Airtel announces winners of First “Airtel IQ Hackathon”

Bharti Airtel (“Airtel”), India’s premier communications solutions provider today announced winners of first ever “Airtel IQ” hackathon. Gurgaon based Green Receipt, Frazor BFSI from Udaipur and Delhi’s Vizard Info were declared winners by the jury. The hackathon was launched in September this year with the objective of identifying and building new- age business solutions across five key sectors of economy such as BFSI, Retail & Ecommerce, Travel and hospitality, Ed-Tech and Contact centre which can potentially improve livelihoods and contribute to the sustainable and economic growth of the country.

The Hackathon received over 9000 entries confirming participation, from students, corporates and ISV’s. These were further shortlisted to 300 then to 23 in semi-finals from which 10 teams were invited to participate in a two-round finale. The finale saw teams present their solution to a jury comprising Mr Vineeth R Nair, Director – IT, Byju’s, Ms Jigyasa Kishore, Chief Strategy Officer – Moglix and Mr Gaurav Agnihotri from Airtel.

The winners received a sum of Rs. 20 lacs as cash award and the best ideas amongst them are eligible to receive potential funding from Airtel’s Start-up accelerator program. All the participants can leverage Airtel’s core platform strengths of data, distribution, network and payments besides its partner ecosystem.

The Hackathon witnessed number of ground-breaking solutions aimed at solving real-world business and customer experience problems- from providing travel convenience, delivering English literacy curriculum to the students in the remotest locations of India, to enabling single-click payment of gas bills and others.

Speaking about the Hackathon, Abhishek Biswal – Business Head, Airtel IQ said, “We are delighted with the scale and level of entries received in this hackathon. We are looking forward to working with all the participants- ISVs, developers to build innovative solutions. These robust, scalable solutions will help Enterprises, MSMEs to deliver world-class customer experience and further boost the ease of doing business in India.”

The Winners

1. Green Receipt – Gurgaon, Category – BFSI & Retail
2. Frazor BFSI – Udaipur, Category – CRM
3. Vizard Info – Delhi, Category – Retail and Hyperpersonalisation

The hackathon is part of a range of projects Airtel has initiated with the goal of developing and enhancing India’s technology talent and it will become an annual feature going forward.