Start-up incubator and accelerator Venture Catalysts on Thursday announced the launch of 9Unicorns, a fund-cum-accelerator to identify, fund, and support early-stage start-ups across the country. The fund will have a corpus of ₹300 crore, offered by Venture Catalysts.

9Unicorns will offer a standard deal of ₹60 lakh funding for selected start-ups, in exchange for 5 per cent equity. There will be scope for the start-up to get funded around ₹3 crore to ₹5 crore subsequently.

According to Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder and Managing Director, 9Unicorns, the accelerator will be open to start-ups that are in the idea-stages as well and will provide assistance to them. This will include gap-area mentoring, which will identify areas that need assistance, mentoring across different countries, and global market access.

Some of the domains that 9Unicorns will focus on include electric vehicles, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), fintech, retail, and FMCG. Sharma said that there is tremendous scope for FMCG start-ups. Men’s grooming start-up Beardo, which was acquired by Marico, is one such start-up that Sharma had backed.

“9Unicorn Fund start-ups will benefit from ready access to business angels and VCats’ (Venture Catalysts) corporate community of 4500-plus members, which is becoming stronger as we add more portfolio companies. They will also be able to access markets across 26 cities across the world,” Sharma said.

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