With the upcoming People and Culture Accelerator, CIIE.CO aims to empower founders with foundational knowledge, tools, frameworks and first principles to safely scale to the next stage. The platform also claimed that it has mentored over 5000 startups, invested in around 350 startups and trained more than 2000 startups as part of its incubation and acceleration programs.
CIIE.CO launches People and Culture Accelerator for 30 startups
CIIE.CO at IIM-Ahmedabad announced that it has launched a first-of-its-kind People and Culture Accelerator to accelerate 30 startups. The 3-month program will include startups across pre-series A – Series B and will include an intensive bootcamp on IIM Ahmedabad campus, bespoke mentoring and various other benefits for startups to overcome a variety of HR-related challenges including hiring, performance management, attrition, formalization, etc.
The firm also added that during the program, startups will focus on various challenges, including but not limited to hiring, attrition, founder’s leadership abilities, culture-building, compensation and benefits, and performance management and appraisals.
“Building a startup is serious work and people are at the centre of everything that startups do. We designed this accelerator to help address a variety of people related challenges that every other startup faces. Over our 20 year journey, we have intentionally built people and culture capacities in our supported startups. We are now opening this to the entire startup ecosystem, hoping to aid startups with tools that can enable them to build bigger and better,” said Supriya Sharma, Partner, CIIE.CO.
IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE.CO partner with SIDBI to launch pre-seed deep tech accelerator fund
IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE.CO and SIDBI have partnered to establish a pre-seed fund, especially for deep-tech start-ups. The MoU signed between the two organisations laid the foundation for the fund with a total corpus of ₹40 crore, equally contributed by both SIDBI and CIIE.CO.
Over the past twenty years, CIIE.CO has been an investor in early-stage ventures in India, investing in more than 350 start-ups, accelerating more than 1,500, and mentoring many more. The organisation’s singular focus has been on backing founders who are building disruptive solutions in their early stages. CIIE.CO’s investments are sector-agnostic, with a broad focus on three thematic areas – deep tech, digitisation, and climate tech.
The partnership was formalised during an event at CIIE.CO, located in IIM Ahmedabad’s New Campus. Attendees included Shri S Ramann, CMD of SIDBI, Prof. Chitra Singla, and Prof. Ankur Sinha from IIM Ahmedabad, Shri S P Singh, CGM of SIDBI, and Kunal Upadhyay, co-founder of CIIE.CO, among others.
CIIE.CO has also been recognised as a Center of Excellence by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. As India continues to position itself as a global leader in deep tech innovation, the partnership between IIMA’s CIIE.CO and SIDBI will play a significant role in strengthening the deep-tech entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country, it said.
India will go from a prepaid to a postpaid economy in next 5 years : Nandan Nilekani
The Reserve Bank of India’s Financial Inclusion Index for 2022 shows an improvement to 56.4 from 53.9 in 2021 across indices like access, usage, and equality. Despite the rise, there’s the scope of much more improvement when it comes to extending financial services to the unbanked population across India. It was to make a difference that CIIE.CO set up the Bharat Inclusion Initiative (BII) in 2018 as a full-stack solution to solve the problem of financial exclusion in India.
Its inaugural Bharat Inclusion Summit, organized in Bengaluru on March 3, served as a platform to reflect on the lessons learned and deliberate on the way forward for inclusive fintech in India. The event brought together industry and policy leaders, research foundations, fintech innovators, and investors to network and create opportunities for collaboration.
Creating financial stability in India
Speaking at the summit, Priyanka Chopra, Chief Operating Officer at CIIE.CO, said, “We recognised that the time was ripe for building for Bharat and created the Bharat Inclusion Initiative as a full-stack platform to attract entrepreneurial energy to solve for Bharat.”
She stated that after supporting over 60 entrepreneurs, who are now serving over 38 million customers, the organisation was convinced that “the moment for Bharat has indeed arrived”.
“CIIE.CO is committed to continuing the conversations that have started and leveraging the platform we have built to create many more solutions that truly include Bharat and meet its unique needs.”
