IIT Ropar launches ‘100 Startups 100 Days’ ahead of India AI Impact Summit 2026

Summary

IIT Ropar announced a national deep-tech acceleration initiative, ‘100 Startups 100 Days,’ positioned as a pre-event tied to the India AI Impact Summit 2026. The program aims to pull early-stage teams into a time-boxed sprint with mentoring, access to technical resources, and pathways to grants or investment, with a focus spanning AI-adjacent deep-tech areas like AgriTech, IoT, and cyber-physical systems. The significance isn’t the slogan—it’s the infrastructure: India is steadily building repeatable mechanisms that move research, incubation, and capital into the same room, which is what turns scattered talent into an ecosystem. For the AGI race, the long-term leverage is talent density and application flywheels: accelerators that push real deployments create datasets, domain expertise, and operational know-how that pure model labs often lack. It’s also a signal that India is increasingly framing AI leadership through “Global South” convening power, not just model-building benchmarks.