SAP Startup Studio announces the launch of its fifth annual cohort

SAP Startup Studio has recently announced the launch of its fifth annual cohort program for 2022-23. The 12-month program focuses on nurturing the startup ecosystem and providing entrepreneurs opportunities to scale their businesses. This year, SAP Labs India is accepting applications from early growth stage SaaS startups in the enterprise-tech domain (under $1million in annual recurring revenue) until May 15th, 2022.

The start-ups will be the shortlisted basis of an internal evaluation by a jury comprising SAP’s leadership, sales, and product engineering team. Selected start-ups will get guidance from SAP experts on how they can scale their solutions through an approach of co-innovating with SAP technology, and dedicated market access through the SAP customer and partner ecosystem in India. Through the program, startups will also gain exposure to the tier-1 and tier-2 VC ecosystem and think tanks in the country.

This year, SAP Startup Studio has the following offerings:

• Enabling a focused co-innovation on SAP leveraging the key capabilities of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) along with deep integrations to SAP portfolio supported by SAP Product Engineering & Product Management teams.
• GTM readiness and joint GTM engagement along with SAP India Market unit teams.
• Listing of the co-innovate solutions on the SAP store for customers and partners of SAP to consume these applications on the go.
• Dedicated access to the SaaS Club initiative in collaboration with Zinnov to drive greater collaboration and thought leadership activities.
• Active engagement with Tier 1 and Tier 2 VC firms to provide support for raising funding and thus helping these startups scale up.
• Partnership opportunity with T-Hub to drive a focused co-innovation and thought leadership engagement for startups from the sustainability tech space.

Sindhu Gangadharan, SVP, SAP User Enablement & MD, SAP Labs India said, “The Indian startup ecosystem has seen substantial growth over the years, esp. during the pandemic, SaaS-enabled solutions gained more prominence for their benefits of a reduced time to market, increased revenue, and simplified distribution model. This year, through SAP Startup Studio, aspiring SaaS entrepreneurs will get opportunities to mature and expand their businesses in a nurturing environment. We will co-identify solutions that complement SAP offerings and jointly take them to market. The objective is to fasten their innovative thinking and encourage the entrepreneurial spirit and foster India’s technology startup scene.”

Justin Paul, Head – of SAP Startup Studio, SAP Labs India said, “As we move forward, our aim is to build this program as the most sought after program in the enterprise space in India and the larger APJ region for SAP, with a key focus on collaborating with SaaS startups through focused engagements both from a co-innovation led GTM model and also creating vital collaboration with the key stakeholders in SaaS space in India.”

Over the past 5 years, the program has nurtured and supported 51 early-stage startups from the enterprise tech domain. As part of the engagement, 18 startups have successfully completed their co-innovation engagement with SAP, 15 successful joint customer go-lives/Paid PoCs, and have facilitated over 135 Mn USD in external funding for its participating startups.