The event showcased numerous conversations, including topics such as financial inclusion through embedded finance, gender inclusion in finance, and implications for the ecosystem. Other focus areas included Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and the future of finance in India, providing smallholder farmers access to credit and insurance, and climate finance’s role in building resilience in Bharat.
The lineup of participants was impressive: Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder and Chairman of Infosys; Ajay Kumar Choudhury, Executive Director, RBI; Suseela Chintala, Chief General Manager, NABARD; Dilip Asbe, CEO, National Payments Corporation of India; Nithin Kamath, Founder, Zerodha; among many others.
The speakers provided thought-provoking insights into holistic financial inclusion and the future of fintech in Bharat.
Dilip Asbe’s fireside chat on ‘Customer Protection: Building a Responsible Digital Payments Ecosystem’ highlighted a necessary trade-off between ease of user flow and customer protection, and the importance of large investments to incentivise mechanisms.
He was followed by Ajay Kumar Choudhury, who, in his fireside chat on ‘CBDC and the Future of Finance in India’, described CBDC as a currency and not any other payment system. “CBDC is going to remove all redundancies, and in the long run is also looking at offline and cross-border transactions. Thus, [we] will seek the support of tech innovators,” he said.
In his chat on ‘Next Frontiers of Financial Inclusion’, Nandan Nilekani said credit was the heartbeat of the economy, adding that taking a loan in India will be as easy as making payments in the next three or four years. “India will go from a prepaid to a postpaid economy in the next five years,” he said.
Speaking about ‘Scaling Zerodha: Lessons on Building for Bharat’, Nithin said they became successful with Zerodha as they were trying to establish the company on an already established platform, and just when digitisation had swept in.
Apart from the fireside chats, the summit also featured several panels exploring the role of enablers in scaling inclusive fintechs and that of climate finance in building resiliency for Bharat.
Workshops on ‘Building Digital Pathways for Inclusive Fintech products’ to discuss how the user experience should be designed when building interfaces for the lower-income segments, and ‘How shall fintechs design products that are intuitive for women customer segments?’ were also part of the programme.
The summit concluded with a networking evening and collaborations with industry stalwarts.
Sanjay Jain, Partner, Bharat Innovation Fund, and Chief Innovation Officer, CIIE.CO, said: “Over the years, BII has worked with 60+ entrepreneurs and backed many different stages. This journey has been insightful; with this initiative, we have explored ideas that have enriched the local ecosystem. Today, the platform we have provided to these young entrepreneurs has grown into a significant movement, and we’re really glad to be a part of it!”
5 incubation centres to give your startup a kickstart
The concept of startup incubators might not be new, but the newfound interest in these centres continues to grow. Just like parents help a child learn how to walk, startup incubation centres enable a startup to nurture its idea and make it into a reality.
There are a few centres in India that really brings out the best of creativity from future entrepreneurs. If you yearn to be an entrepreneur, do have a look at five of the best incubation centres that can give your startup the kickstart it needs.
1. Centre for Innovation Incubation And Entrepreneurship at IIM, Ahmedabad
CIIE Regional Innovation Foundation (CRIF) supports Innovative and Impactful startups in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities of India.
CRIF was set up by the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship CIIE.CO at IIM Ahmedabad, India’s leading incubation and entrepreneurship centre.
CRIF is also a Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India supported Technology Business Incubator.
2. Indian Angel Network
IAN is an equity-based business incubator centre that gives priority to ventures in the areas of healthcare, gaming and animation cloud computing, retail, mobile VAS, media and entertainment, alternative energy, education and clean technology.
It has been established with the support of the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board and the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India.
In addition to the regular functions of a business incubator, the IAN incubator helps startups to get seed funding and pre angel funding through its tie-up with Small Industries Development Bank of India.
3. JECRC Incubation Centre (JIC)
JECRC Incubation Centre is promoting student-driven innovation and start-ups to strengthen the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
JIC envisions fostering an entrepreneur-friendly culture around academics and research by mentoring the incubated startups and evaluating them from time to time.
JECRC Incubation Centre is the first centre in Rajasthan with a well-defined startup policy for students.
4. CEI IIMC
Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CEI) is one of the centres of excellence established by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta.
