Wadhwani Foundation Launches Business Accelerator for growth-stage Startups
Hyderabad: Wadhwani Foundation’s flagship initiative, the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) announced the launch of its business accelerator for growth stage startups, “WF Venture ScaleUp” in 2 cities (Pune / Hyderabad). WF Venture ScaleUp is a three-month accelerator program aimed at hyper-growth oriented startups and applies Ash Maurya’s Scaling Lean approach.
WF Venture ScaleUp is a zero equity and no fees program and is focused on investor and customer connects as a key benefit to startups. The program provides focused coaching and consulting on three growth levers – CUSTOMER, CASH, and CAPACITY (3-Cs) using SCALING LEAN principles. During this program, NEN growth coaches, domain experts and mentors will work with participating entrepreneurs one-on-one to help achieve tangible growth with a focus on the right ‘Traction Metrics’.
U.S based Ash Maurya will be interacting directly with the startups on benefits of “Scaling Lean” either through video conference or in person. Ash is the author of the international bestseller “Running Lean: How to Iterate from Plan A to a plan that works” and the creator of the one-page business modeling tool “Lean Canvas”. He is known for offering some of the best and most practical advice for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs all over the world and has developed a systematic methodology for raising the odds of success built upon Lean Startup, Customer Development, and Bootstrapping techniques.
Commenting on launch of the hyper-growth business accelerator, ‘WF Venture ScaleUp’, Dr Ajay Kela, President and CEO, Wadhwani Foundation said, “With over a million-youth turning 18 every month, India needs thousands of accelerators that drive job creation. India today has only 140 accelerators, most of which are not producing the goods. In comparison, China has over 1500 Incubators/Accelerators. Our goal is to create models for scalable and sustainable high-quality accelerators, build an online platform for entrepreneur connect and open-source these models, platforms and tools for private organization and Govt. to achieve national scale. We have nurtured entrepreneurship in colleges at a national level in India for 14 years and are now focusing on helping startups, and SMEs accelerate their growth.
Startups can register for the WF Venture ScaleUp program at venturescaleup.wfnen.org on or before 8th January 2018 which is the closing date for applications. Eligibility criteria include (a) startups who have a running venture with paying customers and who have already demonstrated product-market fit, (b) Ideas and business models that have potential for hyper-growth (c) angel to Series A funding (or bootstrapped with similar levels of traction).
In addition, Wadhwani Foundation recently launched WF Venture Fastrack, an accelerator program which also applies Ash Maurya’s running lean approach to help transform validated ideas into ventures. This program is aimed at supporting very early stage startups, and offers three-month immersive accelerator program, 12 months of progress check and consultation, and lifetime of networking/ business support. Twelve startups with diverse cross-sector profiles are currently part of the WF Venture Fastrack program, which is also zero-equity and no-fees program.