IIM-A’s incubation platform to invest in 50 new startups

IIM-A's incubation platform to invest in 50 new startups
IIM-A's incubation platform to invest in 50 new startups

CIIE.CO, the incubation platform of IIM Ahmedabad, has announced plans to invest in 50 new startups over the next 12 months.

The new investments would be sector-agnostic with a focus on three core themes of deep tech, digitisation and sustainability.

CIIE.CO, which supports startups in their venture building journey, has coached over 5,000 entrepreneurs, accelerated over 1,200 startups, and invested in 350 startups since its inception.

The organisation was the first institutional investor for almost 90 per cent of the startups and about two-third of these startups came from tier 2 and tier 3 cities of India.

CIIE.CO’s portfolio cumulatively raised over $50M in follow-on funding in 2022 alone. 

Vipul Patel, Partner, Seed Investing, said: “We aim to continue to build our deep-tech portfolio across some of the exciting white-spaces including digital therapeutics and diagnostic-pathology in the health-tech segment. We are also looking at investing in breakthrough-solutions enabling decarbonisation, and enterprise-grade solutions powered by generative AI, amongst others.”

CIIE.CO has found its success in companies it supported early on. Biosense, for example, a pre product investment of CIIE.CO back in 2009 resulted into one of the most successful acquisitions in the medical device space by US-based clinical diagnostics major PerkinElmer.

Another lesser known space to investors before 2019 was Aerospace, when CIIE.CO had started to build its space-tech portfolio. Agnikul, its another portfolio company in space tech, has raised more than $30 million.

CIIE.CO also invested early in IdeaForge, a dronetech startup that announced going public recently.