Qualcomm India on Thursday said it has signed a bilateral cooperation agreement with the Startup Hub (MSH) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to bring the benefits of its "Qualcomm Design in India Challenge" (QDIC) programme to start-ups in the country.

Started in 2016, QDIC promotes and supports early stage start-ups, design houses and product companies to invent useful and innovative hardware product designs.

#MSH : MeitY Startup Hub signs a Technical bilateral cooperation agreement with Qualcomm India to support tech Startups of India.@qualcomm_in @_DigitalIndia @stpiindia @startupindia @NICMeity @ICTIPR @IndiaDST @TIFAC_India pic.twitter.com/rVQzaGPoVc

Ministry of E & IT (@GoI_MeitY) July 3, 2019

"Start-ups are catalysts to the new economy, creating unique opportunities across verticals. Over the last three years, Qualcomm India has been encouraging and fostering hardware and IoT start-ups through our own Qualcomm Design in India Challenge," said Rajen Vagadia, Vice President, Qualcomm India Private Limited and President, Qualcomm India and SAARC.

"We are grateful to Meity for giving us this opportunity to share our learnings, domain expertise and best practices with a larger set of start-ups," Vagadia said in a statement.

The programme offers number of benefits from Qualcomm India, including prize money, access to software and hardware design tools and labs, technical support from a dedicated engineering team, access to intellectual property (IP) generation incentive of up to $5,000 and to professional mentorship workshops.

"The very vision of MSH has been to build a conducive innovation and start-up ecosystem by bringing together various technology innovation stakeholders. The resources offered by Qualcomm India will extend this benefit to larger ecosystem of Indian start-ups," said Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, Meity.