It aims to accomplish a more prominent understanding of an effective mechanism for the promotion of professional management practices in Indian organizations, as well as to stimulate the development of these startups in India for societal benefit.
5. Technopark TBI
Technopark Technology Business Incubator (T-TBI), is India’s first Non-Academic Business Incubator, hosted and housed inside the Asia Largest IT Park Technopark.
Technopark Technology Business Incubator (T-TBI), a joint association of Technopark, Trivandrum and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, to help the technology business start-ups.
TBI provides startups with fully furnished office spaces, mentoring support in developing business and technology plans, networking of business resources, seed capital assistance, marketing assistance, professional assistance, conference facilities and video conference facilities.
Beyond the Bench: Promise of Indian Legal Tech Startups
The legal system of any country is among one of its distinguishing features. As an industry, the legal domain has been around for centuries. It is a human-centric and process-driven sector that has historically operated in a purely physical format with the additional weight of extensive documentation.
More recently, across the globe, the sector has been opening up to the integration of technology and has witnessed accelerated adoption in the COVID-19 pandemic era. It has been no different for India.
Over 47 million cases are pending across high courts and district courts in the country, yet over 19 million virtual hearings have been performed since the onset of the pandemic in March 2022.
Rooted in colonial laws and burdened by operating inefficiencies, the Indian legal system is ripe for innovation as the country strives towards sustainable economic growth.
As per India’s first comprehensive LegalTech Report titled – Beyond the bench: Promise of Indian legal tech startups” by CIIE.CO – the startup platform built at IIM Ahmedabad, India ranks second in terms of the number of startups, behind the USA, with over 650 LegalTech companies.
It identifies the sector to be a blue ocean of opportunities for investors with growth stage funding pouring in the past couple of years. The report also put forward the macro-level ecosystem changes that are required to unlock the full potential of the legal tech market in India.
With insights and opinions from entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers and law firms, enablers, stakeholders, and subject matter experts, the report outlines the current landscape and highlights promising opportunities in the Indian legal tech sector.
Read more about the potential for Indian Legal Tech Startups on the link below:
CIIE.CO’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative invites applications for 6th Financial Inclusion Lab cohort
CIIE.CO’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative (BII) announced the sixth cohort of Financial Inclusion (FI) Lab to support innovations that aid in making mainstream financial products more inclusive for low-and-middle-income households and women.
FI Lab seeks to support startups and entrepreneurs building for low and middle income (LMI) segments in purpose-driven areas across FinTech, Livelihood, and skilling. The initiative is establishing an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and supporters who are building for Bharat, envisioning innovative, technology-enabled solutions for underserved communities.
Inviting applications for the 6th cohort, the FI lab will offer contextualised bouquet of services including capital support upto INR 25 Lakh for market validation and investor connects alongside expert guidance, technical assistance by MSC Consulting and service partner support worth over INR 50 Lakh.
Key focus areas for this cohort include embedded fintech serving industries such as dairy, agri, construction, skilling etc., solutions that are facilitating savings in financial assets that enable protection against uncertainties and exigencies, and products that are built for scale. The cohort is particularly interested in solutions that are contextualised to the needs of women.
Some successful startups who were a part of the 5th cohort included startups such as CreditHaat, Qonect, FLYK, Microfinance.ai, Arboreum, MissCallPay, Mool, GreyMatter and Yes!poho that are building inclusive credit, savings, payments and livelihood solutions.
Startups selected to the 6th FI Lab cohort can gain guidance from FI Lab’s exclusive Network of 100+ founders and an opportunity to access seed capital via Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund.
Commenting on the Cohort, Priyanka Chopra, COO at CIIE.CO, said “The Financial Inclusion Lab is a critical component of the Bharat Inclusion Initiative ecosystem that we have built over the last five cohorts with our partners. We look forward to supporting the sixth cohort with our networks, experience and expertise to help these startups in their scale-up journey”.
To date, CIIE.CO’s BII has supported 42 startups with the last five FI Lab cohorts. Post participation, these 42 startups have cumulatively raised over $80 million in funding and have served over 30 million customers.
