Mangaluru launches ‘Bolpu’ initiative to find, fund, and foster local entrepreneurs. Photo: H.S. Manjunath
The Member of Parliament from Dakshina Kannada, Capt Brijesh Chowta, has launched an initiative titled ‘Bolpu’ to empower start-ups and early-stage ventures based in Dakshina Kannada district.
Named after the Tulu language word Bolpu, which means both ‘light’ and ‘morning’, the initiative offers a complete support ecosystem such as funding, mentorship, market access, and ongoing advisory to help entrepreneurs build, launch, and scale innovative products and services that can thrive locally and expand nationally and globally.
Launching the initiative in Mangaluru on Saturday, Capt Chowta said Bolpu aims to nurture 50 entrepreneurs over five years across more than 10 sectors through mentorship, visibility, and funding access.
Stating that Bolpu is about finding, funding, and fostering new entrepreneurs in Mangaluru, he said it will support new ideas, ventures and thoughts with support from policy, legal, and regulatory perspectives, by plugging in various government programmes and schemes.
Over a period of time, he said, Bolpu should be a community-driven platform where everyone from the region owns it, and it should not just be programme of the MP’s office.
Terming Bolpu as a new dawn of dawn of opportunity for entrepreneurship spirit of the land, Capt Chowta said Bolpu is not just about identifying new ideas, it is also about nudging the people of the region to take up ideas that are relevant today, ideas that can be scalable business models and get people involved in to make it a movement.
Bolpu wants to help women and young entrepreneurs to make their dreams come true. The intention is to give them the requisite support where their ventures can be scaled up to a larger venture.
He said the team behind Bolpu wants to create some success stories from Mangaluru in the next five years. Every year, the initiative will pick up around 10 ventures. “Over a period of five years, we have 50 success stories from Mangaluru,” he said.
Bolpu will reach out to different educational institutions, incubation centres, industry bodies to extend their cooperation in this initiative.
Giving details about how Bolpu’s one-year cohort works, Johnson Tellis, CEO of InUnity and one of the core members of Bolpu team, said the entire programme is divided into three stages: find, fund, and foster.
Bolpu will identify different businesses that are currently out there working in sectors that are very core to Mangaluru. The initial phase will focus on designing an entire programme that helps transform the mindset of entrepreneurs and then help them to create a new business model and help them grow. Capabilities will also be built to ensure that they can take the kind of exposure that is being given.
In the next phase, it will be ensured that these entrepreneurs get right resources, either in terms of mentoring or access to all the funding sources.
The final phase is about making this programme open and ongoing, and not just a one-time initiative. While helping the selected entrepreneurs improve their skills, Bolpu wants to connect them with the new ones. That way they can help and support others, like the way they were supported. Bolpu aims to create a cycle where each cohort supports the next one. This will help develop a community that grows together.
Tellis said the whole Bolpu programme would be designed by partners who are working in global companies or consulting with them. This will help the entrepreneurs scale globally.
Published on July 12, 2025