Background/The Need:
With over 50,000 government-recognized start-ups (and counting), the Indian start-up ecosystem has been on an unprecedented growth trajectory. Availability of capital, and thus Venture Capital (VC) firms, are an integral part of this success story. However, the role of a VC is not merely to provide capital. Visionary VC firms also provide a much-needed ingredient to start-ups and founders – Expertise. It is made available to founders throughout their journey in a variety of areas and in the form of professional networks, connections and/or dedicated mentors.

We, at IvyCap, have a unique and structured mentor model that provides execution, scale-up, and exit support to our founders. Our mentor pool has a blend of corporate executives and successful entrepreneurs who have traveled the entrepreneurship path before. Each Portfolio company gets access to mentors who provide dynamic tutoring for execution, scale-up and for helping with Strategy, Coaching, Capacity Building, Domain Expertise, Recruitment and Go-To-Market. Our mentors

Mentor Selection and Assignment Framework:
In our experience, when it comes to on-boarding and then recommending and assigning mentors to start-ups, the following elements come to the fore for VCs to consider. These elements need periodic monitoring to ensure their effectiveness at different stages of the start-up journey.

Path Forward:
Given the pace of innovation and disruption in the start-up ecosystem, the role of mentors will only grow in the times to come. IvyCap already has quite a few examples of mentor-mentee success stories such as Purplle, Clovia, eShakti, and Lexir to name a few. However, this is just the beginning and we at IvyCap have a lot to look forward to in our quest to take our mentor model to a still higher orbit.