BSE inks pact with IIT Alumni Council to encourage startups listing

New Delhi, Jul 13 () Leading stock exchange BSE on Monday said it has signed a pact with IIT Alumni Council to encourage listing of startups and develop a 'high investor depth' platform for such new generation companies.

The newly-formed partnership will ensure a complete end-to-end ecosystem for the proposed social stock exchange, BSE said in a statement.

In addition, it will revitalise the startup platform by attracting a wide range of venture capital and private equity funds to act as underwriters and market makers (backed by the BSE members in the front-end), it added.

The exchange further said the alliance will ensure entity transparency, governance improvement, market discovery of share price, provide liquidity for private equity investors and enable retail participation.

IIT Alumni Council is the body of alumni, students and faculty across all the 23 IITs with over 100 city chapters globally.

Ravi Sharma, President and Chief Volunteer of the IIT Alumni Council, said to enhance the efficiency of listing process and also to increase access to pool of investors for startups, IIT Alumni Council proposes to use artificial intelligence and other automation tools to reduce time, cost and efforts involved in listing process.

"Further we shall encourage our associated and volunteer managed funds to underwrite, act as anchor investors as well as market makers for these IPOs.

"The entry of big ticket investors like Mega Fund into the startup listing space will lead to a paradigm change in the startup ecosystem and their ability to access capital," he said.

Ashishkumar Chauhan, MD and CEO of BSE said the exchange looks forward to helping more firms get listed on the exchange as well as creating a sustainable startup ecosystem through this strategic alliance.

The alliance will help reduce listing time, complexity and cost for small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) and startups by streamlining, automating and standardising the documentation processes.

Besides, category-1 merchant banks will be empanelled to help automate the listing process so as to reduce time and cost of listing on the startup platform of the exchange, BSE said. SP ANS ANS