This Jaarvis wants to make <em>Iron Men</em> out of startups. And it just arrived in India

Wait a minute before you sigh, another accelerator in India!

It may seem at first that the young startup ecosystem in India already has too many accelerators and incubators vying to net the best among sprouting companies. But, on closer inspection, you may find that many of these greenhouses for fledgling startups are as good as being in the real estate business. That is, a number of them just give a rent-free space in a well-connected locality for startups to work from, and take a substantial equity in return for that privilege, instead of providing the support, mentorship and connections that startups need the most. Little wonder that most ‘incubated’ or ‘accelerated’ startups meander off and die. Or, if they manage to survive, they often end up kicking themselves for giving up so much of their equity for nothing.

Jaarvis wants to take a different track. This global accelerator from Hong Kong, which will kick off its first batch in India in February, promises to roll up its sleeves and work right alongside its incubatees. And it has all the wherewithal to do that, with the tech savvy it commands, just as Jarvis (Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) did for Iron Man in the super-hero movie.

Investor-turned-entrepreneur Gabriel Fong, CEO and founder of Hong Kong’s smart logistics company GoGoVan, and technologists Kuldeep Bhayana and Jaspal Sarai initially founded Jaarvis in late 2013 to start their own new tech startups. The trio has five Jaarvis Technology ventures up and running already: portable embedded device Tag, food guide with in-built point-of-sale Foodsonic, marketplace for handymen CallFixie, payments enabler SecureBot, and web-enabler for small businesses Scribe A Store. These are run from Jaarvis offices in Hong Kong, Gurgaon (a satellite town of Delhi in India), and Melbourne in Australia.

Then the penny dropped: instead of just starting up and running their own companies, why not share their knowledge and experience more widely to help other promising young entrepreneurs make it? The experience with conceptualizing, building, and running the Jaarvis Technology ventures got Fong, Bhayana, and Sarai thinking about starting an accelerator to help others kick-off their cool ideas.

“If we can help startups to save time from not having to second guess every time they have to make a big decision, we would have done our job. In the startup world, every mistake can be fatal. We want to help startups move faster with confidence, and guide them away from fatal pitfalls,” says Fong in an exclusive interview with Tech in Asia.

“Our accelerator will be a rapid deployment partner for every startup we pick,” adds Kuldeep Bhayana, who will be based in Gurgaon, where Jaarvis has just rolled out a smart working space that can accommodate 40 startups at a time.

Before founding Jaarvis, Bhayana was the CTO of a global wireless M2M business headquartered in Australia. Jaspal Sarai was that company’s CEO.

Just like the fictional Jarvis helps Iron Man execute his world-changing plans, the Jaarvis accelerator wants to help entrepreneurs launch startups that can go global. One of Jaarvis’s key propositions is that from day one, it wants the incubatees to think of a global market. “Start in India, but think global,” that’s its mantra. Given the background of the accelerator’s founders, it certainly seems capable of helping Indian startups do exactly that.

Why do 99 out of 100 startups fail?

Fong has been in the private equity and venture capital space for the past 20 years, actively investing in tech companies in China and the rest of the world. Essentially, his job was to pick the right businesses and the right team, invest in them, and help them scale up. He retired from the investment career in September 2013, and very quickly co-founded first GoGoVan and then Jaarvis Technology.