This virtual accelerator with mentors from Google, Facebook, Silicon Valley Bank wants to help startups find their way through the new normal

• The IndiaRath accelerator claims to be ‘borderless’ as it is for Indian startups to go beyond borders for mentorship, guidance and market access.
• The founders accelerated the design and launch of the program within two months with mentors from Google, Facebook, Silicon Valley Bank, and Indian startups like Paytm, OYO, Hike etc.
• In its first year of operations, the accelerator plans to have 200 startups.

The latest startup accelerator in town is in compliance with the new normal – an all virtual accelerator.

While the thought for the IndiaRath accelerator was there even before the coronavirus pandemic came about, the founders accelerated the design and launch of the program within two months with mentors from Google, Facebook, Silicon Valley Bank, and Indian startups like Paytm, OYO, Hike etc.

“What started as an idea between 3 founders quickly took shape as we evangelized it with experts/mentors across the globe,” Yatin Thakur, Chair- Gen Asia, Founder Coworkin, and the co-founder of IndiaRath told Business Insider.

The accelerator claims to be ‘borderless’ as it is for Indian startups to go beyond borders for mentorship, guidance and market access.

“The Indian startup ecosystem has been going through a paradigm shift over the last few months. We saw valuation peaking for some large Indian unicorn, somewhere the pandemic has also put a question on viability and long term impact. We realised we were going through extremely challenging times, this was also the opportunity to rewrite the rules and help the next generation of entrepreneurs,” Thakur told Business Insider.

According to a report by the Asian Development Bank Institute, India jumped five spots in the Global Innovation Index from 2018 to 2019 – from the 57th to the 52nd rank. The ranking is for 129 countries with 80 indicators “ranging from rates of intellectual property filing and mobile-application creation to spending on education, scientific and technical publications, as well as many other criteria.”

And it’s this promise of Indian innovation that the Indiarath accelerator is betting on. “We saw there is an existing gap in our ecosystem where most of these platforms were restricted to startups in urban areas or Tier 1 & 2 cities and realised that most of the opportunities are restricted to startups depending on their geographies,” Upasna Dash, founder of JBC, a communications company and co-founder of IndiaRath told Business Insider.

Who can apply

As the accelerator is sector agnostic, any startup can apply for the 24-week program. The selection will be on the basis of the scope of their product.

“Through the program, the startups will receive help in upskilling founders for business remodelling, product designing, branding, strategy, etc provided by some of the best mentors from the industry in the form of masterclasses, one on one mentorship by some industry veterans and global connects in order to build stronger market reach and build products and services,” said Arjita Sethi, co-founder of IndiaRath, founder and CEO of Equally, a venture-backed edtech startup based in San Francisco. Sethi also sits on the board of advisors of The Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center and is a faculty at Hult International Business School and San Francisco State University.

In its first year of operations, the accelerator plans to have 200 startups.

SEE ALSO:
Here are the startups fuelling India’s electric vehicle dream

India tells Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm Mall and all others to show 'country of origin' next to the products