CENTRE FOR INNOVATION
AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
AT IIIT HYDERABAD
Fostering DeepTech Innovation
Cover story
Solvathon 2026 | Innovating the Future of Healthcare
Solvathon 2026 marked the latest edition of India’s flagship health-technology innovation challenge, jointly organised by Apollo Research and Innovations (ARI) in partnership with CIE IIIT Hyderabad under the Transforming Healthcare with IT (THIT) initiative. The 36-hour innovation sprint brought together students, startups, clinicians, and technologists to collaboratively build scalable, real-world healthcare solutions. Teams worked intensively on diverse problem statements ranging from AI-powered clinical decision tools and voice-enabled healthcare assistants to drug interaction checkers, demonstrating the growing role of technology in transforming patient care and clinical workflows.
The challenge concluded with Team Chikit Sync (Statement 8) emerging as the Winner, followed by SyncMed (Statement 7) as the 1st Runner Up and Codex (Statement 3) as the 2nd Runner Up. Along with cash prizes, winners received mentorship opportunities aimed at accelerating their solutions toward real-world deployment. Solvathon 2026 once again reinforced CIE IIITH’s commitment to fostering collaborative, research-driven healthcare innovation with tangible societal impact.
Happenings @ CIE
The Founders Round Table | Jan 28, 2026
CIE IIITH hosted The Founders Round Table on January 28, 2026, bringing together early-stage founders and investor-mentors to discuss practical strategies for building strong startup foundations. The session highlighted key lessons around customer discovery, product validation, pre-seed experimentation, funding readiness, and community-led growth. Speakers emphasized the importance of focusing on a clearly defined customer segment, validating real pain points, treating pre-seed as a structured learning phase, and aligning funding with product–market fit
eChai AI x CIE | Jan 23, 2026
CIE IIIT Hyderabad hosted the eChai AI x SaaS Founders Meetup on January 23, 2026, bringing together founders, builders, operators, and product leaders to discuss how AI is transforming the SaaS landscape. The session featured practical insights on building and scaling AI-driven products, conversations around customer adoption and technical challenges, and engaging discussions on growth strategies, followed by meaningful networking within the startup ecosystem.
Spotlight
TakeMe2Space’s MOI-1 Mission Highlights Bold Step Toward Orbital AI Computing
CIE-incubated TakeMe2Space, founded by Hyderabad’s Ronak Samantray, launched MOI-1 the world’s first space cybercafe with Nvidia GPU for onboard AI processing aboard ISRO’s PSLV-C62 mission on Jan 12, 2026, despite the rocket’s third-stage anomaly that lost 16 satellites including TakeMe2Space’s 14kg orbital computing payload designed for $2/min real-time data analysis in space. The Hyderabad deeptech startup, authorized by IN-SPACe, aims to reduce ground dependency for space research while founder Ronak remains confident about quick recovery for their next orbital data center mission, exemplifying CIE’s support for resilient space innovation.
Call For Applications
RootnodeA 3-month program that connects startups with IIIT Hyderabad’s research experts to tackle tech challenges. Get focused guidance, tech validation, and research-backed product support to strengthen your innovation.
DT CoWorkzCollaborate in a research-driven space for Gen AI, NLP, Robotics, and ML startups. Access IIITH research, expert advisory, and a thriving innovation ecosystem.
Meity TIDE 2.0
CIE-IIITH presents MeitY TIDE 2.0, a golden opportunity for trailblazing minds in AI/ML, Blockchain, IoT, Data Science, and Robotics. Unlock mentorship and funding up to INR 7 Lakhs!
In News
Top 9 Accelerators and Incubators in Hyderabad (2026)
Hyderabad is a key center for new businesses in India, supported by a strong network of accelerators and incubators. These programs provide essential resources and funding to help early-stage startups grow.
For example, DLabs has backed over 120 companies, while CIE IIIT Hyderabad has supported more than 80 startups.
IIIT Hyderabad developing tool to detect bugs in AI-generated software code
AI is being increasingly used for writing software programs, a new challenge has emerged over whether such automatically generated code is safe, reliable and correct besides being free of bugs.
To tackle this challenge, researchers at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad are developing an automated system that can detect bugs in software development, particularly in modern software that run many tasks simultaneously.
Our
Impact
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15cr+
Invested in startups
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40+
Startup Research engagement
CIE at IIIT Hyderabad is a technology incubator with rich experience in seeding, nurturing, and growing deep-tech startups in emerging segments like med-tech, tech4social, visual informatics, data engineering, and machine learning, language technologies, gaming, and robotics. CIE IIITH, with a research-led innovation as its primary mandate, focuses on amplifying technology through research collaboration and co-creation models for startups to work with research groups at IIITH.
Under the CIE umbrella, there are 3 active incubators: the Deeptech incubator (Avishkar), the Medtech incubator (Ojas) & the Social incubator (AIC). CIE also includes enabling labs such as a well-equipped Maker Lab, a Medical Electronics Calibration Lab, and a AR/VR lab. IIIT Hyderabad also includes Product Labs to seed new products from research — a pre-incubation program to seed startups from research.
In the past 15 years we have grown to be the largest academic incubator in the country, have housed over 450+ startups that have raised about 250+Cr funding, and created over 2500+ jobs. Today there are very active programs focused on emerging technology startups, research-based startups, medical technologies, and social technology startups.
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