How Venture Catalysts groups’ maiden C-Day enabled startups to forge partnerships with corporates

9Unicorns and Venture Catalysts, along with their group company Incubate Hub, together hosted their first Inaugural Corporate Day (C-Day) event to demonstrate innovative solutions by portfolio startups to the corporate representatives.

The theme of the sector-focused quarterly event was tech-based solutions in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG)/retail sector. The event was kicked off by Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder and Managing Director, Venture Catalysts followed by Anuj Golecha, Co-founder, Venture Catalysts with the soft launch of the TBA (Theme Based Accelerator) program. Sameer Dhingra, Director - Retail and Consumer, Google Cloud, delivered the keynote on the CPG and retail ecosystem in India. 

“The Corporate Day was a great showcase of startups in the retail and FMCG industry. It is a fantastic initiative bringing together leaders from large corporations and a mix of startups to show how we can leverage technology to drive innovation in retail,” said Sameer. 

The event ended with closing remarks being delivered by Rajiv Mukherjee, the CEO of Incubate Hub, who highlighted the achievements of Incubate Hub which has enabled 100+ corporate organisations to partner with 300+ startups.

Strategised by Pradeep V, Co-Founder, Incubate Hub and Shivika Sethi, Strategy Lead at 9Unicorns/Venture Catalysts, C-Day witnessed participation by over 70+ corporates with 35+ marquee corporate representatives comprising CXOs, Head of Innovation, Director Procurement at Fortune 500 companies and large Indian conglomerates like P&G, AB Inbev, Target, Aditya Birla Group, Britannia, Nivea, Marico, GSK Consumer, CocaCola, Pepsi, Shell, Loreal, Lowes, CavinKare, KMart, Kimberly Clark, Walmart amongst a few others spread across geographies India, Singapore, Australia and Dubai.

The event showcased nine startups with innovative offerings across the value chain of CPG/retail. These are Frontier Markets, WebEngage, Eunimart, Saara.io, Hesa, Easyrewardz, Orbo.ai, QZENSE LABS, and Zypp.

The event was well received by the corporates and startups alike, with Google expressing an interest to work with three of the start-ups presented and a lot of corporates showing interest in deep-dive calls and offering POCs to selected startups during the event.

“True to its word, C Day held by Venture Catalysts/9Unicorns was a 'One of its kind' event. As promised, we had seen participation from big names of the corporate world. This event for Hesa has opened up doors to stronger partnerships and networking opportunities to take our business model forward,” Vamsi Udayagiri, Founder and CEO, Hesa Technologies said.

C-Day also marked the launch of a Theme-Based Accelerator(TBA) program, a cohort-based program with a dedicated corpus of Rs 15-20 crore to support startups with business development, mentorship, and funding. The industry-specific TBA programs would focus on CPG, retail, consumer durables, D2C, e-commerce, BFSI, automotive, manufacturing, and sustainability, aimed to cater to corporate use cases and requirements.

Alongside, 9Unicorns and Venture Catalysts have launched a new initiative ‘WeNetwork’ for digital acceleration, designed to connect the portfolio companies to mentors, corporate CXOs, unicorn founders, PR, hiring and offer tech and development support, as a holistic one-stop networking solution enabling them to post their requirement, cross-promote their offerings and share achievements on a daily basis. WeNetwork has grown to over 300 users within the first month of its launch and has seen robust growth in active users and daily user registrations across different domains.