CL Educate Limited (CL), an EdTech company recently announced that its board has approved the setting up of a Rs 30 crore fund to invest in early-stage campus-based startups seeking funding in the New Delhi region. The funding will range anywhere from Rs 5 to 50 lakhs.  

CL Educate strengthens its offering on WAINConnect.com, an innovation collaboration platform, home to 75,000 innovators, 200+ organisations, and universities, that has been giving young campus-based entrepreneurs an opportunity to showcase their creations to industry, academia and potential investors. Some of the brands currently associated with WAINConnect include IIT Kanpur, GE, TATA-AIG, HP, among others.

WAIN (Worldwide Academia, Industry Network) is an open innovation platform for collaboration between startups, universities and corporates to solve challenging problems. This platform uniquely brings together all stakeholders of an innovation an ecosystem such as youth, academic professionals, industry professionals, policy makers and investors to enable the creation of valuable services such as funding, fellowships and sponsorships, mentoring, business and research incubation, talent identification, and intellectual property management.

The WAIN innovator pipeline is rapidly closing in on 100,000 innovators and the CL Educate Board has approved the creation of an Rs 30 crore corpus WAIN Fund, with CL Educate as the anchor investor. This will see participation from leading companies, universities, and HNIs as investors. Universities, in particular, see this as a unique opportunity to give their students a head-start on their journey towards entrepreneurship.

The value proposition of the WAIN Fund can be briefly categorised as follows:

Part 1: University Cloud Incubation Platform – with a focus on university/corporate partnerships

Part 2: Incubation Studio – a 1-year accelerator for 25-30 startups a year, with mentoring in specific key areas like technology, go-to-market (GTM) support, product development, and CXO coaching.

Part 3: Incubation Capital – from the WAIN Fund will focus on startups from post-revenue till Series A stage, and will have a significant bias towards university-based Deep Tech startups.

Speaking about the initiative, Satya Narayanan R, Chairman, CL Educate said, “WAINConnect has built an incredible pipeline of startups.  We intend to add The WAIN Fund and WAIN Studio Accelerator Program to the WAIN Innovation, Collaboration Platform to help universities assist young innovators in scripting their own success stories.”