NASSCOM to fund and incubate 25 Indian start-ups

BANGALORE, INDIA: The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) will fund and incubate 25 start-ups to be set up by young entrepreneurs across the country, the Indian IT industry representative body said Wednesday.

"Of the 4,000 applications we received for our '10,000 start-ups programme', we will select 25 best entrepreneurs for angel funding and incubating their start-ups. Another 150 firms will be mentored through partners and members," Nasscom president Som Mittal said in a statement here.

Of the 14,000 registered entrepreneurs in 80 cities across the country, 4,000 of them responded to the programme, conducted between April 5 to May 30.

"We are overwhelmed with the response to the programme. Our industry partners will short-list the start-ups through an evaluation process for funding and incubation," Mittal said.

The programme gave insights into the emerging tech entrepreneurship landscape in the country, as 23 percent of the responses were from Bangalore followed by 20 percent from the National Capital Region (NCR).

"One in every five application came from smaller towns and about 70 percent of them are under 30 years, while 15 percent of them were women," Mittal pointed out.

"From a technology viewpoint, around 66 percent of the applications are for web/internet start-ups, 24 percent for mobile applications, 16 percent for cloud applications and 11 percent for big data processing," Mittal observed.

Global search engine Google, global software major Microsoft, the US-based internet service provider Verisign and leading Indian financial services firm Kotak partnered with Nasscom for the start-ups programme.