Kongu Engineering College

Work out which door you need

• You want a place on campus and hands-on support: apply as an incubatee. This is the rolling route with no deadline, and every funded scheme below assumes you are on it or joining it.
• You have an idea and need to build a prototype: the NIDHI-PRAYAS pre-incubation route is the one written for you.
• You are a graduate ready to go full time on a technology idea but have no company yet: the NIDHI Entrepreneur-in-Residence fellowship is the fit.
• You are a registered company with a working prototype: the Seed Support System is the one to prepare for, but note it wants three months of residency behind you before it invests.
• You are an existing MSME in Tamil Nadu with a technical problem: the EDII-TN Innovation Voucher Program is the route, and it is the only one that does not need you to be an incubatee first.

How applications actually work

There is no online portal. Each scheme page publishes a form set, and the TBI downloads page collects all of them in one place — the incubatee enrolment form, the voucher forms, the fellowship form, the prototype grant form and the seed fund form. Download the right set, fill it in, and send it to the incubator.

Read the document list before you start. The fellowship, for example, asks for the filled form, a presentation of the idea with timeline and deliverables, a one-page summary, a resume with your LinkedIn profile, proof of citizenship, your qualification certificates, a relieving certificate if you are leaving a job, a recent photograph and proof of age and address. The seed fund expects a formal business plan and a pitch deck, and publishes sample templates for both.

Dates on the site are worth checking before you apply. Several published calls closed in 2023 and 2024, and the site is updated unevenly, so confirm the current call by email with the incubator rather than assuming a listed date is live.

How selection works

Expect a screening period of five to six weeks from the day a call closes, then a presentation to a monitoring committee if you are shortlisted. Only shortlisted applicants hear back, and the incubator says silence within the stated window should be read as a no. The committee's decision is final, and it will not explain a rejection, so put everything you want considered into the application itself.

For incubation, the stated entry criteria are your business plan, clarity of ideas, aptitude, educational qualification, experience and financial status. Exit is judged on the incubation period agreed for your venture, your performance during incubation and the marketability of your product.

What reviewers look for

• One dedicated full-time founder, with a team already in place.
• A proof-of-concept or prototype that has been demonstrated and can be reproduced.
• A real technology or knowledge component, and ideally something protectable.
• A clear value proposition, an identified target customer and a market big enough to matter.
• A funding ask sized to reach a specific milestone, with a plan for what comes after it.
• Legal, statutory and environment, health and safety compliance in order.

Two things to be clear about before you apply

The seed support is a loan, not a grant — it carries interest, a mentoring fee and a repayment schedule, with half-yearly presentations and audited annual financials until the loan closes. And the Innovation Voucher covers most, not all, of an approved project budget, so you need to co-finance the rest and meet any cost overrun yourself.

Kongu Engineering College in Perundurai, Erode, Tamil Nadu hosts TBI@KEC — the Technology Business Incubator set up on its campus in 2003 as a joint venture between the college and NSTEDB/DST, Government of India. The incubator has its own site, its own premises on the campus and its own intake, and it is the part of the college a founder actually deals with. The college itself is run by the Kongu Vellalar Institute of Technology Trust, which dates from 1983.

TBI@KEC started with a thrust in electronics and ICT — embedded systems, digital signal processing, electronic card design and repair, wireless embedded systems and multimedia — and says it is diversifying into other domains. Its current scheme pages name advanced manufacturing, robotics, drones, agri and food tech, health and med tech, clean and green tech across air, water, energy and waste, internet of things, AI and machine learning, and AR, VR and MR, and add that other technology areas may be considered on the merit of the idea. It describes its own job as taking an incubatee from concept to commercialisation.

How the programmes work

There are two things to separate here. One is incubation itself: becoming a resident incubatee at TBI@KEC, which is a rolling application with no published deadline. The other is the set of externally funded schemes the incubator hosts, each of which runs as a dated call and each of which expects you to be, or to become, an incubatee.

