Huddle, an early-stage startup accelerator, announced on Wednesday it will invest Rs 50 crore (around $7 million) by 2022. Of this amount, Huddle has deployed close to Rs 25 crore (around $3 million) in 2021 across 19 ventures.
The funds have been and will continue to be invested in startups across sunrise sectors such as direct to customer (D2C), electric vehicles, alternative nutrition, creators’ economy, and gaming, among others.
In 2021, Huddle said it invested in a total of 19 startups across the sectors of retail, D2C brands, electric vehicles, agri-tech, fitness-tech. Some of its portfolio companies include Bold Care, Cell Propulsion, Wellversed, RACEnergy, F5, Celcius, and The New Shop among others.
Founded in 2017 by Ishaan Khosla and Sanil Sachar, the Gurugam-based accelerator and fund Huddle partners with teams at early validation and growth stages (pre-seed/seed/pre-Series A), to support across strategy, business development growth, and investment access.
“Our core principle from Day One has been about accelerating the execution journey of promising teams. As an accelerator, our focus on execution has allowed us to reduce the risk of early-stage building and investing. Now, with capital backing our efforts, we’re able to further strengthen our long-term commitment to founders to build large venture-backable businesses together. We’re pumped for the next phase of growth as we build India’s leading accelerator,” Huddle founding partner Ishaan Khosla said.
Sachar said, “Over the course of us supporting over 100 founders, we have witnessed an increasing need for acceleration of startups. As an accelerator-led fund, we have built the infrastructure and support functions that can assist ventures across, diverse sectors from their early days up."
Huddle said its differentiation stems from its focus and ability to support early-stage start-ups across multiple business functions such as go-to-market strategy, business development, and capital structuring. It works closely with founders and equips them with the right infrastructure, social and intellectual capital to build large venture-backable businesses.
The firm said it has been working with several co-acceleration programmes in the country. As part of this, Huddle recently partnered with Shiprocket and launched Rocketfuel X Huddle, an accelerator program aimed at investing in and accelerating D2C start-ups across early to growth stages. earlier Huddle has partnered with growX ventures to co-accelerate startups in the EV landscape.
The accelerator also co-invests up to $300,000 per on select ventures alongside a network of funds, family offices, corporate VCs, and high-value angels.
