Taizo Son, GSF India partner to incubate agri, food start-ups
Billionaire investor and serial entrepreneur Taizo Son’s start-up incubator Mistletoe has forged an alliance with local incubator GSF India to launch a new accelerator program for agri-tech and food-tech start-ups, at a time when the country’s largest investors and venture-capital firms have had mixed success with ventures in those two sectors.
The accelerator program called Gastrotope will invest in and help incubate early-stage ventures in the two sectors, and attempt to build a so-called ecosystem for start-ups focused on those areas—something that Son feels is lacking in India. The new program will attempt to replicate the model followed by Mistetoe, which is not just an incubator program but is also an investor in start-ups.
In an interview with
Son, the younger brother of SoftBank majordomo Masayoshi Son, said he wants to fix key food and farming industry problems such as oversupply and outdated farming techniques, among others, through the new incubator program.
“If we can make innovations which is 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 program to support those kind of people—and also test every kind of new technology for agriculture and food ,” Taizo Son told
“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 industrialized supply chain to a newer, updated one,” he added.
Taizo Son, who shifted his base from Japan to Singapore and pledged to invest at least $100 million on early-stage ventures in Southeast Asia earlier this year—said he wants to “open source” all the solutions that are generated by ventures in the accelerator program, or in layman’s terms, make those solutions readily available for everyone.
“We will bring the open source culture from the IT industry to the food supply-chain area...we want to take a different approach—and not just look at investing in start-ups,” said Son.
Son did not specify the kind of corpus Gastrotope has set aside for start-up investments in India, but indicated that they would allocate a significant amount of funds towards earlystage ventures in the country.
“We have chosen food and agriculture as the big areas (for investment). Within that scheme of things, India is the place where the biggest impact can happen -not just for India, but for the world. ,” said Rajesh Sawhney, founder of GSF India.