New Delhi, Jan 10 (PTI) IFCI Venture Capital Funds will soon launch a mission for young entrepreneurs from scheduled caste segment to support and promote their business ideas and innovation, its Managing Director S Tomar said on Monday.

IFCI Venture Capital Funds is a subsidiary of IFCI Ltd.

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It presently manages five venture capital funds – the two of which support entrepreneurship among the socially and backward classes of the society.

In 2020, a mission was started to find 1,000 entrepreneurs belonging to the scheduled caste category with innovative ideas. This mission was launched under the name of Ambedkar Social Innovation Incubation Mission, which was carved out of this venture capital fund for SCs (Scheduled Castes) and it has taken off, Tomar said during a session of 'Startup India Innovation Week', organised virtually by the government.

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"We have till now identified about 25 such innovative entrepreneurs...the whole idea was to bring these people into the mainstream. In order to give huge promotion to this idea and scheme, we also intend to run the Ambedkar Young Entrepreneur League and we are going to launch the first league soon," Tomar said.

He said IFCI Venture Capital Fund looks forward to contributing to the larger campaign, which is being run by Start-Up India for supporting and creating an ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship.

"We feel that through this venture fund Ambedkar Young Entrepreneur League that we want to run only for young entrepreneurs, we shall be able to contribute in this whole exercise," he added.

"Besides SC entrepreneurs, we also have a VC fund for backward classes. There also, entrepreneurs are coming forward. That was started a bit late in 2019-20 and the real traction has to come in that," Tomar noted.

Venture Capital fund for Scheduled Castes (VCF-SC) was launched in 2015. It is a government initiative of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE) for which IFCI Venture is the investment manager.

VCF-SC is a first of its kind Venture Capital Fund in India dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship among the Scheduled Castes by providing concessional finance to them.

As of date, the corpus of the VCFSC fund stands at Rs 330 crore.

Recently, the government has mandated IFCI Venture to manage the Venture Capital Fund for Backward Classes (VCF-BC) also. The target corpus of this fund is Rs 200 crore.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)