Hyderabad, Jul 29 (IANS): WE HUB, India's first state-led incubator launched by the Telangana government to foster and promote women entrepreneurship, on Wednesday launched three new programmes for students and tech-based startups.

Telangana Minister for Industry and Information Technology, K.T. Rama Rao, formally inaugurated the programmes -- Greater 50%, Girls in Steam and WE Alpha -- in the presence of Principal Secretary, IT department, Jayesh Ranjan, and Deepthi Ravula, CEO, WE HUB.

Greater 50% is an initiative by FICCI Flo to provide mentoring and business development support to women entrepreneurs.

WE Hub along with FICCI Flo will kick off a pre-incubation programme to incubate 100 aspiring women entrepreneurs and a separate incubation programme for 20 established startups across India.

In order to create a funnel for women entrepreneurs in the fields of data science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and allied domains, WE HUB in collaboration with WiDS (Women in Data Science), Stanford University, will run a cohort of 100 school students from five cities in India.

To create a funnel for girl students to take up entrepreneurship as a mainstream functionality, WE Hub along with five technical educational institutions across Telangana has devised an extensive programme to support 50 students via entrepreneurial development programmes, mentor-support and exposure visits.

Followed by the launches, a tech show was conducted where 22 tech-based startups exhibited their products. The event also included the graduation of four cohorts of preincubation, incubation and acceleration programmes.

Appreciating the diversity, range and ambition that WE HUB's graduating women entrepreneurs exhibited in the tech event, Rama Rao hoped that the first women-led unicorn will be from India and from the WE HUB in Telangana.

"Through these new programmes launched by WE HUB, including with the educational institutes, we will encourage innovation from a very young age across the country," he said.