TiHAN, IIT Hyderabad

Pick the right call

TiHAN lists research calls and founder calls in the same place, so start by matching yourself to one:

• You are an individual with an idea and no company yet: the Entrepreneur in Residence fellowship. It runs six months and does not need a registered company.
• You have a registered startup and a project to build: the Call for Startup Proposals. Twelve months.
• You have a startup with a track record and want a bigger push: the SSS call. Twelve months.
• You are a faculty member or work at a research institution: the R&DI call or the faculty fellowship. These are not startup routes.
• You want to run training programmes: the skill-development calls.

Check the incubation condition before anything else

The Startup and SSS calls ask that you are already incubated at an incubation centre or a technology or research park supported by a Central or State government, and that you attach a letter from that incubator. If you are not incubated anywhere, sort that out first — it is the condition most likely to end your application before it is read. TiHAN itself is a funding hub, not an incubator; IIT Hyderabad's own incubator, iTIC, is a separate organisation.

What you need ready

• Proof that you are an Indian company with at least 51 per cent Indian shareholding.
• Your Startup India registration, or an undertaking to register if selected.
• Recent balance sheets.
• The incubation letter described above.
• Your proposal written in TiHAN's Annexure A template, exported as one PDF.

For the Entrepreneur in Residence route you need a government ID, evidence of your full-time education, and a description of your experience and your business idea instead.

How applications work

• Open the call page from the Partner with Us listing and download the Annexure A template linked there.
• Write the proposal in that template. Keep everything in one PDF, including supporting documents — the calls say so explicitly and a split submission risks losing attachments.
• Upload it through the online form linked on the call page.
• Send questions to office.tihan@iith.ac.in.
• The R&DI call also needs an endorsement letter from the head of your institution, on TiHAN's Annexure B template.

What proposals are judged on

TiHAN does not publish a selection process or scoring criteria, so go by what the calls repeat. They ask for translational technology work with commercialisation in view, inside the named thrust areas — autonomous navigation for ground, aerial and water vehicles, and applications in agriculture, defence, disaster management, infrastructure monitoring, surveillance and environmental monitoring. Proposals that read as general software or general robotics, without an autonomous navigation core, are a poor fit. SSS in particular asks for a proven track record, so show what you have already shipped.

Timing

The Entrepreneur in Residence, Startup and SSS calls are described as rolling advertisements with no closing date, so you can apply whenever you are ready. The dated calls — the R&DI round and the ST-category startup round — have both passed their last dates, and the listing page has been slow to re-badge them, so check the date on the call's own page rather than the badge on the listing.

If you mainly want the testbed

Access to the proving grounds, vertiport, rainfall simulator and drone labs is handled by enquiry, not by an application form. Write to office.tihan@iith.ac.in describing what you want to test.

TiHAN is the Technology Innovation Hub on Autonomous Navigation at IIT Hyderabad. It is run by NM-ICPS TiHAN Foundation, a Section 8 company set up at IIT Hyderabad under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems and funded by the Department of Science and Technology. It sits on the IIT Hyderabad campus at Kandi, Sangareddy, in Telangana.

TiHAN is one of 25 Technology Innovation Hubs set up across India under that mission, and the one whose subject is autonomous navigation and smart mobility. Its work covers autonomous ground, aerial and water-surface vehicles, drones and air mobility, connected vehicles and driver-assistance systems, robotics, and the machine learning, edge computing and communication layers underneath them. TiHAN says it is recognised as a Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and that it is ISO 9001:2015 certified.

What TiHAN is, and what it is not

TiHAN is not IIT Hyderabad's incubator, and it is worth being clear about that before you apply. IIT Hyderabad's incubator is iTIC, a separate organisation, which TiHAN lists among its academic partners; IIT Hyderabad's faculty in charge of incubation, innovation and startups sits on TiHAN's governing body. TiHAN's own startup calls ask the applicant to already be incubated at an incubation centre or technology or research park backed by a Central or State government, and to send a letter from that incubator with the proposal. So the pattern is that somebody else incubates you and TiHAN funds the work. The one route that does not ask for this is the Entrepreneur in Residence fellowship, which is open to individuals who have not registered a company yet.

