After investors and incubators, now business service providers too are betting big on the ongoing startup boom, offering new entrepreneurs all kinds of backend support from patent protection to ecommerce infrastructure either free or at minimal charges. The idea is to build a strong client base for the future, say officials at consultancies and professional service providers in areas such as legal support, patent or trademark, management or HR, accounting or finance, ecommerce infrastructure.

Many of them are chasing startups to 'catch them young' as it's an established fact (norms) in business world that entrepreneurs do not usually change their old associations when it comes to accountants, lawyers, consultants or any other business associates," said Preet Deep Singh, founding partner at Ahmedabad-based Aperio Management LLP, which provides management advisory to several startups including babysteps.Many startup entrepreneurs while possessing a high potential idea have no clue on how to implement it or the nitty-gritties of starting a business. Take the case of Arthi Ramalingam, who recently passed out of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She opted out of campus placement to start her own fashion startup - Neons Fashion LLP. Now, she didn't have enough funds to start her own ecommerce and bring it to potential customers' notice. So she approached Ahmedabad-based ecommerce player 

Under this initiative, Infibeam provides end-to-end ecommerce infrastructure and other support services for successful operation for select 10 business ideas. And what does it get in return? "The proposed program will help Infibeam to acquire merchants at early stage and build sustainable competitive advantage by driving deep user engagement, personalisation and loyalty," said Vishal Mehta, chairman and managing director at Infibeam.com. In other words, a successful entrepreneur on its platform would bring more business to Infibeam and will retain with it for long run.  

Similarly, a leading chartered accountancy firm in Delhi NCR started a separate entity, Startup Buddy, to provide an entire gamut of back-end support functions like accounting, secretarial compliance, reporting, legal knowhow, project advisory and other services to startups only. In just one year of its existence, has about 80 startup clients including Scoopwhoop Mockbank, Innerchef, Burger Singh, Zo Rooms and