Driving Coffee Innovation: The Atal Incubation Centre at the Coffee Board of India with Praveen H J

The Long Road In

It started in 2011-12, in the final year of his MBA at KLE Technological University in Hubli. A capstone project asked students to develop a product and bring it to market in collaboration with industry partners. For most students, it was an assignment. For him, it was the first real glimpse of what building something from scratch actually felt like. Something about that stayed with him.

After graduating, he joined The Federal Bank Ltd, specifically the MSME lending desk, which evaluates loans for small business owners and startup founders. Day after day, he sat across from people who had built something from nothing and were now asking for help to grow it. He watched who scaled after the money came through. He watched who stalled. And he quietly catalogued every gap, every missed step, every moment where better guidance might have changed the outcome.

Most people in that job see spreadsheets. He was watching people.

By 2015, he was back at KLE, where the entrepreneurship cell he had helped plant years earlier had grown into a proper incubation centre with over 70 startups. His director sent him to the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA, for a semester as a visiting scholar to study how American universities build startup ecosystems. What he found reframed his thinking: American universities had been doing this for fifty years. The infrastructure, mentors, labs, funding pathways, and industry connections were not an add-on. It was built into how students were educated. And it showed in how those students thought, not just as future employees, but as potential job creators.

He came back and helped design a minor degree in entrepreneurship for engineering students. Then his director said something that changed the stakes: you cannot teach entrepreneurship without living it. Start your own venture.

So he did. Livehive Technologies was a technology consulting firm, building custom software, ERP systems, and billing platforms for clients. He was good at the work. And for a while, it worked. Until it didn't. As he puts it:

"Entrepreneurship is not just like your regular train ride, it's a roller coaster," he says.

Livehive didn't survive. He closed it, moved to Bengaluru, and kept building. For several years, he consulted for engineering colleges setting up their own incubators, bringing in funding, getting startups onto campuses, and building the kind of culture he had experienced firsthand. His second venture, Arcis Business Solutions, was gaining real ground when COVID arrived and took everything with it. Projects froze. Payments stopped. He made a clear call: step back into employment, stay inside the ecosystem, and rebuild. In 2020, that led him to the Krishik Agri Business Incubator Centre at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Dharwad, where, as Innovation Manager for the RKVY-RAFTAAR Project, he helped startups validate their ideas, file patents and trademarks, and navigate the commercialisation process.

From there, he moved to Hyderabad, joining MANAGE in 2022 at the National Institute of Agriculture Extension Management under the Ministry of Agriculture, as Finance Manager under the RKVY-RAFTAAR Project. The scale was different here. The resources, the reach, the pace of work, all of it was a step up from anything he had worked with before. And then came something he hadn't planned for. The Triangular Cooperation Project between the governments of India, Germany, and Malawi brought him to Africa, where he spent weeks training women food entrepreneurs and teaching government staff how to build an incubator from scratch, how to find startups, support them, and make the whole model/idea financially sustainable.

Relocating to Karnataka in 2023 coincided with the opening of the CEO position at the Atal Incubation Centre of the Coffee Board. Everything he had built, learnt, and lost over the previous decade had, without him quite realising it, been preparation for exactly this.

A Quiet Room With a Big Mandate

The incubator he walked into in July 2023 had a history, but not much momentum. COVID had pushed everything online, and even after the world reopened, the transition back never fully happened. Engagement had slowed to almost nothing.

The challenge was specific. Every other incubator he had run operated across a wide agricultural or technology mandate. This one was focused exclusively on coffee. Seed to cup. Nothing outside that chain.

"Unlike agri incubators with a wide mandate, here it is confined only to coffee," he explains.

At first glance, that looks like a limitation. On taking a closer look, it's the opposite.

Coffee in India is a long, layered chain, and almost every link carries real, persistent problems that nobody has yet seen as startup opportunities. Labour shortages, an unverifiable supply chain, and processing waste with nowhere to go.

Each of those problems, looked at the right way, is a business waiting to be built.

He began rebuilding the incubator's ecosystem. He reached into plantation communities and connected founders with the Coffee Board's scientists, agronomists, and mentors. Quality labs and product development facilities were opened, giving founders access to resources most early-stage startups simply don't have. Slowly, the incubator went from a name on a registration form to a place where founders actually showed up.

The incubation programme he shaped runs across 18 months and is mentorship-driven at its core. The idea behind it is simple: no founder working on a coffee problem should have to figure it out alone.

Today, AIC-CCRI is government-recognised, has incubated over 70 startups, more than 40 of whom have graduated, and is on a steady path towards financial self-sustainability.

The Innovations Nobody Saw Coming

The portfolio of startups that have come through AIC-CCRI tells its own story. Start with something as fundamental as the labour crisis on coffee estates. Most estate owners aren't physically present. They manage their land through supervisors who relay information up the chain. That relay is expensive, unreliable, and full of gaps. One startup at AIC-CCRI is building an IoT and AI-based smart estate management system: sensors that monitor soil and crop conditions in real time, flag what needs immediate attention, and hand the owner data they can actually act on. No waiting for a phone call and no guessing. The estate doesn't go dark when the manager isn't available.

