Purpose of the Accelerator programmes
Accelerators and Incubators support early age start-ups by mentorship and seed funding. There are various programmes for mentorship in partnership with start-up India and private accelerators. The Accelerator Programmes push the entrepreneurial spirit of a promising businessperson by mentorship and guidance of experienced leaders.
Latest Accelerator Programmes: Beauty, Health and Wellness
Huddle Accelerator
Huddle based in Delhi NCR has launched an exclusive ‘Acceleration A programme’ that focuses on new age home-grown consumer-focused/D2C start-ups. The programme focuses on personal care and beauty brands offering skincare, haircare and body care products, early-stage ventures offering wellness supplements for prevention, immunity and other common treatable ailments along with consumer-packaged goods etc. Early age start-ups can log in to their website to fill out the details as no entry announcement has been made yet.
Beauty Accelerate Virtual
Beauty Accelerate will host a virtual event from October 19-21, 2021 to connect Brand marketing and Research and Development Innovation. One can pre-register for the event/programme from their home page.
HealthStart Accelerator 2021
India’s first Healthcare Incubator, HealthStart is introducing a four months-long programme to promote and nurture the early-stage healthcare entrepreneurs with access to the global network. The selection process identifies 5 companies for funding and mentorship and 5 additional start-ups only for advisory services. Each selected company gets an investment of around 25 lakhs. The programme’s current delivery model is virtual and entries for 2021 have already been announced. To enroll timely for the next session, you may want to keep a close watch on the website.
Amazon’s Global Selling Propel (AGSP) Accelerator
It is a 6-week programme to identify early age high potential start-ups in the consumer space. AGSP is an initiative by Amazon India in partnership with the Indian government to support Indian brand sellers and start-ups to expand globally across North America, Europe, Japan, UAE, Singapore etc. through Amazon’s international market place. Amazon already has an accelerator programme in place and they recently announced few start-ups like Sirona and Azani Active in the Beauty, Health and Wellness sector as a part of the 2021 programme.
Pulse
India Accelerator (IA) announced Pulse cohort in December 2020 to enable entrepreneurs to nurture and grow 5-7 innovative start-ups in the health-tech space in a 16-week programme. IA aims to provide access to IA’s technological and business infrastructure, mentors, network-building opportunities that concludes into a demo day that shall be attended by corporates, Venture Capitals, Private Equity Partners and external investors.
Flipkart Leap
Flipkart launched its first-ever accelerator programme for start-ups in August 2020 to help new and upcoming start-ups to contribute to India’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem and boost “Start-up India. Leap focuses on the five different areas that include the Design and Make in India i.e., Consumer and Technology products built for Indian consumers and digitisation of predominantly offline sectors such as Agtech, HealthTech etc. especially in the post-covid world.
The entries were announced in August 2020 to identify B2C and B2B start-ups and support them scale through an intensive 16-week virtual programme. Flipkart has already shortlisted and identified start-up for 2021. However, aspiring start-ups or small business owners can follow their website to take timely action and not to miss any further update on the Flipkart Leap programme.
Max Life Innovation Labs 2.0
Within the seven focus areas, Health and Wellness is one of the largest themes of the programme Max Life has selected the seven areas to post crowdsourcing the use cases within the organisation. Max Life has already selected 4 start-ups to mentor and fund in 2021.
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Accelerators and Incubators support early age start-ups by guidance and funding. They push the entrepreneurial spirit of a promising young aspiring entrepreneurs by mentoring and nurturing them.
What’s in it for me?
Entrepreneurship and successful start-up are more than getting funding. It is about empowering the founders by right mentorship.
India has many incubators and accelerators. As per the Indian Venture Capital Report 2021 (in partnership with Bain & Company, Inc.) report, India has around 450 incubators and accelerators. All the Accelerators and incubators are designed to support early age start-ups to scale by mentoring, funding opportunities, global and local business connections. Enrolling for an accelerator programme is purely an entrepreneur’s choice. However, if one feels the need to expand the product to the global market and require expertise and technological and resource funding, enrolling for one may be a good idea.
Keep a close watch on the scheduled date, track the website for the programme as the entries are called for, usually 6 months in advance and you must not miss out on any opportunity. If you are a Beauty, Health and Wellness start-up or planning to be a part of one, you would want to think about the incubator and accelerator programmes. The best suggestion would be to prepare and start today for any upcoming programmes.
