LabCanvas Private Limited
A DPIIT-recognised deep-tech founder needed non-dilutive seed capital to move from a validated prototype toward a market-ready product — and had to present a Startup India Seed Fund (SISFS) application that would clear an incubator selection committee.
A clear-eyed look at where they stood.
LabCanvas Private Limited is a DPIIT-recognised deep-tech startup building scientific software. At seed stage, the founder had already validated the prototype but still needed capital to carry it to a market-ready product, and wanted that capital on non-dilutive terms rather than giving up equity this early. The Startup India Seed Fund Scheme (SISFS) was the fit: it funds exactly this validation-to-market gap, disbursed through a DPIIT-approved incubator rather than directly by the government.
SISFS gives a startup one route, not a menu to combine: a grant of up to ₹20 lakh, or a convertible-debenture / debt-linked instrument of up to ₹50 lakh, never both. Picking the debt-linked route unlocks a materially higher ceiling, but it also means the incubator’s selection committee holds the application to a higher bar, because they’re assessing repayment and scaling potential, not just early validation. The application has to make that case convincingly, in front of a committee panel that is rarely made up of specialists in the founder’s own technical domain.
That combination is where most SISFS applications lose ground: founders can explain their science to other scientists, but a seed-fund committee needs the same substance translated into a fundable narrative, backed by a utilisation plan the scheme will actually permit and a fund-release structure the committee can sanction with confidence.
CapEasy structured the SISFS application end to end, starting with confirming DPIIT eligibility and building the case for the convertible-debenture route over the grant, given LabCanvas’s need for the larger ceiling to carry a validated prototype to a market-ready product.
We built the utilisation plan strictly against scheme-permitted heads, so the committee reviewing it would find every rupee accounted for against an allowed category rather than a generic budget line.
Alongside that, we built the milestone-linked tranche plan and the financial model the committee actually assesses when it sanctions a debt-linked instrument, since that model is what carries the scaling and repayment story the debenture route requires.
The last piece was narrative: taking genuinely technical, deep-tech work and shaping how it read to a selection committee that reviews applications across sectors, not one built around LabCanvas’s own domain. The goal was a proposal a non-specialist panel could assess on its merits without needing a briefing first.
The outcome
The application was approved for a ₹40 lakh SISFS convertible debenture through the NSUT incubator. A Seed Fund approval is the incubator committee’s sanction; actual disbursement follows the scheme’s own due-diligence and compliance milestones and is not guaranteed by that sanction alone.
What made it work
The instrument choice was deliberate, not default: matching the funding ask to the debt-linked route’s higher ceiling meant the case had to justify that scale from the outset, rather than retrofitting a scaling story onto a grant-sized application.
Keeping the utilisation plan inside scheme-permitted heads and structuring the tranches around milestones gave the incubator committee a sanction it could grant with a clear release mechanism already built in, rather than an open-ended ask it would need to renegotiate later.
This describes work CapEasy delivered in a real engagement. Outcomes vary by company, sector and stage; nothing here is a promise of a similar result. CapEasy is a private consultancy and is not affiliated with any government authority.