Qualcomm Announces Ten Finalist Tech Startups for its Design in India Challenge

Qualcomm recently announced the top ten shortlisted companies for its Design in India challenge, a contest that the company launched three months ago. The objective of the contest was to encourage the creation of an eco-system of product and hardware design in India.

The contest attracted about 400 entries, out of which 10 finalists were shortlisted, who’ll be eligible for a funding of $10,000 each. This is to enable them to translate their ideas into working prototypes. The challenge was to design products, using Qualcomm’s technologies, primarily in the areas of smartphones, tablets, and IoT (Internet of Things), for agriculture, automotive, banking, education, healthcare, smart cities and wearables.

These 10 companies will be incubated in Qualcomm’s Innovation Lab and of these, three winners will be chosen who’ll receive a funding of $100,000 at the end of the incubation period, which is expected around November 2016.

The finalists were announced in the presence of J.S. Deepak, Secretary, Department of Telecom (DoT), Secretary, Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) and R. Chandrashekhar, President, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM).

“These ten finalists not only demonstrate Indian talent, but what can be done in so many areas that are relevant for everyone”, said J S Deepak, secretary, of the Department of Telecom (DoT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India. “This will have a positive impact towards making India a global hub for hardware design”, he added.

“The Design in India challenge’s outcome is the core to the honorable PM’s Make in India campaign. Now, the time has come to have our own IPs”, said Dr. Aruna Sharma, Secretary, DeiTY. “At DeitY it is our endeavor to promote Electronics System Design & Manufacturing industry with a recent focus on mobile manufacturing,” she added.”

“Inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India vision, Qualcomm is excited to support the possibility of making India a hub for design capabilities that would drive the value chain from a service focused to product capable industry ,” said Sunil Lalvani, vice president and president of Qualcomm India & South Asia.

The 10 finalists would be using Qualcomm’s Bengaluru based Innovation Lab to transform their ideas from concept to product stage.

“We are happy to be associated with Qualcomm in this progressive effort, to actualize the Make in India vision,” said R. Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM. “This initiative, closely aligned with NASSCOM’s own vision to 'Connect, Collaborate and Co-create', is a great platform to drive innovation.”

The Shortlisted Companies

The ten shortlisted companies for the first edition of Qualcomm Design in India Challenge are:

• Aarav Unmanned Systems - Nayan, a high performance quadrotor for researchers and developers
• Artificial Machines - HAZE Platform, an End-to-End IoT platform to make your products smarter
• Carnot Technologies - A smart bike platform that makes any conventional two wheeler smarter - get towing/security alerts, engine/battery health and performance insights on you phone
• Green Robot Machinery - Developing smart and compact precision farm machinery for small farms
• iFuture Robotics - Building Ark Robot, an Army of autonomous Robots for Smart Logistics
• Lensbricks Technology - Bringing you Kiba, a camera to automatically capture and share joy through videos
• Myelin - Hybrid Octo-copter with inter changeable modules for different sectoral applications
• Treepie Computing - High Performance Computing (HPC) framework using Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC for IoT applications
• Uncanny Vision - Next generation surveillance solution to bring intelligent security to smart cities
• Watchy Technology - Innovations that enable our customers to broadcast reliably