Indian startups have a reason to rejoice. Unitus Seed Fund has launched a nationwide program to help India based startups raise seed and angel capital for their businesses. The program called Speed2seed aims to help early stage Indian startups grow and realize their potential by helping them raise venture capital.
Social Investor Unitus has already signed on eleven business incubators and accelerators as its partners for the program. Startup Oasis, Catalyzer, IIM Calcutta, Khosla Labs and Deshpande Foundation are some of the famous names signed by Unitus. Over the next two years, the program partners want to achieve a dramatic increase in the number of their graduates receiving venture money within six months of their graduation. The current industry average for Indian incubators is less than five percent graduates in the same time frame. On the other hand, with an industry average of twenty five percent, accelerators are more successful than incubators.
The Bangalore and Seattle based fund plans of working with its Speed2seed partners for a period of two years over multiple program cycles to develop broader investor networks, experiment with new ideas, implement curriculum enhancements, better leverage advisors and refine recruitment strategies. It will also try to teach young entrepreneurs how to effectively pitch their business ideas and plans to venture seed funds and early stage angel investors. The 2012 established seed fund will facilitate its Speed2seed partners with best domestic and international practices along with great peer learning opportunities.
"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," said Will Poole, co-founder, managing partner at Unitus Seed Fund in a statement to the Economic Times.
Unitus even plans to invest in these companies when they are venture ready. The program partners will also be introducing companies under the Speed2seed program to investors.
Unitus Speed2seed program is a part of its India Impact Acceleration Program, which is made possible in part by United States Global Development Lab, a program of USAID.
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