Easwari Startup Peravai opens in Ramapuram on 30 October. Here is what the two days actually list

Chennai, 18 October 2026 — Easwari Startup Peravai, the student startup summit launched last month at Easwari Engineering College, opens on the Ramapuram campus on Friday 30 October and runs through Saturday 31 October.

The public catalogue lists seven sessions, from a CUMTA transport hackathon to a women-focused cohort and a two-day pitch. A visitor pass is priced at free on the registration screen. An event pass is ₹499. Contest fees sit on top of that, from ₹200 to ₹1,500.

The earliest clock on the catalogue is 9:00 AM. A closing time is not published.

The college’s own site calls this Tamil Nadu’s biggest student startup summit and prints 8,000+ participants, 100+ founders and leaders, and an investment commitment of up to ₹1 crore. Those are organiser projections. Nothing in the September launch report, or on the catalogue, turns them into a count of people already registered or money already sanctioned.

The poster is the organiser’s cover. Partners printed on it include StartupTN, TN RISE, and iTNT.

A practical listing, with halls and phones, is on the events page.

The host is Easwari Engineering College (Autonomous), an SRM Group institution on Bharathi Salai, Ramapuram, Chennai 600089. The college’s brochure says it was established in the academic year 1996–97, is affiliated to Anna University, and describes 15 undergraduate and 7 postgraduate programmes. It also describes a flagship ABB robotics centre. Those lines are the institution’s account of itself.

Peravai — பேரவை, a gathering — is the name the students and the college have given the summit. The site’s own line is “for the students, by the students,” in the college’s September launch posts, and the about-page calls it a bridge between classrooms and investors, with an explicit reach into tier-2 and tier-3 towns.

The partner named on the launch posts is StartupTN, the state startup mission under the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises department. The October brochure also puts TN RISE, iTNT (the Tamil Nadu Technology Hub), and a women-and-children emblem on the cover.

Event queries go to Hemachandra on 97890 34548, or office@startupperavai.in. Technical support is 70109 97679.

The homepage does not say a single cheque of ₹1 crore will be handed out on 31 October. The sentence under the figure is longer. It says promising startups will get access to funding, incubation, mentorship, and investment through three routes: the in-house Dr R. Shivakumar Research and Innovation Foundation, government grants, and “our network of investors and ecosystem partners.”

That foundation is the same Section 8 incubator the college named in May, when it hosted the Naturals Beauty Tech Hackathon. Winning teams there were offered six months of incubation through it. The ₹1 crore line at Peravai is a commitment the organiser is advertising. It is not a published sanction order, and it is a different number from the ₹1.5 crore the SRM Easwari Alumni Association contributed toward the Innovation Centre building.

Peravai is new. The college does not have a 2024 or 2025 edition to point to. The documented start is Friday 18 September 2026, on the same campus.

That morning the college inaugurated the SRM Easwari Innovation Centre. Chennaionline’s report the same day names the chief guest as P. Viswanathan, Minister for Higher Education. With him: Dr R. Shivakumar, chairman; Geetha Shivakumar, vice-chairperson; S. Niranjan, co-chairman of the SRM Group institutions at Chennai Ramapuram and Trichy; and principal Dr P. Deiva Sundari.

The programme opened the centre, unveiled a board, and lit the kuthuvilakku. The alumni association’s ₹1.5 crore is recorded in that report as support for the building. Labs opened the same day: a PCB lab, a 3D-printing lab, a machinery lab, and a wood-cutter and fabrication room. The report then records two startup launches in the same function: an Easwari StartupTN pre-incubation centre, and Startup Peravai, described there as a startup conclave.

The college’s LinkedIn posts the next day repeat the minister’s launch and add the line the site still uses: ideas should be something students do, not only something they hear about, with a stated emphasis on women entrepreneurs and students from smaller cities.

The Peravai homepage also carries a caption of the team with the MSME minister and the StartupTN chairman. It does not name either person or date that meeting. This report does not supply the names.

StartupTN itself is older than this summit.

Tamil Nadu’s first startup policy ran from 2018. A nodal mission came later. ThePrint’s account of the 2023 policy, published on 21 September 2023, describes StartupTN as the agency launched in 2021 inside the MSME department. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin released the Tamil Nadu Startup and Innovation Policy 2023 that week. The 2023 document is the one that carried a ₹100-crore co-creation fund and a set of inclusion instruments. It is state policy. It is not a budget line inside Peravai.

