Fund My Crazy 2026 is Google Gemini's student innovation challenge. It asks one question: if you could redesign one piece of your city, what would it be? Ten students or teams take home a share of ₹1 crore.

You do not need a company, a prototype, a co-founder, or a single line of code. You need one idea, four short answers, and one image you made with Gemini. That is the whole entry.

Applications close 15 September 2026, 11:59 PM IST. There is no entry fee.

Who can enter

You must be at least 18 (as of 30 July 2026), a legal resident of India, and enrolled full-time at an accredited Indian college or university during the submission window. Every discipline counts — arts, commerce, law, medicine, design, engineering. Google may ask for your student ID or enrolment certificate, and you get 5 working days to produce it.

Enter alone or as a team of up to 3. Teammates can be from different colleges as long as everyone is enrolled in India. One member is the primary contact and represents the team at the finale. One entry per person or team — you cannot submit twice, and you cannot edit after submitting.

Not eligible: international students, Google employees and contractors, their immediate family and household, and anyone previously banned from a Google contest.

Pick one of six themes

1. Our Roads & Transportation — how people and vehicles move through the city.
2. Our Community & Living — societies, colonies, neighbourhoods, parks.
3. Our Healthcare — the places we go when we need care.
4. Our Education — how we learn, teach and grow.
5. Our Markets — shops, malls and the digital platforms behind them.
6. Surprise us — anything that redefines what a city could be.

The examples Google gives are deliberately big: a street that generates power from its own surface, a neighbourhood that makes its own electricity and recycles its own water, a classroom that becomes a forest or another planet. The brief rewards the leap, not the spreadsheet.

What you actually submit

There are no essay word limits on the live form — but there are five things it demands, and one of them trips people up.

First you pick your element from a dropdown: Roads and Transportation, Our Education, Our Healthcare, Our Community and Living, Our Markets, or Surprise Element. Then four questions, all mandatory:

1. Why this element, why now? Something made you pick this piece of the city over everything else. The form explicitly says: don't be general.
2. What does your reimagined city look like? How does it work — a smart system, a redesigned space, a new service, a physical structure? Paint the picture.
3. How is Gemini integrated into your idea, and what role does it play in your solution? Be specific about the role and the prompts you used. Is it scanning the city, reading traffic patterns, understanding voice or text?
4. How relevant is this for people in the future? Who it helps, how it fits into how people actually live, and what makes it believable rather than just a cool concept.

Plus your name, email, phone with country code, and college with city.

The image, and the part people miss

Upload one visual: JPG or PNG only, maximum 10 MB. It has to show what your reimagined element looks like — the transformation for a redesigned space, the flow for a system or service, the render for a structure, the thing in action for a smart layer.

And then the requirement that is easy to fail: you must supply proof you used Gemini — your conversation history and screenshots of your prompts. Using ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL·E or any other tool means immediate disqualification. So do not delete that Gemini chat. Screenshot your prompts as you go, before you have a finished image and forget where it came from.

Note: the published terms describe an older version of the form — 100/200/100/150-word fields and a PDF upload up to 25 MB. The live form at enter.fundmycrazy.com is what you actually fill, so follow it: JPG or PNG, 10 MB, four open questions.

What it scores on

Legal and policy compliance is scored separately as pass/fail. Fail it and you are out before a judge sees your idea.

Vision alone is nearly a third of the marks, and "Built with Gemini" is worth as much as real-world relevance — so document your Gemini process rather than treating the image as decoration.

What gets you disqualified

Google's content rules are unusually strict and enforced at any stage, including after winners are announced. No appeals. Automatic disqualification for anything political, religious, illegal, hateful or discriminatory; plagiarism or reusing an idea from another contest; violence, sexual content, defamation, or promoting alcohol, tobacco or drugs; false or misleading claims.

Two traps worth naming. First: an idea that looks neutral but carries a political or religious agenda is still out. You can address a social problem — you just cannot frame it in those terms. Second: your entry must be original work created for this campaign. Something you already submitted elsewhere, published, or won with does not qualify, and Google says it runs plagiarism checks.

Criticising your college is fine. Targeting a community, caste or region is not.

The prizes, and what actually reaches your account

Ten finalists pitch at the finale and every one of them is paid:

Total pool: ₹1,00,00,000. Judges set the exact amount inside each tier based on how ambitious and viable your idea is. Google can award fewer than 10 prizes if not enough entries qualify, and the structure is marked subject to change.

Prize money is taxed. TDS of about 30% applies to winnings above ₹10,000. A ₹10,00,000 prize means roughly ₹3,00,000 deducted and about ₹7,00,000 in hand. You get a Form 16A. Before payment you complete KYC — PAN, bank details, cancelled cheque, ID proof, address proof — and money lands within 120 working days of that paperwork. For teams, it all goes to the primary contact, who splits it. Agree the split in writing before you submit.

You are encouraged but not required to spend the money on the idea, and Google does not ask for reports.

The finale

Google flies confirmed finalists in — round-trip economy air or train, hotel, local transport and meals, all covered. No cash instead of travel. You attend mentorship sessions and, if asked, pitch live to the judges. The city and date have not been announced yet. You must confirm within 24 hours of being notified, so watch your inbox and your spam folder.

Do you keep your idea?

Yes. Ownership stays with you — Google takes no equity and no assignment of your IP. What you do grant is a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable non-exclusive licence for Google to show, reproduce and adapt your submission for promotion, plus the right to use your name, likeness and college in campaign marketing. That licence does not end when the campaign does. If publicity is a problem for you, read Section 6 and 11 of the terms before entering.

Timeline

• 15 August 2026 — submissions open
• 15 September 2026, 11:59 PM IST — submissions close
• 16–17 September 2026 — judging
• By 19 September 2026 — finalists confirm within 24 hours of being notified
• Finale date, venue and judges — to be announced

The campaign is run for Google India Private Limited by Communique Marketing Solutions Pvt. Ltd. as contest administrator.