Incubation and funding for technology startups: Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), the principal financial institution for MSMEs in the country, on Monday, announced its partnership with the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad’s (IIM-A) startup incubator CIIE. Through this tie-up, SIDBI will set up a SIDBI Accelerator Fund at the incubator with an initial corpus of Rs 20 crore.
The partnership is part of SIDBI’s new initiative India of Tomorrow under which it collaborates with different incubators in the country to promote deep technologies and science-led innovation by enabling seed funding to startups in exchange for equity.
The programme focuses on supporting startups with meritorious ideas and technologies important for India’s goals for 2047 to become self-reliant as well as a dominant player in high quality/ high entry barrier products/services.
Startups in sectors such as deep tech, hardware/ product startups, energy, clean tech, pharmaceuticals, biotech, defence innovations, rural, social and industrial technologies, high-quality components, chips and others are supported.
“During the program, six start-ups made a presentation on their ideas, methodology and the
likely amount of seed capital required for scaling up their operations,” SIDBI said in a statement.
Also read: Startups in India to grow tenfold in next 4-5 years: Union MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar
Last month, SIDBI also launched the NBFC Growth Accelerator Program in collaboration with the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), a mass entrepreneurship enablement platform to handhold smaller NBFCs that have at least 60 per cent of their exposure to MSMEs.
India has more than 1 lakh registered startups, as of July 2023, as told by the MoS of Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekaran.
SIDBI currently runs the Fund of Funds for Startups (FFS) with a corpus of Rs 10,000 crore launched in 2016 under the Startup India programme. The fund does not directly invest in startups but through SEBI-registered Alternative Investment Funds (AIF). SIDBI had disbursed about Rs 3,931 crores as of April 2023 since the inception of the scheme. The disbursement increased from Rs 6 crore to Rs 1,225 crore in 2022. In the current year till April, Rs 531 crore was disbursed.