Business incubation has been identified as a means of meeting a variety of economic and socioeconomic policy needs, which may include job creation, fostering a community’s entrepreneurial climate, technology commercialization, diversifying local economies, building or accelerating growth in local industry clusters, business creation and retention, encouraging women or minority entrepreneurship, identifying potential spin-in or spin-out business opportunities, or community revitalization.
Incubators have been of increased presence since 2011 due to lack of many resources, experience, and networks, incubators provide services that help them get through initial hurdles in starting up a business. These hurdles include space, funding, legal, accounting, computer services and other prerequisites to running the business.
Incubators often aggregate themselves into networks that are used to share good practices and new methodologies. The network allows collaboration between members of each incubator. Startup Incubator is playing important roles for the Startups in India, here is the Top 10 Indian Startup Incubators and Accelerators Of 2017.
1. Indian Angel Network
Indian Angel Network is Asia’s largest network of Angel investors keen to invest in early stage businesses, which have potential to create disproportionate value and also the first angel group in the world to go international, as IAN along with the British government
IAN is also the first angel group in the world to go international, as IAN along with the British government has set up operations in London. IAN is an angel investor network with over 400 investors across 10 countries with over 80% of our investors actively investing/leading, etc. IAN has invested in 100 odd companies, these are spread across a variety of sectors: Education, Healthcare, QSR, E-Commerce, Gaming, Semiconductor, Robotics, Manufacturing, etc. And it has now started to invest in companies which impact the community/people who are less advantaged through its IAN Impact track.
IAN is able to go beyond the normal, informal, local club structure of angel groups to a larger institutionalized model because of its nimble but robust, standardized & transparent processes that allow it to scale across geographies and a large number of members.
2. TLabs
TLabs is India’s leading startup accelerator and believes that fundamentals of business remains same everywhere and help companies to get to sustainability and scalability with 50+ companies, 7 Exits, $200M+ market cap of the portfolio, 150+ Mentors, 160+ co-founders and connecting to over 200 Angels and most VCs India and abroad.TLabs has seen a tremendous success rate with over 65% of the companies getting funded after graduation raising over $450k investments per team.
They are a mini eco-system in ourselves, enabling to help incubated startups with unparalleled support for Product-Market fit, Growth, Strategy, UX and scaling big. offers a funding of INR 30 Lakhs, a working space and a host of other benefits from prominent tech partners to the startups we accept in the program. It also helps that we are part of the largest Internet tech company of India that reaches to over 160+M users.
3. Seedfund
Seedfund is India’s leading early-stage venture capital fund, with operations in Bombay, Bangalore and New Delhi. Seedfund was founded in 2006 by Bharati Jacob, Mahesh Murthy and Pravin Gandhi and the team has grown to include Anand Lunia, Paula Mariwala, Sanjay Anandaram and Shailesh Vickram Singh.
Seedfund investees include Redbus, AFAQS, CarWale, EduSports, Healthizen, Ixsight, Printo, RupeeTalk, ThinkLabs, Vaatsalya and Uhuroo. Together, they set off to make a visible difference in backing early-stage companies across sectors. With a little money and a lot of attention, Seedfund started plugging the gap in the ecosystem, by providing guidance, perspectives, ideas, and connections.
4. Axilor
Axilor Founded by some of the most respected entrepreneurs, Axilor is an accelerator and a seed fund. It helps founders improve their odds of success through its programs and a unique venture funding model.Founded by S.D. Shibulal, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Srinath Batni, Professor Tarun Khanna and Ganapathy Venugopal. It is currently based out of India with its headquarters in Bangalore.
Axilor was founded with the vision of improving the odds of success of entrepreneurs in their first 24 months. The three programs – Accelerator, Scale-up and Early Stage Funding programs – are designed to improve the odds of success of entrepreneurs in the early stages of their startup journey.
Axilor incubates startups operating in the e-commerce, healthcare, life sciences, sustainability and clean technology spaces focussing on scalable, disruptive and technology-led business ideas from budding entrepreneurs and experienced professionals. Axilor also invests between INR 30 lakh and INR 6 crore ($50,000 and $1 million) each in startups as part of the Scale-up and Early Stage funding programs
5. Prime Venture Partners
PRIME is a seed-stage venture fund which focusses on startups that not only need capital but also require mentoring to transform them into disruptive companies based out of Bangalore India, All the three – Amit, Sanjay & Shripati have been successful entrepreneurs and investors and extended team brings you much-needed expertise in Marketing, Public Relations & Communications, Recruitment, Finance, Legal and Human Resources.
