PM announces Rs 1,000 cr 'Startup Seed Fund': How India transformed into third-largest startup ecosystem

In what will be a welcome development for India's budding entrepreneur community, Prime Minister Narendra Modi revealed, while speaking at the Prarambh Startup India International Summit on Saturday, that the government will launch a 1 billion rupee seed fund to startups called Startup India Seed. The fund is to help startups raise seed capital to grow. In the future, the government will provide guarantees to help startup raise debt capital. He added that we are trying to build an ecosystem for startups that works with the motto of "youth and youth."

The new foundation fund is another positive government initiative aimed at harnessing the potential of India's huge demographic dividend. Last year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology launched a similar scheme to identify and provide seed funding of up to Rs 25 lakh to 300 selected startups. Despite this, "Chunauti" only had an allocation budget of Rs 95.03 crore.

Earlier this year, India's ambassador to the United States, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, revealed that India, which now includes 21 unicorn companies with a cumulative value of $ 73.2 billion, has become the third largest startup ecosystem, expressing hope that 50 companies will join. An additional rise to this choice. Fast forward to 2022. The pandemic has largely led to the general demise of startups in 2020, but it is worth noting that in 2019 Indian entrepreneurs received record funding of $ 14.5 billion.

Indeed, in the context of increased funding, India's startup ecosystem has already established itself in recent years and is now characterized by disruptive technologies, continued consolidation, and a growing domestic market. By some estimates, the country only had 3,000 startups in 2014, but that number rose to more than 30,000 in 2020 with Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi becoming attractive destinations for the country's entrepreneurs.

The explosive growth of information technology companies that began in the 1980s thanks to increased transportation and research and development abroad inevitably led to a huge demand for technical education. Over the next few decades, this talent pool continued to grow, and by 2014, India was estimated to have 25 percent of the world's engineering graduates.

At the time, the startup space was in its infancy, but the government's push towards digitization by implementing digital infrastructure such as "Indiastack," a scalable, approval-based, cashless, paperless platform, was a gift from the Heaven for Indian startups. The architecture was the foundation of Aadhaar, India's global identification project that, in eight years, managed to accommodate more than 1.2 billion users. The platform has also been used to facilitate more than 500 million bank accounts for citizens who have not been able to access one before.

The push towards digitization has naturally coincided with a marked increase in investment in innovative new services, as India is now home to more than 300 business incubators and accelerators. 2018 alone saw as much as $ 4 billion directed at tech-based startups with as many names as Byju's, Unacademy, Flipkart (bought by Amazon now), and Pay now.

Furthermore, as the startup ecosystem in India approaches maturity, what B2C services have primarily dominated for a decade will lead to one, as B2B solutions will now attract more attention as Indian entrepreneurs discover and enter. new applications of Internet of things, blockchain and intelligence. Machine learning and machine learning to tackle complex business challenges.

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