"Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone." said Stanley Gordon West and this is how it is for any entrepreneur too. There is a lot that goes into building a successful start-up venture, right from the assessment of the market need, timing of the venture, founding team, product-market fit, go-to market strategy, funding, business model, pricing, ability to attract right talent etc and therefore it can become overwhelming for the entrepreneurs and hence the need of an investor who not only brings in the much required money onto the table but can also guide, mentor & help the entrepreneurs to manoeuvre through these challenges successfully & most efficiently. While several startups are mushrooming all over the world, the majority of them end up failing due to the lack of appropriate support and mentoring. The need for the advisory firms & venture builders is significantly increasing with startups.

SRKay Consulting Group led by Alok Kumar is one such company that believes more than providing capital, nurturing the start-ups and striving to provide them a favourable ecosystem is of strategic importance. Their focus is always on acting as a catalyst for sustainable scalability, meaningful unit-economics and operational efficiencies of the businesses that they invest in. "Extraordinary results and great returns are possible only by a shared vision and true partnership between the entre-preneurs and the investors. Hence, it is critical that we leverage our network of leaders, innovators, mentors and also talent within our firm to support the companies in which we invest thus working together to

maximize returns for all the stakeholders", believes Alok Kumar, who is the Managing Partner of the firm. With a strong & diversified global industry-experience spanning 3 decades with brands like Hutchison, Reliance & Sears, Alok took up this challenge to help budding entrepreneurs by setting up a company that invests in the acceleration, growth and advisory for the Seed stage startups. Starting his entrepreneurial journey by providing scalable ideas to the family office of multi-billion dollar SRK Exports, he supported them to expand business portfolio and established SRKay Consulting Group. Since the start the company has added immense value in the ecosystem and has incubated & launched three ventures that are at their growth stage now, with several others under incubation.

The company operates on the reverse progressive equity model which is slightly a different approach when compared to other equities. This concept revolves around an idea where founders and key team of the startup chose to be the full-time employees of the SRKay Group at the initial stage of the venture. "We promise them to transfer the equity on mutually agreed milestones while promoting their business to greater stage by providing them a whole eco-system designed to significantly improve their chances of success; therefore making it a win-win for both the parties," says Alok Kumar.

SRKay Consulting has added immense value in the ecosystem and has incubated & launched three ventures that are at their growth stage now

Innovative Solutions SCIKEY- The flagship venture of the company is in the business of improving organizational success using talent as its basis by by enabling them with best matched talent and making the journey of talent identification to onboarding, alignment & engagement a great experience. SCIKEY has three key applications, the first `TCP ­ Talent Commerce Plat-form' is about finding and hiring best fit employee, be it a full-time role or a project or gig-based contractual project assignment. The second one called `TAP ­ Talent Alignment Platform', is about harnessing the power of an individual's Mind-set data towards understanding and fine-tuning the alignment of the employee in the company not only to the job role but also in-line with his/ her peers, line managers & the company culture itself to address business critical aspects like(but not limited to) of employee productivity, succession-planning, change management & organization restructuring, mergers & acquisitions etc; and the third one `TEP ­ Talent Engagement Platform' is about using the same mind-set data to constantly & meaningfully engaging the employees thereafter to get the best out of them in terms of productivity, harmony & longevity for the organization. SCIKEY is currently operating in Finland, South East Asian countries and India, with plans of expansion to the rest of the Europe, UK & USA next year.