IDGVI, a venture capital firm IDG ventures India, has propelled 2017 Innovation program to connect with the budding startups across the core sector of software, consumer tech, fintech, and healthtech. The programme will be appropriate for startup seeking for raising SEED as well as Series A funding round valued between $500, 000 to $5 million.
IDGVI’s collaboration
The venture firm is collaborating with Amazon Internet Services (AISPL) which is an Indian affiliate of Seattle-headquartered Amazon Web Services and Unilever Ventures which is the venture capital and private equity arm of Unilever.
How Unilever connected with IDGVI
A Unilever venture is connected with IDGVI as an investor and evaluates the companies for potential co-investments as a part of the programme.
Benefits which will be provided to selected startups
Additionally, the selected companies will get technology mentorship from the team of AISPL and also get several value added benefits such as premium support, Go-To-Market connects and AWS credits.
IDG ventures said that Amazon has strong understanding
Ranjith Menon, executive director at IDG Ventures India, said that, “Amazon AWS has a strong understanding of tech. They can add value in terms of architecture, etc. Unilever is such a big organisation, you can look across segments we are looking (to invest into) and they are a potential customer (for the startups). That can add tremendous value to young companies”.
About 2016 programme
IDGVI had started separate programmes in 2016 which were primarily focused on software and consumer tech including Axilor. But in 2017 programme it puts all programmes in to one huge innovation project.
DGVI invested in six startups in 2016
The previous programme in 2016 closed at 1000 applications from the various startups and the company had invested in six startups including Flyrobe, PipeCandy, Active.ai, Little Black Book, InfiSecure, and Hansel. Io.
Investment will be varied according to stage of the selected companies and will be from $0.5 million to $3 million.
IDGVI looking for innovation
Sudhir Sethi, founder chairman of IDG Ventures India, said that, “We wanted to look at innovation in one go, not one today, one tomorrow. We will also connect them to some of our companies. Many of our companies are customers to these young companies”.