Venture Catalysts Acquires India Operations Of The US-Headquartered Accelerator and Seed Fund Z Nation Lab Z Nation Lab will continue to invest in high growth enterprise tech startups targeting the customers in the North American market and focused on M&A exits in 3-5 years

Venture Catalysts, an integrated incubator and angel investor network with over 4,500 angel investors spread across 41 cities, announced this week that it has acquired the India operations of seed and early-stage fund and accelerator Z Nation Lab for an undisclosed sum.

Headquartered in the Silicon Valley in the US, Z Nation Lab is co-founded by Amit Jain, who had previously worked with Citibank, PwC and KPMG in both India and the USA, and Anup Mehta, who ran multimillion-dollar family businesses in real estate, healthcare, and education. Neha Jain joined as a co-founder to build the investor ecosystem and corporate partnerships, whilst Sunil Ranka and Ankur Garg both sold their tech startups in the USA and joined the founding team to help ZNL startups build products that can be scaled globally.

Z Nation Lab has operations in India and in the United States. Becoming famous during the early days of the India Startup Story as one of the first accelerator funds, reaching out to startup entrepreneurs in India with a focus to expand globally. Z Nation Lab ran various initiatives like "KHOJ" in association with leading universities like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) & the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in India to organize global startup Boot-Camps held in Mumbai and Silicon Valley. Till date, Z Nation Lab has mentored more than 200 plus entrepreneurs and invested in startups like Fampay, Delightree, Knight Fintech, Gmetri, Ubits, Beehero, Datapoem, Odeko, Hotify, Conversion.ai amongst others through their seed fund in the USA.

"I have been working with the Venture Catalysts team for the last three years, and I have been incredibly impressed by their growth and deep penetration into the Indian startup ecosystem not just in the metros but also in smaller tier 2 and 3 towns. They have truly democratized early-stage investing in India in the last 5 years," said Amit Jain, co-founder, Z Nation Lab.

Z Nation Lab will continue to invest in high-growth enterprise tech startups targeting the customers in the North American market and focused on M&A exits in 3 to 5 years. With this move, the Z Nation lab business is underlining its strategy to partner with high-growth ventures in emerging markets like India and South Asian markets whilst giving unique access and insights to their portfolio startups who want to tap into opportunities in the USA. ZNL also aims to support moving startup headquarters to the USA by leveraging its expertise in helping set up startups in Silicon Valley.

"Since inception Venture Catalysts has a collaborative approach in supporting the India Startup Ecosystem. This is a further step towards the same and simultaneously building inorganic growth of Venture Catalysts. VCATs has recently entered the USA Market to promote and invest in startups founded by Indians who are aiming to expand in the USA and/or USA startups targeting the Indian market. This collaboration with Z Nation Lab team will enable Venture Catalyst to leverage the network and expertise of the Z Nation Lab, to work together to reach and fund more entrepreneurs from India looking at global expansion and take them to exit," shared Anuj Golecha, co-founder, Venture Catalysts.

Venture Catalysts, with its headquarters in Mumbai, provides an investment of $500,000 to $2 million per startup with incubation support for 18-24 months. Having started in 2016, Vcats have incubated and led investments in over 150 startups over a strong filtration of 21,000 companies, In a short span, it boasts of successful investments like BharatPe, Coutloot, Dukaan, Superbottoms, PeeSafe, HomeCapital, Beardo, Fynd, and Suprdaily which are today category leaders.