India's startup story has expanded rapidly over the last decade, but the journey from entrepreneurship to enterprise remains uneven, particularly for women founders navigating limited networks, social expectations and unequal access to opportunities. The challenge is even more pronounced beyond metropolitan centres, where promising ideas often struggle to find the ecosystem support needed to grow.
In this insightful conversation, Himanshu Nivsarkar, Senior Executive Vice President & Head – CSR & ESG, Kotak Mahindra Bank, draws on his experience of leading initiatives at the intersection of business, sustainability and social impact to argue that building successful women entrepreneurs requires looking beyond capital alone. Reflecting on the learnings from Kotak BizLabs' partnership with NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore, he highlights the importance of mentorship, peer communities, confidence building and long term support systems in helping women entrepreneurs move from intent to scale.
Read the full interview to know how corporate India can help transform women entrepreneurship into a powerful driver of inclusive growth and community development.
Q&A
Q. India’s startup ecosystem has grown rapidly in numbers, but many women led ventures still struggle to move from survival to scale. In your view, what are the deeper structural gaps holding women founders back today, especially beyond funding?
A. While access to funding is often highlighted, the more fundamental challenge lies in structural and systemic gaps that restrict women’s participation in entrepreneurship itself. A key issue is the limited pipeline of women entering entrepreneurship, with many ventures concentrated at the ideation or micro enterprise stage.
Beyond this, there are capability gaps at the early stages of venture creation, particularly around idea validation, business modelling and accessing markets. These are compounded by restricted access to networks and mentors, which play a critical role in shaping entrepreneurial journeys.
Socio cultural factors continue to influence outcomes significantly. Women often balance multiple responsibilities, including caregiving roles, which impact the time required for entrepreneurship.
Taken together, these factors indicate that the challenge is less about isolated barriers such as capital, and more about limited ecosystem access, participation and sustained support across the entrepreneurial lifecycle.
Q. At what stage do you see women founders needing the most support—idea stage, early growth, or scaling—and why?
A. Women founders require the most support at the transition from idea to early-stage execution. This is the stage where entrepreneurial intent must translate into a structured business, and it is also where the highest levels of attrition occur.
At this juncture, founders must navigate multiple challenges simultaneously refining their business model, validating market need, developing a product or service and building initial traction. Many women entrepreneurs, particularly first-time founders, lack access to structured guidance and mentorship during this phase, which makes the transition difficult.
The evidence from our Women Startup Program with NSRCEL experience shows that entry into entrepreneurship alone does not guarantee sustainability, and many ventures discontinue at early stages due to weak fundamentals and lack of continuous support.
Therefore, focused interventions at this stage combining capability building, mentorship and structured pre-incubation are critical to ensuring that women led ventures move from experimentation to viability.
Q. What motivated Kotak and NSRCEL to create a long,term, multi,stage programme specifically focused on women founders?
A. The motivation was rooted in the recognition that fragmented and short-term interventions are insufficient to address systemic barriers faced by women entrepreneurs.
Most existing efforts in the ecosystem tend to focus on specific aspects such as training or funding. However, these isolated interventions do not adequately support women through the full entrepreneurial journey. Insights from earlier programme cohorts also highlighted that while interest in entrepreneurship among women was growing, many ventures struggled with early-stage attrition and lack of continuity.
Kotak Mahindra Bank through its CSR initiative, in partnership with NSRCEL, therefore adopted a long term, multi-stage approach to create a structured pipeline from entrepreneurial intent and ideation to venture creation and scale. The objective was to help women start businesses and to enable sustained participation and leadership in entrepreneurship.
Within this broader framework, the Women Startup Program serves as an intervention that addresses the unique barriers faced by women and creates an enabling ecosystem that goes beyond traditional incubation models.
Q. What differences do you see between women entrepreneurs from metros and those from Tier,II and Tier,III cities? Are the barriers and opportunities very different on the ground?
A. There are distinct differences in context, but also important commonalities.
Women entrepreneurs from metros and non-metros typically face greater constraints in terms of access to exposure, mentorship and local entrepreneurial ecosystems. Socio cultural barriers and mobility constraints can also be more pronounced, making it more challenging to engage with markets and networks. At the same time, incubation infrastructure and startup ecosystems remain heavily concentrated in metro cities, limiting access for founders in smaller towns.
