Former Infosys employees and Accel Partners combine to incubate startup ideas

BENGALURU: Former Infosys global sales head Subhash Dhar has joined hands with other IT industry executives to form an early-stage fund with the backing of California-based venture capital firm Accel Partners with an aim to incubate about two dozen startup ideas of graduates from top engineering schools every year.

Dhar, along with former Infosys executive Sanjay Dutt and financial markets veteran Arun Singh, has formed a "startup school" of sorts called Commence Mint, which will aim to incubate at least 20 early-stage startup ideas and fully fund each idea for 12 months.

Accel Partners has picked up a minority stake in the early-stage incubator for close to $500,000 (about Rs 3.38 crore).


"It’s become clear to most people that startups are an important part of our economic future," said Dhar, who spent nearly 15 years at Infosys. "India needs hundreds of problem solvers with ideas that can blossom into sustainable business ventures," he said.

Dhar, who also started cloud-based services venture Enterprise Nube in 2012, shortly after quitting Infosys, said with falling cost of starting up, more and more young people are getting attracted to this field.

"However, to avoid unproductive struggles that they see in front of them, most aspiring entrepreneurs end up taking up regular jobs after graduating from top colleges. That is slowing down our entrepreneurship cycles," said Dhar. Accel Partners had also backed Dhar’s earlier venture Enterprise Nube.

The new fund will offer a one-year programme for startups that will help early-stage ideas reach the stage of proper ventures, along with mentorship programmes for the founders. As part of this programme, Commence Mint will offer to incubate ideas from other angel investors, high net-worth individuals and family offices.

Dhar, who described the new venture as a "pre-incubator", indicated that the initial corpus of the incubator fund will remain extremely small, at $1-2 million (about Rs 6.8-13.6 crore), and each startup idea will receive funding that will be enough to last the course of the programme.

"The quantum of very young entrepreneurs has increased dramatically over the past few years. And VCs alone can’t manage that," Mahendran Balachandran, senior partner at Accel Partners India, told ET.