Sivarajah Ramanathan took charge as mission director and CEO on 5 January 2022. He left in June 2026. The News Minute reported on 25 June that the government had accepted his resignation and given additional charge of the CEO’s post to L. Nirmal Raj, Industries Commissioner, until further orders. Ramanathan’s own account, which that report carries, says DPIIT-recognised startups in Tamil Nadu grew from 2,032 in 2021 to more than 14,700 during his tenure. That is StartupTN’s figure for the state, not a Ramapuram registration count.

The first StartupTN pre-incubation centre Ramanathan himself inaugurated was at Thiagarajar School of Management in Madurai, in February 2025, as part of a stated plan for many such centres. Easwari’s pre-incubation centre, opened on 18 September 2026, sits in that programme. It is the Ramapuram node, not the first node in Tamil Nadu.

The Peravai guest row lists Singai G. Ramachandran as chairperson of StartupTN. That title is what the summit site prints. This desk has not matched it to a government order in the sources used here, and it is a different post from the CEO’s chair Nirmal Raj was asked to hold in June.

Three earlier campus events are the brochure’s “previous events” page. Two of them have dates in the college’s own posts. One does not.

Naturals Beauty Tech Hackathon, 15 and 16 May 2026. The Department of Information Technology and the Shivakumar foundation hosted it at the TRP Auditorium with Naturals Salon & Spa and StartupTN. The college called it a 36-hour AI hackathon for beauty and wellness, from 9:30 AM. The college’s valedictory post names Team Beauty IQ as winner at ₹1,00,000, a first runner-up from IIIT Naya Raipur at ₹50,000, and second runners-up at ₹25,000, including teams from Easwari, Anna University, Ramco Institute of Technology, and Mindrix AI, Coimbatore. Actress Aishwarya Rajesh and chairman Dr R. Shivakumar were at the valedictory. StartupTN’s later post says 50 teams took part, 12 reached the final, and six winners shared a pool of over ₹2 lakh, with six months of incubation at the Shivakumar foundation. Its winner list names BeautyIQ (₹1 lakh), SkinSense AI (₹50,000), and Style Sage, ZenithZ, Mindtrix AI, and AR Frontiers at ₹25,000 each. The two posts agree on the top of the prize table and describe the same hackathon. They do not use the same set of names underneath.

AI Day for Startups 2026. The Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science posted a conclusion on 6 June 2026. It describes the day as the first such Google for Developers and StartupTN programme hosted in Chennai at the college. The welcome on that account was by Enisha Kalita of Google. The opening keynote was by Sivarajah Ramanathan, who was still mission director that week. A panel on AI stacks included Vishesh Rajaram (Speciale Invest), Viswanath Ganesan (Yoloworks), Alex Duraisamy (TCS), and Murali Sethuraman (HCLTech), moderated by Shakthi Kumar of Renambl. Suraj Pujari of Google Cloud took a session on Google’s AI stack and, with Belal Khan and Jitendra Gupta, launched a “Build with Google AI” hackathon. The post does not print a separate calendar date from the day of the write-up.

Startup Mudhal Padi. The brochure calls this an idea-stage competition at the college, with mentoring and a pitch. It does not print a date. A photograph on the same spread shows a board that reads Startup Mudhal Padi and a ₹25,000 cash-prize line. That is all the brochure establishes. It is a different event from StartupTN’s Mudhal Padi 2.0 hackathon for Karur, Erode, and Tiruppur, which was scheduled for 25 September 2026. The names rhyme. The geographies do not.

The catalogue at startupperavai.in/events is the page a student pays against. On 18 October it had seven sessions. Brochure lines that do not appear there are kept separate, below.

Hackathon. The Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority is the named partner. The brief is 24 hours to prototype something about how Chennai moves: streets, public transport, commuters, technology. Problem statements come out on the day. The team leader registers and pays for the members. ID cards are mandatory, and the rules say teams report 15 minutes early. Unfair or copied work is grounds for disqualification, and the judges’ decision is final.

Rupees to Reality. Teams get a virtual budget and a price list of Idea Lab equipment. They do not receive the equipment in the room. They design a project against one or more UN Sustainable Development Goals and are judged on the idea, the resource plan, creativity, and whether it could be built. The page says the winning team can try to build it at the Innovation Centre during Peravai. The rules block under that description is still placeholder Latin. This report does not treat that Latin as the rules.

