Maruti Suzuki Innovation

Pick the programme by your stage

The five programmes are deliberately stacked, and applying to the wrong one is the commonest way to waste a cycle.

• Nurture — you have a prototype and little else. Nine months, run with IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, aimed at east, north-east and central India. Apply on IIM Calcutta Innovation Park's own website.
• Incubation — you are between proof-of-concept and scale-up and you are DPIIT-recognised. Six months with NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore.
• Accelerator — you are past MVP with a few customers, or past product-market fit. This is the platform's main programme and the one with nine cohorts behind it.
• Mobility Challenge — you are mature and your solution is ready to deploy against a specific Maruti Suzuki problem statement.
• Innovation Fund — not an entry point. You reach it after a successful paid pilot.

How applications work

Incubation, Accelerator and Mobility Challenge each have their own form on the Maruti Suzuki Innovation site, under Apply Now. Each one verifies your email and your founder's mobile number with a one-time code before you can start, so use an address and number you can reach while filling it in. The forms ask for your startup name and legal name, country, state and city, website, founding year, team size, and a domain and sub-domain from their own list — pick the sub-domain closest to the focus areas on the programme page rather than the one you would use in a pitch deck. The Accelerator form saves in two parts and gives you an application ID partway through, so you can come back to finish it, and all three let you upload supporting documents.

Nurture is the exception: there is no Nurture form here, and applications go through IIM Calcutta Innovation Park.

If you have applied before, apply again — the site encourages it, and asks you to spell out what has changed since last time and how your idea now applies to automotive and mobility.

How selection works

Applications are screened by Maruti Suzuki business teams together with the partner's mentors. Shortlisted startups are interviewed or asked to pitch to a joint panel. From there you are onboarded, mentored for the length of the programme against a real company use case, and then pitch to Maruti Suzuki's senior management — the Managing Director and business unit leaders in the Accelerator's case. The business units decide which pitches turn into a funded pilot.

What reviewers look for

The stated screening criteria are technology, scalability, uniqueness and viability. The site says founders must be full-time on the idea and able to show the mindset to build and grow a company; existing traction and customers are welcome but not required. It also says applications are judged on growth metrics and on the depth of what you put in the form, the pitch deck and any supporting video — so write the form for someone who has never heard of you, and be concrete about numbers you can stand behind.

The single most useful thing you can add is a specific Maruti Suzuki use case. Every programme ends in a pilot with a business unit, and the Accelerator form invites you to propose one. A startup that arrives with a plausible answer to "where inside this company would this run" is answering the question the panel is actually asking. You do not need to be an automotive company to do that — the site says so directly — but you do need to make the connection yourself.

Before you apply

Check the programme page for the current cohort's status. The Mobility Challenge publishes its problem statement and a tentative timeline, and outside that window there is nothing live to win. If you are unsure which programme fits, or want to know when the next intake opens, the platform's enquiry inbox is contact_innovation@maruti.co.in.

Maruti Suzuki Innovation is the open-innovation platform of Maruti Suzuki India Limited. It is run from the Maruti Suzuki Innovation Gym in Udyog Vihar Phase 1, Gurugram, and it exists to find startups whose technology the company can test, pilot and eventually buy. This page covers that startup platform only, not the car business.

It started in January 2019 as the Mobility & Automobile Innovation Lab, or MAIL. The name is still used in places on the site and in older press, and accelerator events are still filed under it. Today the platform runs five programmes under one umbrella, each pitched at a different stage, and each with a partner that brings the incubation craft: Nurture with IIM Calcutta Innovation Park, the Incubation Program with NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore, the Accelerator, the Mobility Challenge with T-Hub, and the Innovation Fund.

How the programmes work

All five follow the same arc. You apply, your application is screened by Maruti Suzuki business teams and the partner's mentors, and if you get through you are mentored for a few months while you work on a real Maruti Suzuki use case. The programme ends with a pitch to the company's senior management on a demo, pitch or innovation day. Winners are offered a paid proof of concept, which is the point of the whole exercise: Maruti Suzuki funds the pilot, you get to run your solution on the company's own test bed and inside its business units, and after a successful pilot you can go to market together. The site says it has enabled more than ninety proofs of concept and onboarded thirty-eight startups as business partners.

