A school for startups. That’s what Marico Innovation Foundation (MIF) can be best described as. Hand-holding about 20 companies simultaneously, the MIF aims to guide a company till it hits the Rs 100-crore mark. “The uniqueness of our programme is that we work with mentors, who are pulled in from the Marico ecosystem or domain experts from our wider networks, which means that we will take at least six to eight months to close each business challenge before moving on to the next,” said Suranjana Ghosh, head, MIF.
Every two years, MIF identifies a sunrise sector that holds the potential to solve a significant issue for India. The first sectoral intervention was launched in 2018 in the agriculture sector, followed by innovations in combating the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In 2022, MIF forayed into plastic waste management.
“They have to have some component to generating livelihood, some component of impacting the environment. We have a very stringent due diligence process, as stringent as any other VC firms would be. Any startup that meets with the diligence process is then onboarded,” said Ghosh. She added that the selection criteria also looks at whether the technology offered by the startup is extremely unique. “
In that particular category, they need to be serving a very specific need through a very unique technology, something that is difficult to replicate and has a two-year lead time on any other close competitor at least.”
On asking if it is better to just fund the startups instead of going through the entire mentoring process, which is both cost and time intensive for the mentor company, Harsh Mariwala, founder and chairman of Marico, added that they have delibrated upon this several times, but always ended up agreeing on the mentorship programme. “Most companies are not looking at financial assistance; they can raise money from other investors. So this is not our job. They don’t know how to scale up and our job is to create value by helping them scale up several times. And we believe this is the right way forward,” said Mariwala.
Ghosh added: “The DNA of this foundation is really to help build capacity, and make startups capable on their own to be able to sustain their businesses and make themselves profitable as well while they are creating this broader sort of social impact. We do believe that building capacity goes a far longer way than just one-time funding. And there is enough and more funding to be achieved and sourced. But it is this kind of expert mentorship and guidance that there is a dearth of in the market. And, we provide exactly that by helping the startup understand where the right to win lies. So while they might have a really interesting proposition, how do they fine tune that, and how do they ensure that there is adequate demand from the consumer side as well, and that they are being able to deploy that through the right distribution channels and sustainably so.”