With the idea of expanding its scope and reach of Launchpad, Google’s startup accelerator, the tech major is bringing three more programs under it – Start, build, scale. According to a report in the Times of India, these programs will help startups by mentoring them at respective stages of growth for specific requirements.

‘Start’ will be a five-day program and this will be mostly for startups in the idea stage. Here, startups are mentored in basics of user experience and design, marketing and pitching.

The next program ‘Build’ will be a two-day program, which will help startups with validating their technology stack.

For Scale, mentors will address the design challenges of the full-developed product.

TOI reports that for these shorter programs, the acceptance level is 20% of the total applications.

"We increasingly see that while the total number of applications has dropped, those who apply are serious startups that have achieved a minimum scale. The entrepreneurs are self-selecting the programmes that are more valuable for them and are more articulate on what exactly they want to achieve from our programmes," Paul Ravindranath, lead for Google Launchpad accelerator programme and head of developer relations told TOI.

Google’s accelerator program, Launchpad is a six-month program. Under this, the tech major works with mature startups. It helps them with marketing, and customer and investor connect. For every batch, six startups are selected. And so far, a total of 26 startups have undergone this program.

Google says that it gets over 200 applications each time. TOI reports that the search giant's various startup programmes are managed by its developer relations team, whose mandate is to make more programmers use Google products, tools and platforms.