A seed-stage Venture Fund managed by serial Entrepreneurs, transforming disruptive ideas into real businesses – Based out of Bangalore, India and
6. 5ideas Startup Superfuel
The Startup Superfuel Fund is a seed & early stage fund focused on digital assets based in India. Founded by Pearl Uppal & Gaurav Kachru earlier this year, the fund comprises recent only digital entrepreneurs turned venture capitalists and bring a different level of operating knowledge and expertise to their portfolio companies.
Startup Superfuel invests considerable time (each GP will work closely with only 5 businesses in a rolling 12 month cycle), social capital (extensive mentor network) and financial investment from USD 50,000 to USD 500,000 in each business and roll up our sleeves and work closely with their portfolio companies to deliver unique mix of human, social & financial capital… without seeking control.
Startup Superfuel thinks hard about the odds of success in each market, especially given the huge opportunity cost for investors and founders when they choose to pursue a specific area. Their current preferred subset of opportunities in India are – Vertical e-commerce, SME/B2B Focused Businesses, Mobile (Geo + tech + vernacular), big data, ad tech, urban parenting, and education.
7. UnLtd India
UnLtd India is a launchpad for social entrepreneurs. They find, fund and support exceptional individuals whose ideas, passion and entrepreneurial skills can bring about long-term solutions to India’s social problems.
Many of these individuals, however, face barriers such as technical know-how, community support, and access to finances and the right networks. UnLtd India’s mission is to address these barriers and unleash the potential of these entrepreneurs to bring about a radical change in the country.
UnLtd India’s work is unique because of the following: They engage from the very early stages, i.e. idea or concept stage of a project, almost always before other funders or support agencies will become involved and place equal emphasis on providing financial and professional support across various sectors and models, i.e. grant-based, for-profit & hybrid.
8. The Startup Centre
The Startup Centre is an early Stage Accelerator with a focus in the Software Space, based in Chennai. The Startup Centre is a physical space which aims to make a dent in the emerging startup ecosystem by becoming the platform.
The activities that circle around the startup space, acting as a co-working space for founding teams of startups, an accelerator program aimed at fast-tracking select startups and focus only on companies in the internet, mobile and software space.
The Startup Centre organize these weekend meets to build the first version prototypes of your ideas in 50 Hours and are a Hub and an Accelerator, with an aim to foster and enable the birth of bold new ideas, and to nurture teams with exceptional potential, helping them move to the next level.
9. Venture Nursery
Venture Nursery (VN) is India’s first angel-backed start-up accelerator. It was established in March 2012 by two like-minded Angel Investors in Residence -Shravan Shroff, Founder and Former MD, Fame India Limited and Ravi Kiran, former CEO-South East & South Asia, Starcom MediaVest Group and Co-Founder, Friends of Ambition.
Based on the belief that the angel ecosystem must focus primarily on maximizing the success potential of start-ups, VentureNursery undertakes an intensive and immersive coaching and mentoring role in the chosen start-ups and helps each with end-to-end infrastructural and learning support.
VentureNursery intends to conduct a minimum of two boot camps in a year in Mumbai and targets to accommodate up to three start-ups in each program. At the end of each boot camp, each successfully graduating start-up is evaluated for investment by a group of 25 angel investors.
10. StartUpMitra
StartUpMitra aims at fostering entrepreneurship and helping people bring their ideas to life in ways that other people don’t and aspire on building a start-up ecosystem in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities of India. where the startup activities have not taken seriously and also there is a huge gap in terms of resources access for the startups to scale business venture.
StartUpMitra entrepreneurs and wannapreneurs with mentors of their field who can help them with building their idea and their business and organize networking events where you can meet great people who can make useful connections throughout your professional life.
StartUpMitra provides a variety of services to start-ups and wannapreneurs to help them kick off, launch and bring their ideas to life from advisory to administration.
