BSE Signs Pact With IIT Alumni Council To Encourage Listing And Boost The Start-Up Ecosystem

BSE, India’s premier exchange and the world’s fastest Stock Exchange with a speed of 6 microseconds, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with IIT Alumni Council to encourage listing culture for startups and develop a ‘high investor depth’ startups platform.

IIT Alumni Council is the largest global body of alumni, students, and faculty across all the 23 IITs with over 100 city chapters globally. This alliance between BSE and IIT Alumni Council will ensure entity transparency, governance improvement, market discovery of share price, provide liquidity for PE investors, and enable retail participation.

Ravi Sharma, President and Chief Volunteer of the IIT Alumni Council, said, “We are very happy to join hands with India’s largest and oldest stock exchange. The BSE platform has been helping several firms list and raise capital over the years. To enhance the efficiency of the listing process and also to increase access to a pool of investors for startups, IIT Alumni Council proposes to use AI and other automation tools to reduce time, cost, and efforts involved in the listing process. Further, we shall encourage our associated and volunteer-managed funds to underwrite, act as anchor investors as well as market makers for these IPOs. The entry of big-ticket investors like Mega Fund into the startup listing space will lead to a paradigm change in the Startup ecosystem and their ability to access capital.

Commenting on the association, Ashishkumar Chauhan, MD & CEO, BSE, said, “BSE has always been in the forefront helping SMEs and Startups list on the exchange and raises capital. This partnership will enable a complete end to end ecosystem for the proposed social stock exchange. BSE also looks forward to helping more firms get listed on the Exchange as well as creating a sustainable Startup ecosystem through this strategic alliance.”

The newly-formed partnership will ensure a complete end to end ecosystem for the proposed social stock exchange and will also look at revitalizing the Startup platform by attracting a wide range of VC/PE funds to act as underwriters and market makers (backed by the BSE members in the frontend). The alliance will help reduce listing time, complexity and cost for SMEs and Startups by streamlining, automating, and standardizing the documentation processes. Besides, category 1 merchant banks will be empanelled to help automate the listing process so as to reduce the time and cost of listing on the Startup Platform of the Exchange.