GENESIS Scheme: A Complete Guide for Tier II and Tier III Startups

India's startup story has, for a long time, been told largely through the lens of Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, and Mumbai. But genuinely transformative technology is being built well beyond those three cities, in Coimbatore, Bhubaneswar, Indore, and hundreds of towns like them, often without the same density of investors, accelerators, and mentorship that founders in the metros take for granted. The gap is not talent. It is access.

GENESIS, Gen Next Support for Innovative Startups, is the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's answer to that imbalance. Approved with a substantial Rs. 490 crore outlay over five years, GENESIS was conceived as a consolidating umbrella scheme, bringing together MeitY's various startup support programs and assets into a single, more efficient structure, with a clear, explicit mandate: build and strengthen the startup ecosystem specifically in Tier II and Tier III cities. The scheme envisions supporting well over 1,600 tech startups over its lifetime, delivered through a distributed network of roughly 50 Implementing Agencies chosen preferentially from these very cities.

What makes GENESIS distinctive is its range. Rather than a single funding instrument, it offers multiple, purpose built support tracks depending on exactly where a startup or innovator sits in their journey.

The Funding Opportunity: What GENESIS Actually Offers

GENESIS operates through several distinct support tracks, each suited to a different stage.

• GENESIS EiR, Entrepreneur in Residence: support for early stage innovators and students, up to Rs. 10 lakh, with no matching fund requirement, aimed at innovators still working through ideation, concept development, validation, or early prototyping.
• GENESIS Pilot: funding of up to Rs. 40 lakh to help startups validate and demonstrate their solutions through real world pilot projects with corporates, PSUs, and large enterprises.
• GENESIS Matching Investment Fund: a 1 to 1 matching grant of up to Rs. 50 lakh, available to startups that have already raised institutional capital, designed to help them scale further, with only funds from genuine institutional investors, not government grants, counted toward the match.
• Deep tech and early stage tracks: additional funding categories specifically support pilot, investment, early stage, and deep tech startups, reflecting the scheme's broader mandate beyond any single funding instrument.

Across most tracks, startups that have already been supported under overlapping MeitY schemes, such as TIDE 2.0 Scale Up or SAMRIDH, are typically not eligible to apply again for the same category of support, so GENESIS is best understood as complementary to, rather than stackable with, those other programs.

Who is eligible

General criteria, varies by track:

• Must be a registered Indian entity, typically a Private Limited Company, with at least 51 percent Indian ownership.
• Must be registered in a Tier II or Tier III city. This is a hard, non negotiable eligibility filter across nearly all GENESIS tracks.
• Must hold a valid DPIIT certificate.
• For the EiR track specifically, applicants may be full time undergraduate or postgraduate students with entrepreneurial ambitions, or founders and co founders of DPIIT registered startups no more than two years old, and must not have received government or external funding exceeding Rs. 10 lakh for the same idea.
• For the Matching Investment Fund track, the startup should ideally have a market ready, preferably revenue generating product, with a preference given to startups holding granted patents.
• Must not be involved in ongoing legal disputes, and must not have been previously supported under an overlapping MeitY scheme.

How the process works

1. Identify the GENESIS track that matches your current stage, EiR for very early ideation, Pilot for solution validation with a real enterprise partner, or Matching Investment for post institutional funding scale up.
2. Apply through the relevant Implementing Agency, a MeitY designated incubator or accelerator, typically based in a Tier II or Tier III city, running that specific GENESIS track.
3. Go through the Implementing Agency's evaluation process, which varies by track but generally assesses technical merit, market potential, and founder commitment.
4. Selected participants receive funding, mentorship, and, depending on the track, direct connections to corporate or investor networks, disbursed through the Implementing Agency.

Given GENESIS operates through dozens of Implementing Agencies, each running its own cohort timelines, it is genuinely worth checking with a few Tier II or Tier III based incubators near you to find an active call that fits your stage.

The Implementing Agencies Powering GENESIS

GENESIS is deployed through a network of roughly 50 Implementing Agencies, deliberately concentrated in Tier II and Tier III cities to fulfill the scheme's core mandate. A few of the agencies actively running GENESIS tracks include: