New Delhi, July 2 -- About half of the startups participating in The Pitch, VCCircle's multi-city startup pitching programme, piqued investor interest in its second chapter of the third edition, held in Bengaluru last week.
The Pitch aims to facilitate startup discovery by connecting handpicked early-stage ventures with some of India's most active venture capital firms. The programme, which is now in its third year, featured 56 curated startups delivering elevator pitches to a panel of 26 VC investors.
The latest edition began its journey in the country's Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc. The Pitch was in collaboration with the incubation cells INCeNSE and Ent IISc. In the second edition, the first event was held at IIT Hyderabad and subsequently moved to IIM Calcutta in December 2024, followed by sessions at IIT Madras in January and IIM Lucknow's Noida campus in March.
The Bengaluru chapter saw 751 registrations, with over 7% of the startups handpicked to present their ventures at the IISc campus last Saturday. There were five investors for every 14 startups. In comparison, the first chapter of the current edition, held in Mumbai last month, saw about 55% of the startups presenting elevator pitches receiving interest from investors. As many as 635 ventures registered for the event, with only a tenth handpicked to present their pitches.
Participating investors at the Bengaluru event included Aeravti Ventures, Ideaspring Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightbox.VC, Lightspeed India Partners, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Fireside Ventures, F9 Ventures, Verlinvest, Bluehill.VC, Java Capital, Arali Ventures, Speciale Invest, Pavestone VC, ADB Ventures, Theia Ventures, Capria Ventures, Ortella Global Capital, AFE (Hindustan times), Inflexor Ventures, and Ankur Capital.
About 50% of the startups participating at the event received investor interest for potential follow-up discussions. The 56 startups belonged to a wide range of sub-sectors, with more than 90% being bootstrapped, while the rest having angel and seed-stage funding.
Some of the startups that pitched included Zen MOSart Labs Pvt Ltd, Assessli, Zerowings Aerospace, Emmetra Technology, Trackk, Multiply, DYUTA, Pricapital, Uproot, Stacks, Qosmic, SmalBlu Technologies, and Digitory.
In terms of their business model, 38% of the startups were from B2B category, 27% from B2C, and the remaining 36% startups targeted both segments.
Startups from Bengaluru comprised 43% of all the participating ventures at the event, followed by Hyderabad and Mumbai, representing 9% and 7%, respectively. Delhi NCR and Ahmedabad each represented around 4-5% of the startups, while close to a third of the startups came from cities beyond these primary hubs.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.