This woman is building the future by supporting startups and women entrepreneurs

After working with big corporations and smaller companies for a decade, Priyanka Agarwal Chopra discovered a deep passion for building businesses.

This passion fuelled her journey to join IIMA Ventures (formerly IIMA-CIIE), a startup incubator established by IIM Ahmedabad. She currently works as the managing partner of Seed Investing.

“I had seen the best of both worlds, and through my experience in large organisations, I was equipped to set up the right systems in place and thus help other smaller organisations,” she tells HerStory.

Priyanka says that her career trajectory was not planned.

“I took the opportunities life threw at me aiming to be the best version of what I can be,” she adds.

After completing her computer engineering degree from Gujarat University, she went to pursue her master's in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000. Soon after she started her corporate journey with Sun Microsystem as an engineer.

Around six years later she decided to pursue an MBA in strategy and finance at Wharton School. Post her course, she worked as a senior consultant of strategy and change, internal practice, at IBM in New York. Here she worked largely in the corporate strategy team.

Priyanka recalls that, during her MBA course, she had two young children, and it was a particularly challenging time for her.

“It was the most intense period of my life as balancing young motherhood with a demanding, full-time program was extremely challenging. There were many moments of self-doubt,” she shares.

However, she remembers a piece of advice from one of the guest speakers that stayed with her, "Stop treating your career like an on-and-off toggle switch. Lessen the intensity when needed and ramp it back up when required.”

Holding onto this lesson, in 2010, Priyanka and her family shifted back to India.

“We wanted to keep our children close to their grandparents. Additionally, India was a very exciting place at this time and we wanted to be a part of it,” she says.

After returning to India, Priyanka began working in Piramal Sarvajal, a social impact startup providing access to clean, drinking water to India’s underserved using technology and community engagement.

At Piramal Sarvajal she worked in varied roles. As the joint COO she helped in building systems and processes for the company. As CTO, she helped in designing, developing, and commercialising key technological innovations. This includes Soochak, an IoT-enabled remote management and monitoring system for filtration plants, which is said to be the world’s first RFID-powered water ATM.

She also managed the financial planning, budgeting, reporting, and setting key results areas for the entire organisation.

Having gained experience building small-scale startups from scratch, Priyanka decided to join IIMA Ventures in 2014.

“When I began my journey with IIMA Ventures, the startup ecosystem was becoming increasingly exciting. It is intellectually fulfilling and ambitious to help young entrepreneurs realise their potential. They have so many diverse ideas and continuously push their boundaries further and further,” she says.

Helping building startups

Priyanka shares that IIMA Ventures offers a network of industry connections, in-depth training programmes, one-on-one mentorship, guidance in identifying potential customers, strategic direction for business acceleration, and support in securing funds.

She adds that IIMA Ventures has funded more than 350 startups including over 300 startups at the pre-seed and seed stages and around 40 startups at the early-growth stage through its Bharat Fund platform.

The organisation has physical incubation spaces in places such as Jaipur, Guwahati and Ahmedabad. Local startups from these regions can apply and work with the organisation in their physical spaces. It also offers virtual incubation wherein startups can apply online. It also invests in startups through direct investment.

In 2024, IIMA Ventures launched a programme focused on venture creation. This programme supports very early-stage startup founders in refining their ideas, identifying market opportunities, developing prototypes, conducting pilot tests, and reaching the minimum viable product stage.

Among various other programmes, Priyanka talks about the Bharat Inclusion Initiative started in 2018.

She claims that over five years, the BII fund has supported 24 research studies to understand the needs of the Bharat customer using data-backed evidence, incubated five innovations, offered acceleration support to 55 startups, and provided seed investment to over eight startups. Notable startups include Jai Kisan, Riskcovry, Kaleidofin, Finarkein and Kosh,

“Over the next 3-4 years, BII aims to support 35-40 startups building inclusive financial services and jobs and livelihood solutions for the Bharat customer with catalytic capital, customised advisory, training programmes, and market access solutions."

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Focus on women entrepreneurs

Priyanka says the organisation has been an advocate of women empowerment.

Sharing the various initiatives taken towards supporting women entrepreneurs, she talks about the programme—Her&Now, a women-focused accelerator programme. This programme has supported over 100 women entrepreneurs by offering mentoring, capacity building, access to networks, and catalytic capital.

IIMA Ventures also runs programmes that support startups and business building for women.

Currently it runs a multi-year programme, which aims at closing India’s long-standing gender gap in financial inclusion.

“This programme offers essential support to early-stage and ready-to-scale startups in building, validating and scaling intentionally designed fintech solutions, aiming to cumulatively impact 25 million women across India. This will unlock a massive market of under-recognised and financially underserved women,” she says.

Priyanka claims that more than 25% of IIMA Ventures' portfolio is led by women founders/co-founders.

“Additionally, several of our flagship sector-focused acceleration programmes have 30%-40% women-led startups as part of the cohorts,” she adds.

Priyanka believes that the increased role of women in entrepreneurship has been because of women stepping out of their comfort zones.

“Growth and comfort cannot coexist. One has to come out of their comfort areas to learn and grow,” she adds.

Reflecting on her journey, Priyanka says her career in the investment sector has been challenging but she has been fortunate enough to have not faced too much gender bias.

“I did encounter some societal and familial biases, and yes, it was challenging being a mother while managing everything else. However, these challenges are not different from what other women face, and I have learned to overcome them,” she explains.

(The copy was updated with more information.)