Airtel, Meta to launch RS 1 Cr hackathon to boost the popularity of Whatsapp Business

• ByStartupStory     |    September 23, 2022

On Thursday, Bharti Airtel and US-based social media powerhouse Meta Platforms announced a hackathon to encourage businesses to use WhatsApp for Business and move their operations online. The competition, known as the “Airtel IQ Hackathon,” will award prizes totalling Rs. 1 crore, as well as ‘free’ access to WhatsApp Business conversations and the use of the WhatsApp Business application programming interface (API) to develop chat-based business deployments.

The hackathon is part of Airtel IQ, the conversation services platform that has been running for the past 18 months. The platform already has 140 clients, according to Adarsh Nair, chief executive of Airtel Digital, the telco’s services division. These clients include Swiggy, a platform for food delivery services, India Post’s Payments Bank services, and Airtel’s own Xstream over-the-top content streaming services.

These businesses already use WhatsApp through IQ for chat-based customer support, according to Nair. These services include customer support and product recommendations. Nair stated that although IQ now receives 250 billion phone minutes and 60 billion messages annually through its WhatsApp-based customer services, its cooperation with Meta Platforms may enable it to reach out to more small and medium-sized enterprises.

The Airtel startup accelerator programme will also choose a few winning IQ hackathon startups. This programme will include “business coaching,” access to Airtel’s “data, distribution, network, and payments” infrastructure, and financing ranging from $500,000 to $2 million.

The hackathon is a part of Meta’s initiatives to increase WhatsApp for Business adoption, which aims to monetize one of the most popular mobile applications worldwide. Currently, businesses utilising WhatsApp for business must pay a per-message usage fee. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, claimed in May of this year that WhatsApp for Business is utilised by over 1 billion users every week.

Incidentally, one of WhatsApp’s key markets in India. According to data from industry research firm Statista as of January this year, WhatsApp had 487 million monthly active users in the nation.

WhatsApp has indeed been attempting to monetize its user base recently. JioMart, a hyperlocal grocery delivery business run by Jio Platforms, a division of Reliance Industries, launched its public grocery delivery services on WhatsApp on August 29. Additionally, earlier this week Meta announced a collaboration with the US-based software services company Salesforce. In the trial programme, Salesforce’s clients will use WhatsApp’s chat interface to manage their customer relationship management (CRM) needs, starting with global cosmetics giant L’Oreal.

The Airtel IQ Hackathon will ask participating startups to develop this as well. The telco said in a statement that companies from the ed-tech, BFSI, travel and hospitality, e-commerce, and contact centre operations sectors will be required to develop and implement customer interaction capabilities using the WhatsApp Business API. On October 9, the hackathon’s final applications will be accepted no more.

To persuade businesses to utilise WhatsApp for Business in their operations, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on May 19 at the firm’s Meta Conversations event that the company will begin providing free cloud hosting services for businesses. With Zuckerberg’s May release, businesses were able to use Meta’s cloud hosting services instead of the normal third-party cloud platform that they use to start up shop online and later deploy the WhatsApp Business API. Using Meta’s cloud platform, according to Zuckerberg, can enable firms to move their operations from offline to online in “in a few minutes,” as opposed to taking days.

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