Airtel IQ Hackathon Launched For Startups To Build New-Age Business Solutions On WhatsApp

Telecom giant Bharti Airtel has launched “Airtel IQ” hackathon in partnership with Meta-owned WhatsApp to identify and build new-age business solutions using WhatsApp Business Platform.

As part of the hackathon, winners will get prizes worth INR 1 Cr and business mentorship from WhatsApp and Airtel across product, engineering, and business.

Airtel IQ will also offer winners free conversations on WhatsApp Business Platform and WhatsApp API to help them reduce their operating costs and focus on building the future of conversational experience using chat-based experiences on WhatsApp Business Platform, Airtel said in a statement.

WhatsApp Business Platform is a programming language interface that allows businesses to communicate with their customers on scale through its application programming interfaces (APIs).

The program, in addition to providing funding in the range of $500K– $2Mn, will also let the startups have access to Airtel’s core platform strengths of data, distribution, network, and payments, the statement added.

The telco has identified five key sectors – ecommerce, edtech, banking and financial services (BFSI), travel and tourism, and contact centre operations – for the program. 

“This entire hackathon is in the area of cloud communication. The market of cloud communication is an INR 12,000 Cr market today and it is going to be INR 15,000 Cr by 2025,” Adarsh Nair, CEO of Airtel Digital, told Inc42.

According to Nair, contextual conversation is a very important area for most of the industries Airtel has been prioritising for this program. 

Airtel IQ is a customer data platform that centralises the intelligence that all channels can respond to a customer in a personalised communication, he explained. 

“Airtel IQ is a cloud communication offering that is telco integrated. This hackathon for us is to ask all startups across India to come on Airtel IQ and WhatsApp, and build conversational AI products on top of us,” Nair added.

This is not the first time when Airtel has collaborated with startups. In 2019, the telco launched its startup accelerator program to support the growth of early-stage Indian tech startups.

The accelerator currently has eight startups in its portfolio, Nair said. Besides, few of the startups from the Hackathon may also get added to the accelerator program later.

“We have invested $40 Bn in creating the digital fibre as the backbone of the company. We believe a very big part of the future of our nation is young startups. Now, once we give this infrastructure to our startups, the next thing you want to do is basically make sure that it becomes more and more easier for startups to innovate,” Nair said. 

With the exponential rise in the number of startups in the country over the last few years, corporates have started collaborating with them, besides investing and acquiring them, to scale up their innovations. The startup accelerator of Reliance Industries, JioGenNext, has incubated 170 startups over the last 7 years, the Mukesh Ambani-led company recently said in its annual report for financial year 2021-22.

According to the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), India has over 73,000 recognised startups. Of these, 107 startups have entered the unicorn club, with Tata1mg being the latest one to join the coveted club. Besides, many new-age tech startups, including Zomato, Nykaa, and Paytm, listed on the stock exchanges over the last year or so.