Facebook today announced its tie-up with the VC fund Stellaris Venture Partners to scale young businesses by providing them with timely digital skilling support.
The partnership is a part of Facebook’s VC Brand Incubator Program, which is an industry-first initiative for building the ecosystem for SMB growth in the country along with leading venture capital funds. It aims to provide young businesses with timely business skilling and customised training to improve key profitability levers such as new customer acquisition, reach, and brand engagement.
Talking about the VC Brand Incubator Program, and the latest partnership with Stellaris Venture Partners, Archana Vohra, Director, Small and Medium Businesses at Facebook India said, "Facebook is committed to the economic recovery of India, and as we mark the two years’ milestone for the program, we are delighted to partner with Stellaris Venture Partners to help early stage SMBs to unleash their true potential to grow and scale their business.”
Stellaris Venture Partners is an early stage, technology-focused venture capital firm working with SMBs such as Boldcare, Beepkart, CredFlow, Propelld, Whatfix and many more. Their investment focus areas include global software companies with an India advantage, as well as tech businesses solving India-specific problems.
Rahul Chowdari, Partner/Co-Founder, Stellaris Venture Partners, said, “Startups and small businesses are going to be the key drivers of growth and employment in the future and programs like the VC Brand Incubator will go a long way to boost the start-ups and small businesses ecosystem in the country. The VC Brand Incubator helps entrepreneurs to understand the Facebook ecosystem better and avoid common mistakes.”
The latest edition of the VC brand Incubator program is focussed on health and wellness, e-Commerce and CPG. Closely followed by a mix of fintech, education and transport businesses.
Arpit Mehta, Founder, AllRound Club "Facebook and Instagram are critical platforms for AllRound. With the brand incubator sessions with Facebook experts, we hope to learn the recommended best practices and increase our ROI and scale faster.”
Karishma Bhalla, Founder, Foodstrong said, "Facebook's family of apps gives us direct access to customers. We use Facebook and Instagram to understand customer needs and engage with them directly. We hope to interact with Facebook leaders and understand the nuances of winning with the help of these new-age mediums. This will help us to be more efficient and scale faster to achieve our business objectives"
A key trend observed is how businesses such as VOGO, BeepKart, Ayu Health, MFine, Credflow, Reevoy, SwifLearn and many more (over 50 percent of the cohort) are using Whatsapp for their business conversations. The economic disruption as a result of COVID-19 has been very rampant on small businesses and WhatsApp can play a big role in helping these small businesses connect and engage with their customers.
