DPIIT organises event for onboarding startups

Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) on Friday organised an event to facilitate onboarding of 12 unicorns and over 125 startups on the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

The event, organised at Vanijya Bhavan in New Delhi, marked the collaboration of two of DPIIT’s flagship programmes for startups as well as digital commerce.

The aim was to bring about synergy between the two and create an ecosystem to facilitate innovation and growth of startups, Rajesh Kumar Singh, secretary DPIIT, said while addressing the event.

The ONDC network has rapidly grown and matured over the past one and a half years, and the `Startup Mahotsav’ is intended to help startups leverage the opportunities that ONDC opens up. 

More than 125 stakeholders, including startups, unicorns and high growth businesses such as EaseMyTrip, OfBusiness, Winzo, Livspace, GlobalBees, Pristyn Care, Cars24, Physics Wallah, PolicyBazaar, and Zerodha, signed letter of intent (LoI) for collaboration with the ONDC platform during the event. 

Around 5,000 startups participated in the event, both direct and online.

The ONDC Startup Mahotsav will foster collaboration and innovation while empowering startups to redefine the rules of the game in e-commerce”. T Koshy, MD & CEO of ONDC, said.

ONDC has onboarded more than 5 lakh sellers on its platform, over 70 per cent of which are small or medium sized sellers. ONDC also recorded around 7.22 million transactions on its platform in April 2024. 

ONDC-startup collaboration opens up immense potential for startups and emerging businesses to expand and scale-up utilising the open network.

The number of startups in the country has increased from around 300 in 2016 to more thn 1.3 lakh at present. These startups cover more than 55 sectors, providing jobs to more than 13 lakh people in the country.