In metros, while access to resources is relatively stronger, the barriers are not entirely absent. Confidence gaps, limited participation in financial decision making, and questions of legitimacy continue to persist.
Keeping this in mind, we have designed Women Startup Program which now falls under Kotak Bizlabs, to focus on expanding access across regions while also addressing mindset and structural constraints that cut across geographies.
Q. Many incubation programmes focus heavily on funding and business growth. Why was it important for WSP to also focus on aspects like confidence,building, peer networks, and legitimacy?
A. The Women Startup Program recognises that entrepreneurship is as much a behavioural and social journey as it is an economic one.
Many women entrepreneurs do not exit due to lack of ideas or capability alone, but due to limited confidence, lack of validation and absence of support systems. Societal expectations, risk perception and isolation can all affect continuity.
Therefore, Women Startup Program incorporates elements such as peer networks, cohort-based learning and mentorship structures to create a sense of belonging and collective progression. These components help in building confidence, enabling women to articulate their ideas, take decisions and persist through uncertainty.
Q. A key challenge for women entrepreneurs is sustaining momentum after an incubation programme ends. How does this partnership ensure continued support beyond the initial phase?
A. The programme addresses this challenge by adopting a pipeline based lifecycle approach rather than a single stage intervention.
The structure spans multiple stages from foundational learning and pre-incubation to incubation and a dedicated post-incubation Scale Hub, which supports revenue stage ventures in accessing markets, partnerships and growth opportunities.
In addition, the programme focuses on building a long-term ecosystem, including alumni networks, mentorship access and continued engagement platforms. This ensures that founders remain connected to the ecosystem even after completing specific programme stages.
By embedding continuity within programme design, the partnership moves beyond short term outcomes and supports long term venture sustainability and growth trajectories.
Q. Have there been any founder stories or experiences from the programme that particularly stayed with you or changed your understanding of women entrepreneurship in India?
A. One of the most compelling insights comes from founders who have experienced a shift in how they are perceived within their own families and communities.
In some cases, women entrepreneurs have shared that prior to participating in the programme, their entrepreneurial ambitions were not taken seriously. However, once they became part of a structured programme and began to access mentorship or funding support, this perception began to change.
This highlights an important dimension of women’s entrepreneurship in India the role of validation and recognition in enabling agency. Programmes such as WSP contribute to changing mindsets at the household and community level, which is critical for long-term impact.
Q. From a CSR and ESG perspective, how can corporate India better view women entrepreneurship as a driver for measurable inclusive growth and community development, rather than just a diversity metric?
A. Women entrepreneurship should be viewed as a strategic lever for inclusive economic growth, rather than solely as a diversity indicator.
Women led enterprises contribute to income generation for individuals, job creation, local economic activity and community level resilience. By enabling women to own and lead businesses, interventions can have a multiplier effect across households and communities.
From a CSR perspective, this aligns with broader development priorities such as livelihood creation, workforce participation, and economic inclusion.
Therefore, corporate engagement should move towards long term outcome driven initiatives that focus on building ecosystems, strengthening capabilities and enabling sustained participation rather than one off or purely symbolic interventions.
Q. What more do you think corporates, investors, incubators, and policymakers need to do collectively to create a stronger and more enabling ecosystem for women founders in India?
A. Creating a stronger ecosystem for women founders requires coordinated action across stakeholders.
Corporates can play a pivotal role by investing in long, term platforms and ecosystem, building initiatives, rather than short, term programmes. Investors need to expand their focus towards early stage women led ventures and improve diversity in decision, making structures.
Incubators should design programmes that provide stage specific and continuous support, addressing both capability and confidence gaps. Policymakers can enable this ecosystem by expanding access to infrastructure in non-metro regions and strengthening linkages between skilling, finance and market access.
Overall, the shift required is from fragmented interventions to an integrated, pipeline driven ecosystem, where women are supported at each stage of their entrepreneurial journey.
-900x650-(July-31).png)
x
.png)
