Inside the Tamil show turning startups into household names

Startup Singam is a Tamil pitch show on Star Vijay (Vijay TV), additionally streaming on JioHotstar.

The show’s title observe slips an instruction into the refrain: “To succeed in the dream, knock on the door”. Its premise is that the knock could be in Tamil—nevertheless it nonetheless opens the door to individuals who communicate in English, in metros.

Kannan, an electronics and instrumentation engineering graduate (class of 2008), spent virtually 15 years in IT earlier than quitting on 18 Could 2025, when his month-to-month wage was about ₹5 lakh.

In 2021, again dwelling for a temple pageant in Nambiyanvilai village, in Tirunelveli district, he watched about 30 palm timber being lower down in bulk. He’d been seeing palms lower since childhood. This time, he stopped and requested why.

The farmer was afraid of what the fruit attracted. Fallen fruit drew wild pigs; the pigs destroyed the peanut crop subsequent door.

“My concern is barely the palm fruit,” the farmer instructed him. Harvest it—eat it as an ice apple, faucet the tree for neera—simply hold the fruit from bringing the pigs.

Then, he made a proposal: Kannan might entry roughly 200 timber without cost, as a result of the farmer was shedding greater than he was gaining.

Palm Period’s innovation was not flashy. It was sensible. Palm jaggery clumps, sweats, not like white sugar. The corporate’s resolution was to show it into a advantageous granular powder—free‑flowing, with out components. The choice started with the climate (blocks soften; fungus seems) and with a home absurdity: a good friend tried to crack a tough block with a hammer and broke a kitchen stone as a substitute. Kannan determined the model ought to do the breaking.

His different company reflex was packaging. In order for you an unglamorous ingredient to learn as premium—if you need it on “elite folks’s plate,” as he put it—you make it appear to be it belongs there. Inside six or seven months, an organization in the United Arab Emirates supplied ₹25 lakh for the model and packaging even whereas he was shedding cash. Kannan referred to as his father and joked, “Dad, I’m getting a automobile.” His father requested him: “Is that this what you’ve been struggling for all lately?”

The wrestle, for Kannan, is much less about jaggery than palms. He comes from a palm-climbing neighborhood. In his village, he was the first engineer. Climbers in 2021 earned round ₹20,000 a month—and just for about 4 months of the season—after spending hours up the tree morning and night. Palm Period’s “premium” story, he mentioned, was constructed to vary that math. He says climbers working with him now make roughly ₹1–1.5 lakh a month in season, immediately benefiting about 40–50 households.

Kannan virtually didn’t find yourself on Startup Singam. The primary e-mail from the show’s staff, he assumed, was spam. It was solely after he gained a social influence startup award from Startup Tamil Nadu in 2023 that the state’s startup staff nudged him to use in early 2024.

View Full Picture

Startup Singam’s first season, which premiered on 26 January 2025, ran like a weekly funnel: 13 episodes, three startups per episode—39 startups. However the funnel has a time lag. Kannan mentioned his shoot was accomplished in January and broadcast later. For him, the extra significant lag wasn’t the paperwork; it was belief—whether or not “funding speak” truly revered what founders had already constructed.

The digital camera, after all, wished the ritual ending: a quantity, applause, the neat fiction that capital arrives on schedule. However by the time Kannan walked onto that set, the romance of “funding” had already worn skinny.

Earlier than Startup Singam, he mentioned, his first severe investor dialog left him shaken. Palm Period’s income then was about ₹17 lakh a yr. His personal cash already inside the enterprise was nearer to ₹80 lakh—equipment alone costing roughly ₹50 lakh.

When the valuation speak got here, he remembered, “they have been talking solely about the income… they didn’t even contemplate the quantity which I invested.”

He referred to as it “the worst expertise.” He went dwelling “fully down,” and determined he would relatively look ahead to break-even—round ₹1.8 crore a yr, by his estimate—than take cash that didn’t perceive what he had constructed.

That skepticism formed how he approached the show. He didn’t wish to conform to an funding “inside three or 4 minutes”. Earlier than he stepped onto the set, he insisted on “5, six rounds” of dialog with the investor group. He’d agreed to lift ₹50 lakh, he mentioned. After which, about half an hour earlier than filming, was requested to think about ₹1 crore as a substitute. The ₹1 crore on-air dedication didn’t lastly shut, he mentioned, after delays pushed it previous his harvest season. So he selected to maneuver on.

What he remembers most now isn’t the stagecraft. It’s the aftermath. His episode aired on 2 March 2025—his birthday week—and by late afternoon, he was influenza-positive and vomiting, flat in mattress for 3 or 4 days, whereas the web site crammed up. He counted “3,000 to 4,000″ calls and messages. Earlier than the show, month-to-month gross sales hovered round ₹3–4 lakh; on the day of the telecast, it touched roughly ₹7 lakh.