Building an ecosystem of entrepreneurs who are building solutions for Bharat, Bharat Inclusion Initiative (BII) is serving domain knowledge, training, financial support, mentorship and market access they need to bring inclusive, for-profit businesses to life. It supports businesses serving the Indian mass market through programs, fellowships and funding where possible.
CIIE.CO’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative is supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J. P. Morgan, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, MetLife Foundation, Omidyar Network, and is run in collaboration with MSC Consulting.
About CIIE.CO
CIIE CO is the Innovation Continuum spreading from incubation, acceleration, seed, and growth funding to research. Founded at IIM Ahmedabad in 2002, as an academic centre, it has since grown and pivoted to fill the multiple, ever-evolving gaps in the innovation-driven entrepreneurship space in India. Among its various initiatives, CIIE.CO has conceptualised and hosted India’s first and only CleanTech-focused fund, accelerated over 1000 startups, funded over 300 startups, inspired over a million with their publication – Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.
About Bharat Inclusion Initiative
The Bharat Inclusion Initiative (BII) is an effort towards bringing the benefits of technological progress to underserved populations. Led by CIIE.CO, the initiative is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J.P. Morgan, MetLife Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and Omidyar Network. The Initiative focuses on incubating and backing startups that work in areas such as financial inclusion, livelihood, skilling, and health. All startups supported by the Initiative are expected to be using technology as leverage to increase reach and build products that serve the underserved. For ambitious entrepreneurs working on problems of the Bharat market, the Bharat Inclusion Initiative provides domain knowledge, training, financial support, mentorship and market access they need to bring inclusive, for-profit businesses to life. It supports businesses serving the Indian mass market through programs, fellowships and funding where possible.
Build for Bharat Podcast – Inclusivity in India’s digital future
The podcast features bite-sized conversations with the builders and makers of Bharat, like Dr. Pramod Varma from EkStep, Dr. Vivek Raghavan from EkStep Foundation, and Sateesh Palagiri from NPCI among others.
With economic progress, India has created a huge middle-class segment over the past few decades, making digitizing Bharat, one of the world’s most populated countries with 1.3 billion citizens, still a distant dream. However, the urban population benefits from the synergies of power of technology, education, finance, the ability to connect, and government services, giving tremendous opportunities and increasing their technological and financial inclusion dramatically. There is still a huge segment of the population entailing over 600 million Indians who lack access to the full range of formal financial services which meet their financial needs, generate wealth, and maximize the overall potential of their money.
While the country continues to expand its footprint globally and demonstrate high economic growth, financial inclusion has not yet been addressed at scale. Access to basic financial services enables the less fortunate and more vulnerable in society to step out of the vicious cycle of poverty and empower themselves and their families, making it important for the ecosystem to support firms and startups that address the same.
To help cater to this, CIIE.CO, an Indian business incubator established by IIM Ahmedabad, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J.P. Morgan, MetLife Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and Omidyar Network, has been focusing to address the ever-evolving gaps in the inclusion-driven entrepreneurship space in India. Among its various initiatives, CIIE.CO has launched the Bharat Inclusion Initiative (BII) to help entrepreneurs focus on financial inclusion, livelihood, skilling, and health.
The Bharat Inclusion Initiative (BII), interestingly, is an effort toward bringing the benefits of technological progress to underserved populations. The Initiative focuses on incubating and backing startups that work in areas such as financial inclusion, livelihood, skilling, and health. All startups supported by the Initiative are expected to be using technology as leverage to increase reach and build products that serve the underserved.
For ambitious entrepreneurs working on problems of the Bharat market, the Bharat Inclusion Initiative provides domain knowledge, training, financial support, mentorship, and market access they need to bring inclusive, for-profit businesses to life. It supports businesses serving the Indian mass market through programs, fellowships, and funding where possible.
Build for Bharat Podcast is an extension of this to highlight and bring to light the influencers and makers, who are working towards bringing financial and technological inclusion through their innovative technology. The podcast is led by Sanjay Jain, Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund and Chief Innovation Officer at CIIE.co, where he guides efforts to help create, promote, and encourage entrepreneurship in areas around digital technology.
