Early-stage VC fund Antler India has launched a fellowship programme, Antler India Fellowship, targeted at student entrepreneurs, which provides an equity-free grant of $20,000. 

Antler India Fellowship will be a 16-week programme designed to enable students to turn their startup ideas into a business, as per an official statement.

The  16-week fellowship programme aims to fuel the growing entrepreneurial talent in Indian colleges and universities by providing a platform for experimentation, building and scaling with the support of equity-free capital, mentors and a peer network.

Antler India Fellowship

Apart from the $20,000 equity-free grant that can be used by the student entrepreneurs to scale their startup idea, the fellowship programme also gives the students access to a hands-on programme facilitated by domain experts and founders, spanning idea validation, user research, product, engineering and marketing, the VC firm stated.

Additionally, fellows will also be able to leverage the peer community to network and brainstorm as they build on their ideas.

Antler India Fellowship is a pan-India programme and is open to students from any university. The programme is not limited only to student founders having working prototypes of their idea or a product with traction. Students working on strong ideas are also encouraged to apply. 

Speaking on the development, Rajiv Srivatsa, Partner at Antler India, said,

“We don’t just want to enable existing founders, but create new founders. In several western countries, the percentage of student founders is much higher than in India. We want to change this. We believe it’s the students of today who will build to address some of the toughest problems affecting us.”

After the 16-week-long programme, fellows will be provided with an opportunity to raise pre-seed funding from Antler India. Furthermore, they will receive support in raising subsequent funding rounds thereon.

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