This paper presents the design of a Memristor based startup circuit for self biased circuits. Memristor has many advantages over conventional CMOS devices such as low leakage current at nanometer scale, easy to manufacture. In this work the switching characteristics of memristor is utilized. First the theoretical equations describing the switching behavior of memristor are investigated. To prove the switching capability of Memristor, a startup circuit based on memristor is proposed which uses series combination of Memristor and capacitor. Proposed circuit is compared with the previously reported MOSFET based startup circuits. Comparison of different circuits was done to validate the results. Simulation results show that memristor based circuit can attain on (I = 12.94 μA) to off state (I = 1.2 μA) in 25 ns while the MOSFET based startup circuits take on (I = 14.19 μA) to off state (I = 1.4 μA) in more than 90 ns. The benefit comes in terms of area because the number of components used in the circuit are lesser than the conventional startup circuits. © 2016 Author(s).