A leg-up for startups

New Delhi, November 21, 2023: The Centre for Research on Start-ups and Risk Financing (CREST), an institute of Eminence Research Centre at IIT-Madras has developed an information platform on incubators and accelerators that promises to help Indian start-ups navigate the entrepreneurial ecosystem better.

Incubation is a very critical phase in the start-up lifecycle. Choosing the right incubator can significantly contribute to the success of the start-up in subsequent years. India presently has about 1,000 active incubators. But, information about them is scattered. Entrepreneurs have to spend a lot of time and effort to identify the incubator most suitable for their start-up.

Called ‘Incubators’, the new AI-powered platform seeks to address this gap. It offers to help the start-up founders to identify, compare and analyse incubators very easily.  It has been developed in partnership with YNOS, an IIT Madras-incubated start-up.

Dr. Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Departments of Information Technology, Electronics and Communications, Industries and Commerce, Government of Telangana, and Member, Board of Directors of Hyderabad-based T-Hub, formally launched the platform in the presence of Prof. Thillai Rajan, A., Professor at the Department of Management Studies, IIT Madras, and Principal Investigator of CREST. Prof. Thillai Rajan is also the Founder and Director of YNOS Venture Engine.

Congratulating CREST, IIT Madras and YNOS for developing this platform, Dr. Ranjan noted that besides benefitting the start ups, it would also help incubators themselves by providing an opportunity for them to showcase their strengths to policy makers, and investors, apart from the start up founders. “ The managers of the incubation centres can also use the platform to benchmark their facilities with other incubators and constantly achieve higher levels of performance.”

The platform features intuitive filters on multiple incubator parameters to quickly identify the set of incubators that satisfy different criteria for shortlisting and a facility to bookmark shortlisted incubators for detailed assessment at a later stage. It offers a range of information about each incubator from details about the organisation hosting it to the agencies that have invested in the startups supported by it.

A IIT-Madras press release noted that other stakeholders associated with the development of the start-up ecosystem such as educational institutions, government and funding agencies, could also benefit a lot from the platform.