Foundation for Technology & Business Incubation (FTBI), NIT Rourkela

Work out which door to knock on

FTBI has two separate routes and they are not interchangeable. One is incubation itself — a place, space and services, applied for on FTBI's own forms at any time. The other is a funding scheme: TIDE 2.0, NIDHI-PRAYAS, NIDHI-EIR, the MCL Seed Fund, the TEXMiN mining grants or MeitY GENESIS, each with its own eligibility, its own call and its own deadline. Applying for incubation does not put you in a scheme, and most schemes expect you to be pre-incubated or incubated with FTBI first.

Check the date before you spend an evening on a form. Several scheme pages stay live long after their call closes — the TIDE 2.0, NIDHI-PRAYAS and NIDHI-EIR pages all still show deadlines that have passed. If a page shows an old date, email FTBI and ask when the next round opens rather than filling in the form.

How applications work

• Incubation. Send your business plan in the Form 2A format, or submit Form 2A and Form 2B together. There is a non-refundable application fee and an admission fee covering six months of pre-incubation, both paid by bank transfer in favour of FTBI, NIT Rourkela. Get in before the six months lapse or the application dies.
• Funding schemes. Each call links to its own application form. The TEXMiN mining grants also want a signed hard copy delivered to the FTBI office plus a scanned copy emailed to ftbi@nitrkl.ac.in — FTBI says unsigned or incomplete applications are not considered.
• Fab Lab. You do not apply. Machines are booked by the hour, and there is a separate item requisition route for startups.

What you need in place first

Get the paperwork right before anything else, because most of the gates are documentary rather than editorial.

• Incubation needs a company registered with the Registrar of Companies. An idea with no entity cannot be incubated, though it can go the NIDHI-PRAYAS route as an individual innovator.
• GENESIS needs a DPIIT recognition certificate, a private limited company with at least 51% Indian ownership, and registration in a Tier-II or Tier-III city. The pilot component additionally needs a live purchase or work order from a qualifying large organisation. Startups already funded under TIDE 2.0 scale-up or SAMRIDH are barred.
• NIDHI-PRAYAS needs a physical product prototype, an Indian-incorporated company under seven years old with a low turnover if you already have one, and a no-objection certificate from your employer or institute if you are employed or still studying.
• The MCL Seed Fund needs a signed incubation agreement with FTBI, audited annual statements, a full business plan, a record of every funding you have taken before, and a three-year cash flow projection.
• The TEXMiN mining grants need an NIT Rourkela affiliation and a mentor.

How selection works

FTBI runs a compulsory induction round for incubation — expect to present, not just submit. Funding decisions go to a committee, and every scheme page says the decision is final. Beyond that FTBI publishes little about criteria, so lean on what the pages do say they look for: a clear road to commercialisation, real technology content rather than a thin product, and IP you own or have the right to use. NIDHI-PRAYAS states a preference for women innovators, young innovators, and applicants who have bootstrapped or already have co-investment lined up. GENESIS prefers startups with patents filed or granted. NIDHI-EIR discourages anyone whose idea is close to market already — it is built for long-gestation, high-uncertainty technology.

What reviewers look for

Write for a committee of engineering academics. The schemes FTBI runs are weighted towards hardware, mining, materials, manufacturing, clean energy, water, agriculture, health and IoT, and towards ideas that came out of publicly funded research. Show the prototype, be concrete about what the money buys, and say plainly who owns the IP. If you are applying from outside the institute, say so and say why NIT Rourkela's labs and professors are the right place for your build — that is the argument the induction round is there to hear.

Foundation for Technology & Business Incubation (FTBI) is the incubator of National Institute of Technology Rourkela, in Rourkela, Odisha. It is a separate legal body from the institute — a Section 8 not-for-profit company — housed under the institute's Centre for Technology Innovation and Industry Relations (TIIR) and supported by the National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB) of the Department of Science and Technology. Its office is in the TIIR Building on the NIT Rourkela campus.

FTBI is the body a founder actually applies to. NIT Rourkela itself runs no separate startup intake; the institute's own site lists FTBI under its resources and links straight to it.

How incubation works

Admission runs on forms rather than an online portal. You send FTBI a business plan in its own Form 2A format, or submit Form 2A along with Form 2B, the registration form. There is a non-refundable application fee and a separate admission fee that covers six months of pre-incubation, both paid into FTBI's account. If you do not take up the place within those six months the application lapses. Everyone who applies has to clear an induction round before a place is confirmed.

