IIT Tirupati Navavishkar I-Hub Foundation

Pick the right scheme first

• You have an idea or a proof of concept, and maybe no company yet: DISCOVER. It explicitly includes individuals and teams that are not yet registered as startups.
• You have a prototype, or a product with early revenue: SARATHI. Its scale-up tier asks for a minimum viable product with traction, a funding history and a granted patent.
• You are already incubated at IITTNiF and want desk space and mentoring: VIKAS.
• You want to quit a job and work on one idea full time: the Entrepreneur-in-Residence fellowship, when a round is open.
• You are a faculty member or researcher at an institution: the technology development project call, not the startup schemes.

Check you fit the domain

Every scheme is scoped to positioning and precision technologies — mapping, remote sensing, satellite navigation, surveying, and positioning, navigation and timing. Say in the first paragraph of your application which of those your product uses and what it does with the data.

How applications work

VIKAS has a form on the Startups and Entrepreneurship page; the rest do not publish one. DISCOVER and SARATHI describe rolling intake reviewed by the IITTNiF Startup Management Committee, which meets monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly depending on how many applications have come in. If there is no open call for the scheme you want, write to startups@iittnif.com and ask when the committee next meets.

How selection works

• A committee drawn from government, industry and the investment community decides, not a single programme manager.
• Both schemes say they give weight to applicants whose business rests on their own technology, intellectual property or patents. If you hold a patent or a filing, lead with it.
• You may be asked to do a virtual interview or fill in a short form so the incubation plan can be shaped around you. VIKAS adds an interview or presentation to a selection committee.
• Progress is reviewed twice a year once you are in, and support is released against milestones rather than up front.

What to have ready

• What stage you are actually at, stated plainly — prototype plan, prototype built, or product in market with revenue.
• Clear goals for the next three to six months with a route to reaching them. Both schemes ask for this in writing at the pilot and scale-up stages.
• Your intellectual property position: filings, grants, and anything licensed from publicly funded research.
• Whether you have taken a government grant before. The Entrepreneur-in-Residence rules exclude anyone who has already had a startup or innovator grant, or similar support for the same idea.

Things that catch people out

• The Entrepreneur-in-Residence fellowship requires full-time commitment, registering a private limited company within three months of joining, and joining incubation at IITTNiF. You are also ineligible if you hold more than ten per cent of another company. Screening takes four to eight weeks and silence means you were not selected.
• SARATHI is the scheme where IITTNiF may take equity, through promissory or SAFE notes, in exchange for government contributions. DISCOVER and VIKAS are described as grant, fellowship and in-kind support.
• The DISCOVER policy mentions that a nominal fee may be charged for taking part.
• VIKAS is only open to startups already inside the IITTNiF incubation ecosystem, so it is a second step rather than a front door.
• The homepage banner still invites fellowship applications that the fellowships page records as closed since February 2024. Confirm by email before you plan around any dated call on the site.

IIT Tirupati Navavishkar I-Hub Foundation, usually written IITTNiF, is a Section 8 non-profit company based on the IIT Tirupati campus at Yerpedu, in Tirupati District, Andhra Pradesh. It was set up to host the Technology Innovation Hub on Positioning and Precision Technologies, one of the hubs created under the Department of Science and Technology's National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems. It is a separate legal entity from IIT Tirupati: the institute is its host, and the IIT Tirupati Director chairs its Hub Governing Body.

The hub works in four verticals — technology development, entrepreneurship, human resource and skill development, and international collaborations. For founders, the entrepreneurship vertical is the one that matters: IITTNiF runs incubation and acceleration schemes, funds fellowships, and gives startups workspace, labs and mentoring on the campus.

What they support

Everything here sits inside positioning and precision technologies. That covers geographic information systems, remote sensing and Earth observation, satellite navigation including NavIC and GPS, LiDAR, RADAR and ground-penetrating radar, and positioning, navigation and timing work down to atomic clocks. The applied areas the hub names are precision agriculture, disaster management, smart cities, smart villages, land records and insurance, navigation, defence and robotics. If your product has nothing to do with location, mapping, timing or the sensors behind them, this is not the right hub.

