Bengaluru August 10, 2020: Flipkart, India's homegrown e-commerce marketplace, today announced the launch of 'Flipkart Leap'—the company's first startup accelerator program. The program aims to help new and upcoming startups grow, scale, navigate challenges, and in turn contribute to India's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem and boosting 'Start-Up India'.
With the call-for-entries beginning today, Flipkart Leap will identify B2C and B2B startups and help them scale through an intensive 16-week virtual program. Flipkart's leadership from Business, Operations, Product and Technology will mentor the selected startups and share best practices, in addition to master class sessions hosted by industry experts.
The program aims to provide tools, framework, knowledge and an ecosystem to help startups create world-class value-driven products by supporting them in building market-ready solutions.
Key Thematic Areas
Flipkart Leap has identified five themes to shortlist relevant high-potential startups. These themes were identified to tap into the most innovative solutions in the Technology and Consumer Internet space, uniquely built for Indian consumers:
Design & Make for India
Innovation in Digital Commerce
Technologies to Empower the Retail Ecosystem
Supply Chain Management & Logistics
Enabling Relevant Deep Tech applications
The focus is on bringing digitization and tech advancement in these thematic areas, including any startups that will be working on disruptive solutions that have the potential to transform the landscape of e-commerce in the next five years.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Chief Executive Officer, Flipkart Group, said Flipkart Leap is aimed at unlocking this potential and nurturing new ideas that bring innovation, curiosity and unconventionality to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, while boosting the government's 'Start-Up India' initiative.
Jey Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart, said, "As a company that has undergone that phase and built its own success playbook, we wanted to utilize our network to build a program that helps startups in these early stages to evolve and become successful brands in future".
Program Structure and Requirements
The program is curated in partnership with Zinnov.
It focuses on bringing innovation to not just India but Bharat users (primarily based out of Tier 2 and 3+ cities).
Startups applying should be based out of India and should have a working prototype with early adoption metrics.
Post-completion, participants will pitch their model to investors, corporates, and other ecosystem players on the demo-day and may also be considered for funding by Flipkart.
India currently has the 3rd largest startup ecosystem in the world, with consistent annual growth of 12-15%.
For more information on Flipkart Leap, and to apply, please visit: https://www.flipkartleap.com/.
About the Flipkart Group
The Flipkart Group is one of India's leading digital commerce entities and includes group companies Flipkart, Myntra, and PhonePe. Started in 2007, Flipkart has a registered customer base of over 250 million, offering over 150 million products across 80+ categories. The launch of Flipkart Wholesale is a testament to its commitment to accelerate the growth of kiranas and MSMEs in India. Flipkart is known for pioneering services such as Cash on Delivery, No Cost EMI and easy returns.
For more information, please write to: media@flipkart.com
