At an event in New Delhi, the renowned chip maker, Qualcomm today announced the 10 start-ups of the first edition of the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge, that was launched in December 2015. This initiative of Qualcomm in association with the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), aims to promote start-ups in India in the domains of smartphones, tablets and Internet of Things (IoT) for agriculture, automotive, banking, education, healthcare, smart cities and wearables.
“We are delighted to see an industry leader like Qualcomm, join forces and contribute to the government’s Make in India vision,” said J S Deepak, secretary, of the Department of Telecom (DoT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India. “The Qualcomm Design in India Challenge will have a positive impact towards making India a global hub for hardware design.”
This initiative is being organised on the commitment made by Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, executive chairman of Qualcomm Incorporated, when he met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Digital Economy event held in September, 2015 in San Jose, USA. Dr. Jacobs announced Qualcomm’s support for the Government of India’s Digital India and Make in India vision, to introduce a Design in India Initiative to encourage the creation of a local product design ecosystem. Following this, Qualcomm announced the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge in December 2015 and set up the Qualcomm Innovation Lab in Bangalore, to provide technical and engineering support to the 10 finalists in their endeavour to develop innovative ideas into products and hardware designs.
“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. “We are thrilled at the overwhelming response to the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge and look forward to incubating the top 10 finalists in the Qualcomm Innovation Lab to transform their ideas from concept to product stage.”
The ten shortlisted companies for the first edition of the 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 customers to broadcast reliably
The above 10 companies have received 10,000 US Dollars each for their work and will now be incubated in the Qualcomm Innovation Lab in Bangalore and the top three winners will each receive a funding of $100,000 at the end of the incubation period expected around November 2016.
