IITMIC aims to incubate 1000 startups per year by 2030

23^rd August 2022

IITM Incubation Cell, India’s leading Deep-tech Start-up hub, announced its partnership with NativeLead Foundation – India’s first angel driven ecosystem, empowering young minds of Tamil Nadu to become innovators and entrepreneurs. The partnership aims to identify, nurture and help scale startups from Institutes, Incubators particularly in Tier 2/3/4 cities – local entrepreneurs, address local challenges and build solutions for wider impact.

The collaboration also ties into IITMIC’s 10X initiative of Accelerated Incubation, geared towards achieving an ambitious 1000 incubations by 2030, through empowering young emerging entrepreneurs from India’s rural pockets.

NativeLead Angels currently has six local chapters in Tamil Nadu (Madurai, Coimbatore, Erode, Karur, Trichy and Thoothukudi) and three Native Connect Chapters (Chennai, Washington DC and Tokyo). Their core objective is to invest and nurture startups emerging from the small towns of TN.

IITMIC and NativeLead will jointly leverage their network to provide value added support including mentorship, market access, training for strengthening entrepreneurial ecosystems and growth of incubated startups at IITMIC and its partner institutes/incubators across the state.

Focus will be in domains (but not limited to) of Agritech, Retail, Healthtech, Edutech and Cleantech, with social impact and ESG compliance.

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, President – IITM Incubation Cell, RTBI and IIT Madras Research Park, said: Rural entrepreneurs are very important for India. They have the edge of finding localised solutions to challenges that are unique to India. This is a mark of true indigenous innovation. Through this partnership with NativeLead our vision is aligned to strengthen this start-up ecosystem and make it accessible for entrepreneurs in regional areas. We will leverage our respective strengths to jointly provide mentorship and every value-added support to partner institutions and their entrepreneurial ventures.”

Mr. Nagaraja Prakasam, Founder Chairman, NativeLead, added, “Nativelead’s vision is to Enable, Nurture, Incubate and Invest with the goal to provide necessary new age tools to entrepreneurs in small towns of TamilNadu for inclusive growth. With more youth driven towards technology, we are proud to partner with IITM Incubation Cell the premier institute of the country to bring the tech for good and empower youth in solving local problems using technology”.

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