The Homepreneur Awards 2025 is a unique platform that recognises and celebrates women who pursue entrepreneurship from their homes. CREST carried out an analysis of 700 applicants to support the award panelists with an objective basis for shortlisting and personal interviews. The study combined qualitative findings that highlighted positive triggers such as inspiration, growth and empowerment alongside negative influences including obstacles, hardships and adversity to understand the psychological dimensions shaping business outcomes. It also incorporated quantitative assessments by examining business sector participation and performance across innovation, inspiration, growth and satisfactory or good categories, along with variations across age groups from early adulthood onward, educational backgrounds spanning school level to postgraduate degrees, and geographic representation from major cities including Chennai, Coimbatore, Trichy, Madurai and Salem as well as smaller towns. The resulting findings provided a comprehensive understanding of the social and motivational elements shaping home based women entrepreneurs and enabled the award panel to recognise and support promising ventures with a more data informed perspective.

A typical valuation procedure of a startup involves an analysis of potential future cash flows, an analysis of comparative firms’ stock prices, or an analysis of the price-to-earnings ratio of the venture. The valuation of a new venture with significant growth opportunities, high uncertainty and no real cashflow using foggy discount rate estimations seem to defy all the common wisdom on growth firm valuation. Rather than anchoring the Risk-Return equation of such high-growth, high-uncertainty firms in some impassable plan, the study intends to conduct an empirical analysis of the risk and return profile of start-ups in the Indian scenario using a risk-neutral model and backing it up with the findings of the cascade neural network model. This would provide a systematic reference guide for entrepreneurs as well as risk capital investors in India.

The decision to startup into one of the SDG areas can be driven both by external and internal factors. The regulatory environment, societal needs for more sustainable solutions or other drivers constitute the external factors, while the intrinsic motivation could be either idealistic/altruistic orientation or pure economic orientation or a combination of both. There have been studies in the past that examine entrepreneurship in the sustainable development area. These studies are based on western markets and there is a dearth of literature that focuses on the Indian startup ecosystem. This study addresses the gap by examining the drivers of sustainable entrepreneurship (specifically environmental entrepreneurship) in the Indian context and looks at demographic factors including age, gender, education and prior experience, and the behavioural factors like altruism/idealism or economic reward maximisation.

The Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission has proposed a comprehensive study to document the opportunities and challenges within the state's start-up ecosystem. The study aims to achieve multiple objectives. These include analysing the growth and potential opportunities for start-ups, identifying gaps in existing government initiatives, addressing challenges related to sustainability and scalability, promoting social inclusion, exploring the role of public procurement in driving economic growth, and ultimately contributing to Tamil Nadu's goal of becoming a trillion-dollar economy. Additionally, the study seeks to map best practices both within and outside the state to develop appropriate policy interventions. The research will employ a mixed-methods approach, leveraging primary and secondary data sources to provide comprehensive insights. An extensive secondary data review will be conducted to explore policies related to the Tamil Nadu start-up ecosystem and available opportunities. Data will be gathered from diverse sources, including the IIT Madras-YNOS Platform, StartupTN, academic journals, research reports, publications, and government documents. To gather nuanced insights, the study will conduct 500 face-to-face structured interviews with start-ups, focusing on understanding the challenges they face, the opportunities they identify, and the effectiveness of existing policies.

The objective of an “Incubator ecosystem in India” is to provide a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the overall incubator ecosystem across multiple regions in India. The report aims to offer a detailed overview of various aspects, including the incubator landscape, program offerings, startup successes, challenges faced, collaborative efforts, and the broader impact on the entrepreneurial ecosystem. By presenting a thorough examination of incubator models, achievements, and future plans, the objective is to inform stakeholders, policymakers, investors, and the general public about the vital role of incubators in fostering innovation, supporting startups, and contributing to economic growth. The report seeks to contribute to data-driven decision-making, facilitate collaboration, and inspire initiatives that enhance the effectiveness and sustainability of the incubator ecosystem.

Start-ups and its financing have been an area of policy importance for the Government of India in recent years. The thrust of the government policy making can also be seen in the impact – India has emerged as one of the largest as well as fastest growing start-up ecosystems in the world. In this research and documentation project, it is proposed to trace the Start-up policy evolution and how it has emerged as one of the important pillars for the government. While Start-ups also remain as an area of interest for the various state governments, this documentation and research would largely focus on the “Start-up Program” of the Government of India. The research would be conducted mainly through a detailed analysis and study of various secondary sources, archives and policy documents pertaining to Start-up India. However, given the thrust for documenting the intellectual underpinnings behind this policy imperative, we would also be conducting telephonic interviews with key administrators and members of the government who were part of developing the Start-up Policy over the years. Furthermore, we would also be analysing the impact of the policy based on data obtained from various sources.

GAIL (India) Ltd, India's largest Natural Gas Company, has large townships adjacent to its gas fields and manufacturing plants. As a leading and one of the most sought-after PSUs in India, GAIL attracts and employs people of very high calibre. As is most often the case, the spouses of the employees of GAIL are also professionally qualified. Unfortunately, since many of the GAIL townships are in remote locations, there are limited opportunities for the spouses to find suitable employment nearby. To address this concern, a research-based consultancy project is proposed to suggest promoting entrepreneurship and start-up ventures among spouses of GAIL employees. The project will involve conducting research to understand the feasibility and potential success of such ventures, identifying areas where support. The Centre for Research on Start-ups and Risk Financing will partner with GAIL to design and implement a Program for Educating, Mentoring and Handholding on Entrepreneurship for Spouses of GAIL Employees. The activities will be implemented by IIT Madras with the support of YNOS Venture Engine, an IIT Madras incubated startup.

Angel investments are increasingly getting specialized. In recent years, start-ups are raising pre-seed funding before seed-stage funding. Investors in pre-seed and seed-stage companies commonly are angel investors. Majority of the angel investors prefer syndicated investments than standalone investments for the benefits that are brought in by the investors in terms of finance and diversified value-added services. But an index that gauges the robustness of the angel investments syndication by capturing its multi-dimensional aspects is not yet seen. Further, though India being third largest startup ecosystem of the world, the literature on angel investments are at very nascent stage. Hence this study aims to address these gaps by analysing the differences between these two groups of angel investors, by developing a composite syndication index encompassing multi-dimensional aspects of the syndication, factors driving the angel investment decision, in the context of Indian startups.

Three critical aspects of venture capital investments are valuation, security selection, structuring, and exit. Valuing a new venture with limited information is always difficult. The process of valuing a venture and writing contracts between VC and Entrepreneur is an intensive process. Since India receives a significant pile of capital inflows, tax implications in VC investments need be considered. The VC hopes to design a contract that reflects the firm's true value, protect investments on the downside, and reflects all of this in the exit returns. It's fascinating to learn about start-up valuation and the signals that VCs consider before investing. The information asymmetry in venture capital investments has been extensively explored. Securities and the capital structure enable entrepreneurs and investors to optimise their incentives. Contracts, in particular, mitigate downside risk for investors. Given the tax implications, security selection and structuring is a critical component of venture capital investing. These risk mitigation strategies should reflect in the returns when they exit from the venture.