National Quantum Mission to disburse startups grants in three months

CHENNAI: The National Quantum Mission (NQM) will disburse significant grants to around 15 startups in the next three months and has finalised project proposals and thematic hubs. It hopes to fund the startups in the space starting from Rs 2 crore, going up to Rs 25 crore, based on their technology readiness level and other factors.

The idea is to crowd-in private capital to this deep-tech sector, Ajai Chowdhury, chairman of NQM mission governing board, told TOI.

“We have already done initial discussions with many startups, invited proposals. Some of them have sent their proposals. We thought we would give them a good start and then the venture capitalists will feel confident about investing.”

He further said while the government grants to the startups are usually in the range of Rs 50 lakh – 1 crore, the NQM decided the size of the investments higher given the capital-intensive nature of the quantum technologies. This will be disbursed from the Rs 6,000crore corpus of NQM. However, the exact size of the funding for startups has not been finalised.

Startups play an important role in the quantum mission and can take research into commercial products, which academic institutes and scientists (principal investigators) won’t cover, he said.

Many of the startups to receive grants are expected to be in communication and cryptography while some are in hardware and algorithms space. Around 50 startups are working in quantum technologies in the country.

Ajai Chowdhury further said that proposals for various projects and thematic hubs under the National Quantum Mission have been finalised and are waiting for approval from the minister.

He said four thematic hubs would be set up as a section - 8 (not-for-profit) companies and would be governed by a chief executive.

A coordination centre is also being set up at IIT- Kanpur in Noida. It will evaluate progress of various projects every six months.

On building the quantum computing systems, he said the mission would work with 3- 4 different technologies and 3-4 teams- who would then work parallelly on the effort.


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