Four of those schemes are documented in detail. NIDHI-PRAYAS is a pre-incubation grant for turning an innovative idea into a prototype inside eighteen months, with access to the prototyping lab and shared space. NIDHI Entrepreneur-in-Residence is a twelve-month fellowship paying a monthly subsistence grant to a graduate in science or engineering who wants to pursue a technology business idea full time, with office space, administrative support and mentoring. The Seed Support System, run under the Technology Development Board and NSTEDB, backs early-stage startups already in residence — it is structured as a loan with interest, released in instalments against milestone reviews, and repaid over three years. The EDII-TN Innovation Voucher Program, run with the Entrepreneurship Development and Innovation Institute under the Tamil Nadu Department of MSME, issues vouchers valid twelve months for either innovation potential analysis or market entry work, with a Kongu faculty member acting as knowledge partner. An MSME support scheme is also listed, but the site publishes no terms for it.

Every funded scheme runs the same way. Applications are downloaded as forms, not filed through a portal. Screening is a due-diligence process that takes five to six weeks from the day a call closes, and is judged on more than eligibility — innovation, potential for commercialisation and startup creation, team capability and commitment all count. Only selected applicants are contacted, by email, and TBI@KEC states plainly that it gives no explanation to applicants it does not shortlist.

Who can apply

This is an incubator that takes outside founders, not only the college's own students. Its incubatee selection page invites both aspiring techno-entrepreneurs with business acumen and existing small-industry entrepreneurs with a specific product idea. The Innovation Voucher Program is open to any manufacturing or service MSME or startup registered and located in Tamil Nadu. The Seed Support System requires the applicant to be a private limited company in India, or in the process of registering, with at least 51 per cent Indian promoter shareholding, and excludes Indian subsidiaries of foreign companies. The Entrepreneur-in-Residence fellowship asks for a science or engineering graduate with four years of full-time undergraduate or postgraduate education, or a three-year degree or diploma plus two years of full-time work, pursuing the venture full time.

Two routes are student-only and should not be confused with the above: the SPARK Fund innovation grant is for Kongu Engineering College students, as is the student project fund at the TBI.

Facilities

The TBI is a twenty-four-hour facility on the Kongu Engineering College campus. Its own pages describe about 20,000 sq ft of built-up area on 40,000 sq ft of land, while the college's innovation page gives the figure as 26,800 sq ft. Inside are common development centres for embedded systems, digital signal processing, electronic card design, assembly, testing and repair, wireless embedded systems and multimedia, plus a PRAYAS lab with prototyping equipment, PCB testing and measuring instruments, power tools and software. There is air-conditioned workspace, a seminar hall, a mini conference room, a conference-cum-training hall, a documentation centre, computing facilities, a library and information centre, high-speed data and voice links, and accommodation on campus. The incubator promises round-the-clock security and confidentiality over what incubatees are building.

Scale

TBI@KEC publishes its incubatees by name. Its pages list twenty-nine current incubatees and ninety-four graduated ones, across software, industrial automation, agritech, food tech, healthcare, energy, textiles and electric vehicles. Other pages give smaller counts — the college homepage says fifty-plus student startups, and the Principal's profile says more than sixty start-ups supported since he took charge of the incubator in 2020 — so read the named lists as the fuller picture. The incubator also says it won the National Award for Technology Business Incubator for the year 2012.

Who runs it

Dr. R. Parameshwaran, the Principal of Kongu Engineering College, has headed the TBI since 2020 and has been President of the Institution's Innovation Council since 2018. The incubator's contact page addresses its Executive Director without naming the post-holder. On the college side, Dr. Praveen Kumar Subramanian convenes the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum, the umbrella that ties together the incubator, the Institution's Innovation Council and the Entrepreneurship and Management Development Centre, which has run campus entrepreneurship awareness and pre-incubation since 1993.

Enquiries about incubation go to the Executive Director, TBI@KEC, on the Kongu Engineering College campus at Perundurai. Events, hackathons and innovation activity are listed on the college's own site, and staff recruitment runs through the college's recruitment pages rather than the incubator.