Venture Catalysts, a Bengaluru-based incubator and accelerator platform, has launched an accelerator VC to identify the best ideas and early stage startups from India. The accelerator VC fund is named as 9Unicorns Fund and is the first accelerator VC in India, claims the company.
The newly launched fund will identify high-potential, early stage businesses across sectors, including but not limited to domains such as electric vehicles, mobility, AR, VR, AI, ML, fintech, retail, and FMCG.
The company said, “While the pace at which number of unicorns continue to grow is healthy (India added eight unicorns in 2018 alone compared with nine in a span of six years from 2011-2017), the absence of dedicated accelerators is a problem. 9Unicorns Fund has been envisaged to fill this gap by becoming a one-stop mentoring, networking, and growth facilitation platform for emerging businesses to grow to their full potential.”
Venture Catalysts is India’s top incubator for startups, as per mentioned on its website. Its integrated approach offers funding, mentorship and network of CXOs, successful founders, unicorns, deep tech product experts.
It is present across Bengaluru, Delhi NCR , Mumbai, Lucknow, Kolkata, Raipur, Surat, Nagpur, Jaipur, Kochi and Dubai UAE, Hong Kong globally.
While, the company also expressed that India is home to 26 unicorns at present, but only one of them was a part of the 600 accelerators in the country. The number of accelerators is much lesser in India as compared to China and US.
Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, co-founder and managing director, 9Unicorns, said that the Indian startups ecosystem is the third largest ecosystem in terms of number of startups as well as unicorns and ‘soonicorns’. However, it is still not functioning at its sheer capacity, Sharma added.
Apart from Venture Catalysts, other significant startup accelerators under the similar roof includes 50k Ventures, YourNest, LetsVenture, Infuse Ventures and many more.