Pitch Perfect. In partnership with Nebula. Day 1 is a preliminary pitch: problem, solution, model, market. Day 2 is a finale in front of investors for whoever is shortlisted. Five minutes to present, three minutes of questions, slides as PPT or PDF, prototypes encouraged. Here the site disagrees with itself. The fee field is ₹500. The rules paragraph says the team leader pays ₹700. Pay only after the checkout shows one figure.

ScaleUp Studio. Teams pick an existing brand and rebuild its identity, design, technology, and business model for a younger market, then present to a jury. The rules block on this page is also unfinished, including a heading that still reads “nee solu” above Latin filler. The description above that block is the part that is written.

Design Thinking Bootcamp. A workshop for students who have an idea, or only a problem, led on the page by Lavanya G, described there as an entrepreneurship coach. The method it names is the usual one: user, problem, assumptions, test. The fee field is ₹500. The rules underneath are Latin placeholder text, including lines about certification and laptops that sit inside that placeholder. Do not plan around those lines until the college replaces them.

The Art of Selling Nothing. Solo. You are handed an illogical product on the spot and asked to sell it. Scoring, as written, covers audience, pitch, persuasion, branding, and composure. Fee ₹200. The product is not disclosed in advance, which is the point of the session.

Rise Her. The description says a women-only cohort, mentorship, and a path to stay inside TN RISE after the summit. The rules line on the same card says the session is “open to all interested participants.” Both sentences are on the organiser’s page. A student who is deciding whether the hall is women-only should ask Hemachandra before paying ₹200. The fee field and the hall (MBA Seminar Hall 1, both days from 9:00 AM) are unambiguous. The eligibility line is not.

The registration screen has two products.

Contest fees are listed separately, so a hackathon team should expect the event-pass gate and the ₹1,500 catalogue fee, with the team leader paying for members. The site does not print a worked example of the final Razorpay total. The checkout is the number that counts.

Terms on the homepage: a pass is shown at the gate; it cannot be refunded or transferred; if you enter two sessions, overlapping clocks are your problem; the college can change the schedule; and it is not liable for a cancellation caused by weather, a government order, or an emergency.

The site’s “Our guests” strip, with the titles it prints:

• Mohan K, co-founder, IppoPay
• C.K. Kumaravel, co-founder, Naturals Salon & Spa
• Singai G. Ramachandran, listed as chairperson, StartupTN
• Dilip Kumar Devanathan, senior vice president, HCL Technologies
• Balaji Arumugam, founder and CEO, Big Bucks Innovation
• Rajalingam Rathinam, founder, director and chairman, NestOne Group
• Reji Joseph, CEO, Infinity Advisors
• Rohini Manohar, founder, Chennai Yoga Studio and Mitra Yoga Fest
• Bharathan Prahalad, HR leader, Aziro (formerly MSys Technologies)

There is no session grid that places these nine in a hall at a time. Treat the strip as the college’s invited-guest list, and expect it to move. The terms already reserve that right.

A different page in the brochure is headed “Our previous guests.” Those names belong to earlier campus programmes, not automatically to 30 October. The page includes Dr A. Amalraj, IPS, then Commissioner of Police, Greater Chennai; Adityaram of the Adityaram Group; Subrata Karmakar of ABB Robotics India; Enisha Kalita of Google; Rajendran Dandapani of Zoho; Dawn Ohlson of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in the UK; Vinod Krishnan of TVS Next; Dhandapani Rajabathar of Embien; and Dr Subramani Ramakrishnan of the UPS India Technology Centre. Enisha Kalita’s name also sits on the June AI Day write-up, which is why she is in both places.

The brochure’s collaborator page is wider than the seven sessions.

The registration form inside the site still has an attendee role labelled “Shark Tank Participant.” The public catalogue does not list a shark-tank session. Until it does, Startup Singam’s tank is a brochure line, not a hall you can book.

Other marks on the ecosystem page, without a session attached, include TN Skill, JETRO, Aspire for Her, Impactree, ICC, Overqualified Housewives, Logitech, and TN WESAFE. The college’s centres-of-excellence page in the same PDF is a map of existing industry labs (ABB, Ansys, Cadence, Cisco, Hitachi, Nokia, Oracle, Siemens, and others). Those labs are part of the campus. They are not, on this document, a menu of Peravai workshops.

The brochure also says the college and StartupTN have already run a Naturals beauty hackathon, Startup Mudhal Padi, and a Google AI summit. The first and the third match the May and June record above.