Coming back home: UK's desis set up start-up accelerator in Bengaluru

Spark10 provides $15,000-30,000 as seed funding to its start-ups, reports Tech in Asia

From billionaire steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal to London cabbies, England teems with people from its former colony, India. They bagged nearly 60 per cent of British work visas last year and comprise the UK’s biggest overseas-born population.

One of them is Atal Malviya, who got a computer science degree from Gwalior, near Delhi, and went to England for an MBA after working for SAP Labs and Oracle. He became an entrepreneur during his MBA programme, and launched his big data text analysis start-up Odimax right afterwards.

He exited and decided to pool in funds from like-minded people in the UK who wanted to engage with the tech start-up scene back home in India. Spark10 was born.

Last year, it launched an accelerator in the Engineering Staff College of India in Hyderabad. Nine start-ups were in the first cohort. And now, a second cohort of five start-ups is in the new Spark10 accelerator launched during the weekend in Bengaluru.

Apart from NRIs, Spark10 is bringing to India start-up mentors based in the UK.

Atal’s start-up Odimax was incubated in Ignite, a leading accelerator in the UK. Ignite’s co-founder and CEO Paul Smith, who is also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Techstars London, became a friend and later a founding advisor in Spark10. Former Techstars MD John Bradfield is also supporting the programme.

Spark10 provides $15,000-30,000 as seed funding to its start-ups, with an option of participating in the next rounds. Atal points out that 20 per cent of the funding for the start-ups in the first cohort in Hyderabad came from local angels. But for the second cohort launching now in Bengaluru, 80 per cent of the seed money has come from NRIs. This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here