Bharti Airtel (Airtel), on Thursday launched ‘Airtel India Startup Innovation Challenge’ in partnership with Invest India, 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 Airtel’s advanced technology infrastructure to scale up their use cases and even co-innovate with Airtel’s engineering teams, the company said in a statement.

A select few of the 10 startups will be offered to be on-boarded onto the Airtel Startup Accelerator Program and hyper-scale their company with Airtel. Under this programme, startups gain access to Airtel’s core platform strengths of data, distribution, network and payments. Further, startups get access to Airtel’s global partner ecosystem and advisory from Airtel’s executive team, it said.

“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. As a core enabler of this emerging digital ecosystem, Airtel is thrilled to be working with the government to help early stage companies navigate their growth journeys and scale up quickly and sustainably,” Adarsh Nair, Chief Product Officer, Airtel, said.

Applications will close on January 24 and the results will be announced on February 14, Airtel said.

“The Indian startup ecosystem is the third largest in the world, and we are delighted that through this challenge, growing startups will be able to showcase Made-in-India solutions that solve complex global problems,” Deepak Bagla, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Invest India, said.

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