Forge Innovation & Ventures

Choosing the right route

Forge is six things at once, so work out which vertical you belong to before you write to them.

• If you want lab time, grant support, seed investment or advisory for your own hardware startup, you want Forge.Fund.
• If you only need machines and testing, you want Forge.Labs, and it is worth naming the specific equipment or test you need.
• If you already have a product and want an industrial customer, you want Forge.Lighthouse, which matches startups to problems industrial companies have posted.
• If your buyer is a government department, a city or a public-sector body, you want Forge.Foundry.
• If you are a student or an educator rather than a founder, Forge.Academy is the one, and ProtoSem is aimed at pre-final and final-year engineering students.

Forge is explicit that it backs hardware, not software. It describes itself around what it calls Phygital — hardware-first, digital-plus — and sorts its startups into defence, industrial, mobility, energy and sustainability, health, climate, production and assistive hardware. A pure software or consumer-internet product is not what this incubator is set up for.

How applications work

There is no application form and no portal. Every button on every Forge page leads to the same short enquiry form, which asks for your name, email, business name and phone number. That means your enquiry does the work an application form usually does, so put the detail in it yourself:

• Which vertical and which programme you are asking about.
• What your product is, in hardware terms, and what stage it is at. Forge sorts startups as product stage, market stage and growth stage, and most of the ones it works with are at product stage.
• What you actually need: a specific machine or test, help getting to a production-ready design, grant support for a pilot, or an introduction to an industrial buyer.
• Whether you already have a prospective customer. For the impact programmes this is the whole point — those grants exist to part-subsidise a pilot for a named buyer.

The only inbox Forge publishes is info@forge-iv.co, and its published phone number is on the contact page. Expect a conversation rather than a decision.

How selection works

The only selection process Forge sets out is the Forge.Lighthouse platform flow: an industrial company's challenge is turned into a solution requirement and posted, startups submit against it, a screening and selection step picks the high-potential candidates, the selected startup runs a pilot under monitoring, and an impact study measures the result. If you are going through that route, the requirement document is what you are being judged against.

For everything else Forge publishes no criteria and no timeline. Its impact grant round with HDFC Parivartan gives some sense of the odds it works at: 270 applications came in, 11 startups were shortlisted and 4 were selected.

What reviewers look for

Read Forge's own language about the problem it thinks it solves, because that is what it screens on. It talks about hardware innovations stalling in the gap between a trial-ready prototype and a production-ready MVP, and about getting startups through design, testing, certification and compliance to the point where they are ready for user trials and paid pilots. Its product method is framed as three questions — defining the right product, building the right product, and building the product right — with an emphasis on designing for manufacturability, quality and scale.

So the strongest case is a concrete one:

• The specific technical or certification step you are stuck at, not a general need for support.
• Evidence you have talked to real industrial users about the problem.
• A view of how the thing gets manufactured, not just how it works on a bench.
• A named prospective buyer, if you have one — Forge measures itself on pilots landed and procurement unlocked, so a route to a real customer is the outcome it cares about.

Things to check yourself

Forge's website does not mention its Technology Business Incubator status, its host college, or any government scheme. Those come from government listings, which also do not say whether the support is current. Its impact figures differ between pages, and several of the numbers on its site belong to programmes it manages for the Ministry of Defence or the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs rather than to its own portfolio. Ask directly about anything you plan to rely on, including whether a programme you have read about is still taking new startups.

Forge is a hardware and deep-tech incubator in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. It runs under the name Forge Innovation & Ventures, and the registered entity behind it is the Coimbatore Innovation and Business Incubator (CIBI), whose host institute is Kumaraguru College of Technology (KCT). Forge's own base, Forge.Factory, sits inside KCT Tech Park at Chinnavedampatti, and it works on what it calls Phygital technology: hardware-first, digital-plus products built for factories, defence and infrastructure rather than for app stores.

The work is split into six verticals, and it helps to know which one you are dealing with before you get in touch. Forge.Fund is the founder-facing one: grants, seed investment, lab access and advisory for hardware startups. Forge.Labs runs the machines. Forge.Lighthouse connects startups to industrial companies that have posted a real problem. Forge.Foundry does the same for government and impact-sector buyers. Forge.Fast is a corporate venture studio sold to large industrial firms. Forge.Academy teaches students, educators and factory workforces.

How programmes work

Forge.Fund is the route most founders want. It describes a suite of startup catalysis services offered to hardware startups in India: access to product innovation, compliance and certification labs; plug-and-play pilot production space; a structured product-management method for reaching product-market fit; industrial pilot projects and demo labs that put a startup in front of industry buyers; grant support for product development and for pilot deployments; growth grants and seed investment; and investor introductions with advice on dilution. Engagements are described as high-touch and tracked by milestones and metrics rather than as a fixed-length cohort. No duration, no cohort dates and no terms are published.

