Google for Startups Accelerator (GFSA) India is a 3 month, free mentorship and support program for startups that are utilizing cutting edge tech to build for India and the world. Over the past few years, GFSA India has successfully worked with over 80 startups.
Last year, through the Covid-19 season along with publishing Emerging Stronger: A Playbook for Startups to face the Covid-19 Challenge as a means to help startups with tactical tips to surviving the pandemic, we also doubled our cohort intake in a fully virtual program for Class 4, ensuring that their areas of solutioning focused on the urgent challenges of a post-pandemic world.
A look back at Class 4:
With Class 4, we took 20 mentee startups - spanning across Education, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Healthcare, Agritech, Gaming, Sustainability and Hospitality verticals. We helped the startups through intensive mentorship sessions, delivered by Google & industry experts, workshops , custom connects and support across the areas of Technology, Product Strategy, Marketing, UX/UI, Growth and Leadership.
In addition to technical mentoring, founders were also coached on key aspects of leadership, in a Google-created 'Leaders Lab', specially conceived to make leaders aware of the blindspots in their management styles.
These 20 startups have since graduated with multiple wins to their credit - including deploying and optimizing scalable tech architecture, managing growth, executing pivots through covid season, fundraises, features/ awards on Google Play and more.
Hearing from the founders and mentors:
"We were able to work with GCP to reduce our tech cost by upto 40% by optimising the infrastructure and running preemptible instances."
- DCoder
"... during covid-19 we had to move from digital assisted to a 100% digital business, GFS Accelerator helped us pivot our business and came at a very right time . During this transition we were also able to raise capital."
- Bharat Agri in an interview with CNBC
"We believe that after the program we would be able to manage our team better, we would be able to understand their needs and we have also learnt the importance of communicating business vision and values to our people.This would enable us to drive more value and efficiency from the team and we should also be able to retain them for longer."
- BlackLight Games
"Google for Startups Accelerator was an enriching experience with access to top mentors in Product, Marketing, Growth and Technology. We had a chance to have at least 4-6 hour sessions weekly for the first month, and then 2-3 hours per week towards the end of the program."
- Navia LifeCare
Apply Now for Class 5 of Google for Startups Accelerator :
While these 20 startups continue their journey to scale their solutions to meaningfully address some of India's toughest problems, we are now ready to accept applications for our 5th Class and are looking for startups that are not only using scalable technology such as AI/ML, but are meaningfully helping the world adapt and move forward.
The accelerator class will be fully virtual with 3 months of support and will kick off with a virtual mentorship bootcamp in April/May, 2021.
If you are a startup that uses cutting edge technology to build for India and the world, solving societal and economic challenges, submit your application now at this link, by March 20, 2021.
Startups that meet the following criteria are eligible to apply:
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Startups in either of these verticals but not limited to - Edtech, Healthtech, Fintech, Retail & Logistics, Media, Productivity and Agritech
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Startups based in India
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Preferably in the Seed to Series A, B stages
Posted By Paul Ravindranath, Program Manager, Google for Startups Accelerator India