Startup Réseau partnership aims to attract participation from 80-100 corporates
Visa, which has always been a reliable partner for fintechs across the world, is collaborating with the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) for the AIM iLEAP program to work with tech start-ups across India.
“Visa has always been a reliable partner for fintechs across the world and in India, whether by opening our APIs to them or through programs like Visa Everywhere Initiative. Now, we are excited to collaborate with AIM for the AIM iLEAP program and work with tech start-ups across India,” Arvind Ronta, Head – Products, India and South Asia, Visa, said on the collaboration.
“Through this partnership, we hope to enable opportunities for India’s innovative start-up ecosystem to take secure, scalable solutions to market faster,” Ronta said on 30 June 2021 at the conclusion of first fintech cohort of AIM-iLEAP – an initiative to back tech start-ups with much-needed access to industry, markets and investors.
AIM has onboarded Visa, a corporation known globally for backing entrepreneurship, as an industry partner along with Startup Réseau.
The digital payment company will be extending their API’s and services to the start-ups. They will also provide the B2B and B2C start-ups their platform for digitized payments, said AIM iLEAP program organiser, NITI Aayog, which along with AIM, held the first fintech cohort of ‘AIM-iLEAP’ as major step to accelerate Tech Start-ups across India.
The organisers said Startup Réseau partnership aims to attract participation from 80-100 corporates for a series of 12 thematic bootcamps and Virtual Demo Days, over the course of the program.
Startup Réseau Founder and CEO Ajay Ramasubramaniam said, “We firmly believe that successful models of incubation and acceleration of start-ups require broader participation of the industry at large. Atal Innovation Mission is a fantastic enabler of incubators and the infrastructure supporting innovation and entrepreneurship.”
He added that Startup Réseau brings a strong global network of mentors, enterprise connections and investors that can be leveraged by these start-ups supported under Atal Incubation Centres. AIM iLEAP is to enable next-gen start-ups in India, through a series of bootcamps and demo days that will open up access points.
In a move to give a major push to tech startups across the country, NITI Aayog and AIM, conducted the fintech cohort through a series of thematic virtual demo days. These were organised in partnership with Startup Réseau and Visa as part of AIM-iLEAP (Innovative leadership for entrepreneurial agility and profitability) initiative.
The program had kickstarted with the inaugural four-day bootcamp for “FinTech” start-ups (the chosen few from among the several AIM supported Fintech start-ups) from 14-17 June 2021.
The Fin-Tech cohort consisted of start-ups from a wide range of areas such as payments, international money transfers, personal finance, consumer banking, insurance and neo bank. In the bootcamp they got an opportunity to fine-tune their pitches, work on their GTM strategy, understand more about the fintech ecosystem, ask questions to sectoral experts and so on.
After going through rigorous polishing, the start-ups showcased their solutions to various enterprises for market access and investors for funding via the inaugural virtual Demo Day on 30 June 2021. The Demo Day saw participation from a large number of corporates and investors. Fintech giants such as Visa, Paytm etc as well as big investors attended the program.
As per the AIM’s mission, AIM-iLEAP bootcamp and demo day is the first among the many more to come initiatives to push startups in the country. Future cohorts shall be focussed on different sectors such as Agri-tech, Defence Tech, Smart Mobility, AI and so on.
While speaking on the virtual event today, Mission Director AIM, NITI Aayog, Dr Chintan Vaishnav said that the main mandate of AIM is to catalyse India’s start-up and innovation ecosystem and the AIM-iLEAP program is a step in that direction.
“It gives a structured yet lite-weight approach to bring together the start-ups, enterprises, investors and financers to come together and create partnerships that would help these start-ups to take a leap forward in achieving more scalable and sustainable solutions,” he asserted in a release on 30 June 2021.
He further said that this will help to build trust and confidence among all the stakeholders which are the vital ingredients of a vibrant start-up and innovation ecosystem. Fintech community is at the forefront of building an ecosystem where everyone wins; such platforms catalyze movement towards reaching such a goal. It is AIM’s main objective to culminate into reality the vision of an Indian innovation ecosystem that runs sustainably on an auto-pilot mode. #technology #fintech #startups #investors /fiinews.com
