The Startup Centre: Accelerating Indian Startups into the Future

Just as communities need places of learning, the whole startup ecosystem can benefit from entrepreneurial hubs. In India, The Startup Centre wants to be that critical resource. Founded 2011 by Vijay Anand, who’s the CEO too, it’s an incubator for early stage startups, with two main programs: a resident program that lasts for six months and takes on new teams every month, and an accelerator that lasts the same period of time and leads to about $20,000 in seed funding.

Of course, the journey is more important than the act of graduation, so there’s a very experienced group of mentors on hand to ensure that everyone’s keeping things lean and reflexive. Last year we heard from one Indian entrepreneur, Teliportme’s Vineet Devaiah, that bad mentors in India are one of the three biggest barriers to a startup’s success in the nation; so a curated, expert bunch of overseers at TSC is a welcome addition to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country.

The Startup Centre is headquartered in Chennai and has two outposts in Bangalore and Mumbai.

(See also: China’s Innovation Works now incubating 50 startups, worth $600+ million in total)

Since we last chatted with Vijay in May of last year, TSC was so new that it didn’t yet have a track record. But now we can see that it has helped mould some interesting alumni, such as Unclassroom, AppStark, Mirraw, Luttie, and TinySurprise. In total, TSC now has eleven resident startup teams, three resident graduates, and a good many more who have collectively created 92 prototypes and plenty more ideas.

With all those new developments under the belts of both TSC and Vijay himself, the startup scene in India is still dogged, he reckons, by a lack of exits as a motivation and reward for the whole startup scene. Vijay explains:

TSC's Vijay

The space that still needs a bit more work on, is in the M&A [mergers and acquisitions] scene. Its still very nascent and large companies are yet to come to the ‘build vs buy’ dilemma and go for the buy route. But there are a lot of native companies and a surge of foreign companies making inroads into India, which should mean that there should be a splurt of M&As coming up soon – but as of now, it is not a natural one and does take a bit of work to make it happen.

Despite frequent comparisons of India and China in terms of their emergence, Vijay reckons their entrepreneurial paths are far apart:

We’ve seen quite a few companies from India, also setup base in the US and do rather well – so it looks like India is following the Israel scene in terms of building a corridor between the US and India rather than the route a few other south Asian countries have taken.