The surge didn’t cease with the broadcast. He mentioned the pitch clip hit Instagram round 5 p.m., and by the subsequent morning, it had crossed two million views.

By Could 2025, when he give up his job, Palm Period was doing about ₹20 lakh a month. By January 2026, it was round ₹50 lakh a month. The staff had grown from six folks to 24. “Startup Singam gave me the push,” he mentioned, including that the visibility helped him shut an outdoor spherical in late 2025 with an impact-focused investor group primarily based in Bengaluru.

It’s why his recommendation to different founders is sort of anticlimactic: don’t go “only for an funding.” Go for the window. Mass media makes a enterprise legible to individuals who would by no means open a pitch deck.

Constructing the platform

Balachandar R., often called Bala, the show’s co-founder at Baanhem Ventures, frames Startup Singam as a market failure, not a TV-format alternative.

“The issue is startups are usually not discovering buyers and buyers are usually not discovering startups,” he mentioned. Tamil Nadu isn’t quick on entrepreneurship; it’s quick on capital that reliably reveals up the place founders are. Cash, in his metaphor, behaves like an impatient traveler: “Folks simply land in the airport, go to IIT, come out to the airport and return from Tamil Nadu.”

Bala’s pitch, he instructed me, wasn’t “let’s make a show.” It was: let’s construct a platform—tv as the entrance door to teaching, mentorship, pre-due diligence, deal-making.

He described pitching it for 2 years, dwelling via rejections, and placing in a few crore together with his co-founder Hemachandran L. In a single early try, he mentioned, they tried to accomplice with the authorities; it collapsed when officers wished management—screening episodes and sending them again with cuts.

That’s after they went to see Kumar Vembu, the founding father of GoFrugal Applied sciences and Mudhal Companions. Bala pitched him for an hour. Vembu backed the enterprise early, giving the show’s creators sufficient runway to maneuver from a pitch to a telecast. When the first episode aired, Bala watched it together with his youngsters and cried—he mentioned it felt like a burden had lifted after two years of carrying the undertaking.

Kumar Vembu says he invested in Startup Singam in October 2024 as a result of he appreciated the premise: a market that would velocity up funding for founders whose journeys stall between conferences and time period sheets. What shocked him later was how rapidly the show turned a living-room behavior. Recovering from surgical procedure, he watched the first telecast at dwelling together with his spouse, daughter, and 79-year-old mom. His mom usually retains TV serials on in the background, he mentioned, however she watched the full hour, requested questions throughout the breaks, and the subsequent week, completed her chores early so she wouldn’t miss it.

View Full Picture

Gaps and phrases

Startup Singam’s numbers break up into two buckets: what will get dedicated on tv, and what truly will get deployed after time period sheets and due diligence. Bala mentioned Season 1 generated about ₹45–50 crore in on‑air commitments (together with debt devices), and that about ₹23 crore had been deployed at the time of this interview. In a message this week, he mentioned deployed capital has since risen to ₹24 crore, and will finish Season 1 at about ₹26 crore, with the hole pushed by due diligence points, closing situations, or closing phrases that don’t maintain.

In the meantime, the show’s essential work occurs backstage. Founders undergo bootcamps. Bala described the “unseen work” that occurs earlier than filming.

“The best way they have been prepared on TV … was not the manner they have been prepared the first day they approached us,” he mentioned. He additionally pointed to the operational backbone. “We have been fortunate to get Arun (Nair) come on board as the CEO,” he mentioned.

Nair, in the previous, has constructed founder and investor communities, working with TiE Kerala, the Kerala Angel Community and the Kerala chapter of the NASSCOM 10,000 Startups programme.

Toys to well being necklace

The clearest proof of that infrastructure just isn’t the cheque; it’s what founders do with the consideration it brings.

Arthi Raguram, founder of non-public care product model Deyga, mentioned that she constructed the firm from a private drawback (pimples) into a client model. She started making charcoal cleaning soap at dwelling as a teen, then scaled from there. The identify, she defined, comes from a Tamil phrase for the physique: “The physique is known as deham.” She described herself as coming from a tier‑3 metropolis and mentioned that 97% of her workforce is ladies.

Raguram didn’t come to the show to lift capital—Deyga is bootstrapped and worthwhile—however for visibility and buyer consciousness, she talked about.

View Full Picture

Bharat and Shruti, co-founders of the medical-products firm B-Arm Medical Applied sciences, described fundraising much less as a trophy than as an working actuality. The corporate was primarily B2B at first, then it watched a D2C competitor of their class pull far forward on spending and determined they couldn’t compete “as a money sport” with out capital. Shruti traced her product obsession to her postpartum journey—discomfort, hormonal shifts, and despair. B-Arm Medical Applied sciences, she claimed, is already worthwhile—about ₹60 lakh a month—and initiatives roughly ₹7 crore in turnover this yr.

On stage, ₹6.85 crore was dedicated. Nair mentioned the firm continues to be in diligence. The founders are actually taking ahead a ₹5 crore elevate, which was the authentic ask.

