The Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kanpur, has partnered with Unicorn Incubator, a South Korean company, to bring UpStart 2025, its flagship business model pitching competition, to the Korean Peninsula. The event also provided an opportunity to gain exposure, mentorship, and resources for South Korean startups, opening a direct door for early-stage founders to access global mentors, investors, and markets.
The event was held in South Korea on Friday, December 12, in KITA Startup Space, COEX, Seoul. The event hosted 12 startups, along with prominent investors and VCs. Evify, one of the Upstart India regional winners, along with the Indian Delegation from Startup India, were also present at this cross-border event, mentioned the press release, adding that the event also marked the first time in the event’s history to be hosted in an international venue, highlighting the growth of UpStart and IIT Kanpur’s Entrepreneurship Cell over the years.
Winners of the five UpStart rounds (Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai & Seoul) will compete with their final pitches during the UpStart finale at the IIT Kanpur campus, during the E-Summit from January 23rd-25th, 2026.
Meanwhile, the placement season at the Indian Institutes of Technology across India has begun, and, according to IIT Kanpur, its students received 672 job offers on December 1, the highest day 1 tally to date. In their ongoing 2025–26 campus placement, IIT-Kanpur has registered a 16% increase over last year’s day-1 placements. With some results still pending, the count is expected to rise further.
These include Pre-Placement Offers (PPOs), reflecting a significant 20% rise in placements compared to the previous season. As per a statement by IITs, PPOs played a major role with 253 offers recorded, marking a strong 27% increase over the last year. Moreover, nine students secured overseas offers.
Over 250 companies have shown interest in hiring IITK students this year, including Accenture, BlackRock, HSBC, SAP, Airbus, PwC, Navi, Qualcomm, and Deutsche Bank, among others.
As per an RTI filed by The Indian Express, 19 of the 23 IITs show that three-fourths of them have seen an increase in the percentage of students placed in 2024-25 compared to the previous year, when there had been a sharp slump in placements across most IITs. This included IIT Kanpur.
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Despite the increase in the placement, numbers for 2024-25 are still below the 2021-22 level across all 19 IITs.
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