Sanjay has always been passionate about innovations in the Financial and Technological inclusion sectors. He leads the efforts at the Bharat Inclusion Initiative to bring more people into the formal economy, and workforce in India. He is also a volunteer with iSPIRT, the software product industry think tank of India. He has been an active member of the India Stack, Open API, and Cashless teams and has also been working with the NPCI to define the next-generation payment systems (the Unified Payment Interface), as well as with regulators and other bodies to help entire processes go paperless. He has been one of the key contributors to helping create, and evangelize various government open APIs, which are collectively referred to as the India Stack. These APIs have led to the digitization of various processes, enabling them to go paperless, cashless, and presenceless.
Sanjay has been responsible for the development of many large-scale, high-impact systems. He was the Chief Product Manager at the UIDAI, where he led the product development efforts from its early days till well after the launch. He was also responsible for the creation and launch of Google Map Maker – a crowd-sourced mapping product that is responsible for Google Maps data for 170+ countries (including India) and worked for global organisations, TIBCO and Sun Microsystems.
The podcast features bite-sized conversations with the builders and makers of Bharat, like Dr. Pramod Varma from EkStep, Dr. Vivek Raghavan from EkStep Foundation, and Sateesh Palagiri from NPCI among others. So far, the first three episodes have seen tremendous responses from the listeners. Industry leaders like Nandan Nilekani and Dilip Asbe have shown immense interest in the podcast and have also taken to their social media to highlight the importance of innovation in these spaces.
India is at the cusp of a digital revolution, it is imperative to promote and contribute toward innovations that bring Financial and technological inclusion to the Indian populace. The Government has been actively taking steps with multiple initiatives like Make in India, Digital India, etc., but it is not enough. Encouraging the new India and upcoming startups to solve the real-life challenges of Bharat is of crucial importance.
With this aim, CIIE.CO’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative is driven to identify and support startups solving India’s toughest problems in financial inclusion, skilling and livelihood, health, etc. by providing them with an enabling environment and ecosystem that assists entrepreneurs who are building solutions for Bharat. BII provides purpose-driven entrepreneurs with a continuum of support across research, incubation, acceleration, and soft and commercial capital to bring their inclusive, for-profit businesses to life.
Accenture Sustainability Value Accelerator programme chooses 10 tech startups for cohort
Accenture Sustainability Value Accelerator programme, which was launched in collaboration with IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE.CO has chosen 10 sustainability tech startups to help them become market-ready and scale commercially, among 80-plus applicants.
The startups will be seed-funded and given business progression support to identify the best opportunities for their businesses and analyse risks in their business models.
The programme focuses on startups that can expedite the broader goals of working towards sustainable value chains, net-zero transitions, sustainable technologies, and sustainability measurements and analytics.
“Businesses globally are looking at integrating sustainability into their business design and operations and through this programme. We are proud to support deep tech startups from India who can help solve sustainability challenges faced by organizations across the world,” said Avnish Sabharwal, Managing Director, Accenture Ventures and Open Innovation.
The 10 selected startups are:
- Amplepac, an AI (artificial intelligence) and Blockchain platform to facilitate the package, return, and reuse of items in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) supply chain
- Bizlog-Value Chain, a reverse logistics solution provider to enable a sustainable supply chain
- Blobcity, a platform for AutoML (automated machine learning) tools enabling shared GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) usage by data scientists
- Chara, a platform for rare-earth free electric motors
- CogniTensor, an integrated MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) environment enabling faster development
- LivNSense Technologies Pvt Limited, a platform that converts continuous and discrete process industries into Cognitive Living Equipment
- Oizom, which provides IoT-enabled (Internet of Things) environmental data solutions
- Taqanal Energy, which provides proprietary cloud-based solutions to enhance battery life and reduce degradation
- The Disposal Company, a tech-enabled plastic credit platform
- Updapt CSR, a business-to-business SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform that builds software modules for corporates to track, monitor, and report ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance) compliance
The focus areas for the evaluation process included technologies that provide closed-loop systems to reduce the resource wastages, technological solutions that help transition to net zero, and solutions that use cloud technologies efficiently and support responsible migration to the digital ecosystem among others.