Building a startup ecosystem in the mountains: How Jammu & Kashmir laid its foundation

There is a particular kind of ambition that flourishes not despite adversity but because of it. In Jammu & Kashmir, that ambition is no longer anecdotal; it is becoming institutional. Beneath the familiar narratives of the region lies a quieter, more consequential story: thousands of young people choosing to build rather than wait.

And increasingly, the ecosystem around them is beginning to catch up. This is the story of how that foundation was laid, the institutions, the policy, the capital, and the culture that had to come together before anyone could reasonably ask what comes next.

The architecture of an ecosystem

Startup ecosystems are not born. They are constructed, layer by layer, through patient institution-building that rarely makes headlines. Jammu & Kashmir's central institution in this effort, the Jammu & Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI), has undergone its own quiet transformation, evolving from a training body into something closer to a full-spectrum ecosystem enabler.

Its mandate now spans the entire entrepreneurial arc: awareness, capacity building, incubation, project financing, mentorship, market access and investor facilitation. The logic is straightforward, even if the execution is not; entrepreneurs fail not at a single point but at every point where support is absent. JKEDI's ambition is to close those gaps.

The numbers, while imperfect proxies for progress, are worth pausing on. Over 40,000 aspiring entrepreneurs have undergone structured training. More than 235,000 participants have been reached through 4,100 awareness programmes. Over 35,500 Detailed Project Reports have been facilitated, each one representing a founder who accessed institutional finance rather than being turned away at the door of a formal system they didn't know how to navigate.

Across roughly a decade, from 2010 to 2020, approximately 16,000 enterprises were created: businesses that represent livelihoods, families and choices made by people who decided to build something of their own. These are not trivial achievements in a region where the infrastructure for entrepreneurship had to be built from scratch.

The Startup Policy as Operating System

Policy documents are easy to dismiss as intention dressed as action. The J&K Startup Policy 2024–27 invites scrutiny on exactly that question: is it operational, or merely aspirational? The answer requires context, because the timeline matters more than most people realise.

The policy was notified in 2024, but operational guidelines were issued only in July 2025. Implementation began in August 2025. What that means is that everything being reported, the jump in registrations, the seed funding, the mentor network, the cultural momentum, has been built in less than a year.

Not a year with a generous budget and a running start, but a first year, with the constraints that first years always carry: systems being stood up in real time, and a team learning the operational shape of a policy even as it was being delivered.

The budget for that first year reflected exactly that reality. It was modest enough to establish proof of concept, not enough to reach anything close to full scale. Against that backdrop, the early numbers deserve to be read differently. Around 1,400 startups registered.

Twenty-five startups sanctioned seed funding of ₹20 lakhs each. Four incubators sanctioned grants of ₹50 lakhs each, with the first tranches already released. A mentor network of over 400 professionals is onboarded and ready to actively engage. Registrations are accelerating sharply as awareness spreads beyond early adopters into the broader entrepreneurial community.

Beyond the numbers, the policy has delivered something equally important: connection. Startups have been sponsored to attend national-level events, including Startup Mahakumbh and Bangalore Tech Summit, giving J&K founders direct access to investors, peers and opportunities that were previously out of reach.

Regular mentorship sessions with successful founders, investors and national-level mentors are now a routine part of the ecosystem rather than an occasional feature. These are not the results of a mature, well-resourced programme running at full capacity. They are ten months of implementation under real constraints, which makes them considerably more significant than they might appear at face value.

What the policy has demonstrated, in that compressed window, is that the architecture works. It does not merely announce incentives; it maps a structured pathway from idea to registration, mentorship, seed support and market access, integrating digital platforms and investor engagement into implementation rather than treating them as future additions. Founders who engage with it find a system that moves, imperfectly, and with room to improve, but with genuine operational intent behind it.

The private capital question

If there is one indicator that separates an ecosystem from a programme, it is the willingness of private investors to put capital at risk. Grants and government support can nurture early-stage ventures; it is patient private capital that determines whether those ventures can scale.

