Indigram Labs Foundation

Pick the door before you write

ILF has one application form, but the programme you should have in mind when you write is not the same for everyone.

• Early-stage, agri or rural, nothing recognised yet: the general incubation route. It is the only one with no stated entry condition.
• DPIIT-recognised and incorporated within the last two years: SISFS.
• Technology-led, past prototype, needs help reaching the market: NIDHI-SSS.
• A product already selling, looking to scale with matching investment: SAMRIDH.
• Biotech or life sciences at TRL 6-7, aimed at agriculture: BioNEST at the Krishi Utthan Incubation Center.
• From a farming family, building in agriculture or an allied sector: COFE.

How applying works

The form lives on the incubation page, and every "Apply now" button elsewhere on the site jumps to it. It asks for your name, your email, an optional phone number, and a presentation in PDF or PowerPoint, which is compulsory. That deck is the whole application — there is no long form, no separate portal and no set of questions to answer, so everything a reviewer needs has to be in it.

ILF publishes no deadlines and no cohort dates, so there is no window to wait for. Applications sit with the incubation team until they come back to you.

What to put in the deck

ILF's own language is a good guide to what it is looking for. Make these easy to find:

• The farm, food, climate or rural-health problem you are solving, and which of its four thrust areas you sit in.
• Evidence from the ground — pilots run, farmers or producer organisations you have worked with, what came back.
• Where you are technically: an idea, a prototype, a product in trials, or something already selling.
• Your legal status and dates. Incorporation date and DPIIT recognition decide whether SISFS is even open to you.
• Any intellectual property filed or granted. ILF counts registered IP among its results, so it pays attention to it.
• What you would use the incubator for: the labs and workspace, the market linkage into the ISAP producer-organisation network, or a route into a seed scheme.

Things worth knowing first

ILF's strongest asset for an agri startup is distribution rather than money — the farmer producer organisation network it reaches through ISAP, used for pilots, procurement and buyers. If your plan needs that, say so plainly.

Its pages give no fee and no equity terms. Ask about both, and about how long a place lasts, before you commit. If you are applying for a specific scheme, ask which one you are being considered under, since the same form feeds all of them.

Several of the named programmes on the site — Agripulse, the women entrepreneurship bootcamp, Adhunik Gram and an older NIDHI accelerator — are written in the past tense with no page behind them. Do not plan around one running; ask instead.

Indigram Labs Foundation (ILF) is a Technology Business Incubator in New Delhi, set up in 2015 with support from the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB) at the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. It backs startups working on agriculture, food technology, climate technology and rural healthcare, and it says its aim is to build enterprises that make a difference to rural lives and livelihoods. ILF describes itself as an affiliate of ISAP India Foundation, and the two share a chairman.

ILF groups its work into four thrust areas: farm production, inputs and allied agriculture; farm mechanisation and digital agriculture; post-harvest, supply chain and food technology; and climate and sustainable agriculture. Its bio-incubator, the Krishi Utthan Incubation Center, extends that into biotechnology and life sciences for the agri sector.

How programmes work

ILF is mainly a delivery incubator for national schemes. It says it is an approved incubator under the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS) of DPIIT, that it offers seed support through the Department of Science and Technology's NIDHI Seed Support System, that it is a delivery partner for MeitY's SAMRIDH accelerator, and that it runs a BioNEST bio-incubator with BIRAC. Alongside those it runs COFE, Children of Farmer Entrepreneurs, which is its own initiative for young founders from farming families, and it advertises an agritech accelerator for growth-stage startups.

There is one way in for all of it. Every programme page ends in the same Apply for Incubation form on ILF's incubation page, and no programme publishes its own portal, intake window or deadline. The form is short: your name, your email, an optional phone number, and a presentation upload in PDF or PowerPoint format, which is required. After you submit it, the site says the incubation team will review your application and get back to you.

What a startup gets is described the same way across the programmes: mentoring from domain experts and industry figures, routes into government-backed seed schemes and to impact investors, corporates and philanthropic funders, networking with farmer producer organisations, research institutions, corporates and policy stakeholders, professional services covering HR, finance and compliance, branding, legal support, digital tools, prototyping labs and infrastructure, and market linkage through on-ground pilots, procurement partnerships and buyer access via ISAP's farmer producer organisation network.