The schemes are written for a wide range of starting points. DISCOVER takes people who have an idea or a proof of concept, including individuals and teams who have not registered a company yet. SARATHI takes startups that already have a prototype, and at its top tier asks for a minimum viable product with early traction and revenue, a history of grants or funding, and a granted patent. VIKAS is for startups already inside the IITTNiF incubation ecosystem. The Entrepreneur-in-Residence fellowship is aimed at first-generation founders with no prior startup experience.

Programmes

DISCOVER is the incubation scheme. Cohorts run six to nine months, with two to three cohorts a year, and the policy document describes support for up to twenty people per cohort. It moves participants through three stages: idea to proof of concept on a fellowship, proof of concept to a working prototype on a one-time grant, and then commercialisation. Selected participants get laboratory access, mentoring, training, co-working space, weekly mentor and expert meetings, a demo day, legal help and support with negotiation and technology commercialisation.

SARATHI is the accelerator half, and DISCOVER participants who reach scale-up are pointed at it. It runs four to nine months with rolling entry, aiming at ten to fifteen deep-tech startups a year. The three tiers mirror DISCOVER's — prototype, pilot and product scale — and the support is heavier on going to market: market research and positioning diagnostics, technical mentorship, legal support for intellectual property and incorporation, founder peer sessions, a demo day in front of venture capital and angel investors, and help closing an investment. SARATHI is the one scheme that says IITTNiF may take equity, in return for government contributions, through promissory or SAFE notes.

VIKAS is deliberately non-financial. It runs up to twelve months, extendable, and gives a dedicated desk, hot desk or private office in the hub's co-working space, regular mentor sessions on product development, business strategy and market entry, and introductions through workshops, seminars and events.

The Entrepreneur-in-Residence programme, run with Operation Dronagiri and the hub's Geo-Intel Lab, pays a monthly grant for twelve months to someone working full time on one technology business idea. Its last advertised round closed in January 2026. It is the strictest of the four on eligibility, and the conditions are worth knowing before you plan around it.

IITTNiF also calls for technology development project proposals. That route is for principal investigators at academic and research institutions rather than for startups, though the hub lists incubation of a company and startup creation among its intended outcomes. Separately, the hub has offered CHANAKYA fellowships and internships for undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and post-doctoral students; the last advertised round closed in February 2024, even though the homepage banner still invites applications.

Facilities and support

Startups get co-working space at the hub — dedicated desks, hot desks or private offices — and access to co-working and prototyping labs subject to the incubation centre's own rules. The hub's technology development side runs labs in GNSS, GIS, LiDAR, quantum navigation, computer vision, AI and machine learning, and a Geo-Intel Lab, each with its own microsite. IITTNiF's registered address is inside IIT Tirupati's Central Instrumentation Facility.

Beyond space, the schemes list mentoring, training, intellectual property and legal help, market research, commercialisation and technology transfer support, and investor introductions through demo days.

Track record

IITTNiF publishes less about its results than about its plans. Its Startups and Entrepreneurship page shows a wall of portfolio company logos linking out to their websites, but it does not name any of them or give a total, so we do not publish a startup count. Its technology development page lists thirteen current projects with their technology readiness levels. Its CSR page says the hub has more than twenty national and international connections, undated and self-reported. Its press releases record memoranda of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh Innovation Society and with J-Hub, a Research2Market workshop in Tirupati, the Agrithon 2023 hackathon, and geospatial training run with NIT Mizoram and at colleges in Coimbatore.

How to apply

There is no single application portal. VIKAS has a live online application form linked from the Startups and Entrepreneurship page, followed by an interview or presentation to the Startup Selection committee. DISCOVER and SARATHI both say applications are taken on a rolling basis or in cohorts through an online submission, and that the IITTNiF Startup Management Committee — made up of people from government, industry and the investment community — meets monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly to review them. Neither publishes a link, so the practical route in is to write to the hub. The Entrepreneur-in-Residence call ran through its own form on the Operation Dronagiri site.

Who runs it

Prof. K. N. Satyanarayana, Director of IIT Tirupati, chairs the Hub Governing Body and sits on the board. Dr. Roshan K. Srivastav, an Associate Professor at IIT Tirupati, is Project Director. The governing body also carries academic representatives from IIST Trivandrum, IIT Kanpur and IIT Tirupati, industry representatives including a former Director Emeritus of the Open Geospatial Consortium and a regional head from SIDBI, and the NM-ICPS Mission Director from DST. The hub lists open positions on its careers page and takes CSR support for its four verticals.