Google Announces Startup Accelerator Programme For Women-led Startups

Google on Tuesday announced the launch of the Google for Startups accelerator programme for women-led startups. This is the first time that the tech giant is announcing a women-founder focused programme in India.

The programme for women-focused founders will have two cohorts for this year and each cohort will support 20 women founders. The application for the first cohort for this programme will begin from today and Google will select 20 women-led startups for the programme.

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The sector agnostic programme will focus on the early stage to a series A startup.

One of the reasons for starting a women-founder focused by Google was the abysmal percentage of funding going to these startups.

Aditya Swamy, director, Google Play and Google for Startups shared with Business Standard that just about 6 per cent of the funding raised by the startup ecosystem in India is going to women founder companies. “If you actually take out companies where a woman has a male co-founder, the number comes down to 1.5 percent. We found this huge gap from a product point of view as well as from a content point of view and from that came the idea of launching an accelerator which is specifically focused on women founders,” he added.

“In one of the surveys, almost 48 per cent of women said that they need access to a better mentor and we want to solve this. Importantly, there's nothing like having a peer group that allows you to connect and grow,” said Paul Ravindranathan G, program manager, Developer Relations and head of Google Accelerator at Google India.

The focus of the programme will be mentoring, hiring, capital raising, building a community, and networking.

Under its accelerator programme, Google so far has had 6 cohorts, which have had over 100 companies who went on to raise over $2 billion and created 12,000 jobs. Swamy also added that one in every 10 companies from Google’s accelerator programme has raised $100 million.

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