Incubation and investment platform Atal Incubation Centre (AIC)-Pinnacle Entrepreneurship Forum has secured a grant of around Rs 4.5 crore and aims to invest in 19 early-stage startups in the next three years, it said in a statement on Thursday.
AIC-Pinnacle is supported by Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, Ministry of MSME and Ministry of Electronics and IT. It has been selected by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) under the “Startup India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS)”, it added.
"The SISFS grant will work as a catalyst for us to achieve our goal of creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem focused on innovation, incubation, and investment in key sectors. Through this assistance, we are aiming to incubate and provide financial assistance to 19 early-stage startups over the next three years. We will be helping the early-stage startups with prototype development, product trials, outreach activities, legal compliance, IP support, market-entry, commercialization, scaling up,” said Sudhir Mehta, founder, AIC-Pinnacle Entrepreneurship Forum and Chairman of Pinnacle Industries & EKA.
“So far, we have facilitated over Rs 80 million to 56 startups across sectors like automotive, electric mobility, agritech, artificial intelligence, clean energy, healthtech, social innovation and other emerging areas, and transformed their ideas and vision into scalable products, services, and models. With the SISFS grant, we look forward to supporting the startups from tier 2 and 3 cities that are willing to address the ground-level issues of ‘Bharat’—where 70 per cent of Indians reside, and the next-generation entrepreneurs will come from,” Mehta added.
AIC-Pinnacle Entrepreneurship Forum is a part of Pinnacle Industries Limited. It supports and promotes complex, complex, technology-enabled, high-impact product startups and technologies that generate economic wealth and support socio-economic development by solving societal issues.
Earlier in June, AIC-Pinnacle announced its plans to incubate 30 new startups with an estimated facilitation of funds up to Rs 10 million in the current financial year.