Here, Jammu & Kashmir is beginning to answer a question that has long hung over it: will serious investors look beyond geography? Through programs like Capital Connect, more than twenty-five venture capital funds have engaged directly with founders from the region, not in cursory meetings, but through structured pitch sessions, investor interactions and mentorship engagements.

Startups from J&K, such as Fast Beetle Services, Genetico Research, GR8 Sports, and E-Curve, have secured institutional funding running into several crores. These are not symbolic investments made out of regional goodwill. They are commercial decisions made by serious investors who looked at what these companies were building and chose to back them on merit. For every founder in J&K watching from the outside, each of these deals quietly shifts what feels possible.

Incubation as infrastructure

A founder with no access to prototyping equipment, co-working spaces or peer networks is operating at a structural disadvantage that motivation alone cannot overcome. Incubation infrastructure is not a luxury; it is the difference between an idea that develops and one that dissolves.

Last year, the Startup Policy funded four university-based incubators at IIT Jammu, SMVDU Katra, IUST Pulwama and SKUAST Kashmir, with grants of ₹50 lakhs each, with first tranches already released. The choice of institutions was deliberate: anchoring incubation within universities places it where early-stage founders actually are, rather than asking them to travel to support that should come to them.

Strategic partnerships have brought national expertise into this infrastructure. Collaborations with T-Hub, TISS and leading corporates, including Tally, Zoho, AWS and Sanchi Connect, have connected our incubators to networks, best practices and opportunities well beyond what any regional institution could build independently.

The Startup India initiative has further integrated our work into the national framework, ensuring J&K's ecosystem is plugged into the country's broader innovation architecture, not operating at its margins.

Building the culture: The work that takes the longest

Infrastructure can be built. Policy can be written. Capital can be mobilised. But none of it sustains itself without a generational shift in how people think about entrepreneurship as a viable, desirable path, and culture takes far longer to build than any programme or policy.

Last year, we launched the Startup Idea Challenge, not primarily as a competition, but as a catalyst. The goal was to ignite entrepreneurial thinking in places it hadn't yet been invited: rural areas, remote districts, communities where the idea of building a startup had never felt like a realistic option. More than 5,000 students participated across 43 boot camps spanning all 20 districts of J&K.

That is not a competition statistic. That is 5,000 young people who spent time in a room being told, through structure, through mentors, through peers, that their ideas are worth taking seriously. For many of them, it was the first time anyone had.

The Under-18 Idea Challenge is an extension of this logic, and perhaps the initiative we are most quietly proud of. It reaches students before they have finished forming their beliefs about what they are and are not capable of. The reasoning is simple: if we only reach people after they have already decided on their future, we are arriving too late.

Combined with design thinking workshops, maker-space access and structured mentoring, the Under-18 Challenge is not designed to produce teenage entrepreneurs. It is designed to produce a generation of people who default to building when they encounter a problem, regardless of the career path they ultimately choose.

We have also begun building founder capability more systematically through learning modules covering market validation, pricing strategy, intellectual property, regulatory pathways and fundraising. The gap between a good idea and a fundable business is rarely talent. It is almost always knowledge that nobody thought to pass on.

What has been built

Jammu & Kashmir's startup ecosystem has reached an inflexion point that deserves to be described plainly. The policy is operational. The institutions exist. Incubation infrastructure is expanding. Private capital is beginning to flow. Cultural momentum, measurable for the first time in the thousands of students walking into boot camps across twenty districts, is real.

These are not small things. They took years of sustained effort to put in place, and they matter. Five years ago, none of this conversation would have been possible because the institutions, the policy architecture, the mentor networks and the early cohort of funded companies did not exist. They do now.

That is the foundation. What is built on top of it, and how honestly the next phase is measured, is a different story, one still being written.

(The author heads the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Business Modelling at the Jammu & Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute, and leads the implementation of the J&K Startup Policy 2024–27. Views expressed are personal.)