IIMs Are Quietly Incubating AI Startups That Will Outlast th…

Over the last two decades, India’s startup narrative leaned on a familiar axis: engineering institutes produced technologists, technologists started companies, and the labs and dorm rooms in those institutes fed the country’s innovation pipeline. 

Management schools, however, were often the backbenchers in this conversation. But, that scenario is evolving now. The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore, IIM Lucknow, and others have built incubation centres that not only accelerate market-ready startups, but also train researchers to become founders. 

They equip companies with model training and data pipelines, while also training on pricing, compliance, sales cycles, manufacturing challenges, stakeholder psychology, fundraising, and the slow, painful art of scale.

Having become nurseries for deep tech and AI ventures, these incubators are complementing IITs by introducing managerial discipline to back engineering vision. 

Business Incubation Finds a New Frontier

Anand Sri Ganesh, CEO of Nadathur S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at IIM Bangalore, said that for any tech or IP-driven innovation, the intervention of a business incubation is critical mainly in two areas. 

The first occurs “somewhere in the TRL three, four stages,” when “innovation is starting to crystallise within the lab.” 

This is where IIM incubators step in, long before a product hits the market. They ask founders to consider interoperability, price thresholds, customer archetypes, certification, procurement, and downstream integration at a time when most scientists are still polishing their core technology. 

“The credibility of being part of a premier incubation programme builds trust and encourages enterprises to engage with us under NDA,” said Raja Mohan, founder and CEO of Prodloop, a voice AI startup incubated at NSRCEL. 

NSRCEL provided peer networks, industry connects, and compliance playbooks that accelerated enterprise pilot conversations. For a young AI company, that support is catalytic.

It also helped Prodloop navigate integration with legacy call-centre stacks, a task more complex than many engineers realise. Enterprises often run “heterogeneous or legacy telephony stacks that lack standardised APIs,” Mohan noted. 

Compliance thresholds such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2 further slow down onboarding. NSRCEL’s grant support helped Prodloop pursue certification faster and exposed the team to seasoned SaaS founders with real-world integration experience.

However, the second moment where business incubation is critical comes after the prototype is real enough to be demonstrated. “Once beyond the lab, the invention gets into a customer demonstrable prototype pre-MVP ready,” Ganesh said. 

“That is when the real translation of the business model takes shape,” he added. This is where most AI ventures stall, not due to technical incompetence, but because few engineers have ever sold to an enterprise buyer, or structured a stakeholder-driven pilot.

Prodloop experienced this friction firsthand. Mohan isolated the core barrier to training robust voice models: “Access to diverse, high-quality conversational datasets… is critical.” 

But large organisations are “still hesitant to share voice data for POCs due to compliance concerns, even when PII/OII masking and anonymisation is offered,” he added. Public datasets are inadequate, scarce, fragmented, and unrepresentative of enterprise reality.

These blind spots are precisely what IIM incubators target.

According to Ganesh, one of NSRCEL’s core evaluation criteria is whether founders have “sweated the idea.” They must show they have read papers, met suppliers, spoken to customers, and challenged their own intuition.

IIM Lucknow’s Role 

The Enterprise Incubation Centre (EIC) at IIM Lucknow is another nursery for innovative aspirations.

When asked what most AI companies struggle with, Amrit Tiwari, head of investment at EIC, didn’t reach for buzzwords. “AI startups often struggle with data privacy compliance, model explainability, and domain-specific validation.” However, these are not model-architecture problems; they are industry problems, he said. 

EIC intervenes through expert-led regulatory workshops, connects startups with legal advisors, and facilitates pilot testing, Tiwari said. It guides them through compliant data pipelines, ethical AI frameworks, and enterprise integration, solving the bottlenecks that engineering institutions rarely deal with.

Durability carries more weight than hype cycles at EIC. “We evaluate the startup’s tech adaptability,  modularity, proprietary IP, data advantage, and model scalability,” Tiwari said. The goal is defence against obsolescence in a rapidly shifting AI landscape. Instead of relying solely on external LLMs and APIs, IIML EIC favours “problem-first, model-agnostic solutions.”