Four older acceleration programmes still appear on the site and are described in the past tense, with no pages of their own: Agripulse, for founders in the North-East; a NIDHI accelerator, separate from the NIDHI-SSS seed support that is still running; a women entrepreneurship programme built around bootcamps and an investor pitch; and Adhunik Gram, a smart-village initiative for rural markets. Treat them as closed unless ILF says otherwise.

Who can apply

The general incubation route names early-stage startups, innovators and rural entrepreneurs. ILF states no incorporation requirement, no geography or category gate, and no student or host-institute restriction for it — the application form asks only for contact details and a deck. The scheme programmes carry the schemes' own conditions instead. SISFS is for DPIIT-recognised startups incorporated not more than two years before applying. NIDHI-SSS is for technology-based startups that can show innovation and scalability. SAMRIDH is for growth-stage startups with a market-ready product and demonstrated traction. BioNEST is for biotechnology and life-sciences startups at TRL 6-7 working on science-led solutions aligned to agriculture, and ILF adds that it looks particularly for founders from tier 2, 3 and 4 cities. COFE is for young entrepreneurs from farming families, across agriculture and allied sectors.

ILF publishes no fee and no equity terms for any of its programmes, in either direction. Its SISFS page notes that seed funding under that scheme can take the form of grants for validation work and convertible instruments or debt for scaling, which is the scheme's structure rather than a stake ILF takes for a place.

Facilities

ILF's New Delhi office has a co-working space it gives as 10,000 sq ft and a conference and meeting space with a stated 35-person capacity. The incubation page lists prototyping labs and infrastructure among the services startups can use. The Krishi Utthan Incubation Center is described as providing incubation-cum-office infrastructure for BioNEST startups, along with mentorship and links to research institutions, investors, farmer producer organisations and market channels. The site does not name specific laboratory equipment.

Scale

ILF's homepage counters say it has supported more than 200 startups, that innovations from its startups have reached over 600,000 farmers, that 3,500 jobs have been created, that more than 80 intellectual properties have been registered, that over 70 startups have been supported with funding and that 12 have revenue above a ten-crore threshold. These are ILF's own figures and they are undated. Its pages do not always agree with each other: the same farmer number is written as six lakh in one place and 600,000 in another, its story section still describes itself as nine years old, and while two pages claim more than 500 mentors and experts, the mentors page names 20.

What can be counted directly is the published portfolio. ILF lists 19 startups supported under NIDHI-SSS, 17 under SISFS, 11 across two SAMRIDH cohorts, and 35 across three BioNEST cohorts, each with a location and a one-line description. Named ventures include Farmonaut Technologies, Behtar Zindagi, Raheja Solar Food Processing, Citrus Freight, FarmDidi, Hydrogreens Agri Solutions, Newndra Innovations, Chimertech and Rang De. ILF also states two recognitions: Emerging Incubator of the Year 2019 from DST, and Smart Incubator of the Year 2019 from ISGF.

Who runs it

Dr. Ram Narayan Ghatak is chief executive officer, Dr. Yogmaya Verma is chief operating officer and Ashish Khetan is president and chief investment officer. Krishna Narayan Mishra is the incubation coordinator and is the named contact for the BioNEST programme. The board is chaired by Bhaskar Natarajan, who chairs ISAP as well, and includes Prashant Pund as a director of ILF alongside members drawn from CFTRI Mysore, DRISHTEE, W Shakti Foundation and a women's dairy producer company. The mentor panel named on the site spans Reliance Retail, Britannia, PepsiCo, NABARD, Caspian, Capria, Krishi Jagran and the former adviser on agriculture to the Planning Commission.

Where it is, and working there

ILF works from Nafed Building on Mathura Road, in Mohan Cooperative Extension, New Delhi 110044. General enquiries go to tbi@indigramlabs.org or +91-11-43154100. It has a careers page, and it asks candidates to email a resume and a cover letter saying which area of work interests them to the same address.