Nurture is the pre-incubation end. It is a nine-month programme for very early startups that already have a prototype, run with IIM Calcutta Innovation Park and aimed at eastern, north-eastern and central India. It works through regional idea hunts feeding a grand idea hunt; winners get cash grants, a guided visit to a Maruti Suzuki plant and, for a few, a route into one of the bigger programmes or straight into a pilot. Applications for Nurture are taken on IIM Calcutta Innovation Park's website rather than here.

The Incubation Program runs six months with NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore and is for startups from proof-of-concept to scale-up stage working on high-risk, disruptive technology. It adds regulatory guidance, investor connects and a needs assessment on top of the mentoring, and it is the one programme with a hard eligibility gate: you must be DPIIT-recognised and a technology-based company. Six cohorts have run, the sixth in progress.

The Accelerator is the platform's main programme and the one with the longest history — nine cohorts so far. It is for startups past MVP with a few customers, and it has also taken startups past product-market fit. Cohorts start with an in-person kickoff at the Innovation Gym, then move through mentoring and a product roadmap review to Innovation Day, where startups pitch to the Managing Director and business unit leaders. Winners get a company-funded pilot, cash grants, a Maruti Suzuki car and a networking trip to Japan. Alumni stay in the network afterwards, with cloud credits, investor mixers, venture-capital roundtables and the annual Startup Connect event.

The Mobility Challenge is the shortest and the most specific. Run with T-Hub, it sets one Maruti Suzuki problem statement per cohort and invites mature startups to solve it. Past statements have covered video analytics, agentic AI for marketing spend and a diagnostics assistant for service engineers; the current one is enterprise cybersecurity. It runs about two months through a pre-finale hackathon and a grand finale, with cash prizes for the top three and a paid pilot for the winners. Its founders are also offered a place in Maruti Suzuki FundRays, an investor-readiness programme the company runs with the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad for startups already in its alumni network.

The Innovation Fund sits at the end of the funnel rather than beside the others. It is a strategic minority investment route, and you cannot apply to it directly — you become eligible by finishing a paid proof of concept through one of the four programmes. Three investments are disclosed on the site: Sociograph Solutions, which builds the DaveAI platform, Amlgo Labs, and Ravity Software Solutions.

A seventh programme, Quest for Clean Air, appears on the site as a three-month deep-tech programme on air pollution in Delhi NCR, run with FITT at IIT Delhi. It has full eligibility and structure on its page but no application link and no dates, so treat it as a programme to ask about rather than one you can apply to today.

Who can apply

You do not have to be an automotive startup. The site is explicit that complementary technologies that could be used in mobility are welcome, and it asks you to explain the fit yourself in the application. Across the five programmes the focus areas are mobility and mobility infrastructure, vehicle technology, clean technology, digital transformation and Industry 4.0, and green manufacturing; Nurture adds social impact and sustainability.

The gates differ by programme. Nurture needs an Indian citizen applicant, a startup registered in India and a working prototype. The Incubation Program needs DPIIT recognition and a technology-based company. The Accelerator is open to any startup with an innovative, cost-effective idea, including not-for-profits and startups that have already raised. The Mobility Challenge accepts entities not registered in India, but only if the solution is ready to deploy at scale. Solo founders can apply. You can re-apply to a later cohort if you are not selected.

Applying is free across the programmes, and none of them takes equity — only the Innovation Fund does, and that is a separate, later decision.

Where it is

The platform is based at the Maruti Suzuki Innovation Gym, on the third floor of Platinum Tower in Udyog Vihar Phase 1, Gurugram. Programme activity runs both online and in person, with the in-person parts at the Gym, at the partner's campus, or at a Maruti Suzuki plant.