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Grey Orange Robotics – Leaders in Warehouse Automation

2013-02-05T10:06:00.001-08:00

Established in 2009 and co-founded by BITS Pilani alums Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta, Grey Orange Robotics develops and deploys leading-edge products and services in robotics and warehouse automation business. In a giant leap, Grey Orange Robotics has developed a warehouse management system that not only skips several generations of research, but also places it on par with two other companies in the world that offer similar products.

It is a first -of-its-kind venture for the Indian logistics industry. It builds robots that can move shelves stacked with various products to a floor assistant who then scans a bar code to confirm the right items. The robot in turn moves the chosen products to the shipping bay where workers seal the packages for final transport.

Grey Orange Robotics has raised Rs 3 crore from consortium of "There is no player in the Indian marketplace offering a similar solution today," says Sanjay Nath, managing partner at Blume Ventures. investors led by Blume along with other investors - BITS Spark Angels and the Hatch Group in January. As part of the investment, Sanjay Nath of Blume Ventures will join the board of directors, while Abhinav Khushraj will be a board observer representing the BITS Spark Angels group.

BITS Spark is an initiative launched by the institute and alumni of BITS Pilani, with the aim of building an entrepreneur ecosystem for BITSians. Spark Angels is an angel network comprising of BITSian angels (distinguished alumni and entrepreneurs) and select non-BITSians partners. It targets to invest from R25 lakhs to R2.5 Cr at seed stage in high potential BITSian start-ups based in India.

Recently, the company developed a new technology - 'Butler System' which aims to automate the warehouse operation by using a fleet of mobile robotic drive units (Butlers) to speed up and streamline work quickly and efficiently. The robots, which look like cubes and are called Butlers, help a worker pick 500 items per hour compared to 40 items in the normal course. GOR Butlers are squat contraptions of fast-moving mobile robots, which scurry around the warehouse and manage everything. Grey Orange Butler System has three components: small, wheeled retrieval robots, tall upright racks and human workers.

This also helps retailers' ship products in one hour instead of two days. In India, warehouses are plagued with many problems due to increasing inventory, labour theft, wrong shipments and wastage of time in searching and fetching goods. It is estimated that 90% of the time is wasted in searching and fetching the items. Centralized warehouse operation is preferred but the labour is unable to support high volumes.


Samay Kohli and Akash Gupta

“We have a demo warehouse in Gurgaon where we have tested the product. Currently we are looking for pilot customers which can help us in ‘live testing’ of the butler system for 2-3 months so that we can commercially launch it too,” said Kohli, co-founder and CEO of Grey Orange.

Kohli said Grey Orange would confine its services to Indian companies for now. The other product package sortation system, which helps in sorting of ready-to-be-shipped packages, already has customers like Flipkart and Flipkart logistics, Kohli shared.

"We were missing product development," says Gupta. Meanwhile, AcYut, the robot they had built in college, was competing at international robot Kung Fu and football matches. It won one gold, two silver and one bronze medal at the RoboGames (previously ROBOlympics) held in the US in 2010. At the event, Kohli and Gupta met a series of mentors and investors who advised them to spin their business into industrial robotics.

Now check your blood sugar in 10 seconds, for just Rs. 2

2012-07-08T12:32:00.003-07:00

Diabetes patients monitoring glucose levels regularly will attest to the fact that testing strips — expensive and sometimes hard to get — are a downside. By the yearend, the sugar test could cost just Rs 2, take about 10 seconds and draw far less blood than the regular glucose meter.
Developed by Dr Suman Kapur, professor of biological sciences at BITS-Pilani, the new cellphone-sized blood sugar machine uses a capillary (narrow pipe) worth Rs 2 through which the blood is transmitted to the reading device. It will require 1,000 times less blood than a standard glucometer.

The device will undergo final evaluation by July 15 and is expected to be ready for mass production by December.

This low–cost rapid test will be a boon for India which plans to test five crore people for diabetes by the end of this year. India plans to screen all adult males above 30 years of age and pregnant women of all age groups for diabetes and hypertension in 100 districts across 21 states.