Vasanth Tamilselvan, who runs Ariro Toys, framed the show’s worth as distribution: the platform’s consideration modifications how different folks negotiate—retail, landlords, distributors—lengthy earlier than a founder has “earned” belief the gradual manner. Ariro makes Montessori-based picket toys. It started due to his daughter’s atopic dermatitis and a mistrust of plastic.

In 2018, at the Shanghai toy honest, he mentioned they got here again “very unhappy,” as a result of “80% of toys in India… have been export rejected merchandise.” Then BIS certification turned obligatory, and “in a single day… 90% of the toys acquired killed.” He additionally supplied the clear warning: many on-air offers die later. In 2023, he mentioned, Ariro practically shut down; to maintain it alive, he pledged private property.

Selvan, too, didn’t cite an on‑air quantity raised to this author.

Senthilkumar Murugesan and Dinesh Pandian, founders of Save Mother, a maternal care platform, constructed the firm after watching a pregnant sister get swallowed by hospital ready.

“We have been ready virtually five-six hours to get a three-minute session from the physician,” Senthilkumar recalled. On the show, he held up Allowear, a wearable machine designed to watch the well being of pregnant ladies and kids.

He defined why this wasn’t a smartwatch. “It’s a sensor. And this can be a necklace.” Then he mentioned the line that explains why the platform’s language mission isn’t beauty: “In the show, that is the first time I’m giving my pitch in Tamil.”

His dad and mom had watched his English shows; they didn’t perceive. “Due to the show… they actually perceive what I’m doing.”

For Save Mother, the deployed quantity at ₹2.97 crore was properly above what was promised on stage.

Save Mother has onboarded “three lakh moms,” with round 7,000 high-risk pregnancies given the wearable, manufactured in India via a licensed accomplice in Pune. After the show, he mentioned, city clients who pays further turned a option to subsidize the rural work his firm started with.

The locked door

Preethi Shashikumar first discovered what it means to lose an organization with out ever leaving her telephone. She was three months into a shapewear model she’d began with a faculty good friend; their Instagram web page had climbed to round 30,000 followers. That they had every put in ₹1 lakh to start out, she mentioned. Then, sooner or later, she opened the app and landed on the flawed facet of a login display screen. The OTP went to her co-founder. The password modified. The model identify—registered quietly, preemptively—was abruptly not hers. She requested for closure and was instructed to take her ₹1 lakh and disappear.

This can be a form of theft that doesn’t require a break-in. You don’t steal the store; you steal the keys.

She referred to as her good friend. No reply. So she referred to as her good friend’s father. He started gently. 9-to-5 jobs; weekends; possibly the U.S. After which the tone snapped. “You’re not match for doing enterprise,” he instructed her. “My daughter is match for doing enterprise.” After which he laughed. “Like a villain in the cinema,” Shashikumar mentioned.

She returned to her company job and constructed the subsequent firm, one other shapewear label, in the hours that didn’t belong to anybody else.

Orders have been packed by household again in Coimbatore. The corporate that emerged from that betrayal grew: from about ₹1.2 crore in her first monetary yr to ₹6.5 crore, then ₹16.5 crore, projecting ₹23–25 crore. She expanded offline too: “Now now we have 5 offline shops,” she mentioned, and she or he had already signed three extra franchises.

View Full Picture

Then she pivoted by listening. “70% of my clients then acquired pregnant,” she mentioned. A buyer messaged her: she wished to purchase, however she was pregnant—what ought to she put on?

Shashikumar ran polls and constructed what they requested for. “We launched maternity attire,” she mentioned, “and we acquired a turnover of ₹5 lakh in 5 days.”

Fundraising, she instructed me, nonetheless felt like a closed ritual carried out by different folks. She wished to go on Shark Tank India. She couldn’t. “You must communicate Hindi,” she mentioned. Startup Singam—lion in Tamil—supplied a special entrance door. “Now I do know the route,” she mentioned after becoming a member of Season 2—not as a result of somebody handed her a test on air, however as a result of the platform launched her to investor communities she didn’t know existed, and demystified the course of.

The route, once more

It’s tempting to speak about capital as the bottleneck. In lots of founders’ lives, it isn’t the first one. The primary bottleneck is legitimacy—the sense that cash strikes via rooms you’ve by no means been invited into, in a language you don’t communicate.

Startup Singam doesn’t promise to repair each locked door. It guarantees one thing narrower: that the subsequent time a founder hits one—buyers, phrases, diligence—the founder will a minimum of know what the lock is known as.

Kannan mentioned that after his episode aired, 30 or 40 folks from his district set his clip as their WhatsApp standing. He hadn’t even instructed most individuals upfront. His father—who had as soon as requested whether or not he was a idiot to depart IT for jaggery—didn’t ship a giant speech. He merely put his son’s video on his personal WhatsApp standing. Later, the father requested one query: “Are you advantageous?”