The number of incubators in the Indian ecosystem has grown steadily, with more than 1,100 active incubators dotting the Indian startup ecosystem, reveals a report jointly presented by the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M), Indian Institute of Management (IIM) , Bangalore’s NSRCEL, the first management institute incubator.
The Southern region leads the way in terms of incubators, housing 45 percent of all incubators and having the highest number of incubators.
The report titled, ‘India Incubator Kaleidoscope 2024’ shows that tier 1 cities are home to almost half of all incubators at 48 percent. Chennai has the highest number of academic incubators at 82 percent, while Bengaluru and Gurugram have the highest number of industry incubators at 71 percent and 84 percent respectively.
The number of incubators is 0.8 incubators per million people according to the report, while countries like the US, UK and China vary between 8 to 10 incubators per million.
Incubation rate is high among deep technology fields like AI/ML, Data Analytics, Biotech and other fields. All have an incubation rate of up to 12 percent and are sought after by students, young professionals, female entrepreneurs and those with limited financial resources.
Despite being small in number, the incubators have won many awards in all the best startup awards. Embedded startups were also more involved in the creation of intellectual property – the percentage of embedded startups that published patents was about 5 times that of non-embedded ones, the report said.
The seeded startups were able to secure their first round of funding before those that were not seeded. While 27.1 percent of incubated startups received their first round of funding within one year of incorporation, the corresponding percentage of non-incubated startups was 15.4 percent.