Mazumdar Shaw Medical Foundation TBI (MSMF TBI)

Work out which door you are knocking on

There are two very different routes here and they have different bars. Incubation at the MedTech Innovation Centre wants a company with a minimum viable product, early traction and a full-time team. The Clinical Immersion Program wants nothing except the fee and an interest in healthcare, and it is explicitly open to people still at the ideation stage, from any background. If you are pre-product, apply for CIP and use it to frame a problem worth building on, rather than pitching incubation and being told to come back.

Email before you apply

This is the single most useful thing you can do with this provider. The incubator's own site has not been updated since 2022, its events calendar shows nothing upcoming, and no page names a current intake window. Write to tbi@ms-mf.org, say what you are building and ask whether incubation applications are open and whether the lab rate card still holds. A short reply will save you filling a form that may not be read.

Make the clinical need the spine of the application

Every page here argues the same thing, so a reviewer will be reading for it. The foundation's own diagnosis of why healthcare start-ups fail is that the product does not solve a clinical pain point, that pre-clinical and clinical validation is missing, and that early proof-of-concept money is hard to reach. Answer those three in order. Name the clinical problem, name the clinician or specialty you need alongside you, and say what evidence you still have to generate. A device with a clinician already willing to co-develop it is the shape they are set up for.

What reviewers look for

The Apply Now page lists four things, and they are worth answering one by one:

• innovation that creates sustainable solutions in healthcare
• affordability for marginalised communities in India, and the social impact that follows
• a for-profit business that is viable over the long run, not a grant-funded project
• a solution that can scale across geographies so the impact multiplies

The affordability line is not decoration. The incubator and Villgro both frame their mandate around low-cost care for people at the bottom of the pyramid, so a premium-priced device aimed at metro private hospitals is a poor fit however good the technology.

How selection works

Four stages, and the last one is a real gate. You submit an application; the incubation team screens it and contacts the enterprises that match the mandate; then comes due diligence, which includes site visits and interviews with your own stakeholders, so have your customers, clinical collaborators and manufacturing partners ready to be called; then you pitch an investment committee of outside investors and operators, which decides on both incubation and money. Prepare the pitch as an investment pitch, not a programme application.

Give the application more detail than feels necessary

The process page asks for this in as many words: the more detail you give, the better they can evaluate the company and the solution. For a medtech team that means the regulatory pathway you are on, what testing you have done and what is left, your bill of materials position, and which of their labs or clinical areas you would actually use. Pointing at named equipment on their rate card shows you have read what they have.

Be ready to be paired with a clinician

Incubation here comes with a named clinical mentor and a named scientist mentor. Say in the application which specialty you need and why, and what you want out of the relationship. Founders who arrive with a clear ask get more out of a couple of hours a month than founders who expect the mentor to set the agenda.

Budget for lab use separately

Equipment and space are charged per use, by the hour, day, run or month, and CIP lab access is pay-per-use too. Work out roughly how many runs and how much cold storage a year of your development plan needs, and raise for it. Also ask what the rate card is now, since the published one has not been touched in years.

MSMF TBI is a technology business incubator for medtech and healthtech founders, run by the Mazumdar Shaw Medical Foundation on the Narayana Health City campus at Bommasandra, Bengaluru. The foundation is a nonprofit Section 25 company set up by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, and the incubator is one of its named arms, alongside its translational research centre, its advanced diagnostics centre and its cancer outreach programme. It describes itself as a corporate hospital-based start-up incubator, and that is the whole idea of the place: a founder building a device or a diagnostic works next to the clinicians who would use it.

What it is recognised for

The foundation says on its own pages that it was granted Technology Business Incubator status by the Department of Science and Technology, and BioNEST status by BIRAC, the Department of Biotechnology's industry research council, in July 2019. BIRAC's own public list of BioNEST bio-incubators does name the Mazumdar Shaw Medical Foundation, and records 8,000 sq ft of incubation space for it, so the BioNEST side is confirmed outside the foundation's own copy. The DST side is not as clean: three of the incubator's own pages give three different dates for the same recognition, 2014 on one, June 2015 on another and July 2015 on a third, and a fourth page describes the same status as coming under Startup India instead. Neither the foundation nor BIRAC publishes how long the BioNEST support runs, so whether it is still funded cannot be told from what is public.

