NASSCOM 10K Startups Announces Fifth Phase of Konnect

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) announces the fifth phase of NASSCOM 10,000 Startups ‘Konnect’ and will be impacting applications from technology startups across the country. This phase five is focussed on identifying, supporting, incubating, and accelerating innovative technology start-ups in India.

Sharing his views, Mr. Rajat Tandon, Vice President, NASSCOM 10K Startups said, “India is the third largest startup ecosystem in the World with immense talent and innovative startups flourishing each day. With the strong support from mentors, industry experts, investors and VCs, we have successfully created a significant impact on the startup ecosystem of the country. Phase 5 is going to be our biggest Konnect to date as we are aiming to create a greater impact across the early stage startup ecosystem.”

For the fifth phase, NASSCOM has shortlisted 200+ domain centric applications from startups, which will provide a detailed overview of their business idea and the market opportunity. Startups who have applied in the last 4 months are now being considered for Phase 5 shortlisting and for the 10K Nurture program. The shortlisted startups will be pitching to over 100 investors in 6 locations and will have the access to participate in the intensive accelerator pitch and mentoring Konnect sessions. The program has strong support from 50+ industry experts (NIPP) and close to 100 incubator partners. The sessions will start in the first week of March across Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Kochi and Hyderabad.

In its last four phases, a total of 11,000 startups applied,   1,100 shortlisted and 500 have been impacted by way of funding , acceleration and mentoring. Some of their impacted startups include SmartVizX, Lazylad, EnglishDost, Flutura, SeekSherpa, Faircent, Hiree, Sliderule, Vidgyor, CustomerXPS to name a few.

NASSCOM 10,000 Startups, is a startup incubation program whose objective is to create 10,000 domain specific startups in the country by 2020. Phase Four of the NASSCOM 10K Start-ups Konnect had 150+ startup shortlists that went through pitch and mentoring sessions

About NASSCOM 10,000 Start-ups

Started in April 2013, 10,000 Start-ups is an ambitious attempt by NASSCOM to scale up the start-up ecosystem in India by 10x. 10,000 Start-ups aims to enable incubation, funding and support for 10,000 technology start-ups in India over the next ten years. The program’s vision is to foster entrepreneurship, build entrepreneurial capabilities at scale and strengthen early stage support for tech start-ups. The initiative brings together key stakeholders of the ecosystem including startup incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capitalists, start-up support groups, mentors, and technology corporations. Since its launch, we’ve done about 600+ high impact events in 25 cities of the country which were attended by a whopping 25,000 attendees and have impacted 1100 startups out of 11,000 Applicants. The program is supported by our founding partner Google for Entrepreneurs, and Industry Partners Microsoft Ventures, Kotak, IBM and Amazon Web Services.