CIE-IIITH Partners With SucSEED Indovation Fund To Invest In Early Stage Deeptech Startups The alliance will invest upto INR 40 lakh in the pre-revenue stage, very promising deep technology startups in AI, and other emerging technologies
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Deeptech academic incubators CIE-IIITH, along with SucSEED Indovation Fund, an Angel Fund registered with SEBI as Category-I AIF-VC Fund- Angel Fund have joined hands to fund and support early-stage deep-tech startups through the accelerator programs of CIE.
SucSEED Indovation will be the investment partner of this program, and will jointly invest up to INR 40 lakh in the pre-revenue stage of very promising deep technology startups in AI and other emerging technologies.
"Early-stage formal VC funds and the structured support of such funds resolves a serious gap in the tech startup ecosystem today. Extremely glad to see SucSEED Indovation Fund filling this gap. We are happy to have partnered with SucSEED in our journey to support deeptech and research-based startups," said Prof. CV Jawahar, chief executive officer, CIE-IIITH.
In the past 13 years, CIE has helped over 300 startups to Seed and scale. More than 40 startups actively engaged with the deeptech research labs of IIIT Hyderabad to build innovative technology solutions. CIE has invested more than INR 10 crore in multiple startups at various stages in the form of equity investments and grants. CIE is well connected to the broader deeptech ecosystem in Hyderabad and beyond.
"There's lot of common synergy between us and CIE-IITH. As an early-stage fund, we are looking for sustainable innovative solutions around problem statements of the world and invest in startups, primarily from India, that could turn beneficial for people. Our purpose under this partnership is to anticipate deep-tech trends and focus on them collaboratively as much as we can to shape their rapid growth through our experiences of supporting entrepreneurship," remarked Vikrant Varshney, co-founder and managing partner, SucSEED Indovation Fund.
SucSEED Indovation Fund has grown out of SucSEED Angels Network and IIITH Tech Ventures, an early-stage Seed fund initiative started by CIE (Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship - IIIT Hyderabad Foundation).
IIITH Tech Ventures worked with Seed-stage startups in CIE since 2017 and has secured huge success with those startups delivering great products to the market and has seen 4 exits already in the last 3 years, with the decacorns and unicorns like Byju's, Ericsson, and Muthoot Finance Ltd acquiring the startups from the portfolio.
Through this CIE-IITH and SucSEED collaboration, startups get to leverage the expertise of IIIT Hyderabad's deeptech research acumen and tech capabilities and get benefitted by business experiences of SucSEED GPs, LPs, and mentors onboard.
Deeptech has become integral part of the startup ecosystem and as per a report by NASSCOM, 19 per cent of Indian technology driven startups are already leveraging the deep tech innovations to develop product enhancements and command greater market share, it is expected that the deep-tech and startup hubs will see a steady 40-45 per cent CAGR. Confidently it can be predicted that deeptech and the incredible potential of the Indian IT sector is going to pave the way for consistent growth in the years to come.
The report also highlights AI and IoT accounting for two-third of the deeptech startups. While enterprise, healthhtech, fintech, industrial manufacturing were the quickest adopters, investor trust and interest in deep tech startups is on the rise.
