Three startups win $100,000-contest to offer digital payments on feature phones

Hello everyone


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

Three startups have won a $100,000 prize to create a feature phone based digital payments  solution on a challenge hosted by the National Payments Corporation of India ,.  CIIE.CO and the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.



While 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.


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

The idea is to take digital payments to around 500 million Indians . Currently , UPI's supported only on smart phones and the number of users could be around 100  million.

Gupshup uses encrypted SMS to enable UPI payments through bill pay sms, qr codes or contact list of phones.
Minkville runs a missed call payments solution and Tonetag allows sound based 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 payments mechanism USSD but that has not been able to scale beyond a certain level.