[Funding alert] Venture Catalysts backs open innovation platform IncubateHub

Venture Catalysts, an integrated incubator and early-stage investment firm, has made an undisclosed investment in IncubateHub, which provides open innovation and corporate venturing management-as-a-service for corporates. 

Dr Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, President and Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, 

“The corporate innovation market in India is growing rapidly, and we wanted to address the gaps that exist in the market through this strategic investment in IncubateHub. By bringing established companies and startups together, IncubateHub is helping the former to overcome the barriers to enterprise innovation.”

Founded by Rajiv Mukherjee, Uday Vipra, and Pradeep V, IncubateHub connects large corporates with a curated community of deep tech startups to help them create proof of concepts, accelerate solution development, drive digital transformation, and build capacity. 

IncubateHub offers workshops for use case refinement, white-label portals for open innovation management, and has a group of dedicated analysts, community managers, and programme managers to drive corporate accelerator programmes.

Additionally, the company provides corporates with access to 11,000 startups, 900+ academic institutions, along with 30,000 designers and developers. IncubateHub has served nearly 50 corporates to date, and has multi-year contracts with more than seven clients. 

Rajiv Mukherjee, Co-Founder, IncubateHub, said, 

“IncubateHub has been growing at 66 percent CAGR for the last four years with an annual revenue of Rs 2 crore for FY’18-2019. Given our exponential growth since inception, it is now the time to increase our operational capacity and expand our footprint globally. The capital infusion from Venture Catalysts comes at just the right time and it will help us further bolster our presence in the market.”

The platform expects the open innovation and corporate venturing management market is projected to reach $750 million by 2023 from the current $200 million. IncubateHub is poised to capitalise on the immense potential in this sector with its plans of foraying into the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe within the next couple of years, it added. 

Founded by Dr Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Anil Jain, Anuj Goenka, and Gaurav Jain, Venture Catalysts invests $250,000 – $1.5 million in early stage startups with the potential to create enduring value for over a long period of time. Earlier this week, it backs a Noida-based cleantech startup Skilancer Solar.

(Edited by Megha Reddy)