The "WTF Fund" initiative, announced by Zerodha CEO Nikhil Kamath on Wednesday, offers a chance for passionate aspiring entrepreneurs in various industries, including the home, fashion, and beauty businesses. He published the details on his LinkedIn profile.
"Introducing the #WTFFund! Young entrepreneurs under 22 years of age can now grab the opportunity to secure funding and receive mentorship in the home, fashion, beauty, or lifestyle sectors from Ananth Narayanan, Raj Shamani, Kishore, and myself," Kamath wrote in his LinkedIn post.
Ananth Narayanan (founder of Mensa Brands), Raj Shamani (content creator), Kamath, and Kishore Biyani (founder of Future Group) will all serve as mentors to the entrepreneurs as part of this project.
In the most recent edition of his podcast, "WTF is with Nikhil Kamath", the WTF Fund was announced.
In episode 11 of the series, "WTF Goes into Building a Fashion, Beauty, or Home Brand," the Zerodha founder was speaking with Shamani, Narayanan, and Biyani, and said, “We normally do charity with every episode. We thought we'll do it differently as an experiment this time. We will pick entrepreneurs (under the age of 22) in either fashion, cosmetics or any of the industries we discussed who would otherwise not have got funding and we will fund them by virtue of this podcast."
The fund size, which has been set at a total of 80 lakh with each investor contributing 20 lakh, was discussed by the four.
He claimed that the narrative of Zepto founders Aadit Palecha and Kaivalya Vohra, who took part in the most recent episode of the podcast, served as the inspiration for the idea to create the WTF Fund for young entrepreneurs.
“We will put out an application, have some preset filters, and we'll bring it down to say 10-15 companies. We can then do a Zoom call between the four of us and pick. We can also ask them to incorporate all they learned in this episode," Kamath said in the podcast.
The age of 22 was specially mentioned by Kamath because young people of that age face difficulties raising capital for their businesses, he addressed.
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