Startup India Hub, a one of its kind platform for start-up ecosystem, is working on a feature to let start-ups directly apply for government schemes and venture funds from the platform itself, as per sources. This government hub has been developed in a bid to address the issues of start-ups, from lack of awareness of government schemes to difficulty in applying for extracting benefits of those schemes.

“We are in the process of adding more functionality to the virtual hub to make it more effective as a platform. The real challenge is that people don’t know about government schemes. Currently we are only showing the schemes on the platform but the next step is to allow startups to apply for these schemes and enable them to track their application form’s status online,” said an official.

The virtual hub was launched in June of 2017 by Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Since then the platform has listed about 167 schemes pertaining to start-up benefits, and received more than 60,000 queries. The hub will also start operating in 6 more languages in days to come.

To make the Startup India Hub more effective, the portal has on-boarded companies that have launched funds to connect investors to relevant start-ups.

Similarly, to open up the portal to more stakeholders, Startup India Hub will host an all-stakeholder event in August, 2017 involving accelerators, incubators and venture funds.