Indian Startup Stalwarts launches Artha School of Entrepreneurship to assist scaling of startups

• ByStartupStory     |    August 24, 2022

The Artha School of Entrepreneurship was established by some of India’s leading startup founders and executives to solve the challenges faced by Indian businesses when scaling up and boosting their chances of success. 

T.N. Hari, a former top executive of BigBasket, Suruchi Maitra, a former vice president of human resources at UnitedLex, Pramath Sinha, the founder and chairman of Harappa Education, Pavan Vaish, a former CEO of IBM Daksh, and others cofounded the Artha School of Entrepreneurship with the goal of influencing entrepreneurs from MSMEs and social ventures to traditional VC-funded startups.

Hari, a co-founder of Artha, said, “Scaling up is currently urgently needed because, of the 70,000 firms in India, only 1,800 have reached the Series A round and less than 100 of them have achieved unicorn status. At every step, the dropout rate is very high. We would be able to produce perhaps 200 unicorns if the dropout rate can be lowered by 1% to 2% at each level.”

Vaish said, “Entrepreneurs have an undeniable bias for learning from people who have successfully navigated their own journeys, and a programme like this can enable India to become not just a land of unicorns but also a land of high growth and sustainable companies. Starting-up is not easily coachable but scaling-up certainly is.”

Through the programme, Artha is running live, problem-solving seminars led by seasoned business professionals, giving participants access to multiple online content forms. In addition, mentors are available to help the participants with any scaling issues. 

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of Infosys, Hari Menon, co-founder and CEO of BigBasket, Peyush Bansal, co-founder of Lenskart, and Vamsi Krishna, CEO and co-founder of Vedantu are among the faculty members and mentors at Artha. 

In Kochi, Kerala, the first round of workshops involving 20 entrepreneurs was held. Additionally, Artha is collaborating with T-Hub in Hyderabad and KSN Global in Kochi. The organisation has scheduled its upcoming workshops in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Delhi, with additional locations in Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Pune, Mumbai, and Chennai.

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