Taizo Son’s Mistletoe ties up with GSF to launch incubator
BENGALURU: Billionaire Japanese investor and serial entrepreneur Taizo Son’s start-up incubator Mistletoe has forged an alliance with GSF India to launch a new accelerator programme for agritech and food-tech start-ups.
The largest investors and venture capital firms in India have had mixed success with ventures in the two sectors targeted by the alliance.
The accelerator programme called Gastrotope will invest in and help incubate early-stage ventures in the two sectors and attempt to build an ecosystem for start-ups focused on agri-tech and food-tech—something that Son feels is lacking in India.
The new programme will attempt to replicate the model followed by Mistletoe, which is not just an incubator programme but is also an investor in start-ups.
In an interview, Son, who is the younger brother of SoftBank Group Corp.’s founder Masayoshi Son, said he wants to fix key food and farming industry problems such as oversupply and outdated farming techniques through the new incubator programme.
“If we can make innovations which are good for India, those technologies and ideas can be adapted later for the rest of the world. Together with GSF, we will support and invest in startups in these areas and create a programme to support those kind of people—and also test every kind of new technology for agriculture and food,” Son said.
“Today’s food supply chain is discriminatory towards producers, farmers, logistics and distribution companies and consumers. This is a 20th century industrialised paradigm... I think we need to change from the industrialised supply chain to a newer, updated one,” he added.
Taizo Son, who shifted base from Japan to Singapore and pledged to invest at least $100 million in early-stage ventures in South-East Asia earlier this year, said he wants to “opensource” all the solutions that are generated by ventures in the accelerator programme, or in layman’s terms, make those solutions readily available for everyone.
“We will bring the open source culture from the IT (information technology) industry to the food supply-chain area... we want to take a different approach—and not just look at investing in start-ups,” Son said.
“So far the venture world view of farming is basically one that sees the farmer as a labourer or the farmer as a factory manager,” said Rajesh Sawhney, founder of GSF India.
Mistletoe has already made inroads in India—so far the venture-capital and incubator program has backed food-tech and agri-tech start-ups such as Ninjacart, InnerChef and Kisan Network. Sawhney is also a co-founder of InnerChef.