The investment capital arm of SAR group, Ncubate Capital Partners, has formed Ncubate Venture Labs to invest and mentor startups.
“To focus on start ups, last month we launched Ncubate Venture Lab which will provide skills and financial help to small companies which need help,” said Rakesh Malhotra, Founder Ncubate Capital Partners and Chairman SAR Group.
Entrepreneur turned investor Malhotra forayed into venture capital space with Ncubate Capital Partners to fund micro, small and medium enterprises across the country in December last year.
The private investment firm has a corpus of $40 million, out of which $30 million has been anchored by Malhotra and rest $10 million has been raised from an NBFC. Ncubate Venture Labs will invest out of this fund only.
Prashant Parida, head marketing, SAR Group explained, “ We will basically be helping start ups with assisting them with knowledge , guidance and skills apart from financial help. The only difference between the parent Ncubate fund and Venture labs is the size of companies that we will be focusing on. We could also help a start-up which just has an idea in mind.” Malhotra added that Ncubate venture labs will also help companies that have gone through bad times and need revival.
A big chunk of the $40 million fund came from the money that Malhotra made by selling-off 74 per cent stake in SAR group-promoted Luminous Power Technologies (LPT) to Schneider Electric for Rs 1,400 crore, in June this year. The balance 26 per cent stake remains with Luminous founders, including Rakesh Malhotra, Navneet Kapoor and Sunil Bhalla.
The parent Group SAR is diversified into various sectors like Water purification, Clean technology, Telco, Electricals and Real Estate and Capital Investment. It runs brands like Luminous Water Technologies, Navitas developers, Fly Mobiles and Ncubate Capital.There are many incubators that help start ups establish their business like Sameer Guglani’s Morpheus, which runs a startup acceleration programme. This basically helps entrepreneurs during the crucial seed period. The company works with entrepreneurs who are typically in the first 12-18 months of their business operations.
Another example is Startup village, which is promoted by the Kerala government aggressively. It recently announced that in the next three years, 2,000 IT firms will be incubated at the Startup Village in Kochi, India's first public private partnership model technology business incubator.
The promoters of Startup Village are Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Technopark and MobME Wireless.
(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)
