India’s homegrown e-commerce giant Flipkart has launched Leap, an incubation and accelerator support to startups. With the launch of the startup accelerator, Flipkart has joined the league of top corporates in India such as Reliance, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amity, Intel, Oracle, Target, Yes Bank, etc.
Nearly a year-and-a-half after Walmart-owned Flipkart launched its venture fund to back early-stage startups, the e-commerce company has now forayed into accelerating startups. Flipkart has launched its startup accelerator Flipkart Leap for startups in technology and consumer internet segments. Inviting applications beginning Monday, the 16-week virtual programme will support both businesses-to-business and business-to-consumer startups. The support will be offered by Flipkart’s own leadership team in business, operations, product, and technology verticals to help startups build market-ready solutions.
With the launch of the startup accelerator Flipkart Leap, Flipkart has further joined the league top corporates in India such as Reliance, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amity, Intel, Oracle, Target, Yes Bank, etc. offering incubation and accelerator support to startups. Flipkart would pick startups based on five ‘themes’ including Design & Make for India, innovation in digital commerce, technologies to empower the retail ecosystem, supply chain management & logistics and enabling relevant deep tech applications.
On similar lines, Flipkart in a statement said,
“These themes have been identified to tap into the most innovative solutions in the Technology and Consumer Internet space, uniquely built for Indian consumers,”
Speaking of a broader aspect of the development, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Chief Executive Officer, Flipkart Group, said,
“With innovations and disruptions in the field of technology coming about each day, we want to be at the forefront of driving scalability and helping these startups bring value to the industry as well as Indian consumers,”
The accelerator programme will be managed by Naren Ravula who leads Flipkart’s product strategy & deployment team looking after managing innovation at Flipkart and Myntra and the broader ecosystem. Curated in tie-up with consulting firm Zinnov, Leap will also allow startups to win an equity-free grant of $25,000. Startups applying for the programme should have a working prototype of their solution with metrics around its early adoption. Post programme, startups will pitch their business to investors, corporates, others on the demo-day while Flipkart may also look at investing in them.
Adding further, Jey Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart, quoted,
“As a company that has undergone that phase and built its own success playbook, we wanted to utilize our network to build a program that helps startups in these early stages to evolve and become successful brands in the future,”