The problem doesn't end at the estate gate, either. When coffee moves from a farm in Coorg to a trader in Bengaluru to a buyer in Amsterdam, almost none of that journey is verifiable. Startups like Acviss Technologies and Tracex Technologies are building blockchain-based traceability platforms that track a single bean from its origin to the consumer's cup. For exporters operating in a speciality market where provenance drives price, that transparency isn't a nice-to-have. It's the product.

And then there is what the industry has always thrown away. For decades, coffee processing left behind spent grounds, husks, and the dried cherry skin known as cascara; byproducts that estates discarded without a second thought. Several startups at AIC-CCRI have examined that pile and identified a product line. Essential oils from spent grounds are being used in skincare. Coffee husk is being shaped into cutlery and decorative objects. Cascara is being brewed into tea. What was once a disposal problem is now a business.

The opportunity doesn't stop there. A Coffee Board research report tracks a sharp rise in soluble coffee consumption, driven by convenience and changing lifestyles. Cold coffee has become a fixture on campuses and in offices. A younger generation is stepping away from carbonated drinks and finding coffee not just as a beverage but also as an ingredient in protein bars, ice creams, biscuits, and premixes.

"Coffee can go as one ingredient for all of that," he says.

But beneath all these opportunities lies the most foundational challenge: The majority of Indian consumers have never tasted pure coffee and do not know what they are missing. For any startup entering this space, that isn't a problem to solve eventually. It's where the work begins.

"When customers know what pure coffee actually tastes like, they are far more likely to accept it," he explains.

How a startup communicates that, through its packaging, its branding, the story it tells at every touchpoint, matters as much as what goes into the cup. Educating the customer isn't secondary to building the business. For most coffee startups, it is the business.

Inauguration of India Coffee House Kiosk to train Women Self Help Members on Coffee Brewing and Cafe Management - 1st Oct 2025.

Learnings in the Form of Failures

More than 70 startups. Over 40 graduated. Two ventures of his own that didn't make it. Twelve years of watching founders up close. By now, Praveen has a very clear sense of what separates those who build something real from those who don't.

The first thing he asks every founder to sit with is this: "Is it a problem or just a symptom?"

It sounds simple, but it is far from it. Most founders arrive with a solution they believe in and work backwards to justify the problem. The ones who last do the opposite. They sit with the problem long enough to understand what's actually causing it. Get that wrong at the start, and you can spend two years building something the market never needed.

Beyond that, the thing that most determines a startup's trajectory is surprisingly human: whether the founder can actually be taught. First-time founders are often the hardest to reach, not because they lack talent, but because they haven't yet failed. They arrive certain. When told their idea might not work, they take it personally. Some leave to find a different incubator rather than ponder over the advice.

The founders who genuinely listen are almost always those who have already lost something. Having burned money and time once, they arrive knowing what they don't know. They hear advice differently. From there, Praveen turns to something most startup conversations politely avoid: sales. It is, he says, the most underrated skill a founder can have, and the one most consistently handed off to someone else too early.

"You have to be the first salesperson of your company, you have to make your hands dirty," he says.

The reasoning cuts straight to the point:

"The salesperson you appoint should give you the 101st strategy, not the 100 ways you already tried," he adds.

But that only works if the founder has done the groundwork first. Talking to customers, absorbing honest feedback, going back to the drawing board, and trying again. It's unglamorous work. It's also the work that decides everything.

And then there's a pattern he has named, one that is hard to forget once you've heard it. Some founders never finish anything. They start something, hit the first serious wall, abandon it, and jump to the next idea. Always moving, never arriving.

"It's like a hopping frog, you never achieve what you want to do," he says.

For anyone stepping into the coffee startup space, his advice is rooted in everything above. Patience matters more than most founders expect. The first years will bring more rejection than support, and the ones who survive that period are the ones who stay focused rather than pivot at the first sign of difficulty. And whatever happens, bring the failures to the incubator, not just the wins.

"Startups will tell you they raised funds and won awards, but they won't tell you where they failed," he observes.

The ones who do are the ones who scale. Every time.

The Bigger Picture

Praveen came to this role the long way. Banking, teaching, two ventures, and an agri-incubator in Malawi. Each chapter added something. All of it, from where he stands now, was preparation.

India's coffee-sector startup ecosystem is at an early yet real inflexion point. The technology exists to solve problems that have lingered for decades. The waste that estates once discarded is becoming someone's product line. And the domestic consumer who has spent a lifetime drinking chicory blend is, slowly, beginning to discover what they have been missing.

The opportunity was always there. What it needed was people who understood both the depth of it and the difficulty of building inside it. People who had seen enough failure, in others and in themselves, to know what they were doing.

Praveen is one of those people. And the room he walked into in 2023 is proof that sometimes, the long way round is exactly the right way.

To know more, visit www.aicccriced.in or reach out to: ceo@aicccriced.in.