Facebook, T-Hub float Accelerator Program to support AR/VR startups

Facebook in association with Hyderabad-based tech start-up incubator T-Hub launched an accelerator program 'India Innovation Hub Accelerator Program' on Tuesday for startups working in the Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) space in the country.

Country’s largest technology incubator T-Hub and global social media behemoth Facebook will identify 8-10 startups who are working in the area of healthtech, industrial manufacturing, education, corporate learning and development, hardware and accessories positioning, gesture and eye tracking, among others.

The program, which is going to mentor these startups to scale up their businesses, will accept applications till February-end and the accelerator program will start in April.

In addition, the qualified startups will be directly accepted to the Facebook Start program and could access T-Hub's network of mentors, industry experts, investors, service providers, and community, reports ET.

The startups will be given an opportunity to develop Proof of Concept (PoC) on the prioritized solution and showcase their PoC to key executives of Facebook and T-Hub during the 'Demo Day' at T-Hub Hyderabad.

Accelerator and incubation program in India

Earlier, this month Kerala Startup Mission or KSUM in association with Zone Startups India launched ‘Kerala Accelerator Program’, to promote revenue making startups across the country.

In November, India’s largest technology incubator T-Hub announced the launch of its first accelerator programme in collaboration with Microsoft. The three months long programme will be launched in February 2018.

In the same month, T-Hub along with US-based aerospace giant Boeing also launched the ‘Boeing HorizonX India Innovation Challenge 1.0’, to tackle complex challenges in the areas of autonomous and unmanned systems, advanced manufacturing, industrial IOT and automation, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Last week, PM Narendra Modi, along with Benjamin Netanyahu who was on a six-day visit to India, inaugurated an entrepreneurship/incubation centre iCreate in Ahmedabad.

Last month, digital payment behemoth Paytm has launched ‘Indian Open Source Project Incubator’, with an aim to enable building and sharing of solutions among technology developers in India.

The incubator programme of Paytm is the part of ‘Paytm – Build for India’ initiative. The first batch of the incubator will run for 6 months started on January 1, 2018.