IIT Madras Research Park & Technology Transfer Office

IIT Madras Research Park in Chennai houses the IIT Madras Incubation Cell (IITMIC) and the Institute's Technology Transfer Office (TTO), which together run India's longest-standing university deep-tech incubation and IP-licensing pipeline. Since IITMIC's founding around 2013, it has incubated a cumulative 567 startups, over 60% of them founded by entrepreneurs from outside the Institute.

In FY2025-26 alone IITMIC incubated 112 new startups (its second consecutive year above 100, under the 'Startup Shatam' programme) and IIT Madras filed 431 patents (352 Indian, 79 international) — up from 378 in FY2023-24. The TTO licensed 27 IP assets to industry in FY2025-26 (21 patents, 5 know-how, 1 other), after a peak of 44 licensed IPs in FY2024-25, to partners including Tunga Aerospace, AspenTech and Ciena. The cumulative startup portfolio is valued at roughly ₹74,100 crore (about US$8 billion) and includes two unicorns; Ather Energy became the first IITMIC-incubated company to complete an IPO.

The combination of a dedicated Technology Transfer Office tracking patents-to-licenses by fiscal year, and an incubator that has sustained more than 100 new startups a year for two straight years, gives this practice unusually granular, multi-year evidence of a university knowledge-transfer pipeline in action. The main caveat is that most figures are self-reported by the Institute (via press releases and India's official PIB press service) rather than externally audited, and the wide FY2024-25 licensing spike (44 IPs) versus FY2023-24 (13) and FY2025-26 (27) is not explained in available sources.

Read the full analysis: https://www.business-standard.com/education/news/iit-madras-incubates-112-startups-files-431-patents-in-fy26-milestone-year-126042700940_1.html