The Karnataka Government will fund startups from pan India by calling them to register in Karnataka. According to IT Minister of Karnataka, Priyank Kharge, entrepreneurs and startups across the country seeking funds can soon look up to the Karnataka government.
The IT Minister further added, “We want to take our startup policy to the national level this year. We will support startups from across the country provided they pay taxes here.” For this purpose, entrepreneurs registered in Karnataka under the Shops and Commercial Establishment Act, 1961 can apply for funds and other initiatives. The Minister, however, did not elaborate on when this new phase will kick off and whether more funds will be allocated.
The Karnataka government was one of the first governments in India to launch their startup policy in 2015 in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Startup India initiative. Since then, the government has set up several funds with a corpus of over Rs. 300 crores to back startups across different sectors such as biotechnology, tourism and animation. In accordance with their five year startup plan, the State Government is aiming to boost 20,000 technology based startups by 2020 in Karnataka and create 6 lakh direct and 12 lakh indirect new jobs in the sector. In 2017 alone, 250 startups received funding from the from the Government while 5000 startups were registered under the policy.
In October last year, the Karnataka government also invested Rs. 40 crores in the construction of a state of the art artificial intelligence (AI) and data science capabilities center. The Centre of Excellence for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence aims to help global companies create approximately 35,000 jobs over the next five years for data science and artificial intelligence professionals. In August, the State government also provided funding worth Rs. 35 crores to 100 innovative startups through its Elevate 100 program.
According to the data from research firm Tracxn, till date, Karnataka has funded 890 startups while Maharashtra funded 645 and Delhi NCR funded 419. Currently, 7909 startups were founded in Karnataka following Maharashtra with 8117 startups.