TiE Mumbai has partnered with FIS and AROH Foundation to launch a free, six-month cohort-based programme for 35 women entrepreneurs, unveiled in Mumbai on October 5, 2026. The focused, high-impact cohort will offer mentorship, networks, investor access, market opportunities and knowledge support to help women-led ventures build and scale.
Announcing the programme, TiE Mumbai executive director Naveen Raju framed it as a direct answer to the network-and-mentorship gap that women founders still face: capital is only one part of the equation, and warm introductions to investors, customers and operators often matter more at the early stage. The programme's deliberately small cohort — just 35 entrepreneurs — is designed to keep the support intensive and personal rather than mass-scale.
Women-led startups remain underfunded relative to their share of the founder pipeline, and programmes like this one target the bottleneck honestly: not just money, but the rooms where money moves. Six months of structured mentorship, investor access and market linkages is precisely the kind of scaffolding that converts promising ventures into fundable ones.
Why it matters for founders
If you're a woman founder, a free six-month programme with investor access is one of the highest-ROI applications you can file this quarter. Even if you're not eligible, the signal is worth reading: ecosystem capital is actively hunting women-led dealflow, which means the funding environment for women founders is more open than the headline stats suggest.