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IIMA Ventures, the entrepreneurship centre at IIM Ahmedabad, has successfully wrapped up the third edition of its flagship People and Culture Accelerator, selecting 11 high-growth startups to join the latest cohort. The program, designed for founders and CXOs of seed to Series A startups, focuses on helping leadership teams build scalable organisational and cultural foundations during key inflexion points of growth.
The 2025 cohort features startups across diverse sectors, including fintech, aerospace, healthcare, deeptech, textile manufacturing, food and agri packaging, and leadership hiring. Some notable participants include The ePlane Company, PierSight, Ignosis, Clean Electric, Fabriclore, Orbitt Space, and Butterfly Learnings.
Throughout the bootcamp, founders engaged in intensive workshops built on proprietary toolkits developed by IIMA Ventures. These included modules on startup identity, people and culture audits, and culture development. The program also offered sessions on safe risk-taking, team structuring, performance management, and retention strategy. Leading these discussions were IIM-A faculty Prof Neharika Vohra and Prof Rajesh Chandwani, along with domain experts like Anirudh Mullick (Peak XV), Shruti Malik (Crompton), and Siddhartha Nangia (Smytten).
In a closing huddle, participants crafted tailored action plans for their companies’ next phase, focusing on sustainable team growth and people-first leadership. They will now receive continued support through HR consulting, founder coaching, and peer-learning townhalls.
Supriya Sharma, Partner at IIMA Ventures, highlighted, “Across the world and in India, issues around people and teams often rank among the top three reasons why startups fail. And yet, founders have and continue to hustle around this, often without much success. We’ve designed the People and Culture Accelerator as a structured, rigorous, and application-oriented intervention to help founders build better people systems—so they can scale fast and scale right.”
With this third cohort, the accelerator has now supported over 35 startups—including notable alumni like Third Wave Coffee, SatSure, Joyspoon, Riskcovry, and Heelium—underscoring the growing relevance of team-building support in the Indian startup ecosystem.
As early-stage startups expand into complex domains such as space tech and healthcare, the People and Culture Accelerator remains one of the few focused initiatives dedicated to tackling the human side of scale.