Forge.Lighthouse works the other way round. An industrial company brings a challenge, Forge turns it into a solution requirement and hosts it on its platform, startups submit against it, a screening step picks candidates, and the selected startup runs a monitored pilot with the company before an impact study closes it out. That is the only selection process Forge publishes anywhere on its site, and it is a route to a customer rather than an intake into incubation.

Forge.Foundry carries the government and impact work. Forge says it helped devise the iDEX framework for the Ministry of Defence, including the procurement steps that led to the Innovation category in the Defence Acquisition Procedure 2020, and that it onboards, mentors and manages iDEX projects. It is the named knowledge and capabilities partner to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs on City Innovation Exchange, and co-authored the SmartProcure policy that lets cities buy directly from startups. Two impact programmes sit here too: Impact Innovation Grants with HDFC Parivartan, which funded four climate-tech startups to run six-month pilots with prospective buyers after a round that drew 270 applications, and Impact Innovation Nexus with Karur Vysya Bank, which pairs pilot grants with an accelerator and currently has five startups in it.

Who can apply

Forge says its services are for hardware startups in India, across eight domains it names as defence, industrial, mobility, energy and sustainability, health, climate, production and assistive hardware. It groups the startups it works with as product stage, market stage and growth stage, and most of them sit at product stage. Beyond that, the site sets out no criteria at all. It does not say whether you must be incorporated, whether you must be in Tamil Nadu, or whether there is any tie to the host college. There is nothing on any page restricting Forge to KCT students, faculty or alumni, and nothing opening it to them either.

The impact programmes are narrower. Both ask for a market-stage startup that already has a prospective buyer willing to host a pilot, because the grant is designed to part-subsidise that buyer's cost. The HDFC Parivartan round was climate-tech only.

How to apply

There is no application form on Forge's site. Every call to action on the home page and on all six vertical sites goes to one general enquiry page, which asks for your name, email, business name and phone number and nothing else. So the first step is an enquiry, not an application, and you should expect to explain which vertical you want in your own words. The published inbox is info@forge-iv.co.

Facilities

Forge says it operates seven industrial innovation centres across seven cities of Tamil Nadu, and describes that network as the largest set of Fab Labs accredited by MIT's Fab Foundation in India. The Coimbatore headquarters holds HWjunction, described as an MIT-accredited digital fabrication lab covering computing, IoT, electronics, desktop fabrication, 3D printing, drones, and automation and robotics. Four of the centres run as InnovateTN labs.

The equipment falls into three groups. Product Innovation Labs cover industrial robotics and cobotics, electronics design and test, industrial design and fabrication, accelerated computing, cyber-physical control systems, additive manufacturing, electronics rapid prototyping and what Forge calls the industrial metaverse. Product Compliance Labs handle the testing a hardware product needs before formal certification: vibration, sound level, coating thickness, dimensional measurement, flaw detection and ingress protection on the mechanical side; Hipot, earth, current leakage, harmonic, battery and motor testing on the electrical side; flying probe and EMC/EMI testing on the electronics side. Pilot Production Facilities cover low-volume manufacturing, with PCB design, fabrication and assembly, milling, welding, sheet metal cutting, turning, vacuum casting and dough moulding. Forge gives the total lab floorspace as over twenty thousand square feet, with twenty resident technical experts and forty external mentors across the network.

Who runs it

Vish Sahasranamam is co-founder and chief executive. Lakshmi Meera is vice president and chief programme officer for Forge.Academy, and Sriram R is vice president for finance and operations. The board of governors is Gopal Srinivasan of TVS Capital as chairman, M. Balasubramaniam of Sakthi Group, Sonia Manchanda of Spread, and Shankar Vanavarayar as founder and managing director.

Scale

Forge's own figures are self-reported, undated and not always consistent between pages. Its portfolio page headlines 132 startups in what it calls the Forge Hardware Startup Collective, but the same page says that number mixes portfolio startups with programme startups and a pipeline of startups merely discovered and evaluated, so it is not a count of startups incubated. Its pages give employment created by its startups as 2,200 in one place and 2,851 in another, and revenue and external funding raised also differ between pages. The figures that are not contradicted anywhere are 200 products commercialised and forty external mentors. Forge.Academy's separate numbers for students trained and patents published belong to its education work with colleges, not to incubation.

Forge names the grant schemes its startups have drawn on, including its own FORT Grant, NIDHI PRAYAS, TIDE 2.0, SISFS, SAMRIDH and the HDFC Parivartan and Karur Vysya Bank rounds. Government listings record CIBI as a Department of Science and Technology supported Technology Business Incubator hosted by Kumaraguru College of Technology, established in 2014; Forge's own site never mentions that designation, and neither listing says whether the support is still running.