Startup incubator T-Hub and Telangana government announced the launch of the three-month accelerator programme T-Angel. This venture is to support technology startups in healthcare, real estate, entertainment, sports, education, and finance sectors and make them investible. The programme will pick 30 startups for quarterly support beginning on October 20, 2019. The top 10 startups from each batch will receive funding from angel investors. “T-Angel is the part of the ecosystem capacity building that we do. While we are probably the fourth most active investment ecosystem after Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, and Mumbai but we are far behind them. We can either assume things will fall in place or we can take a very concerted effort in building this ecosystem in a different way,” Ravi Narayan, CEO, T-Hub told Financial Express Online.
The deals discovery platform 'LetsVenture' supports this programme, wherein 10 selected startups from each batch will onboard the former's platform. Through the platform, investors and startups can list themselves and discover each other based on their interest areas. “In Hyderabad ecosystem, the gap is that at the angel investment level. The ecosystem has more than 200 startups that are ready to raise angel money but we have less than 50 active angel investors. To bridge this gap fast, we partnered with LetsVenture to ensure that the deals we identify goes through completion,” said Narayan. LetsVenture has so far helped more than 190 startups raise over $85 million in the past six years.
The programme will handhold startups, and create right business plans for them. Also, financials and investment pitch deck will be created to get angel investors excited about them. T-Hub is also working with angels and training certain of them to become lead investors in investment rounds. “While we are doing quite a lot in terms of mentoring, handholding for startups but we feel that it will take a while for venture capital investors and angels to appreciate Hyderabad for the kind of startups available here for funding. While investors are setting up offices here as well but not at the pace at which it is required like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Gurugram. So we feel early-stage startups miss out because of this,” Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary Industries and IT, Telangana State told Financial Express Online.
Shanti Mohan, Co-founder and CEO of LetsVenture said: We are excited about our partnership with a credible brand like T-Hub. As a market leader in early stage startup investments, LetsVenture will work closely in this T-Angel programme. The sole objective of this venture is to make the first batch of startups investor ready. Our experience in developing the angel community and tech-enabled platform will be handy. We can systematically intervene to help build the ecosystem with T-Angel.
T-Angel is looking to help 15-25 startups get funded in the next 12 months. The investment could be Rs 2 crore on an average and around Rs 100 crore in total.
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