Arise Accelerator
Applications Now Open

StrongHer Ventures, the world's largest diversity platform for women VCs and entrepreneurs, in partnership with WeWork Labs, the leading flexible workspace provider, today opened applications for startups for "Arise" accelerator. Ankita Vashistha, Founder & Managing Partner at StrongHer Ventures and Arvind Radhakrishnan, Head of Labs at WeWork India, have both personally committed to lead the Arise accelerator. 

The Accelerator engages the entire women-led innovation ecosystem, including corporate leaders, founders, talent, mentors, hands-on master classes, investors and client connects (Engage). Applications are now open (Apply) to all pre-Seed women-led and women-focused startups in categories such as fintech, health, future of work/life, consumer, and Web 3.0. 

Arise brings together the benefits of StrongHer Ventures' extensive investment expertise and global investor network, coupled with WeWork Labs' global acceleration platform. General partners of StrongHer Ventures have a track record of generating unicorns and multifold returns. The program will engage with 5,000 startups, mentor 1,000 entrepreneurs and invest in over 200 startups. It will impact engagement and empowerment of over a million women in the country, resulting in 5x increase in funding for women entrepreneurs, doubling the number of women leaders across the impacted group of women, and a 50% reduction in pay gap. Arise expects to add $1.5 billion to the country's women-led economy (GDP). 

"The Arise program by StrongHer Ventures and WeWork Labs is leading the way to triple the number of women entrepreneurs who get funded and increase women in leadership positions by 50%", said Ms. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Executive Chairperson, Biocon & Biocon Biologics.

Apart from capital investment, Arise will offer women entrepreneurs benefits including knowledge sessions, bootcamps, sector experts, engaged mentoring, curated networking events, hiring drives, warm client connects, access to follow-on capital, highly subsidised WeWork spaces and up to $1M worth of benefits and valuation impact. 

Arise brings in engagement from industry leaders and successful entrepreneurs like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (Biocon), Kirthiga Reddy (WeWork), Deepak Parekh (HDFC Bank), Upasana Taku (MobiKwik), Neha Motwani (Fitternity/CureFit), Bhavna Suresh (10Club), Ganesh Natarajan (Ex Zensar), Anisha Patnaik (LexStart) and Avinash Vashistha (Former Chairman & MD, Accenture), among several others. 

Mr. Deepak S. Parekh, Chairman, HDFC Ltd., said, "Ankita Vashistha has created an enabling platform for women entrepreneurs who are an important untapped source for India's economic growth - by empowering women to scale up their ventures. StrongHer has forged immense opportunities such as increasing female labor participation, closing the gender pay gap and fostering innovation."

Arise will immerse startups on competitive strategy, design, marketing, operations, and fundraising that leads to 1:1 investor meetings and Demo day. StrongHer Ventures will continue to engage with startups for guiding them for subsequent rounds of funding and their growth post Demo day. 

Contact
For more information, visit: https://www.strongher.vc/
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