Once you are in, FTBI gives incubated companies office space with electricity, water and round-the-clock internet included, mentoring from NIT Rourkela professors, access to the institute's equipment, meeting and conference rooms, an auditorium, printing, and admin support. It also lists a set of professional services on top of the space: company secretary, accounting, legal and IP work, an advisory committee, joint technology development, product and service development, go-to-market strategy, preparation for later institutional funding rounds, bank lending and credit assessment, and introductions to investors, angels and venture funds.

FTBI separates pre-incubation from full incubation, and publishes its pre-incubation teams by name and idea. Its pages define three kinds of money it can pass on — fellowships under the entrepreneur-in-residence route, grants against a proof of concept, and seed loans, which are debt with repayment terms — so which one you get depends on the scheme you come in through.

Who can apply

Incubation is explicitly open to more than the campus. FTBI names four groups: faculty, alumni and students of NIT Rourkela; the technology or R&D arm of an existing small or medium enterprise, an industry association or an R&D company that wants a close technology link with the institute; and outside candidates. The hard gate is corporate form — a company has to be registered with the Registrar of Companies before it can be incubated.

The funding calls narrow that differently, so read each one. The Mining CPS grants FTBI runs with TEXMiN are restricted to NIT Rourkela students, alumni, faculty and affiliated innovators. The MeitY GENESIS calls are open to any DPIIT-recognised private limited company with majority Indian ownership registered in a Tier-II or Tier-III city, and nothing about them requires a link to the institute. The DST NIDHI-PRAYAS route takes individual innovators with no company at all, as long as the prototype is a physical product — it excludes pure software, e-commerce, app-only and services ideas.

Programmes and schemes

FTBI hosts several national schemes rather than one flagship cohort. It states on its own page that it is a Group 3 incubation centre under the Ministry of Electronics and IT's TIDE 2.0 scheme. It runs DST's NIDHI-PRAYAS prototype route and DST's NIDHI entrepreneur-in-residence fellowship. It runs the MCL Seed Fund out of Mahanadi Coalfields' corporate social responsibility budget, for companies already incubated at FTBI. With the TEXMiN Foundation it runs a Mining Cyber-Physical Systems Centre of Excellence with a student fellowship, a faculty technology development grant and a pre-incubation grant. And it hosts MeitY GENESIS, which has both a matching-investment component for startups that have already attracted a private investor and a pilot component for startups holding a purchase or work order from a large corporate, PSU or government department.

The dates matter here. GENESIS and the TEXMiN fellowship carry 2026 deadlines. The TIDE 2.0, NIDHI-PRAYAS and NIDHI-EIR pages still show deadlines from 2023 to 2025, so those are between intakes — worth watching rather than applying to today.

Facilities

FTBI describes its building as around 10,000 square metres of floor space with central air conditioning, underground parking, lifts, lab space and a manufacturing area, sized to hold several industrial and technical tenants at once setting up R&D and product development units. Alongside it FTBI runs a Fab Lab, which it also calls the DST PRAYAS Shala: laser cutting, milling, moulding, an automated high-pressure machine, 3D printing, UV printing and packaging, plus a longer list of woodworking and measurement tools. Machines are booked by the hour at published rates, so the lab is usable by people who are not resident incubatees.

Scale

Every headline number FTBI publishes is its own, undated, and its pages do not agree with each other. The homepage counts both "100+ Start-up Companies" and "150+ Incubatees", while the named incubatee list holds about two dozen tiles. It counts "40+ Pre-incubatee Teams" where the pre-incubation page lists 28. We have not published a startup count for that reason. The counters it gives that nothing else contradicts are 35 or more patents filed with 19 or more granted, and 800 or more jobs created. FTBI also says it received the Bharat Incubator Award 2025 at the 4th Bharat Entrepreneurship Summit in New Delhi.

Who runs it

Mr. Chiranjibi Samal is the chief executive officer and Prof. Subrata Kumar Panda is the president. The board of directors is chaired by the Director of NIT Rourkela, Prof. K. Umamaheshwar Rao. A separate steering committee, chaired by Prof. Himanshu Bhushan Sahu, carries eight NIT Rourkela academics plus the CEO. Supporting and funding organisations FTBI names include the Department of Science and Technology, Startup India, Startup Odisha, the Odisha government's Department of Planning and Convergence, GAIL, SAIL's Rourkela Steel Plant, Mahanadi Coalfields and the institute's own alumni relations centre.

Contact and careers

FTBI is at the TIIR Building, TI-013, ground floor, NIT Rourkela, Odisha 769008, and answers on ftbi@nitrkl.ac.in. It keeps a careers page for roles at FTBI itself, which is currently empty, and a separate page for jobs at its startups. A note on its two websites: FTBI has a newer site on the institute's own domain and an older one that still carries all the scheme detail, and the institute's homepage links the older one — so if a scheme page on the new site does not open, the older site is where to look.