Eximius Ventures Launches Student Venture Partner Program to Support Student-led Startups with Allocation of up to $500,000
New Delhi : Recognizing the potential of student-led startups, micro VC Eximius Ventures has launched its first cohort of the Student Venture Partner program, an initiative designed to empower undergraduate Indian students to participate in deal sourcing and support upcoming startups from their campuses.
Founded by two 19-year-old entrepreneurs who left Stanford in 2020, Zepto recently raised $60Mn in its first institutional round from investors like Glade Brook Capital, Nexus, and YCombinator, among others to disrupt the grocery delivery space.
Examples of successful student entrepreneurship are visible all across the startup landscape today, including the likes of Practo (NIT Karnataka), Pepper Content (BITS Pilani), and OYO (student dropout), which have gained significant investor confidence.
Founder and Managing Director, Pearl Agarwal shares the motivation behind starting the program, “As the startup ecosystem in India matures, we will see an increasing number of entrepreneurs emerging from colleges. Through Eximius Ventures, we want to develop an ecosystem to help nurture them with the right network and capital.”
Founded in 2020, Eximius is headquartered in Delhi NCR and invests in pre-seed stage startups across gaming, healthtech, and fintech.
Through this program, Eximius Ventures aims to not only accelerate the success of nascent-stage student-led startups but also groom the Student Venture Partners to become a part of the VC ecosystem.
The one-year program will allocate up to $500,000 to Student Venture Partners for investing in startups from their network. It will also enable each of them to present deals to Eximius’ internal committee (IC) and gain hands-on experience of working at a VC.
The program has selected three students: Aryan Mittal from IIT Delhi, Bhargav Chaudhari from IIT Bombay, and Parth Goel from IIT Kharagpur, and is scheduled to start in December 2021.
In addition to this, the program will also present the opportunity for Student Venture Partners to build meaningful relations with industry players.