The APOGEE English Press sat down with Pranav Girish Morab, the Coordinator of the BITS Embryo, to gain insight into their work prior to the fest.

Pranav explained that Embryo is a student organisation under the Director whose responsibilities for the fest include their flagship event, the APOGEE Innovation Challenge (AIC), wherein Embryo brings in companies that present their problem statements to participants all over the country for prizes. This year, they were set to host companies including Sunmount Solutions, DevSwarm, Luminous, CureBay, FinShots and so on. He further added that  Embryo conducts a Renewable Energy Panel annually, with representatives from solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy companies, along with a hackathon with MapmyIndia, an Indian technological company.

According to Pranav, the previous year had seen the club being unable to conduct any event due to starting work too late, thereby not obtaining any partnerships. This prompted the club to begin planning significantly earlier, leading to this APOGEE being a “significant step up”. Despite this, Pranav revealed that they had faced considerable setbacks due to companies backing out, citing Nykaa and Blinkit as examples.

He also mentioned that he initially wished to conduct the hackathon offline, but due to the lack of a Joint Coordinator this year, much of the burden fell onto his shoulders, causing the idea to fall through. He did, however, add that he hoped future Coordinators would try to move events like AIC into a different domain, such as making them offline, which he believes would be a very strong step for the club.

He elaborated that they had mainly overcome these setbacks through better record maintenance and separating the 2024 and 2025 batches into groups to target sectors and reach out to companies. They began arranging meets every week to map progress and track companies which led to them signing with at least one company from each sector. He went on to mention that most companies appearing for AIC were tech companies that wished to procure bright minds from institutes like BITS.

Another positive for the club was the fact that, since Embryo was completely “non-funded”, they did not rely on APOGEE funding. Since their events were mostly about working with companies, the companies themselves were willing to sponsor the winners’ rewards, which meant that they were completely unaffected by the cancellation of student fest deductions this APOGEE.