CHENNAI: The Centre for Entrepreneurship Development (CED) of Anna University has introduced the ‘Startup Associateship Scheme (SAS) for free for students to join as members in various activities to establish start-ups.

The scheme provides participants with a range of resources, support, and opportunities to help them build successful start-ups.

Sources from the university said that the scheme aims to form a partnership or collaboration between educational institutions of all domains and industries with CED. Benefits for SAS members includes free participation in ideation sessions, start-up mentoring, focused design thinking workshops and resource person support for students.

Similarly, the CED will also organise start-up competitions especially designed for SAS students with access to the CED library. Industrial visits and utilising CED labs exclusively for SAS will also be arranged.

The institution said that many start-ups choose to not raise funding from third parties and are funded by their founders only (to prevent debts and equity dilution). However, most start-ups do raise funding, especially as they grow larger and scale their operations.