UPI on feature phones - Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation & NPCI give $100,000 to 3 startups

UPI on feature phones – Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation & NPCI give $100,000 to 3 startups

Gupshup won the first prize and will receive $50,000 in cash. Minkville finished second and will get $20,000. A sum of $10,000 will go to Tonetag, the second runners-up.

Gupshup, Minkville and Tonetag will work with NPCI and also get support from CIIE.CO.

The aim of the contest was to look for the next-generation tech solution that can help feature-phone users adopt UPI payments.

Gupshup uses encrypted SMS to enable UPI payments through BillPay SMS, QR Codes or contact lists of phones.

Minkville runs a missed-call-based UPI payments solution

Tonetag allows sound-based UPI payments across any form of device.

Along with the case, these startups will get a chance to work on a pilot project with NPCI.

They will also receive support from CIIE.CO’s Bharat Inclusion Initiative which offers incubation, acceleration and seed funding to early-stage startups.

At present, NPCI runs an SMS-based payment mechanism USSD but that has not been able to scale beyond a certain level.