All About Accelerators & Incubators
What is Risk ?
For a middle class Indian family “risk” can be investing money in mutual funds and wait for returns. However, investing in Fixed Deposit (FD) which attracts low returns is the safest of option for them.
Google gives definition of Risk as — “a situation involving exposure to danger”.
It is this risk factor which has tied ropes to the wings of some of the greatest ideas that India can produce for the world audience. Entrepreneurship has slowly caught hold of Indian households with the younger generation or to be precise “millennials”, wanting to work for themselves. The report “NASSCOM 10000 Startups Report” by Rajat Tandon, Director at NASSCOM and Sunil Rao, Country Head-Startup Ecosystem at Google India gives a fair idea of India’s progress and attitude towards startups and Entrepreneurship. How well can it be phrased when they say that India is just behind US, UK & Israel. In fact the updated numbers suggests that India have even surpassed Israel to grab the 3rd largest tech startup hub.
What are the possible avenues for a budding entrepreneur or a startup to get funding is a crucial question that would be going through the minds of each one of us. Well the answer is simple — the money is available in the market, you just have to locate where. Let’s not think of the terms like Angel Investor, crowd funding, seed funding, Venture Capitalist (VC). There is a long way to reach to those people and terms
Accelerators and Incubators are such avenues that budding startups can rely upon during their initial days. How good are they? Well let’s see.
INCUBATORS
If you have just an idea and no business model or direction to move, then Incubator is the best bet. An Incubator provides you space, a small funding, mentoring and training. Incubators support startups during the beginning stages of building their company. It more or less provides the startup a platform to start thinking big and growing options however, with no compulsion on quick growth. Incubators usually mentor startups from anywhere between 1–1.5 years.
Some of the Indian based Incubators are - CIIE IIMA, IAN Incubator, ICreate, Indavest, Khosla Labs, NSRCEL, Science And Technology Entrepreneurship Park, Seedfarm, Seedfund, Startup Village & Technopark TBI
ACCELARATORS
Accelerators can be termed as the next stage of Incubators. If you have an idea and a business plan then you should certainly proceed to an accelerator. Accelerators serve as a platform to catapult startups to the VC’s and investors state. They work with a set time frame of 3–4 months and provide enough capital for the startup to start finding their own feet by mentoring them and helping them to make pitch decks, videos pitches etc. Each accelerator has only a selected number of spots and a startup has to compete among others to secure their spot. The requirements that accelerators are looking for include scalability, investability and ability to grow within months. Unlike in incubators where they do not charge anything for helping you build up your idea, accelerators give a small seed investment, and access to a large mentor network, in exchange for a small amount of equity.
Some of the best Accelerators across the world include AngelPad, Y Combinator, Alchemist, Amplify LA, MuckerLab, StartX, Techstars, 500 Startups, gener8tor. These accelerators are very choosy. While Y Combinator accepts about 2% of the applications it receives, Techstars fills its 10 spots from around 1,000 applications.
SOURCES
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/294798
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/accelerators-vs-incubators-what-startups-need-to-know/
https://microventures.com/accelerators-vs-incubators
https://inc42.com/datalab/active-accelerators-in-india/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/06/07/best-accelerators-of-2017/#53283b9010cb
