Cisco launches its own startup launchpad

Cisco today launched its own startup launchpad program at its Bengaluru centre, an initiative to accelerate startups and support growth in India’s startup ecosystem.

Cisco’s in-house teams would help mentor and co-work with startups to help build businesses. Startups will be offered office infrastructure, mentorship, investments, validated use-cases to work on and Cisco’s proprietary GTM (go to market) engines to co-develop solutions for partner organizations.

Amit Phadnis, President of Engineering at Cisco said, “You can call this an accelerator plus plus. It’s a consortium to solve the problems of the next 3 billion Indians on their way to digitization.”

The programme aims to connect over 50 billion devices to the current ecosystem through digitization. This would be done by matching ideas to business acumen and talent to investors and customers.

When asked about investments open to contestants, Phadnis said, “We have committed to invest over $280 million via CDA (Cisco Digitization Acceleration) and other investment programs. The entire amount is potentially open to these startups.”

The launchpad would have a selection programme, post which 5-8 startups would be shortlisted basis their business plans, team strength and other parameters. These would then have access to Cisco’s infrastructure, the company’s channel partner ecosystem and a select customer-base to test their technologies to validate and scale these ideas.

As a part of the launchpad, Cisco and Tech Mahindra have coordinated to develop solutions for Indian electric utilities. The duo would partner with startup s to drive digitization in the power sector.

The US networking major had announced series of strategic investments in India earlier this year, including $40 million to fund early-stage and growth-stage startups in the country. It has also launched a Global Delivery Center in Pune that would see its employee strength doubling over the next two years.

With the upcoming Pune centre, India is the only country in the world where Cisco will have two global delivery centres, the first one being in Bangalore.

Today, Bengaluru houses nearly 30% of the country’s technology startups, including the biggies like Flipkart, Ola, and InMobi. The city has the world’s second-fastest growing startup ecosystem, and is among the top 15 largest startup ecosystems globally.