Startup Grants & Funding for Idea-Stage Startups

Idea-stage startups in India can access pre-revenue, pre-incorporation funding through DST's NIDHI-PRAYAS (up to ₹10 Lakhs for hardware prototypes), Atal Innovation Mission's AIC grants, university-run incubator seed programmes, and the Smart India Hackathon. These schemes fund concept validation, initial prototyping, and early customer discovery — typically without requiring incorporation, revenue history, or a complete team. Pure software/SaaS, e-commerce, and app-based solutions are excluded from some hardware-focused schemes (notably NIDHI-PRAYAS).