From School Hackathons to Prototype Grants: Muthoot Sets Up ?1 Crore Fund for Young AI Innovators
The five-year CSR programme will support school students up to Class 12 with prototype funding, mentorship and technical guidance for AI-led ideas.
A school project usually ends when the competition does. Muthoot CSR is trying to take some of those ideas a step further.
The company has announced Muthoot Young AI Innovators, a pan-India CSR initiative that will earmark ?1 crore over five years to identify and support AI ideas developed by school students up to Class 12.
The programme is designed to provide funding beyond the initial idea stage. Selected students will be eligible for prototype grants of ?2 lakh to ?5 lakh, along with mentorship, technical guidance and business support. According to Muthoot, ideas that demonstrate stronger potential could subsequently receive investment support of ?10 lakh to ?25 lakh.
The initiative will initially be rolled out in Kochi and neighbouring districts before expanding nationally, with Sanskara School serving as the incubator.
The announcement follows the second season of Hack Your Future – Inter-School Coding Hackathon, which brought together 25 school teams from across Kerala. The participating teams developed AI-led solutions addressing areas including education, healthcare, sustainability and smart communities.
That progression—from a school hackathon to funding prototypes—forms the central idea behind the new programme. Instead of limiting student innovation to a competition or demonstration, Muthoot says it wants to create a pathway through which selected ideas can receive resources to be developed further.
The focus on AI also comes at a time when the technology is increasingly finding its way into classrooms and student projects. For younger innovators, however, moving from an idea to a working prototype can require access to technical expertise, equipment and funding that may not be readily available in a school environment.
Muthoot’s programme attempts to address some of that gap through a combination of grants and mentorship. The eventual expansion beyond Kochi will determine how widely that support reaches students across the country.
For now, the initiative places school students at the beginning of an innovation pipeline rather than at its endpoint—giving selected ideas the opportunity to move from a hackathon submission to a prototype and potentially further development.
