Collaborative Community Startups Club Launches Incubator For Early-Stage Startups

Bengaluru-based Startups Club a platform to accelerate early-stage startups has launched an incubator called SC Incurator (“SCIN”). SCIN will incubate, invest and accelerate early-stage startups over a 12-month period.

Earlier this week, Chinese accelerator and venture fund ZDream Ventures, known as Zhudao in China, also announced the launch of incubator ZDream Labs in Gurugram.

“India’s time is now. Startups are engaging to reshape the Indian economy and the daily lives of Indian people. The ecosystem of government, universities, incubators, and communities like Startups Club are crystallizing around the most innovative sector in one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. For investors, this represents an unprecedented opportunity to deploy capital intelligently as an elegant fit with this maturing ecosystem,” said Michael Marks co-founder at Innoventure Partners and mentor on Startups Club.

For the last five years, Startups Club has been engaged with early-stage companies across India. It has conducted about 500+ events, 7000+ hours of mentoring, and claims to have engaged with over 100 founders. Startups Club believes that mentorship, access to market and funding are the main requirements for early-stage firms. It is aiming to solve the gap through its Incurator.

The community comprises veteran investors and mentors on its board who have come together to form SCIN. These include Mahesh Bhalla (former Executive Director at Dell, former President at Qwikcilver) and Michael Marks (co-founder at Innoventure Partners). Marks has been involved in investments in companies such as Twitter, 23andMe, Palantir and SpaceX.

For startups to be eligible to apply to SCIN, they must be ‘early stage’ businesses that have been operating for less than five years. Apart from this the participating startup’s valuation should be below $1.56 Mn (INR 10 Cr).

Initially, SCIN will look to mentor 10 startups per year, across multiple industries in India, and has plans of growing this number in the coming years. Four startups have already been selected for participation in the SCIN programme. They are –

• Vicara – Vellore-headquartered Vicara is an early stage hardware startup. It is building human augmentation (including gesture recognition) technologies and solutions in order to make human interactions with computers more natural and efficient.
• Renaura – Vellore-headquartered researching and developing a revolutionary approach to personal care products that target India-specific challenges.
• Grabbngo – Bengaluru-based Grabbngo is developing an intelligent technology platform that enables enhanced retail solutions and services to customers through the integration of product pick-up and delivery services from retail outlets.
• Foxity – It is a technology platform focused on enabling engagement between night-life entertainment venues and their customers through an enhanced experience for discerning users. Apart from several Indian cities it also provides nightlife listings even for international cities like Bangkok, Madrid, London, Paris, Rome, etc.