May 10: Nabil Bank in collaboration with Udhyami Innovations has announced application for the Nabil Nari Udhyami Seed Camp aimed at aspiring entrepreneurs and early-stage startups that are led by at least one woman co-founder.

Issuing a statement, Udhyami Innovations said that the Nabil Nari Udhyami Seed camp is a business bootcamp dedicated to providing a platform to women co-founders with creative business ideas.

“Udhyami Innovations, together with Nabil Bank, strongly believes in gender diversity and its potential in Nepal’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem and that Nepali women must be given equal opportunities to realize their ideas into ventures,” says the statement.

According to the company, the seed camp aims to identify some of the best ideas of startups led by women and provide them with the required resources to help them refine their business ideas, grow their networks, form profitable business connections and kick-start their entrepreneurial journeys.

The application was announced on May 9. Of the total applicants, the selected 20 teams will go through a tried and tested entrepreneurship programme at the bootcamp, according to Prabha Timilsina, programme coordinator of Udhyami Innovations.

“They will be provided with full-fledged mentorship and guidance from entrepreneurs and experts, access to an entrepreneurial community, assistance in developing their business models, refining and validating their business ideas with the objective of kick-starting their ideas into businesses,” added Sharad KC, business and partnership coordinator of the programme.

On the final day of the bootcamp ‘Pitch Day’, the teams will pitch their business ideas to the investors and other selected stakeholders to secure the seed money.

Following the bootcamp, the teams will carry out intense research, work on their business models for a month and again will make an investment pitch at a larger scale during the ‘Demo Day’, according to the statement.

Since the inception of the camp in 2017, it has helped 48 teams and 119 individuals realize the entrepreneurs inside them, enabled more than 60 senior entrepreneurs and experts to share their insights, and provided investors opportunities to invest in the best entrepreneurial people and ideas, according to the organisers. Three teams have succeeded in securing investment and are working to scale up their ventures while five other teams have received investment commitment from interested investors.

Seeing an incredible impact of the programme in earlier editions, Nabil Bank said it is supporting Udhyami Seed Camp with the objective of uplifting women entrepreneurship in Nepal.

The application deadline for the Nabil Nari Udhyami Seed Camp is June 9.