Officials, including GenNext Ventures' chairman and scientist R A Mashelkar and Pramanik, at a press conference here refused to give any indication on the investments, including the size of the corpus created to invest.

"The first hub will start operations in October in Mumbai, and will be subsequently emulated across multiple cities in India," the companies said in the joint statement.

The company's Microsoft Ventures runs an accelerator lab for entrepreneurs in Bangalore, while Reliance Industries already has its venture investing business GenNext Ventures.

Entrepreneurs will have to apply for four-month long course aimed at enhancing strategic, tactical and communication skills.

The programme will start from a 12,000 sq ft facility created by Reliance at a facility in the satellite city of Navi Mumbai from next month, GenNext's Managing Director John Kuruvilla said, adding, this facility will conduct two programmes of four months each every year.

Pramanik said both the partners are aiming to scale it up to eight centres nationally and the work of identifying the locations for the centres is on.

Mashelkar said while RIL brings speed, scale, sustainability and domain knowledge across sectors to the partnership, Microsoft brings in the global reach and network.

To a question on helping the start-ups work around the maze of regulations, Mashelkar, who also sits on the board of RIL, said there is a need to reduce the same and he has voiced it at several fora.

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