MME Students team Named Among the Top 10 Nationally at IIM MATRIx 2026

NITK Surathkal Students Named Among the Top 10 Nationally at IIM MATRIx 2026 Startup Hackathon, Organised by the Indian Institute of Metals at IIT Hyderabad:

NITK is proud to share that a team of students from the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering — Shubhang S. Galagali, Anindith B. L., Suhas Gowda M, and U. M. Tejasvi Karanth — guided by Prof. Subray R. Hegde and Dr. Sumanth Govindarajan, has been named among the Top 10 teams at IIM MATRIx 2026. Notably, theirs was the only shortlisted team to represent an NIT.

IIM MATRIx (Materials Research, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Expo) is a national startup hackathon organised by the Indian Institute of Metals in the domains of Metallurgical/Materials and Manufacturing/Production Engineering. Held at IIT Hyderabad on 19 June 2026, 25 shortlisted teams demonstrated their working prototypes before a panel of experts, industry leaders, and investors, with seed grants of up to ₹20 lakh on offer to support promising innovations.

The team's innovation, AI-FA (AI-Assisted Failure Analysis), is an AI copilot for industrial failure investigation, which grew out of the team's capstone project under the same faculty guidance. Grounded in real on-site failure investigations at nearby industries — where the team contributed to formal investigation reports — AI-FA tackles a persistent industrial gap: failure investigation remains a largely manual, expert-dependent task, with AI yet to play a meaningful role.

AI-FA turns the evidence of a failed component into a first-pass root-cause assessment in minutes rather than weeks— helping industries learn from every failure, big or small, as early movers driving the shift from a human-centric Industry 5.0 toward the AI-driven factories of Industry 6.0.

This achievement reflects the team's ability to combine metallurgical domain knowledge with modern artificial intelligence to build a practical, real-world solution for industry. The team is now working to take AI-FA forward as a startup. 

Congratulations to the team for their dedication, innovation, and problem-solving, and sincere thanks to the faculty and mentors who supported them throughout this journey.