In an encouraging and refreshing trend, the number of women-led start-ups among the winners of ELEVATE, the Karnataka government’s flagship start-up support and grant programme, has been steadily rising year after year.The percentage of women-led start-ups in the programme has more than doubled since the launch of the programme in 2017. According to data from the IT-BT Department, among 103 winners in 2025 in the general category, 44 are women-led enterprises, taking the share of women start-up founders in the programme close to 43%.In 2017, this stood at 16.96% with only 19 women-led start-ups among 112 winners. By 2023, the share of women entrepreneurs in the programme rose to 37% out of 99 winners and in 2024 it stood at 42%.Shattering stereotypes The list of women entrepreneurs in the programme shows a growing tilt towards deep-tech. Businesses span across sectors from healthtech, biotech, robotics and hardware, IT and SaaS, consumer products, ed-tech, climate tech, food tech, industrial tech, materials, manufacturing, agri tech, to R&D.“Our start-up ecosystem is growing because of the kind of ecosystem that exists in Karnataka, and the increase in the share of women entrepreneurs has a lot to do with more women being inspired by the other women founders,” said Manjula N., Secretary to the Government of Karnataka in the Department of Electronics, IT, BT, and Science & Technology. She noted that it was inspiring to see young girls venturing into fields that were previously thought of as male bastions. “We see a lot of women founders in biotechnology, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and so on. There are increasing number of women graduates from STEM backgrounds and who have completed professional courses, making this shift happen,” she said.Support at early stage TrashCon, a Bengaluru-based start-up that built a technology to segregate waste, was one of the winners of the first batch of ELEVATE. Nivedha R.M, founder and CEO of the company, said the programme proved crucial to her start-up’s success by facilitating early-stage capital and support.“I was only 22 then, not even out of college, and pretty much a one-woman army. I am from a middle-class background, and I was trying to solve the massive problem of waste by building a technology that never existed. ELEVATE was a turning point, because otherwise getting that sort of capital for a problem of this kind, when you do not have any background, would have been unimaginable,” she said.Other policy interventions ELEVATE gives a one-time grant of a maximum of ₹50 lakh to every winner.The department of Electronics, IT, and BT has introduced other programmes like We-Escalate, which offers six-month incubation/acceleration, including mentorship, workshops, and investment support for women-led startups in Biotech, AgriTech, and MedTech.More in the offing According to officials, the department is planning to introduce a women-led incubator in the coming days and is mulling whether a separate vertical could be carved out for women-led start-ups within ELEVATE.“The separate vertical for women is still in the ideation stage. But it is one way we can encourage more women led-start-ups and bring in more women into the programme if they meet the minimum requirement to qualify. When we are 50% of the population, I think that should reflect everywhere,” said Ms. Manjula.