Flipkart's 16-week accelerator programme to offer $25,000 equity-free grant

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Flipkart launches first start-up accelerator programme 'Flipkart Leap'
• To mentor 6-8 startups; 16-week programme offer $25,000 equity-free grant
• Flipkart senior leadership to mentor start-ups during the program

E-commerce giant Flipkart has started its first free start-up accelerator programme to help early stage start-ups to scale and grow. The programme 'Flipkart Leap' will pick B2C and B2B start-ups and help them scale through a 16-week virtual programme. The programme aims to provide tools, framework, knowledge and an ecosystem to select start-ups to create world-class value-driven products by supporting them in building market-ready solutions. Flipkart has identified five key areas - Design & Make for India, Innovation in Digital Commerce, Technologies to Empower the Retail Ecosystem, Supply Chain Management & Logistics and Enabling Relevant Deep Tech applications to select start-ups for the programme.

Flipkart will look at six-eight start-ups to mentor in the programme's first cohort. "Flipkart Leap is aimed at unlocking this potential and nurturing new ideas that bring innovation, curiosity and unconventionality to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, while boosting the government's 'Start-Up India' initiative," said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Chief Executive Officer, Flipkart Group.

The programme has been designed and managed by Flipkart's Product Strategy & Deployment team led by Naren Ravula and has a $25,000 equity free grant to win. For its programme, under the identified themes Flipkart will look at  consumer and technology product building start-ups working on digitisation of offline sectors such as agritech, edtech and healthtech, on e-commerce start-ups building models around  platform seller capabilities and providing intelligence, insights & tools for online sellers to grow business, frameworks and vertical specific solutions that enhance customer buying experiences and deep tech applications enabling other technology areas like blockchain, internet of things, edge devices and big data.

"With India now being the bed of hot start-ups, a growing talent pool of entrepreneurs is going above and beyond to bring solutions to the market. As a company that has undergone that phase and built its own success playbook, we wanted to utilise our network to build a programme that helps start-ups in these early stages to evolve and become successful brands in future," said Jey Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer.

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