Members of Next Tech Lab, a cross-disciplinary research laboratory based in SRM Institute of Science and Technology has garnered multiple accolades at hackathons around India in the past two months. Hackathons usually last anywhere from 24 hours to 48 hours and participants range from college students to experienced working professionals. Teams formulate an idea on the spot and work on the idea within the stipulated time.After two rounds of screening process and a preliminary online hackathon, Team Satoshi — consisting of members Souradeep Das, Tejasv Sharma and Rounak Datta made it among the shortlisted 15 teams out of 7000+ participants for the final round and won the Prize for the First Runner-Up and a cash award of 1 Lakh INR at the Techgig Code Gladiators Blockchain Hackathon hosted by Reliance Jio at Reliance Corporate Park, Mumbai in June 2018.Motivated by the previous accomplishment, the team took part in the NIPP Blockchain Challenge, hosted by 10,000 Start-Ups, an initiative of NASSCOM which aims to establish a cross-collaborative platform that enables startups to grow to the next level. Established startups and budding Entrepreneurs from all over the country signed up, to compete with their products in this Innovation Challenge.
After rounds of severe screening process, top 50 teams were shortlisted for the final round. Souradeep, Tejasv and Rounak won the First prize and a cash award of 1 Lakh INR at the NASSCOM NIPP BLOCKCHAIN challenge in the Fintech track at NASSCOM Startup Warehouse, Bangalore. Their solution was to disrupt P2P microlending with a dynamically-priced, fair, and transparent blockchain-based system which allows to crowdfund loans and incentivised lenders for lending their money.Another student team from SRM Institute of Science & Technology, Kattankulathur bagged the 1st prize at Angelhack hackathon which was conducted as a part of Angelhack Global Hackathon series 2018 at the Microsoft campus in Hyderabad. Ankur Agarwal and Krishna Maneesha Dendukuri were a part of this winning team which received the amazing opportunity of attending the Global HACKcelerator Program 2018 where they will be connected with thought-leaders and experienced entrepreneurs to help them become more versatile while refining their ideas to build their hackathon-winning prototype into a startup.The multidisciplinary culture at the lab inculcates collaboration of different areas of science and technology — This promotes creation of cutting-edge prototypes by staying ahead of the curve.
Team NoName, consisting of Suresh Kumar, Chirag Parmar and Swaroop Belur bagged the winning prize of 1 Lakh INR at WearHack 2018 organised by Titan Company Pvt. Ltd. out of over 2500 registered teams.Team Unergia, consisting of Next Tech Lab members Farhan Ahmed and Projjal Gupta, among others, emerged first in the International Blockchain Congress Hackathon. The hackathon saw 1800 participants applying for the online round and 60 teams participating in the main event on the 3rd and 4th of August. It was a grilling affair that took place over a period of 36 hours at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre, panelled by the luminaries of the startup world including NASSCOM Director Srikanth Srinivasan and Rakesh Bhatia from 50K Ventures to name a few. Team Unergia concentrated on implementing blockchain into the solar industry. The appreciation for their idea has motivated them to turn this into a full fledged startup.About Next Tech Lab - It is an undergraduate research laboratory with over 100 research scholars working in six diferent fields — Artificial Intelligence, Extended Reality, Internet of Things, Electrical Systems, Computational Biology and Cryptography. To know more about the lab, visit their website at www.nextech.io