The Smart City Living Labs at IIIT Hyderabad in association with the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MietY) and the smart city mission have launched a smart city start-up challenge.

The programme is envisioned to support and scale start-ups that are building sustainable, inclusive and innovative solutions for smart cities. The last date to apply for the challenge is June 1, 2021. For more details about application process, visit the official website -https:martcityresearch.iiit.ac.in.  

The month-long programme gives selected start-ups an opportunity to pitch to smart city technology MNCs, smart city officials and the winner will get an equity-free grant of Rs 10 lakh for further development.

Ramesh Loganathan, professor co-innovation, who is heading the Research/Innovation outreach at IIIT Hyderabad, said, “The Smart City Living Lab is an attempt to discover cutting edge innovations with smart city use cases and enrich them with our knowledge from research. This start-up challenge will help discover innovations to enable smart cities. The winning teams will get capital, network and knowledge support.”

The focus areas for the challenge are water, waste, safety and security, health and energy. Any start-ups with solutions or products with smart city use cases can apply, especially tech start-ups working with products with smart city use cases, market-ready products with or without customers (revenue is desirable), expertise in commercially deploying the solution.

Living Labs is also currently running the water challenge in association with the Government of Telangana and NIUM to find viable solutions to the problems faced regarding water quality, supply and non-revenue water by cities in Telangana.