content means content marketing can scale. Anup clearly has an eye towards creating and leveraging high quality content, having produced an eight part guide on how to start a podcast from finding your voice and selecting guests to marketing and monetizing.

Anup credits his Babson MBA with teaching him both strategic frameworks, including product positioning, go-to-market strategy and managing a team, and tactical skills, including creating financial projections, doing competitive analysis, and running meetings. You can hear him put his MBA to work as he describes how he is preparing to pitch in the virtual finale: “For the pitch, I will focus on communicating four things clearly and simply – the problem, our unique solution, how big can this company be (the market) and the team (why we are the best team to solve this problem?).” In his pitch, he plans to emphasize that Spext has built a highly talented research team in India and that this is a team with deep tech knowledge that global researchers will want to join.

Spext’s revolutionary technology has the potential to change how we produce, search, and consume media. To continue developing the Spext technology, Anup is clear on what the team needs – and it’s not just funding: “An early stage company like Spext needs value added investors in addition to the capital. IAN has seasoned operators and executives who have built and scaled tech companies before. Their expertise on strategy, go-to market and growth will be invaluable.”

Register now to watch Anup pitch in the IAN Global Startup Competition virtual finale on Saturday, December 15!