How the funding calls work

Everything TiHAN funds runs as an open call, listed together on its Partner with Us page. Three of them are open on a rolling basis rather than to a deadline: Entrepreneur in Residence, Startup Proposals and SSS Proposals. Each call has its own page setting out the thrust areas, the eligibility conditions and the project length, and each links a proposal template TiHAN calls Annexure A. You write your proposal in that template, save it as a single PDF and upload it through the online application form linked from the call page. Questions go to the hub office inbox, office.tihan@iith.ac.in.

The thrust areas are the same across the startup-facing calls. TiHAN wants autonomous and intelligent navigation for ground, aerial and water-surface vehicles; applications in agriculture, defence and disaster management; infrastructure monitoring for power lines, pipelines, construction and railway tracks; maritime, aerial and terrestrial surveillance; and environmental monitoring. On the technology side it names machine learning for navigation and multi-sensor data, internet-of-things and cyber-physical architectures for Indian conditions, DSRC and C-V2X communications, edge computing, robotics, smart-mobility design, vehicle swarms, and the control, power and design side of drones and remotely operated vehicles. Proposals are expected to aim at translational work with a commercial end in view, not at pure research.

TiHAN also runs calls that are not founder routes, and they sit in the same list, so read the eligibility before you spend time on one. The R&DI call is for scientists, engineers and faculty at universities and registered research institutions and needs an endorsement letter from the head of the institution. A faculty fellowship invites teaching staff from centrally funded technical institutions and IIITs. Skill-development calls invite organisations to propose training programmes.

Who can apply

The Entrepreneur in Residence fellowship is for individuals. You need to be an Indian citizen with a government ID, to have completed or be pursuing full-time education at undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral or post-doctoral level, to have relevant experience, and to bring a scalable technology business idea. No company is required.

The Startup Proposals and SSS calls are for companies. You need an Indian company with at least 51 per cent Indian shareholding, registered under the Companies Act or meeting the Startup India definition of a startup. You may apply before registering as a startup, but you have to register if you are selected. You must already be incubated at a government-supported incubation centre or technology or research park, and you submit balance sheets and proof of registration with the proposal. SSS asks on top for a proven track record in TiHAN's core areas.

A separate call for startup proposals from ST-category founders ran on the same terms with a shorter project budget; its deadline has passed, though the listing page still shows it. It is worth watching for a repeat.

Facilities

TiHAN's testbed at IIT Hyderabad is the reason many founders come. It includes proving grounds and test tracks, road infrastructure with smart poles and signalised and unsignalised intersections, drone runways and landing areas, a DGCA-compliant vertiport, hangars, ground control stations and simulation tools. There are labs for vehicle design and drive-by-wire integration, drone propulsion testing, advanced air mobility, edge computing, 3D printing and connected-vehicle testing, plus a rainfall simulator and a wind shaper for testing sensors in rain, fog and wind. TiHAN says testing follows ISO, NCAP and UNECE standards, and that its drone propulsion testing facility is NABL-accredited to ISO/IEC 17025. The testbed page asks you to contact the hub for access rather than listing a booking process.

Courses and training

TiHAN runs online certificate courses that anyone can enrol in, separate from its funding calls: a six-month programme in AI with autonomous vehicle technology open from class 12 upwards, short certification programmes on autonomous drone technology and on future mobility with driver-assistance systems, and a longer driver-assistance perception course run with CADFEM. It also runs skill-development workshops with partner institutions across the country.

Who runs it

Prof. B. S. Murty, Director of IIT Hyderabad, chairs the hub. Prof. Rajalakshmi P is Project Director and Member-Secretary, with Dr. Santhosh Reddy D as Hub Executive Officer and Dr. Syam Narayanan S as Hub Technical Officer. The governing body brings in the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Quality Council of India and the Automotive Research Association of India, alongside industry figures from Cyient, Tejas Networks, Myelin Foundry and Athera Venture Partners.

TiHAN hires on a rolling basis and lists its open roles on its careers page: post-doctoral fellows, junior and senior research assistant fellows, a technical officer, a business development manager and internships, all based at IIT Hyderabad.