BENGALURU: The first cohort of eight startups in Flipkart’s corporate accelerator programme, Flipkart Leap, graduated on Wednesday. The eight had been shortlisted from nearly 1,000 applicants, and went through a 16-week mentorship programme.
The selected ventures are in areas strategic to the e-tailer, including retail tech, robotics, agritech and fintech. Flipkart Leap offers mentorship, training, tools, technology and business support services, and connects the startups with relevant investors. It also offers an equity free grant of $25,000.
Jeyandran Venugopal, chief product and technology officer at Flipkart, said, “If you look at India’s ambition to become a $1 trillion digital economy by 2025, digital commerce will play a big part in it. We want to support the make for Bharat narrative,” he said.
Naren Ravula, VP and head of product strategy and deployment at Flipkart, said the tailored curriculum maps each startup to mentors and senior leaders from Flipkart based on the industry in which they are.
Google and Microsoft provide the cohort with cloud credits and relevant workshops. Ravula said some of the proofs-of-concepts (PoC) could lend themselves to commercial agreements.
Adarsh Kumar, CEO & co-founder of supply chain monitoring solutions provider TagBox, one of the graduating startups, said the programme gave them a chance to talk to multiple teams across groups to evaluate different kinds of use cases for their product. The insights from industry leaders was an added benefit.”
Pramod Ghadge, CEO of Unbox Robotics, another graduating startup, said they could do deep dives in areas right from hiring to international go-to-market strategy and fundraising.
The Demo Day on Wednesday saw participation from Mohit Bhatnagar, MD, Sequoia India, Shanti Mohan, founder, Let’s Venture, and Mekin Maheshwari, founder, Udhyam Learning.
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