Kumbhathon Innovation S.P.R.I.N.T. 2026 × Project NANDA and Prof Ramesh Raskar, MIT, September 5–7, 2026 | Nashik
Kumbhathon Innovation S.P.R.I.N.T. 2026 × Project NANDA and Prof Ramesh Raskar, MIT
September 5–7, 2026 | Nashik
What if the Kumbh could become a living laboratory for building technologies for the cities of the future?
Kumbhathon Innovation S.P.R.I.N.T. 2026, in partnership with Project NANDA, brings together innovators, startups, researchers, designers and technologists to build and advance solutions for challenges that emerge at Kumbh scale — from mobility, health and public information to identity, payments, sustainability and citizen services.
Project NANDA brings a special focus on AI agents and the open Agentic Web: exploring how trusted AI agents can help pilgrims, businesses, government agencies and public services interact more intelligently during the Kumbh.
Over three intensive days, participants will work with domain experts and stakeholders to:
Validate real problems and user needs
Refine and build existing solutions
Explore AI-agent and civic-tech applications
Connect with government, industry, startups and researchers
Identify pathways toward pilots and real-world deployment
This is not a blank-page hackathon. Participants are encouraged to arrive with an idea, prototype, research project or startup already underway and use S.P.R.I.N.T. to move it significantly forward.
Who should join?
Students · Researchers · Startups · Developers · Designers · Entrepreneurs · Civic-tech innovators · AI builders
Areas of Exploration
AI & Software · Health · Mobility · Infrastructure · Food · Sustainability · Public Services · Culture & Spirituality · AI Agents & Agentic Commerce
Come build technologies at Kumbh scale — and solutions that can ultimately work anywhere.
About Kumbhathon Innovation Foundation (KIF)
KIF is a Section 8 non-profit and Maharashtra State Innovation Society–recognized incubation organization based in Nashik that uses cities and large-scale public events as living laboratories for innovation. Born from the original Kumbhathon initiative around the 2015 Nashik Kumbh Mela, KIF has evolved into a year-round, problem-first ecosystem bringing together startups, students, researchers, government, industry and mentors to identify real societal challenges, build and test solutions in the field, and help promising ideas move from prototypes to pilots and deployment. Its work spans civic technology, AI, health, mobility, sustainability and public infrastructure, with the upcoming Kumbh serving as a unique testbed for innovations that can ultimately scale to cities across India.
About Prof. Ramesh Raskar, MIT
Ramesh Raskar is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he directs the Camera Culture research group and leads the work on Networked AI Agents to build the "Internet of AI Agents." He is the founder of Project NANDA (Networked AI Agents in Decentralized Architecture), which is tackling the four infrastructure choke points of the agentic web: registry, credentials, interoperability, and attestation. His research vision holds that the next frontier of artificial intelligence lies not in ever larger centralized models but in a world of personal, edge based agents that people own, customize, and connect.
Beyond academia, he has worked on special research projects at Google [X], Facebook, and Apple, has co-founded and advised several startups, launched REDX.io as a platform for young innovators exploring AI for impact, and holds more than 100 US patents. He is widely recognised as one of the leading global voices on decentralized AI and the governance of the emerging agentic web, arguing that agentic commerce faces the same fork the World Wide Web once did, between closed walled gardens and a neutral, open infrastructure.
About Project NANDA
Project NANDA is building the foundational infrastructure for the Open Agentic Web, an open ecosystem where autonomous AI agents can securely discover one another, verify capabilities, communicate and collaborate across organizations and platforms.
Its work spans:
Agent discovery and interoperability
Trust, identity and verification
Agent-to-agent communication
Mobile and edge AI agents
Open standards for distributed intelligence
Civic and sovereign AI
Enterprise adoption of autonomous AI systems
The project is also developing NandaTown, an open developer sandbox where builders can experiment with real-world agent discovery, coordination and orchestration.
Research: https://nanda.mit.edu
Open Source: https://projectnanda.org
Developer Sandbox: https://nandatown.projectnanda.org