Centre for Financial Innovation (CFI) inaugurated the Sunil Bhatia Start-up Hub on July 15, 2023. SPJIMR PGDM 1989 alum Sunil Bhatia, Board Member, Investor and Former CEO of Infogain, has committed INR 10 crore towards launching the Start-up Hub. His contribution resonates with both his and SPJIMR’s commitment to boosting the start-up ecosystem in India. The Sunil Bhatia Start-up Hub is a comprehensive ecosystem for budding start-up founders. The Hub will fund educational and networking activities that support entrepreneurship at three levels: Pre-Incubation, Incubation, and Acceleration.
Pre-Incubation
The Hub will offer networking opportunities, boot camps, workshops, masterclasses, contests, and micro-grants to entrepreneurs, with the goal of identifying and connecting the most promising start-ups to the appropriate incubators from the Hub’s network of high-quality incubators across the country. Hub events for entrepreneurs will be conducted in-person in key cities, and also online.
Incubation
The Hub will act as a quality feeder of early start-ups to India’s incubator network. The Hub will also provide educational programming to start-ups housed in partner incubators, and will help promising start-ups to graduate from the incubator to domain-specific accelerators, such as SPJIMR FinNovate Accelerator for FinTech and TechFin.
Acceleration
The Hub will support the start-ups selected into SPJIMR FinNovate Accelerator with customised educational programming, and by also funding them alongside the FinNovate Accelerator’s other institutional early-stage investors, on graduation from the Accelerator. FinNovate is SPJIMR’s recently-launched equity-free accelerator for FinTech and TechFin start-ups, with a partner network of prominent companies from the BFSI sector, and a distinguished “C” level mentor network.
