Bharti Airtel on Thursday launched 'Airtel India Startup Innovation Challenge' in partnership with Invest India that will let early-stage technology companies demonstrate differentiated solutions.

The challenge invites early-stage Indian startups to demonstrate solutions for 5G, IoT, Cloud Communications, Digital Advertising and Digital Entertainment.

"India's startup ecosystem is now a globally celebrated story and our young technology companies are doing some phenomenal work in building solutions that solve hard problems," Adarsh Nair, Chief Product Officer, Bharti Airtel, said in a statement.

"As a core enabler of this emerging digital ecosystem, Airtel is thrilled to be working with the Government of India to help early-stage companies navigate their growth journeys and scale up quickly and sustainably," Nair added.

The top 10 winners will win cash prizes, get access to Airtel's Innovation Lab and will be able to leverage Airtel's advanced technology infrastructure to scale up their use cases and even co-innovate with Airtel's engineering teams.

"On behalf of Airtel, I invite companies to be a part of this challenge and benefit from Airtel's deep technological capabilities," Nair said.

A select few of the 10 startups shall be offered to be on-boarded onto the Airtel Startup Accelerator Programme and hyper-scale their company with Airtel.

Under this programme, startups gain access to Airtel's core platform strengths of data, distribution, network and payments. Further, startups get access to Airtel's global partner ecosystem and advisory from Airtel's executive team.

"We look forward to enable India's young technology startups through the Startup Innovation Challenge in partnership with Bharti Airtel," said Deepak Bagla, MD & CEO, Invest India.

Applications for the challenge will close on January 24, 2022, and the results will be announced on February 14, 2022.