DLabs and the awkward art of becoming a business

In May 2014, the plan was surprisingly intimate: five to eight healthcare startups, twenty weeks, and a team of designers prepared to work alongside the founders. Dheeraj Batra, an early DLabs core-team member with experience at IDEO, described an accelerator built around human-centred design. Its proposed advantage was proximity to the problem. A patient, after all, has little use for a magnificent slide deck.

That early initiative offers a useful entrance to DLabs at the Indian School of Business. ISB dates the establishment of its DST-supported incubator to 2015. Today its remit stretches across healthcare, finance, education, agriculture and clean energy. The interesting continuity is the work between an invention and someone being willing to use it.

A prototype has excellent manners

A prototype behaves beautifully in a demonstration. Outside it, somebody must approve the purchase, trust the evidence, explain the regulation and find the budget. DLabs operates in that less photogenic territory. Its Business Incubation Cohort combines incubation and mentoring with fundraising support, under the Department of Science and Technology’s NIDHI Seed Support Program.

The incubator is a not-for-profit Section 8 company, drawing on ISB’s entrepreneurship resources and its own mentor and investor network. Its website reports more than 200 startups supported. Physical workspace provides a place to meet; virtual incubation widens access. For founders, the service is practical business assistance rather than a product they install.

DLabs now sits within the ISB I-Venture umbrella, alongside AIC ISB and I-Venture Immersive. Those distinctions matter: a programme offered somewhere in the ISB family is not automatically a DLabs programme. The family resemblance is useful, but the particular team, partner and eligibility rules determine what a founder actually receives.

The bank is part of the experiment

Consider Build for Billions. Launched with Reserve Bank Innovation Hub and Union Bank of India, it focuses on financial services for the informal economy. Its intended beneficiaries include gig workers, migrant workers and street vendors, whose income and access to conventional finance can be uneven. The startup is the participant; the worker is the person the product must serve.

The format is a fifty-day, equity-free accelerator with needs assessment, individual mentoring, product and pitch clinics, regulatory preparation and opportunities to pitch to banks. Selected ventures may explore a Union Bank pilot. RBIH’s 2023-24 annual report records more than 150 applications by January 2024. That indicates interest, rather than proof that every participant found a market.

Equity-free describes dilution. It does not establish that travel, time or every cash expense disappears. The programme’s terms are admirably plain about another distinction:

“Acceptance into the program does not guarantee funding”Build for Billions programme terms

Different doors require different keys

Healthcare demands a different set of introductions. I-HEAL, DLabs’ healthcare accelerator under I-Venture, is supported by CitiusTech and offers clinical validation, regulatory advice, product development and market access. Its criteria include an MVP-stage product or service, technology readiness level five or above, and commercial viability. A promising idea alone does not meet that threshold.

The inference is straightforward: the evidence that opens an investor’s door may differ from the evidence that opens a hospital’s. I-HEAL’s offer addresses that difference. Founders seeking clinical support have a more specific reason to apply than simply wanting another mentor, and a clearer way to judge whether the programme has helped.

FinChAIn, developed with Broadridge, takes another route: roughly nine weeks for AI, blockchain and DeFi ventures, with mentoring, go-to-market assistance and internationalisation support. Its published criteria include at least a year since incorporation and early revenue. Meanwhile, the Agri & Food Accelerator with Deshpande Startups includes field immersions and product refinement. The setting changes because the test changes.

A carmaker meets the pitch deck

FundRays makes the commercial logic especially visible. DLabs and Maruti Suzuki Innovation created the investor-readiness programme for the carmaker’s alumni startups. The first cohort numbered fifteen. Financial modelling, negotiation, mentoring and pitch preparation were part of the offer: a business may already have useful technology and still need help explaining its economics to an investor.

DLabs reported fifteen investors and more than seventy-five individual investor meetings at the first cohort’s demo event. These are counts of encounters, not cheques. What a reader can copy is the order of operations: assess the gaps, work on the business and its pitch, then arrange conversations with people qualified to evaluate it.

Borrow the method, then choose the room

The breadth is real. EduRISE supports education ventures through product refinement and industry mentoring. ISPROUTE’s current ten-week format helps aspiring ISB entrepreneurs test ideas and develop proof of concept. DiscoverShe extends support to women micro-entrepreneurs through digitisation, financial literacy and access to microfinance. The intended user is not always a venture-backed technology founder.

DLabs belongs in a market that includes alternatives such as T-Hub and IIMA Ventures. Its ISB connection and named sector partners give founders concrete reasons to investigate it. The useful comparison is between available support and a venture’s next obstacle. A university affiliation, however handsome, cannot substitute for that match.

For a reader building a company, the transferable habit is to name the next piece of evidence needed. It might be a field trial, a credible financial model or clinical validation. A programme fits when its resources help produce that evidence. It fits poorly when the founder is too early for its criteria, outside its theme, or expects an introduction to do the work of a sale. DLabs’ most useful invitation is to make the next test more deliberate.