Srikanth
Venture Catalysts, India’s leading integrated incubator and early-stage investment firm, has entered into the corporate innovation space by making strategic investment in open innovation and corporate venturing platform IncubateHub, which provides open innovation and corporate venturing management-as-a-Service for corporates. Venture Catalyst’s investment in IncubateHub is in line with its commitment to nurturing startups that adds value to the overall startup landscape in India. With IncubateHub empowering startups as well as corporates, this is a step in the right direction.
Founded by seasoned business development professional Rajiv Mukherjee, industry veteran Uday Vipra and startup expert Pradeep, IncubateHub is India’s No.1 open innovation platform in terms of the number of programs managed. It connects large corporates with a curated community of deep tech startups to help them create proof of concepts, accelerate solution development, drive digital transformation and build capacity.
IncubateHub’s offerings include workshops for use case refinement, white-label portals for open innovation management, and a group of dedicated analysts, community managers and program managers to drive corporate accelerator programs. Additionally, the company provides corporates with access to 11,000 startups, 900+ academics institutions, along with 30,000 designers and developers. IncubateHub has served nearly 50 corporates to date and has multi-year contracts with more than 7 clients.
Sharing his insights, Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, President & Co-Founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “The corporate innovation market in India is growing rapidly, and we wanted to address the gaps that exist in the market through this strategic investment in IncubateHub. By bringing established companies and startups together, IncubateHub is helping the former to overcome the barriers to enterprise innovation. At the same time, it brings a great opportunity for our startups to work closely with successful corporates and experienced professionals to test, pivot and validate their ideas and bring them to life in a real-world scenario. This is a win-win solution for both parties, which would also give huge fillip to India’s startup ecosystem.”
Currently estimated at ~$200 million, the open innovation and corporate venturing management market is projected to reach ~$750M by 2023 with a CAGR of 27%. IncubateHub is poised to capitalize on the immense potential in this sector with its plans of foraying into the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe within the next couple of years. The company also aims to become the global leader in the open Innovation and corporate venturing space by 2025.
“The fact that both VCats and IncubateHub are driven by a single vision, i.e. to empower the startups in India, is what inspired us to take this investment decision. Moreover, there are vast and complementary synergies between two businesses, and therefore the expansion of both is set to happen hand in hand. We are confident that this association will prove to be beneficial for large corporates and up-and-coming startups alike.” added Anuj Golecha, Co-Founder, Venture Catalysts,
Sharing his insights, Rajiv Mukherjee, Co-Founder, IncubateHub, said, “IncubateHub has been growing at 66% CAGR for the last 4 years with annual revenue of INR 2 crore for FY 2018-2019. Given our exponential growth since inception, it is now the time to increase our operational capacity and expand our footprint globally. The capital infusion from Venture Catalysts comes at just the right time and it will help us further bolster our presence in the market.”
