Venture Catalysts invests in corporate venturing platform IncubateHub

By Narinder Kapur

  • 09 Jan 2020
Credit: 123RF.com

FHS Accelerator Pvt. Ltd, which operates innovation and corporate venturing platform IncubateHub, has raised funding from incubator and accelerator Venture Catalysts.

Venture Catalysts said in a statement the investment is in line with its commitment to nurturing firms that add value to the overall startup landscape in India.

Rajiv Mukherjee, co-founder at IncubateHub, said it will use the funds to increase its presence in the market. “Given our exponential growth since inception, it is now the time to increase our operational capacity and expand our footprint globally,” he said.

The company achieved a revenue of Rs 2 crore ($280,660) for the 2018-19 financial year, Mukherjee added.

The financial details of the transaction couldn't be ascertained.

Separately, Venture Catalysts president and co-founder Apoorv Ranjan Sharma said the investment in IncubateHub would help address the gap in the corporate innovation market and help other startups in its portfolio to develop, pilot and validate their ideas.

Bengaluru-based IncubateHub, which was founded in 2014, has so far served nearly 50 corporates and has multi-year contracts with at least seven clients. The startup says its offerings include workshops for use case refinement, white-label portals for innovation management. It also has a group of dedicated analysts, community and programme managers.

The firm provides corporates with access to 11,000 startups, over 900 academic institutions, and more than 30,000 designers and developers. This access helps clients to create proof of concepts, accelerate the development of their solution, and build out their capacity.

Venture Catalysts

This is the second reported investment by Venture Catalysts this year. Set up in December 2015 by Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Anuj Golecha, Anil Jain and Gaurav Jain, the firm usually invests between $250,000 and $1 million each in early-stage startups.

The incubator and accelerator said its network of high-net-worth individual investors struck 60 investment deals and 27 exit transactions in 2019.

In August last year, it floated a fund, the 9Unicorns Fund, with a corpus of Rs 300 crore ($43.44 million), to help early-stage Indian startups expand their business. The fund will typically invest Rs 60 lakh for a 5% stake in a startup and may put in additional Rs 3-5 crore in subsequent funding rounds depending on a company’s ability to meet its growth objectives.

Earlier this week, it announced an investment in Skilancer Solar Pvt. Ltd, which provides robotic cleaning systems for solar panels of commercial parks and establishments.

In November, the incubator invested an undisclosed sum in WonDRx, a startup that seeks to bridge the gap between patients and healthcare providers through a data-driven approach. In October, it took part in a $500,000 seed funding round in online dermatology solutions provider Remedico.