Even if the festive season is over startups are receiving festivities every now and then. First, Google came up with plans to boost them, then Indian Government and now social investor Unitus Seed Fund. It has launched Speed2Seed programme and as the name suggests it will help early-stage startups raise angel and seed capital to aid them in their growth and realizing their potential. The program will last upto two years.
The company has signed on 11 business accelerators and incubators which include namely, Catalyzer, Khosla Labs, IIM Calcutta, Deshpande Foundation and Startup Oasis as program partners. Others in the network of partners include Amity Innovation Incubator, Catalyser, CIBA, CIE IIITH, Startup Village, Sylvant Advisors, and VIT TBI.
On this move Will Poole co-founder and managing partner at Unitus Seed Fund said,”Our main contribution, to this program will be to assemble global best practices as knowledge partners to accelerators and incubators and the findings from this survey will be available to our partners. We will be bringing in different content modules, sample documents and regular pitch sessions, to startups on how investors think so that they can better prepare and rapidly understand how to build a venture investable business. We will augment existing programs at our partners.”
The accelerators and incubators will introduce companies to investors. Once the companies are uplifted Unitus will look at investing them too. Unitus conducted a research with a sample of over incbuators in India and the findings were intriguing. It revealed that only about 5% of incubated graduates receive angel or VC investment.
Unitus Seed Fund is the leading venture seed fund supporting startups innovating for the masses in India. Unitus invests in healthcare, education, mobile commerce & value-added services, marketplaces & e-commerce, retail & distribution, agriculture, and water & energy sectors. Unitus Seed Fund is based in Bangalore and Seattle.
