Opportunities available for students to startup by Dr. Nisha Mukund, Technical Manager, CIIC; organised by Project Management Institute, Chennai on 20th November 2021
According to NITI Aayog’s 2018 Composite Water Management Index report, public water supply in India will meet only half the projected demand by 2030, resulting in extreme water scarcity for millions. With 54 percent of India’s total area facing high water stress, urgent measures need to be taken to preserve and manage existing water resources across cities if we are to avoid a crisis like Cape Town’s Day Zero.
Water scarcity in India is a looming issue. WEGoT aqua was innovated with an aim to reduce the water consumption by bringing about a much need behavioral change in the way people use water. In April 2015, 4 engineers (Vijay, Mohideen, Abilash, Sundeep) with absolutely different yet complementary skill sets founded WEGoT. In a country like India where almost all big cities are water starved, there is still no accountability for a consumer on his water usage. Growing up in Chennai and being witness to acute water shortages, the founders wanted to contribute and help the city solve its water shortage. Having understood the promise of IoT, the group ventured to develop a sensor-based IoT device and a software platform that provided an end-to-end water management solution. WEGoT aqua enables real time, data driven & automated decision making to reduce the water demand & increase the efficiency of water infrastructure in buildings. WEGoT aqua tracks the usage at all consumption points & generates bills as per water usage. The sensor also detects & notifies leakages, broken pipes, abnormal usage in real time via mobile app and web dashboards. Once notified, the user can shut the leaks remotely, thus saving water from getting wasted in leakages.
WEGoT aqua, an internet-of-things (IoT) water management digital platform, captures and shares real-time data on daily water usage patterns with clients, incentivizing them to save water over time. These water meters are a low cost, high precision, data driven water management solution that solves impending water crisis by reducing water consumption by up to 50%. While coming up with an innovative solution to tackle the water crisis was step one, we have also innovated on the business model to make it easily accessible to everyone by giving the product for free and charging only a monthly subscription fee. This dramatically reduces the upfront Capex cost to be incurred and leads to increased adoption. Since 2015, WEGoT has been instrumental in changing the way people treat water, and has helped save more than 3 billion+ liters of water and have successfully installed this solution across more than 30k+ homes, 40k million+ sq. ft of commercial spaces in India. WEGoT aqua, has brought about a much need behavioral change in the way people treat water and has resulted in reducing water consumption. WEGoT is one of the star startups incubated in Crescent Innovation and Incubation Council in the year 2019 and has strived to bring laurels with the help of CIIC. WEGoT has received many awards and recognitions of international and national standards.
Impensus Electronics Pvt Ltd were one of the first few companies to be incubated in CIIC at the inception of CIIC.
According to UN report, every year 1.3 Billion MT of food is wasted in the post-harvest stage i.e they don’t even reach the markets after they are harvested from the field. This results in food shortages, seasonal availability and increased pricing of the commodity for the regular people. Impensus strives to reduce this huge loss by providing IoT enabled simplified and scalable solutions for post-harvest management that will help in increasing the shelf life, quality of the harvest and also helps increase the income of the farmers.
Impensus Electronics works in the post-harvest management sector with the aim of proving affordable and efficient storage solutions for perishables. Our solutions help to improve the shelf life of the commodity by 1.5 to 2 times, than the conventional method, in a more organic way.
We got introduced to CIIC through our mentor, Mr. Ravichandran Purushothaman. As a resident incubate, we got a proper office setup and a perfect startup environment to work. From day 1 our startup visibility has only improved and it all started with a CIIC sponsored stall for an event organized by TiE, Chennai. Following that we applied for Entrepreneurship Development Innovation Institute of India (EDII’s), Innovation Voucher Program (IVP) with CIIC as our knowledge partner. Though we got rejected initially we ended up getting Voucher B grant next time with the mentorship of CIIC team. Focusing on UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG), our start-up was recognized as one of the top 10 startups in India that contributes towards UNSDG by UNDP. Despite covid pandemic our revenue has grown 2.5 times than the previous year and this helped us to approach investors for capital investment to scale up our operations. We have successfully raised our first round of investment from a Dubai based investor and Keiretsu Forum, Chennai with the help of CIIC. And by March 2021 we got selected for FLCTD grant by UNIDO to deploy our solutions at various sites in Tamil Nadu that helps to reduce carbon emission.
Dr. Nithyakalyani, Founder and CEO of Cell2Cure Therapies Pvt Ltd, deals with islet isolation and transplantation techniques being developed, products such as the mesenchymal cell kit, Salivary kit product for diabetes, Campath program etc. She is a BIG (Biotechnology Ignition Grant- 50 lakhs) grantee given by BIRAC DBT, an ICMR grant( 1.5Cr) grantee and also an EDII-TN IVP (Innovation Voucher Program-5 lakh). Dr. Nithyakalyani is a scientist and also classical bharatanatyam dancer and bridges science and arts as natural partners and believes that both are manifestations of consciousness and both require and inspire creativity.
Dhanvantri Biomedical Private Limited is a medtech startup working on the product Sahayatha which is a wheelchair cum bed with an inbuilt defecation system and is supported by BIRAC and EDII-TN. Dhanvantri has obtained a total grant of 58.75L from the BIG (Biotechnology Ignition Grant) and EDII- TN’s- IVP (Innovation Voucher Program). The startup has also received several awards and recognitions such as the Cavinkare best idea - jury award – 2020, Sandbox – EDIITN. Turnover - pre revenue stage.
