CHENNAI: IIT Madras Incubation cell aims to incubate at least 100 startups this year with focus on climate-tech, agriculture, rural-tech, water, sustainability-related, future factory, supply chain management.
“We are sector-agnostic, but we would focus on certain areas of interest and attract young entrepreneurs (for that), in the next three months,” said Tamaswati Ghosh, Chief Executive Officer of IIT Madras Incubation Cell. “We are not just waiting for startups to apply, but we are also creating programs to generate potential for new startups.” Country’s leading academia-backed incubator onboarded 70 last year. IITMIC incubated startups totaled 350 in 2023 and have a combined valuation of Rs 45,000 crores. In the financial years 2022-23, they have a combined revenue of Rs 3,000 crores.
Tamaswati Ghosh said it is a good measure of startups’ performance.” Amid the funding winter, she says startups at IITM took longer to close the funding rounds than usual but managed to pull off investments. “It all goes down to certain principles the way companies are being run where investor confidence falls.”
“For the majority of the companies here, getting funding has not been difficult, but (it) got longer to close the round. Startups across stages have received funds. Some well-known companies have closed funds with good valuation.”
IIT Madras enjoys a high success rate in deep-tech ranging from Space-tech, drones, semiconductors, hyperloop, robotics and life sciences, boasting 80% survival rate since its inception in 2010. But many of the startups have not scaled up in a big way like Flipkart, Zomato and Swiggy or gone public. IITM’s Uniphore became an Unicorn in 2022 with a USD 400 million funding. Most startups are in the business to business (B2B) ventures rather than consumer-tech business. Tamaswati Ghosh expects a few major startups to scale up their business this year including Agnikul Cosmos, Ather Energy and others.
She said the incubation cell aims to bring startups from remote places, reach out to students from tier- II, tier- III and tier-IV cities to create entrepreneurial culture. IITMIC partners with around 50 colleges and co-incubating startups from non-metro cities to create entrepreneurial hub within these institutions. “It is all about confidence.”
Though the institute has a pan India presence of incubatees, it is concentrated in the south and plans to expand its geography throughout the country. IIT Madras has multiple centers of innovation, pre-incubators, five incubators including the mother incubator IIT Madras Incubation cell, cyber-physical system incubators, Health-tech incubator, bio-tech incubators, rural-tech incubators.
Speaking to TNIE, IIT Madras Director Prof. V Kamakoti said, starting 100 startups which essentially mean 2-3 people will become CEOs and CTOs. “We have to have some kind of target,” he said, adding they aim to guide startups to scale-up, becoming unicorns.
This year he wants more startups out of IIT-M students. Space sector, satellite and communications, manufacturing, robotics, accessibility, will play a major role in 2024, apart from fintech, IT and AI-related startups, he said.
The institute has a high number of patent filing among IITs and plans to share its patent filing mechanism with other colleges and hope the technology licensing will soon become a big chunk of revenue for the institute. Recently, 5G radio access network (RAN) technology developed by IIT Madras and others has been licensed to Tata’s Tejas Networks. “We are now pushing on innovation and entrepreneurship, the two important things to make our country a tech power, “ Prof V Kamakoti said.