According to a survey conducted by IIM Bangalore’s start-up incubator NSRCEL and the Centre for Research on Start-ups and Risk Financing (CREST) at IIT Madras, there are over 1,100 active start-up incubators in India.
According to the ‘India Incubator Kaleidoscope 2024’ research, the southern part of the nation has the most incubators, accounting for 45% of the total. Though Tier-I cities house over half (48%) of all Indian incubators, the mix of incubators, which are sponsored by academic institutions, businesses, and the public sector, varies significantly amongst cities.
Chennai led the list of academic incubators (82%), while Bengaluru (71%), and Gurugram (84%), had a large number of industry incubators. A major source of worry is the incubator density of 0.8 per million people, which is far lower than in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, where the density is between 8 and 10 incubators per million.
According to the statistics, in the third largest start-up ecosystem, just 8.2% of all start-ups are incubated. Furthermore, just 10% of incubators assist 98% of all incubated start-ups. Students, young professionals, female founders, and those with little financial means seek out incubators. This is a positive trend, indicating that the support system is helping individuals in need.
Deep-tech areas such as AI/ML, data analytics, biotech, and others have significant rates of incubation. Start-ups in these industries have a 12% upward incubation rate.
While 27.1% of incubated start-ups got first-round funding within one year of incorporation, 15.4% of non-incubated start-ups did the same. Interestingly, the yearly average income in the first years for every 100 fostered start-ups was around Rs 1,590 crore.
Professor Srivardhini Jha of IIM Bangalore commented on the findings, saying, “Incubators play an important role in making entrepreneurship more accessible and inclusive throughout the country, but their activities and impact are not well recognized. This paper tackles that gap and stresses the need for both raising the volume of incubation activity and improving