Farha should be making a pitch deck. Or testing a prototype. Or networking with VCs. Instead, she is worrying. Mostly about how to make money stretch for a startup that, on paper, has already received a government grant.<\/p>\n
Her 12-month-old women\u2019s health platform was accepted into one of India\u2019s flagship Atal Incubation Centres (AICs)\u2014the kind that aim to nurture innovation and entrepreneurship in India with sanctioned grants, formal mentors, and built-in support. At least, that\u2019s what they\u2019re supposed to do.<\/p>\n
But Farha\u2019s struggles aren\u2019t at the cutting edge. They\u2019re on the ground floor: hiring, outreach, marketing. Work at the founder\u2019s office leaves her with no room to think and absolutely no time to raise external funding.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe grant only covers the tech aspect of my startup. I have to invest my own money into everything else,\u201d said the 36-year-old founder.<\/p>\n
Building a tech platform was necessary, of course. But it was only one part of Farha\u2019s vision. The bigger goal was to fend for the community. And the startup needed traction to work. It needed buzz, visibility, and conversation.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne would think a startup-focused programme, with all its talk of mentorship and expansion, might have understood that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Spoiler: it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Launched in 2016 and created with a Rs 500 crore corpus, Atal Incubation Centres, functioning under the country\u2019s apex policy think tank Niti Aayog\u2019s Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), had a simple promise\u2014nurture India\u2019s innovators. These centres were meant to be the backbone of the government\u2019s innovation push.<\/p>\n
Instead, after nearly a decade of incubating over 3,500 startups across 72 AICs in the country, fewer than 5% of the companies have raised external capital, according to data from various government sources. Most centres, in fact, show no visible activity, outcomes, or meaningful audits.<\/p>\n
Now, the government wants to \u201cexpand, strengthen, and deepen\u201d the ecosystem, and so it has allocatedPress Information Bureau<\/a>Cabinet approves continuation of the Atal Innovation Mission Rs 2,750 crore ($308 million) to continue the mission. Not just the centre, states like KarnatakaDeccan Herald<\/a>Karnataka govt and VCs distribute Rs 400 crore to deep tech startups\u00a0are also announcing Rs 1,000 crore in new deep-tech and AI funds and fresh incubators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Farha should be making a pitch deck. Or testing a prototype. Or networking with VCs. Instead, she is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":317042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[28,158],"class_list":{"0":"post-317041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}