As the world struggles to find sustainable solutions to everyday problems, the rise of the start-up ecosystem is inevitable. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century or even the late nineteenth century, the start-up industry has been at the forefront of finding environmentally and economically friendly solutions to various issues associated with global warming.
Although the start-up revolution began in the western part of the world, India is now gradually emerging as the leading country. It has to do with the country's enormous talent pool and opportunities to find various solutions to various problems.
Lately, Indian start-ups have become more daring in the sense that they can not only develop technologies, products, and solutions that are globally competitive in terms of quality or price, but they can also do it even better, said Avinash Punekar, CEO, iCreate, in an interaction with Mobility Outlook.
However, Punekar believes that the only challenge for start-ups in India at this stage is a lack of funding. He pointed out that while iCreate assists these start-ups in developing unique products by providing them with the necessary infrastructure, the monetary aspect still needs to be addressed.
The autonomous institute was founded to develop an efficient methodology for selecting tech innovators and assisting them in becoming successful entrepreneurs, thereby having a large positive impact on the nation's economy.
Now, to help the start-ups surpass the funding hurdle, Punekar revealed that the incubator is looking at setting up its angel investment scheme.
Under this, the initial funding of INR 100 crore is expected from the Government of Gujarat, he confirmed, adding that “we've started the process of formulating and I am hoping that in the next three months, we would be coming out with the funding.”
In addition, iCreate also aims to enhance its offering in terms of infrastructural and mentorship support to the new-age start-ups in India. During the interaction, he mentioned that the start-up incubator is in the process of adding CoE for indigenisation.
Punekar stated that the 'indigenisation' Center of Excellence (CoE) aims to target all products across all domains. It is to make components accessible and available to everyone so that Indian industries, particularly small-scale industries, can compete globally.
The CoE will not only aid the Indian start-ups working in the field with the necessary support but will also provide OEMs with an opportunity to source local components already available with iCreate.
Furthermore, iCreate is developing a platform where Indian-developed and manufactured components for all sectors will be available for OEMs to choose from. This will not only allow OEMs to obtain components at a lower cost but also provide them with higher-quality products than their Chinese counterparts.
Comparing the portal with the likes of Amazon and Alibaba, Punekar noted it would be a discovery platform for the Indian OEMs, as many of them are not aware of the reliable alternatives available within India.
While players on the platform are free to conduct transactions outside of the platform, 'the benefits would be that not only will we be able to track it, but we can also track the performance, history and quality of products with the feedback mechanism from the customers built into that platform itself,' the CEO added.
“Currently our focus is to target the EV segment. However in the future as the new CoEs get operational we are going to look at the overall marketplace,” he said.
Speaking of other CoEs, he said iCreate also aims to set up these centres for defence, aerospace and agrotech; fintech is also to be added. Although a few start-ups in these sectors were already working with iCreate, separate CoEs weren’t formed.
Punekar noted that the idea behind adding these CoEs is to develop a value chain and provide end-to-end solutions to the OEMs. In addition, the plan is to target specialised sectors in the given areas one at a time to ensure that start-ups from the ground up can be properly nurtured.
Further, to build the Indian start-up ecosystem and take these players to the global scale, iCreate has also tied up with the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
As part of the partnership, iCreate will take IPs from CSIR to provide to the start-ups to solve the industry problems. Meanwhile, problems from the industry will also be taken to CSIR, while start-ups will be allowed to work with the research body to solve the issues.
Punekar believes that the Indian start-up ecosystem across sectors has evolved over the past few years and is now at par with its global counterparts. While iCreate is working on multiple fronts to help these players to attain a global platform, collaboration from other stakeholders will also become necessary.
With this task of taking Indian start-ups to the global maps, academia will act as the backbone as they could provide the research and development support while the pace of R&D needs to be much more agile, making it more industry-driven than the traditional academia approach, he concluded.
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