Start-up Incubator Hatch To Open Centres In Six Cities

Serial entrepreneurs Anupama Arya, Puneet Vatsayan and P. K. Gulati have launched the start-up accelerator called 'The Hatch' that aims to incubate 1000 entrepreneurs over the next five years. Hatch will be a pan-India incubator with campuses in six cities besides overseas centres.

As a start-up accelerator and business incubator, Hatch will provide mentoring, operational guidance, knowledge & resources, infrastructure support and access to capital. Its very first centre would come upeither in the National Capital Region (NCR) or in Chandigarh, said Vatsayan in an interview to VCCircle. According to him, Hatch will be similar to the Plug and Play Tech Center, which has centres across California and was the starting point for technology majors like Facebook, Google and Cisco.

Vatsayan and Arya are co-founders of Mobera Systems Pvt Ltd, a contract research and development company focused on communication, networking, wireless and embedded technologies. Both worked at Silicon Valley before moving to India. Gulati, currently the CEO of Optimistix Ventures, is a telecom professional with two decades of exposure in the Middle East, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Hatch will be initially funded by Arvat Foundation (set up by Vatsayan and Arya) and will also look at other modes of financing.

Vatsayan said that Hatch would open centres in six Indian cities including the NCR, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and Pune.

The company also plans to open overseas centres at Silicon Valley, Dubai and Singapore. Each centre would have an area of 15,000-20,000 sq. ft., fitting in 15-20 start-ups at any point of time, added Vatsayan, who expected a complete roll-out within the next two years.

Hatch will be sector-agnostic although it will be more inclined towards technology start-ups, given the background of its founders. It also plans to rope in 100-125 mentors by January, including entrepreneurs, investors and senior professionals. It has already got 63 mentors on board, with key people like Guardian Lifecare founder Ashutosh Garg, Deloitte's Kalpana Jain, Dabur Group's Aditya Burman, TiE Global chairman Ashok Rao, among others.

The accelerator will charge the start-ups for using its centre and plans to pick up small stakes in them. This stake will be split between board members/mentors of the start-up and Hatch. It will also invest capital in the start-ups after they gain certain traction or scale.

Additionally, Hatch will tie up with universities, venture capital firms, angel groups, governments and other incubators. It has already tied up with the entrepreneurship cells of MDI Gurgaon and IIM-Ahmedabad, and the business plan contest finalists of these organisations will join Hatch.

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