Senior Venture Coach

Role overview

GITAM Deemed University is hiring a Senior Venture Coach for its Venture Development Centre in Visakhapatnam. The role is centered on guiding startup and innovation teams through incubation and pre-incubation support, from early idea development to investor readiness.

Key responsibilities

• Support and mentor promising student, faculty, alumni, and external startup teams enrolled in pre-incubation and incubation programmes.
• Take ownership of allocated ventures and track completion of milestones, deliverables, reviews, documentation, assessment criteria, and graduation conditions.
• Help founders move from concept stage to prototype development, customer discovery, business model testing, market validation, launch preparation, and investment readiness.
• Provide direction to Venture Coaches and other team members on venture reviews, milestone monitoring, founder engagement, mentor coordination, and programme delivery.
• Identify, assess, and bring into the programme strong innovations, research-based ideas, faculty-led ventures, student startups, alumni startups, and external startups.
• Plan and run review meetings, founder clinics, validation sprints, pitch-preparation sessions, bootcamps, workshops, and masterclasses.
• Make effective use of the Venture Mentor Network, makerspace, industry contacts, investors, and other ecosystem resources to strengthen venture outcomes.
• Develop and sustain partnerships with mentors, investors, corporates, government bodies, incubation partners, academic units, and other ecosystem stakeholders.
• Track venture data, maintain progress reports and impact records, manage dashboards and stakeholder information, and represent the VDC in relevant ecosystem forums when needed.

Skills and attributes

• Confident, mature, and self-driven professional with leadership, ownership, and strong execution ability.
• Capable of coaching early-stage founders with empathy, structure, clarity, and accountability.
• Solid understanding of entrepreneurship, innovation, incubation, venture building, and startup ecosystem development.
• Strong communication, facilitation, networking, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills.
• Highly organised, proactive, and outcome-focused, with the ability to manage several ventures, programmes, and partnerships at once.
• Comfortable working collaboratively and supporting junior colleagues within a coaching environment.

Education and experience

Applicants should meet either of the following criteria: a Bachelor’s degree along with at least 7 years of relevant experience, or a Master’s degree/MBA with at least 5 years of relevant experience.

Relevant experience may include entrepreneurship ecosystem development, startup incubation, venture building, accelerator programmes, corporate innovation, innovation management, partnerships, investment readiness, technology commercialisation, or similar work.

Experience in a university, educational institution, research organisation, incubation centre, accelerator, venture studio, corporate innovation team, or government-backed entrepreneurship programme will be an advantage.

Exposure to early-stage startups, founder coaching, business-model validation, market discovery, mentoring networks, and investor readiness is desirable.

Additional information

The position is based in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India, and is a full-time onsite role.

Interested candidates are asked to complete the prescribed Google Form application process.