IITM Incubation Cell has announced its partnership with NativeLead Foundation — India’s first angel-driven ecosystem, empowering young minds of Tamil Nadu to become innovators and entrepreneurs.
The partnership aims to identify, nurture and help scale up start-ups from institutes and incubators, particularly in tier 2/3/4 cities — local entrepreneurs, address local challenges and build solutions for wider impact.
The collaboration also ties into IITMIC’s 10X initiative of Accelerated Incubation, geared towards achieving an ambitious 1,000 incubations by 2030, through empowering young emerging entrepreneurs from India's rural pockets, said a release.
NativeLead Angels currently has six local chapters in Tamil Nadu (Madurai, Coimbatore, Erode, Karur, Trichy and Thoothukudi) and three Native Connect Chapters (Chennai, Washington DC and Tokyo). Their core objective is to invest and nurture start-ups emerging from the small towns of Tamil Nadu.
IITMIC and NativeLead will jointly leverage their network to provide value added support including mentorship, market access, training for strengthening entrepreneurial ecosystems and growth of incubated startups at IITMIC and its partner institutes/incubators across the State.
“Focus will be in domains (but not limited to) of agritech, retail, healthtech, edutech and cleantech, with social impact and ESG compliance,” the release said.