Qualcomm and MeitY partner to support startup ecosystem in India

Qualcomm's India unit has signed a technical bilateral cooperation agreement with the MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, to bring the benefits of its Qualcomm Design in India Challenge (QDIC) program to MSH supported startups.

“Start-ups are catalysts to the new economy, creating unique opportunities across verticals. Over the last three years, Qualcomm India has been encouraging and fostering hardware and IoT startups through our own Qualcomm Design in India Challenge. We look forward to expanding our reach through this collaboration and we are grateful to MeitY for giving us this opportunity to share our learnings, domain expertise and best practices with a larger set of startups.” said Rajen Vagadia, Vice President, Qualcomm India Private Limited and President, Qualcomm India & SAARC.

The collaboration will focus on enabling overall growth of startups including development of soft skills, knowledge base, and opportunities to connect with domain experts, venture capitalists, and other industry accelerators.

“The very vision of MSH has been to build a conducive innovation and startup ecosystem by bringing together various technology innovation stakeholders. The resources offered by Qualcomm India will extend this benefit to larger ecosystem of Indian startups. Qualcomm’s expertise in the area, ability to provide an access to various stakeholders relevant to startups and a dedicated lab with state-of-the-art equipment to start ups selected to be part of Qualcomm Design in India Challenge make them an ideal partner of choice for this collaboration.” said Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY.

Qualcomm Design in India Challenge, an initiative started in 2016, promotes, encourages and supports early stage start-ups, design houses and product companies to invent useful and innovative hardware product designs. The program offers number of benefits from Qualcomm India, including prize money, access to software and hardware design tools and labs, technical support from a dedicated engineering team, access to intellectual property (IP) generation incentive of up to USD$5,000, access to professional mentorship workshops held over the duration of the program.