Bengaluru-based gradCapital has announced a $500,000 (Rs 3.72 crore) student-focused venture capital fund directed towards women founders - named Entreprenher. It will also help college graduates grow their ideas into businesses.
The firm said it will invest $25,000 in each of the 20 startups it selects over the next year, thereby investing a total of $500,000. gradCapital is also being supported by CIIE.CO.
The Entreprenher team consists of female founders from Zouk, Snap, ShareChat, CIIE, Unitus Capital, and others.
Entreprenher said it will host an eight-week programme for companies founded and run by college students.
”We genuinely believe in female founders. Currently, companies with female founders perform 63% better than those of their male peers. However, most women don’t receive the support to pursue this dream,” Simran Handa, team lead at Entreprenher, said.
Built and run by Abhishek Sethi and Prateek Behera, both graduates from IIM-A and BITS Pilani, respectively, gradCapital has now opened up the application process for its first cohort of startups.
Sethi and Behera ran a pilot to test their hypothesis and ended up with a cohort of eight companies including KiranaKart, Humit, Codedamn, Valerio Electric, and Neuralastic, many of which have raised funding successfully.