Flipkart Eyes Consumer Tech Space With Its Latest Accelerator Programme

Homegrown ecommerce marketplace Flipkart has launched a 16-week-long virtual accelerator programme, Flipkart Leap, to help new and upcoming startups to scale their B2B and B2B ventures.

Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart Group said, “With innovations and disruptions in the field of technology coming about each day, we want to be at the forefront of driving scalability and helping these startups bring value to the industry as well as Indian consumers.”

“Flipkart Leap is aimed at unlocking this potential and nurturing new ideas that bring innovation, curiosity and unconventionality to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem while boosting the government’s ‘Start-Up India’ initiative,” he added.

Flipkart Leap has been curated in partnership with global management and strategy consulting firm Zinnov to bring innovation in technology and consumer internet space for users across Tier I, Tier II, Tier II and beyond regions. The programme is open for startups based out of India with a working prototype and early adoption metrics.

Upon completion of the program, the final participants of Flipkart Leap can pitch their successful model to investors, corporates and other ecosystem players on the demo-day, and get an equity-free grant of $25,000 (nearly INR 19 Lakh). These startups may also get an opportunity to get funded by Flipkart.

Besides this, the homegrown ecommerce unicorn has also selected mentors across its leadership from several verticals —  business, operations, product and technology —  to mentor the selected startups and share best practices. The mentors will also be holding masterclass sessions with industry experts.

Flipkart Leap aims to provide tools, framework, knowledge and an ecosystem to help startups create world-class value-driven products by supporting them in building market-ready solutions. The programme has also identified five themes to shortlist relevant high-potential startups that tap into the most innovative solutions in the technology and consumer internet space.

These include ‘design and make for India’, ‘innovation in digital commerce’, ‘technologies to empower the retail ecosystem’, ‘supply chain management and logistics’, and ‘enabling relevant deeptech applications’.

Flipkart, in its press statement, clarified that the focus is on bringing digitisation and tech advancement in these thematic areas, including any startups that will be working on disruptive solutions that have the potential to transform the landscape of e-commerce in the next five years.

The programme has been designed and will be managed by Flipkart’s product strategy and deployment team led by Naren Ravula. The team is responsible for shepherding innovation within the Flipkart commerce companies, Flipkart and Myntra, and the broader ecosystem.

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