How programmes work

The main route is BioNEST incubation at the foundation's physical incubator, the MSMF MedTech Innovation Centre – BIRAC BioNEST, which opened in December 2020 with 8,000 sq ft of space. It is run jointly with Villgro, the impact incubator, which sits on the operating team. Once a start-up is taken in, it is paired with a clinician from Narayana Health who works on the solution with the founders; the one cohort the site documents in detail lists a named clinical mentor and a named scientist mentor against every company. Incubatees get office space, introductions to vetted service providers, help with regulatory paperwork and clinical validation, and a route to BIRAC funding and follow-on investors.

Alongside that sits the Clinical Immersion Program, or CIP, a paid hot-desking programme for people much earlier on. It buys a privilege card for the clinical areas of Narayana Health City, a couple of hours of desk time a week, a couple of hours a month with a matched clinician, regulatory support towards FDA, ISO, CE and Indian device approvals, help designing a research proposal for ethics committee clearance, and pay-per-use lab access. Two other things appear under the site's Programs menu. InCITE is a description of the clinician-plus-scientist setup and the research facilities rather than a separate intake, with no eligibility rules or dates of its own. Hack the Paper is an event series for researchers presenting their work in an un-conference format, and it looks dormant.

Who can apply

For incubation the bar is stated plainly: a minimum viable product with early traction, a committed full-time team, a for-profit business model that works in the long run, and a solution that is affordable for marginalised communities in India and can scale across geographies. This is an outside-founder incubator, not a campus one: there is no student, faculty or alumni route, because there is no teaching institution here. No state or category restriction is stated. CIP is the opposite end, and is open to anyone contemplating a healthcare start-up whatever their background, including people still at the ideation stage; it is designed for individuals rather than whole teams.

Facilities

The incubator publishes a rate card for its own equipment, bookable by the hour, day, run or month: a flow cytometer, a fluorescent microscope, a gel doc, real-time PCR, a bacterial incubator, a cell culture microscope and hood, CO2 incubation, liquid nitrogen, freezers and a cold room, plus a video conference room and an amphitheatre. Separately, incubatees are told they get access to the foundation's molecular and translational research facilities, which cover genomics, proteomics, cell biology, immunology, histopathology, transcriptomics, bioinformatics, biostatistics and an animal house. Those labs belong to the foundation's research wing rather than to the incubator, and the clinical premises reached through the CIP privilege card belong to Narayana Health. The hospital's size is worth knowing for what it gives a medtech team access to, but it is the hospital's, not the incubator's.

Scale

BIRAC's BioNEST list records 21 incubatees for the foundation, 15 of them not funded under a BIRAC scheme and 6 funded under one. The list is undated. The foundation's own account of its 2020 call with Villgro is the clearest picture of throughput: 264 applications, 52 shortlisted at first screening, 25 taken to virtual pitch sessions with around fifteen mentors, and a cohort inaugurated in March 2021. That same page says six were finally selected and then introduces nine companies as the cohort, so the number is best treated as around half a dozen to nine. At the December 2020 launch the centre was described as able to hold 39 start-ups and 82 seats, which is capacity rather than a record of work done.

Who runs it

Dr Paul C Salins is chairman of MSMF TBI as well as managing director of the foundation and medical director of the Mazumdar Shaw Medical Center. Kiran Vuppala heads operations for the incubator, with a chief engineer, a clinical coordinator and engineering staff listed alongside him. Dr Kiran Mazumdar Shaw chairs the foundation and Dr Devi Prasad Shetty, chairman of Narayana Health, sits on the governing council. The investment committee that makes the final call on applications draws on Biocon, Menterra, Ideaspring Capital and UCSF Innovation Ventures.

How to apply, and one thing to check first

Applications go through the Register Now button on the incubator's Apply Now page, which opens a registration form. After submission an incubation team does a preliminary assessment, then due diligence with site visits and conversations with your stakeholders, and finally you pitch the investment committee, which decides on both incubation and investment. Questions go to tbi@ms-mf.org. CIP is a register-and-pay programme instead, settled by bank transfer to the foundation.

Before you spend time on an application, email first. The incubator's own site has published nothing since August 2022, its events page says there are no upcoming events and the most recent one listed was in April 2021, and every team photograph and partner logo on it was uploaded in 2020. The foundation's main site was updated in 2026 and still lists the incubator as one of its arms, so it has not been retired, but the incubator's own pages are several years behind and none of them names an open call. The incubator has no careers page of its own; the foundation lists openings through its translational research centre.