Airtel, Invest India team up to launch Startup Innovation Challenge

Bharti Airtel (Airtel), on Thursday launched ‘Airtel India Startup Innovation Challenge’ in partnership with Invest India. The telecom major is inviting early stage technology companies to demonstrate differentiated solutions areas like 5G, Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) and digital entertainment.




The top 10 winners will win cash prizes, get access to Airtel’s Innovation Lab and will be able to leverage its advanced technology infrastructure to scale up their use cases, even co-innovate with Airtel’s engineering teams.

“India’s startup ecosystem is now a globally celebrated story and our young technology companies are doing some phenomenal work in building solutions that solve hard problems,” Adarsh Nair, Chief Product Officer, Bharti Airtel, said in a statement.

“As a core enabler of this emerging digital ecosystem, Airtel is thrilled to be working with the Government of India to help early-stage companies navigate their growth journeys and scale up quickly and sustainably,” Nair added.

A select few of the 10 startups shall be offered to be on-boarded onto the Airtel Startup Accelerator Program and hyper-scale their company with Airtel.

Announcing Airtel’s launch of Startup Innovation Challenge in partnership with Invest India, the statement said applications will close on January 24, 2022 and the results will be announced on February 14, 2022.

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Under the program, startups gain access to Airtel’s core platform strengths of data, distribution, network and payments. In addition, the startups get access to Airtel’s global partner ecosystem and advisory from Airtel’s executive team.

Set up in 2009, Invest India is a non-profit venture under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

Invest India, as the national investment promotion and facilitation agency, focuses on sector-specific investor targeting and development of new partnerships to enable sustainable investments in India.