Sandip TBI

Pick the right route in

SANDIP TBI has two quite different doors, and they suit different founders.

• Ordinary incubation is the general route. It is open all year, it accepts you at any stage from an idea to an operating business, and it is paid.
• The MeitY TIDE 2.0 routes are free to the founder and carry grant support, but they only open when a call is announced, they are restricted to ICT-enabled solutions, and they come with strict citizenship, education and full-time-commitment rules.

If you are not incorporated yet, start with pre-incubation. It explicitly accepts individual innovators, proprietorships and partnership firms for the first six months. You move into the twelve-month incubation stage once you have an LLP or a company.

How applications work

• Write to the incubator asking to enrol as a startup under SANDIP TBI. The enrolment address is manager@sandipincubator.org; general questions go to info@sandipincubator.org.
• Send the incubation application form back with all the supporting documents attached, to the same address.
• The team verifies and approves it before anything else happens.
• Ask for the fee schedule at this point. Incubation is paid and the rates are not published, so get them in writing before you sign.
• Enrolment finishes with a signed agreement with SANDIP TBI.

There is no online application portal of the incubator's own, and no published deadline — the process reads as rolling.

If you are going for a TIDE 2.0 route

• Calls open for roughly a month at a time, so watch the site rather than waiting to be told.
• Selection is a shortlist followed by a presentation to a committee, then a final list.
• The fellowship route wants an idea or prototype; the grant route wants a working proof of concept you can show.
• The scale-up grant is only for startups already incubated at SANDIP TBI, and the incubator forwards endorsed proposals to the ministry, which makes the final call.
• Get your paperwork in order early: proof of Indian citizenship, your degree or diploma with work experience where relevant, and a written business plan with an investment proposal.
• You cannot hold another fellowship or grant for the same work at the same time, and you will be expected to register a company within three months of acceptance.

What reviewers look for

• One founder able to work on this full time. It is stated for every programme.
• A technology solution, not a service business. Ideas with little or no technology innovation, or that are already weeks from commercialisation, are discouraged from the grant routes.
• Real demand. The scale-up route asks for a validated product with demonstrable market demand before it will consider you.
• A fit with one of the sixteen thrust areas, or with the national priority domains the ministry programmes name.

Before you commit

The site has no team page, so you will not know who you are dealing with until you write in. Ask who your mentor would be, what the co-working and Makers Space access actually includes, and what the incubation charges cover. If you are applying under the seed fund scheme, apply on the national seed fund portal and name SANDIP TBI as your incubator there.

SANDIP TBI is a not-for-profit technology business incubator on the Sandip Foundation campus at Mahiravani, Trimbak Road, Nashik. Its name is short for Startup Assets Nurturing through Diversified and Innovative Platforms. It is run by SANDIP Incubator Association, a Section 8 company, and its own pages describe it as supported by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Its about page also says it was promoted by Sandip University.

The incubator says its aim is to turn technology ideas in science and engineering into products, processes and services, and to build an entrepreneurial culture in its parent institution and in other colleges around Nashik. It lists sixteen thrust areas, which range from healthcare, education and agriculture to AI and machine learning, drones, cyber security, robotics, food processing and digital payments.

How incubation works

The incubator's brochure sets out a six-step enrolment. You email SANDIP TBI asking to enrol, then send the incubation application form with your documents to the same address. The team verifies and approves the application, you pay the incubation charges set out in its annexure, and enrolment is confirmed with a signed agreement.

There are two stages. Pre-incubation runs for the first six months and is open to individual innovators, proprietorships and partnership firms — you do not need an incorporated company to start. Incubation runs for the twelve months after pre-incubation and is for LLPs, private limited companies, limited companies and partnership firms. Incubation is a paid programme; the rate card is not published on the site, so ask for it when you write in.

Separately, SANDIP TBI runs three routes funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under its TIDE 2.0 programme — an Entrepreneur-in-Residence fellowship, a proof-of-concept to product grant, and a scale-up grant for startups already incubated there. Its pages describe itself as a TIDE 2.0 G3 centre. All three run for twelve months and all three carry grant support for selected participants. The last dated milestone anywhere on its TIDE 2.0 pages is August 2025, so treat the calls as between intakes unless the site says otherwise. The incubator also says it is a recognised incubator under the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme, where applications go through the national seed fund portal rather than to SANDIP TBI directly.

Who can apply

The brochure's own list of who can apply is broad: an innovative idea, a prototype model, prototype development, a minimum viable product, a ready-to-market product, or an established organisation. No age, category or district restriction is stated for ordinary incubation, and outside founders are not asked to be students or staff of the host colleges. The only structural gate is the entity type — individuals and unincorporated firms go into pre-incubation first, and the incubation stage is for registered entities.

The TIDE 2.0 routes are much tighter, because the rules are the ministry's rather than the incubator's. You must be an Indian citizen, your solution must be ICT-enabled and sit in one of the national priority areas, at least one team member must work on it full time, and you cannot hold a fellowship or grant from another funding body at the same time. You also need either four years of full-time undergraduate or postgraduate study in science or engineering, or a three-year degree or diploma plus two years of work experience. For the Entrepreneur-in-Residence route the incubator's pages add that the innovator should be under 35, should be a first-generation entrepreneur with no other income, and must register a company within three months of accepting the fellowship. The scale-up grant is only open to startups already incubated at SANDIP TBI.

Facilities

The facilities page lists co-working space, a Makers Space, high-speed internet and access to Sandip Foundation's campus infrastructure. The TIDE 2.0 pages refer to a digital fabrication lab that programme participants can use to build prototypes. Alongside the space, the incubator lists advisory services, mentorship, marketing assistance, networking assistance, workshops, legal and IPR support, and accounting and financial management.

Mentoring is the offer the incubator leads with. It says it brings in experts from different industry domains and describes a network of chief executives and senior leaders from business houses who guide entrepreneurs.

Scale

The home page reports 65 or more startups incubated, more than five IP filings, more than twenty memoranda of understanding signed, startups across more than twenty sectors, more than sixty jobs created by its startups and more than two thousand students and startups reached. These are its own undated figures, not audited ones, and the same page gives sectors as twenty-plus while the thrust areas page lists sixteen.

The TIDE 2.0 pages report two calls announced for each of the fellowship and grant routes, more than 150 applications for the fellowship and more than 200 for the grant, with four people supported on each. Those pages contradict themselves in places — the grant block lists both one and two products commercialised, and repeats the fellowship count inside the grant's own figures — so the safest reading is that around eight startups have been funded across both routes, which is what the home page says.

Its current portfolio page names eighteen startups with their companies, founders and sectors, including Prepbook in exam preparation, Navratna Innovation's DigiClean sanitation robots, drone companies NxtQube, FlyLab Solutions and SKYCIRCUIT Innovations, Trace Ostock Global's Urjafarms organic commodities marketplace, Clairifier's outdoor air purifiers and Integrated Rehabtech Systems' Ultramotiv rehabilitation technology. A past incubatees page lists roughly twenty more.

Who runs it and where

The site names no chief executive, director or board anywhere, and has no team page and no careers page. The published contacts are a general enquiry address and a manager's address used for enrolment, plus a phone number in the brochure. Everything runs from the single Nashik campus at Mahiravani on Trimbak Road; there are no other branches.

The events page records activity from around 2021 and 2022 — IEEE entrepreneurship bootcamps run with the host engineering college, faculty development programmes, a workshop on the legal side of starting up, sessions on going from an idea to a validated product, and two rounds of a startup pitch series.