CallerDesk is a case study in how an incubator can change a company by reshaping its thinking. When co-founder Kaushal Bansal began the startup in 2016, he saw a gap in India’s voice communication market. There was no tool SMEs could use with the frictionless simplicity of WhatsApp or Dropbox. 

For telephony, founders had to choose between a ₹10,000 IVR system or a ₹50 lakh call centre infrastructure. “We thought that we should start this thing,” Bansal recalled. “They [enterprises] can just download the app, configure the IVR, and onboard their cloud call centre things at 90% discounted rates.”

Tiwari sees a repeating pattern in most AI startups’ failure: they stall after pilots. Enterprise clients hesitate due to integration challenges. Teams lack a go-to-market strategy. Data quality collapses. EIC bridges this gap by providing corporate partnerships for paid proofs of concept, investor access, and deployment advisory. 

CallerDesk embodied a scrappy ingenuity common to Indian entrepreneurs. But as Bansal admitted, it lacked direction. “Before IIM Lucknow, we were…very misaligned.”

At the EIC, the founders realised what they had built was “actually very good,” and that it was “time to scale.” EIC provided CallerDesk mentorship, infrastructure, workspace, and funding, including ₹25 lakh in seed support.

The change was not theoretical. CallerDesk’s client base grew threefold, and call volume increased fivefold. The company went from dealing with a handful of enterprise clients to supporting “around 50,000 plus agents… on a daily basis.” Its revenue mix matured into roughly 30% subscription fees and 70% usage-based charges.

The Convergence of IIMs with the IITs

When Ganesh was asked whether IITs or IIMs have the advantage in nurturing startups, he rejected the idea of rivalry entirely. “The multiplier effect of joint incubation is very high,” he said. 

That collaboration brings deep IP development and testing capabilities, along with ability to transfer to markets and create entrepreneurial mindsets, he emphasised. 

In other words, India’s next generation of innovation belongs to avenues where labs and markets converge.

Ganesh denied that IITs, being technical institutes, hold an inherent advantage. For him, co-incubation is the most potent form of support, as engineering campuses alone can not handle the whole innovation lifecycle. 

To achieve this, NSRCEL works with a national network of technical institutes. They work with IIT Guwahati on circularity and climate tech, IIT Hyderabad on medical equipment, IIT Madras on climate and deep tech, and IIT Kanpur on robotics and avionics. These partners provide “anything from design, fabrication, prototyping, testing, validation, and pre-certification,” said Ganesh. 

Meanwhile, NSRCEL complements this with business incubation, focusing on product-market fit, venture readiness, stakeholder management, and sales discipline.

However, the work gets messy. “Giants find it difficult” to collaborate, Ganesh admitted, referring to larger institutions and corporations. True co-incubation “is more embedded in design, difficult to execute, but more effective if you’re able to execute it.” 

Management Meets Engineering

India is now at an inflexion point. Engineering institutions continue to play a vital role in creating the intellectual property that drives deep tech innovations. At the same time, management incubators are essential in developing the commercial, regulatory, strategic, and operational frameworks necessary for the sustainable success of these technologies.

Summing up the landscape, Ganesh said that in India, “the incentives are not yet aligned” between researchers, corporates, startups, and capital. “I’m hoping it will happen in time.”

But, the change is indisputable. CallerDesk wants to be “the WhatsApp for voice in India.” Prodloop is expanding multilingual dataset coverage at enterprise scale. IIM Lucknow is training AI companies to withstand regulatory scrutiny and commercial pressure. NSRCEL is turning students and graduates into entrepreneurs.

The old innovation axis has evolved, as IIMs, instead of competing with IITs, complement their innovations.

The post IIMs Are Quietly Incubating AI Startups That Will Outlast the Hype appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Generated by RSStT. The copyright belongs to the original author.

Source