Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management, Mangaluru

Start at SHINE, not at the college site

The incubation side of Sahyadri lives at SHINE Foundation, and the college's own website does not link to it. Go to SHINE's site to see which programmes are open, or write to shine@sahyadri.edu.in.

Pick the right door

• You have a Karnataka-registered company with a working product or early customers: the Karnataka Acceleration Network cohort is the one to apply to. Download the cohort brochure from SHINE's home page first — it lists the criteria and what each module covers.
• You are an early-stage innovator in a smaller city and want an entrepreneur-in-residence place: Genesis EiR is applied for on the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's own portal, reached from SHINE's home page.
• You are earlier than either, and still validating: ask about the standing incubation programme. It has no application page, so email the enquiry inbox and describe where you are.
• You are a student at the college: the New Age Innovation Network centre, the innovation council and the entrepreneurship cell are the internal routes, not the ones above.

What the acceleration cohort asks for

Read the criteria carefully before you spend time on the form. The cohort asks for a startup registered in Karnataka, and it explicitly excludes One Person Companies — if that is how you are incorporated, sort that out first. It also asks that you be past the idea stage, with a working product, a proof of concept or early traction, and that founders be working on the business full time rather than alongside a job. Innovation-led, tech-enabled solutions are what it is looking for; no single sector is named.

What to have ready

• Your certificate of incorporation, showing Karnataka registration and your company type.
• A short account of what you have built and what has been proved so far — a demo, a pilot, first users or first revenue.
• Whether you have raised anything yet, and what you would do with a pilot customer.
• Who is full time, and who is not.

How selection works

Neither programme publishes its selection process or its dates. The acceleration cohort's own material describes what happens once you are in — four modules, weekly mentor reviews with milestone tracking, local market pilots, pitch coaching and a demo day — but not how applicants are picked or when applications close. The application form is behind a sign-in, so you cannot see from outside whether a round is still taking entries. If the timing matters to you, call or email SHINE and ask before you start writing.

Two things to check yourself

• Sahyadri has three separate innovation bodies on one campus — SHINE Foundation, the Atal Community Innovation Centre set up as ACIC Sahyadri Foundation in September 2026, and the state-sanctioned innovation network centre. They publish no shared contact page, so say which one you are asking about.
• If you are building hardware, ask specifically about the in-house engineering companies on campus and the prototyping and PCB facilities. That support is described on the college's pages rather than on SHINE's, so it may not come up unless you raise it.

Sahyadri College of Engineering & Management is an autonomous engineering and management college on a 35-acre campus at Adyar, Mangaluru, in Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka. It was established in 2007 by Bhandary Foundation (R), a trust set up in 2001. Its incubation work is run by a separate company it created for the purpose: Sahyadri Hub for Innovations and Entrepreneurship, known as SHINE Foundation, a Section 8 company that supports startups and industries emerging from the region.

SHINE is the part of Sahyadri that a founder deals with. It has its own website and its own enquiry inbox, and it is the body that runs the programmes below. One point worth knowing before you start: the college website does not link to SHINE's site anywhere, so most visitors never find it. If you are looking for the incubation side of Sahyadri, go to SHINE directly.

How programmes work

SHINE currently advertises two programmes you can apply to, and each has its own way in rather than a single shared portal.

The first is the Karnataka Acceleration Network, or KAN, a startup acceleration programme run by the Government of Karnataka and the Karnataka Digital Economy Mission. SHINE is the execution partner for the Mangaluru cluster, and the college says it is one of six partner accelerators across the network. Cohort 3 is the current round. It runs as four structured modules delivered under the mission's guidelines, with weekly mentorship reviews, pilot opportunities with industry and government, pitch coaching and a demo day, and workspace access.

The second is Genesis EiR 3.0, an entrepreneur-in-residence round under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's GENESIS scheme. The college says the ministry has approved it under GENESIS to find and grow startups in Tier-II and Tier-III cities. Applications for this one are made on the ministry's own portal, not on Sahyadri's site.

Alongside those, SHINE describes a standing incubation programme for early-stage companies validating a product, offering mentorship, networking, co-working space and help getting ready for funding. It has no separate application page, so the enquiry inbox is the route in.

Who can apply

This matters, because a college-hosted centre can be either open to the public or closed to its own students, and Sahyadri is both at once depending on which door you use.

KAN is open to outside founders. Its published criteria ask for a Karnataka-registered startup, other than a One Person Company, that is MVP-ready, proof-of-concept ready or already has early traction; seed-funded or revenue-ready companies; innovation-led, tech-enabled solutions; and founders working on the business full time. Nothing in that list asks you to be a student, an alumnus or otherwise connected to the college. Genesis EiR is a national ministry scheme aimed at founders in smaller cities, and its application sits on the ministry's portal.

Several other things on the campus are internal and are not a route in for an outside founder. The New Age Innovation Network centre sanctioned to the college by the Government of Karnataka's Department of IT, BT and S&T works with the college's own students, taking their ideas to proof of concept. The Entrepreneurship Cell, the Institution's Innovation Council, the student innovation club and the social innovation projects are all for students and faculty. Sahyadri Science Talent Hunt is an annual competition for school and college students, not a startup intake.

A third body arrived in September 2026: ACIC Sahyadri Foundation, which operates an Atal Community Innovation Centre on the campus with support from the Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog. The college lists a 100-seater incubation facility supported by it. It is a separate organisation from SHINE and did not have a website of its own at the time of checking, so treat SHINE's inbox as the way to ask about it.

Facilities

Startups on the programmes get workspace, and co-working space is one of the six services SHINE names. SHINE runs Idea to Prototype labs where founders can turn a design into a working product. The campus around them adds a tinkering space, a Mech-Tech garage, CNC machines and robotic welding, a non-destructive testing lab, rapid prototyping machinery, PCB fabrication with reflow soldering for surface-mount work, gas chromatography, a wave tank, and bio-compost and bio-gas facilities. There is a social innovation centre and a hands-on experience lab, along with conference rooms, meeting rooms, seminar halls and two auditoriums.

The college also runs three companies of its own on campus — an embedded electronics and product design consultancy, an enterprise software firm, and a precision machining and robotic welding manufacturer — and says these in-house industries help startups build a first working product and grow at a reduced rate. That is an unusual thing for a campus to offer and worth asking about if you are building hardware.

Scale

Be careful with the numbers here, because Sahyadri's pages do not agree with each other. SHINE's home page counts 12 startups on campus and 18 graduated, while the paragraph directly below those counters says the foundation houses 22 companies made up of three MSMEs and 19 startups, with 20 more ideas before incubation. The college's about page describes the same 22 as companies established by students on campus and supported by a different state scheme. The college separately reports that 12 LLPs have been incubated and 11 projects funded through the state's New Age Innovation Network. We have not published a total, because no two pages state the same one.

Recognitions

Sahyadri is on the Atal Innovation Mission's own published list of established Atal Community Innovation Centres, for Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka, against the year 2026. It states on its own pages that it is a recognised Host Institute for technology business incubation funding under the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, which matches the ministry's published host institute list. It says the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has approved it under GENESIS. Its Karnataka links run through the state-sanctioned New Age Innovation Network centre and through SHINE's role in the state acceleration network. It does not appear in any of DST's five NIDHI registers, and it does not claim to.

Location

Everything sits on one campus: Sahyadri Campus, Adyar, Mangaluru 575007, on the bank of the Netravati River. The college publishes news and events on its own site. SHINE publishes a phone number and an email address for enquiries, and is on LinkedIn.