IMC Ladies' Wing to Host 39th Women Entrepreneurs' Exhibition, Bringing 300+ Founders to Mumbai

The Ladies' Wing of the Indian Merchants' Chamber will host the 39th edition of its Women Entrepreneurs' Exhibition later this month in Mumbai, bringing together more than 300 women-led businesses in what has become one of India's longest-running and most established platforms dedicated specifically to female entrepreneurship.

The exhibition, now in its fourth decade, has evolved considerably since its earliest editions, expanding from a relatively modest showcase of women-owned small businesses into a significant annual event that attracts founders spanning fashion, food, wellness, handicrafts, technology-enabled services and increasingly digitally native direct-to-consumer brands.

Founded in an era when formal support structures for women entrepreneurs in India were virtually non-existent, the exhibition's persistence across nearly four decades mirrors the broader, often underappreciated history of women-led business networks that operated well before India's current startup ecosystem, venture capital infrastructure or government entrepreneurship schemes had taken shape.

For India's broader women entrepreneurship ecosystem, this year's exhibition arrives as both a celebration of longevity and a working reminder of how much structural effort continues to be required to keep such platforms relevant across changing generations of entrepreneurs and consumers alike.

The longevity of the event — now approaching its fourth decade — offers a useful lens into the evolution of women's entrepreneurship in India more broadly. Early editions of the exhibition, organisers note, primarily served as a marketplace for women running small, often home-based businesses to reach urban consumers directly. Over the decades, the profile of participating entrepreneurs has shifted meaningfully, increasingly including founders who have built venture-backed startups, scaled manufacturing operations, or established export-oriented businesses alongside the traditional small-business exhibitors that remain core to the event's identity.

This year's edition arrives at a moment when India's women-led startup ecosystem, while still facing significant structural funding gaps, has continued to expand steadily. Industry data suggests India is home to several thousand active women-led startups, collectively representing a meaningful and growing share of the country's overall startup base, even as women founders continue to raise venture capital at lower rates than their male counterparts across most funding stages.

Participating entrepreneurs this year span a striking range of business maturity, from first-time exhibitors testing consumer response to a new product line, to established women-led enterprises that have used previous editions of the exhibition as a genuine springboard toward broader retail distribution, export contracts or, in a growing number of cases, subsequent institutional fundraising.

Organisers have increasingly incorporated structured programming beyond the core exhibition floor, including mentorship sessions, panel discussions featuring established women business leaders, and networking sessions specifically designed to connect emerging entrepreneurs with potential institutional buyers, corporate partners and, increasingly, angel and venture investors interested in women-led businesses.

Corporate sponsors have played an increasingly important role in sustaining and expanding the exhibition's scale over recent editions, with several large Indian conglomerates and multinational consumer companies providing both financial support and direct procurement engagement with participating women entrepreneurs, a shift that organisers credit with helping the event evolve well beyond its original grassroots marketplace format.

For many participating entrepreneurs, exhibitions like this one serve a function that goes beyond direct sales: they provide access to networks, mentorship and visibility that remain disproportionately difficult for women founders to build through conventional channels, particularly outside India's major startup hubs. Organisers of the IMC Ladies' Wing exhibition have consistently framed the event not merely as a marketplace, but as an ecosystem-building exercise, designed to connect emerging women entrepreneurs with more established peers, potential investors and corporate buyers.

The event's continued relevance after nearly four decades also reflects a broader truth about women's entrepreneurship in India: that structural barriers around access to capital, mentorship and market networks have proven persistent enough that dedicated platforms remain necessary, even as awareness of gender gaps in entrepreneurship has increased substantially across Indian policy and investment circles.

India's persistent funding gap for women entrepreneurs remains stark by most available measures, with women-led startups continuing to capture a disproportionately small share of total venture capital deployed despite representing a meaningful and growing share of the country's total startup formation activity, a disparity that industry bodies including the IMC Ladies' Wing have increasingly sought to address through targeted advocacy alongside their more traditional exhibition and networking programming.

Corporate procurement programmes specifically targeting women-owned vendors have also expanded steadily across both Indian and multinational companies operating in the country, creating an additional channel through which events like this exhibition can translate into meaningful commercial outcomes for participating entrepreneurs beyond direct consumer sales generated during the event itself.

Digital-first women entrepreneurs, including several building direct-to-consumer brands that originated purely online, have increasingly sought participation in physical exhibitions like this one specifically to build the kind of in-person customer trust and brand tangibility that purely digital marketing channels often struggle to replicate.

As the exhibition opens its doors to what organisers describe as its most diverse cohort of exhibitors yet, it stands as both a celebration of how far India's women entrepreneurship ecosystem has come, and a reminder of how much structural work remains before women-led businesses achieve parity in access to capital, markets and institutional support.

As the exhibition continues into its fifth decade of operation on the horizon, its evolution from a modest local marketplace into a nationally recognised platform offers a useful lens on both the progress achieved and the structural work that remains before India's women entrepreneurs compete on genuinely equal footing for capital, market access and institutional support.

Organisers of the exhibition have indicated plans to expand its digital and export-facing programming in future editions, reflecting a broader ambition to help India's women entrepreneurs access not just domestic urban consumers but international buyers, a shift that would mark a further evolution in the event's nearly four-decade history.

Beyond the exhibition floor itself, organisers say the event's enduring value lies in the informal mentorship relationships it continues to spark between newer and more established women entrepreneurs, connections that often persist and generate business value long after the exhibition itself has concluded for the year, reinforcing the IMC Ladies' Wing's broader mission beyond any single annual gathering.