Startups

The team focuses on two primary areas - intelligence and anti-bribery and corruption.

PwC’s approach to ESG is holistic and well-integrated with how startups do business. The firm’s team of experts help startups understand where to begin by developing their ESG strategy and building an achievable roadmap. PwC ESG team offers the following:

• Develop a purpose-led ESG Strategy to be integrated into the long-term vision of the business
• Support the business in a phased manner aligned with level of operations to achieve E&S risk mitigation, ESG maturity and finally value creation
• Based on sector, design a bespoke impact strategy and framework to achieve purpose leadership for measuring business outcomes and contributions to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Support the business to align E&S Governance with Global Investor Frameworks to facilitate fund raising
• Support the company in due-diligence / assessment for fund raising

PwC India’a IPO Accelerator helps you to assess your IPO readiness through a detailed dipstick diagnostic to identify potential bottlenecks, risks, and areas for improvement with respect to operational efficiency, growth acceleration, human resources and Information technology strategy, risk management framework, ESG preparedness, financial reporting, corporate governance and beyond; to prescribing tailored strategies, and enhancing overall value, to preparing and project managing for a compelling IPO and making a stellar market debut, we are with you at every step. Our commitment and journey doesn't stop with a successful public offering but goes beyond that with a robust investor relations programme crafted with peer comparisons, perception studies, sell-side coverage and buy-side outreach. In short, we are there to support your evolving business, fostering growth, and ensuring long-term sustainability. Choose PwC India for a transformative IPO experience and always stay ahead of the competition.

The firm also assists startups in setting up an effective and efficient governance framework, fraud risk management, monitoring and incident management programme that corresponds to their requirements. PwC's corporate governance framework encompasses board structure and operations, ethics framework, policies and procedures, compliance framework, risk management (business and fraud), continuity - business and operations, monitoring performance and control assurance.

Governance maturity assessment as far as startups are concerned go through different stages:

1. Stage 1: Seed/idea: First idea, understanding marketability and building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
2. Stage 2: Seed/Startup: Go-to market defined business model, testing MVP, first revenues, continuous feedback on MVP and first hires
3. Stage 3: Early growth: Product revenue starts to increase, aiming towards break-even point, pivot business model where needed, team structure becomes more complex
4. Stage 4: Expansion: Marketing efforts increase, cash flows become positive and more stable, recurring/growing revenues and +/- break even, expansion to new products/ markets

The team creates a robust framework by performing a diagnostic review of current framework as per the following approach:

1. Assessing the current state: aims to manage expectations and scope of work, identfy key focus areas etc
2. Maturity/gap assessment: generates detailed gap report, maturity assessment matrix, maturity heatmap etc
3. Governance roadmap: aims at implementing the roadmap and managing ction plan and timelines

PwC’s comprehensive support services are committed to empower startups not only to secure funding but to thrive post-deal and are tailored to ensure a smooth transition and sustainable growth making it easier for the startups to embark on the post-deal journey. The multifaceted approach covers financial reporting and governance, HR processes, organisation structure, organisation-wide diagnostic and deal-readiness diagnostic and support.

PwC Gen AI team provides a wide range of services to the startup ecosystem such as:

1. Automated customer support agents: Reduces customer service costs and improves response times, implements Gen AI chatbots on websites and mobile apps to answer common customer queries, interact with the customer and provide a transformative experience to the customer.
2. Product description and listings: Detailed and SEO-friendly product descriptions and taglines.
3. Hyper-personalised and hyper-localised marketing: including content generation, email marketing and social media.
4. Customer feedback analysis: This enables a quick analysis of the customer feedback to gain insights and improve products or services thereby enabling predictive growth and risks analysis.
5. Dynamic pricing strategies: This helps to adjust pricing in real-time based on data about market demand and competitor analysis.
6. Interactive phygital product experiences:  To create a personalised experience for every customer with built-in phygital products such as interactive conversational customer kiosks.
7. Digital simulations and testing: This includes synthetic data creation; digital twin design-build and interaction with the digital twin simulator through various parameter mapping, testing, visualisation, and forecasting, and design simulations plugging in multiple macro, micro parameters and other touchpoints and creating variations with a single prompt in natural language.
8. Optimising business operations: Leveraging Gen AI to automate and create content for back office operations such as Gen AI powered – summarisations, information discovery , analysis of financial data, Gen AI-powered hiring through JD creation, CV analyser and interview process etc. It also helps in task automation and augmentation.

PwC's transformation team offers a wide range of offerings to the startup space through the following framework:

1. Customer-led transformation: Accelerates value and enables leading startups develop customer loyalty, drive growth, increase productivity, and inspires and engages the workforce.
2. Workforce transformation: Transforms the people, organisation and HR function for the future of work and growth paradigm through identification of the right organic and inorganic growth levers while addressing the operating model and structure, processes, platforms, alliances and capabilities of startups.
3. Finance transformation: Designs and implements a ‘future-ready ‘ finance function for startups enabled by fit-for-purpose digital; scalable operating model; top quartile processes and controls; and value-centered business partnering
4. Digital operations: Designs and builds 'smart factory of the future' for startups by maximising assets and helping achieve higher productivity using Industry 4.0 technologies
5. Supply chain transformation: Transforms the supply chain across strategy, process and operating model for startups, enabled by digital, to optimise service levels, costs and working capital
6. Digital core (large tech-led transformation and value-led ERP): Re-engineers, simplifies and harmonises processes and implements Core Cloud-based ERP platforms to deliver sustainable value for startups

PwC's finance function transformation team helps startups with:

• Setting up a finance function, helping with the right processes and controls
• Financial reporting, MIS, and investor presentations
• Performance management and KPI benchmarking
• CFO secondments