IIITD Innovation & Incubation Center

Choosing the right programme

Start by matching your stage. If you have an idea and no company, PRECUBE is the pre-incubation route. If you have a startup and want space, labs and mentors on campus, apply for physical incubation; if you cannot be in Delhi, virtual incubation gives the same support remotely. If you need capital to scale, the seed support route is the one to ask about. If you graduated from IIIT Delhi, check the Alumni Fellowship first — it is reserved for you and nobody else competes for it.

Before you apply for NIDHI PRAYAS

This is the programme applicants most often get wrong. It funds building a physical prototype. If your product is software, an app, an ecommerce site or a service, it does not qualify, and if your hardware has already passed prototype stage it is too late for this grant. Software that runs on your own hardware is fine. Be ready to pre-incubate or incubate with the centre if you are selected, and note you can only take this grant once, and not for the same idea you used for a NIDHI Entrepreneur-in-Residence grant.

How applications work

All programmes funnel into one application portal, linked from the Apply Now button on each programme page. Physical incubation runs year-round, so there is no rush to a deadline; the virtual programme opens once a year, and the grant programmes run to their own calls. The last PRAYAS call listed closed in August 2025 and the centre shows as closed on the government's PRAYAS portal, so if that is your route, watch for the next call rather than assuming it is open.

What to prepare

Say clearly what you are building and where the technology is hard — the centre is set up around technology and deep-tech teams, and its recorded thrust areas are AI, healthcare technology and robotics. Show what stage you have reached: an idea, a working prototype, paying customers. Say what you need from an incubator, because the answer routes you to a different programme: workspace and labs, prototype funding, mentoring, or investor introductions. If your build needs hardware, mention it — the Design & Innovation Lab is one of the centre's strongest offers and hardware teams are the ones who get the most from it.

Where selection is decided

For the prototype grant, the centre's own monitoring committee decides who is funded and how much. Seed support is also decided by a committee. Neither publishes its criteria, so if in doubt write to the centre's info inbox and ask what they want to see before you spend a week on the form.

IIITD Innovation & Incubation Center (IIITD-IC) is the incubator of IIIT Delhi, working from the fifth floor of the Seminar Block on the institute's campus in Okhla Phase III, New Delhi. It is a Section 8 company promoted by IIIT Delhi and was set up in June 2017, nine years after the institute itself. It backs startups in technology and deep-tech fields, and its own pages name AI, cybersecurity, data science, robotics, drone technologies, digital humanities and social sciences among the domains its portfolio covers.

How programmes work

The centre describes support running from pre-incubation through to scale-up, and the programmes line up with those steps. PRECUBE is the pre-incubation programme, for people who have an idea rather than a company: mentoring sessions, cloud credits, time in the hardware prototyping lab, contact with startups already incubated at the centre, a completion certificate, and a chance to move on into incubation.

Incubation itself comes in two shapes. Physical incubation puts you in the building, with lab and infrastructure access, researchers and mentors on the technology and business side, and routes into support schemes run by the Department of Science & Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and IT and Startup India, plus the centre's own investor contacts. Virtual incubation is the same support delivered remotely, for founders who cannot be on campus.

On top of that sit the funded programmes. NIDHI PRAYAS is a prototype grant for young innovators, and it is the narrowest of the set: it is for turning an idea into a working physical product, so pure software, ecommerce, service and app-only projects are not supported, and a product that is already past prototype stage is not either. Software counts only as part of a hardware build, such as an internet-of-things device. Projects run for twelve months, with one six-month extension possible at the monitoring committee's discretion, and a grantee must pre-incubate or incubate with the centre. You can take it only once, and not for the same idea as a NIDHI Entrepreneur-in-Residence grant. Seed support is the later-stage route, decided by a committee, for startups that need capital to scale and raise further investment. The Entrepreneur-in-Residence programme, which helps an entrepreneur turn an idea into a proof of concept, is between intakes — its page currently says applications are closed.

The Alumni Fellowship is the one programme limited by who you are: it is for IIIT Delhi graduates building their own startup, and combines financial support with incubation facilities, workspace, prototyping, mentoring and investor introductions.

Who can apply

Most of the centre is open to founders with no connection to IIIT Delhi. The physical incubation page invites applications from startups in technology and deep-tech domains throughout the year, and the virtual programme opens annually for the same fields. Neither states a restriction to students, alumni or faculty, and neither states an incorporation requirement. The Alumni Fellowship is the exception and is restricted to IIIT Delhi graduates. NIDHI PRAYAS carries the scheme's own rules on what kind of product qualifies rather than a rule about who you are.

How to apply

Every programme uses one application portal, reached from the Apply Now button on each programme page. There is no separate form per programme, and no published deadline for incubation — applications for the physical programme are accepted year-round. The last NIDHI PRAYAS call on the site closed in August 2025, and the centre's listing on the government's PRAYAS portal currently shows its call as closed, so watch that page for the next round. General questions go to the centre's info inbox or its listed phone number.

Facilities and services

The centre runs a Design & Innovation Lab for hardware prototyping, office and co-working space, and its own incubation floor, which was built for ninety people when it opened in 2019. Startups also get access to facilities of the host institute, IIIT Delhi, rather than only the centre's own rooms, and the centre lists accounting and management services reaching incubatees through the institute. Alongside that it offers mentoring from academics and industry people, technical and fabrication support, networking through its events and partner organisations, and help finding funding.

Recognition

IIIT Delhi's incubator appears in the Department of Science & Technology's own NIDHI register as a NIDHI Technology Business Incubator, with AI, healthcare technology and robotics recorded as its thrust areas. It is also listed as a centre implementing the NIDHI Seed Support Programme, sanctioned in 2021-22, and as a NIDHI PRAYAS centre on the department's PRAYAS portal. The centre additionally says it works as a G2Center under the Ministry of Electronics and IT's TIDE 2.0 scheme, as an incubation centre under the Government of NCT of Delhi and as a Startup India Seed Fund Scheme incubator; those three are its own statements, which we have not matched against a public register.

Scale and community

The centre's homepage counters report more than a hundred startups incubated, around two hundred entrepreneurs engaged, three hundred jobs created and forty startups funded. Those are self-reported and carry no date. Startups it names include ScrapUncle, Arista Vault, Velmenni, Enord, Grow Indigo, Embedsense Solutions and CoGrad. It also runs a public events calendar — hackathons such as Hack4Health and HackFinance, masterclasses, open houses and incubator roundtables — and posts its own job openings on a careers page.