The winners from the five UpStart regional rounds - Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Seoul will face off with their final pitch presentations at the UpStart Grand Finale, to be held at the IIT Kanpur campus during E-Summit 2026 from January 23 to 25, 2025. The Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT Kanpur has collaborated with Unicorn Incubator, a South Korea - based firm, to take its flagship business model pitching competition, UpStart 2025, to South Korea. This collaboration provided a stage for South Korean startups to broaden their reach worldwide, get the guidance of experienced people, and have easy access to essential resources. At the same time, it made it possible for early founders to establish relationships with international investors, mentors, and markets.
The South Korea edition of the event took place on Friday, December 12, 2025, at KITA Startup Space, COEX, Seoul. It featured pitches from 12 startups and was attended by leading investors and venture capitalists. Evify, a regional winner from UpStart India, along with an Indian delegation from Startup India, also participated in the cross-border event. According to the press release, this marked the first time UpStart was hosted outside India, showing the expanding reach of both UpStart and IIT Kanpur's Entrepreneurship Cell.
IIT Kanpur Records Highest Ever Day 1 Placements in 2025-26 Season
In the meantime, all Indian Institutes of Technology around the country have begun their campus recruitment. IIT Kanpur made history when it received its maximum number of Day 1 placements on December 1 by receiving 672 job offers. This is a 16% increase over last year for Day 1 placements in the 2025-2026 placement period, and as more results are released, this figure will likely continue to rise.
These stats are inclusive of Pre-Placement Offers (PPOs) that show a significant 20% increase in the number of people placed compared to the last season. As per an official statement of IIT, a large proportion of the Pre-Placement Offers made up a significant share, with the number of such offers recorded standing at 253 marking a strong 27% year-on-year increase. Besides this, nine students were offered jobs overseas.
IIT Kanpur students are currently on the radar of more than 250 companies that want to hire them. Some of the major resource- and service-based companies that are going to recruit at IIT Kanpur include Accenture, BlackRock, HSBC, SAP, Airbus, PwC, Navi, Qualcomm, Deutsche Bank, and many more.
Details collected by means of an RTI query suggest that 19 out of 23 IITs have reported an increase in the ratio of students placed during the academic year 2024–25 as compared to the year previous to that, which was characterized by a steep decline in the number of placements across most IITs. The result of the placement drive at IIT Kanpur was in line with the trend of positivity of other institutions.
Nevertheless, the number of placements for the year 2024–25 at the aggregate level of 19 IITs is still not comparable to that of the 2021–22 academic year when the figures were at their highest despite the overall comeback.
