With funds, mentorship, and interns, a Silicon Valley incubator plays friend to Indian startups

A trio of university students is giving Indian startups unprecedented access to Silicon Valley. In April 2016, 20-year-old Abhinav Kukreja and two of his fellow freshman students at the University of California, Berkeley, Anish Prabhu, and Aryaman Dalmia, created an incubator called Moonshot that connects Indian startups with experts, funds, and talent from Silicon Valley. Its four-month program gives companies access to over 20 mentors in India and California, exposes them to various venture capitalists and angel investors, and provides interns. The first batch of startups Moonshot incubated last year included student benefits platform Frapp, marketplace ListUP, small-business cash-flow management startup Numberz, home appliance automation company Hombot, online B2B billing solutions portal Pumpcharge, and real estate and rental management service Azuro. For their second round in January 2017, Moonshot zeroed in on startups "advancing science and technology, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and companies that have a positive social impact," Kukreja, a computer science and statistics major, said.