Now, India is home to over 61 million diabetics — an increase from 50.8 million last year. By 2030, India’s diabetes burden is expected to cross the 100 million mark. The country is also the largest contributor to regional mortality with 983,000 deaths attributable to the disease last year.

Dr. Suman Kapur said, Our device is as handy as a glucometer but with a different Chemistry. The major aim was to make a pocket sized, affordable glucose monitoring device. Diabetics are required to test their blood often, each time costing around Rs. 25. Our test will bring the cost down to Rs. 2. Also we will require just 1 or 2 picolitre of blood that means less than 1000 times blood comparing to standard glucometer.

Dr. Suman Kapur also explained the working of Machine. Once the finger pricked with a needle, red blood cells from the blood will be trapped and plasma will be allowed to pass, just like OSMOSIS, a process of chemistry. The machine will react at this moment and will give a color corresponding to glucose level.

We are using nano particles to intensify the colour using a colour to frequency censor. Then, the reading will show up on the device. The major advancement will be on the sensitivity," added Dr Kapoor, who is also dean of research at BITS-Pilani.

He said the test has been successfully tried with human samples. "We are working on the reading device which will be the size of a cellphone. Instead of strips that glucometres use now, our machine will use a capillary (small hollow pie) which will cost Rs 2 every time a diabetic tests h/his blood," he added.

A health ministry official said, "The best way to detect abnormal BP and high blood sugar levels is to conduct mass screening. This will give us a clear picture of the prevalence of diabetes in the population. "Sources said when ICMR negotiated with companies for a million diabetes strips, and the lowest quote it received was Rs 13 per strip.” If this comes down to less than Rs 2, it will be a massive breakthrough," the official added.

Get yourself Caricatured @ Dezains.com

2012-02-28T01:43:00.000-08:00

Who says caricatures go hand in hand with only celebrities and political bigwigs? In keeping with the latest trend, personalized caricatures on coffee mugs, posters, T-shirts, and the like, are being bandied as gift ideas. Recognizing the potential of the idea, Ankit Vatsa and Prannoy Kothari decided to quit well-paying jobs to start Dezains Inc., a company that specializes in designing caricature-inspired products.

Dezains.com helps you get your photos, memories and celebrities in caricatured form on different articles including tee shirts, coffee mugs etc. The talented cartoonists at Dezains hand-draw caricatures based on your photos, and print them on t-shirts of your desired brand.

It’s really simple to place an order with them. You just have to browse your photo in order form, and put your details there. After that, you will get an option to choose t-shirt from some of the major brands including Killer, Wrangler, Lee, NumeroUno, etc.

The prices of all the items are published on their portal. Just fill in the details and they will send across the finished product within a span of few days. Dezains aims to offer the highest quality available, the fastest delivery times and the fairest prices.

Ankit Vatsa and Prannoy Kothari

Vatsa, a 25-year-old from Patna, and 24-year-old Kothari, who hails from Mumbai, have known each other since their engineering days at BITS Pilani. While Vatsa graduated in 2009, Kothari graduated in 2010. Both were expected to follow a career in engineering, but the duo was more interested in T-shirt designing.

However, they knew that the market was oversaturated. Says Kothari: "Customized printed tees is available dime a dozen, so it would have been hard to capitalize on these. Moreover, it's difficult to personalize each product."

The product differentiator was staring them in the face. Vatsa's elder brother, Amrit, had been designing caricatures for free on his blog, but it was Vatsa, who was working with a coaching center in Mumbai at the time, recognized its potential. “We didn't quit our jobs immediately as we wanted to save as much as possible for the start-up," says Kothari. The buffer time also served another important purpose-test-proofing the concept.

Dezains officially launched in August, 2011 and with a little buzz created pre-launch, Dezains saw 1600 visitors on the first day. They have been growing steadily ever since and process 25-30 orders each day now. Having served over 3000 customers by now, Dezains employs 3 fulltime and 6 part-time caricature artists. Dezains has a huge fan base in the online space with more than 50,000 fans on the Facebook page. They have also teamed up with seal sites like Groupon and Anapdeal to accelerate sales.

Gharpay.in : Helping e-commerce Vendors with Cash On Delivery (CoD)

2011-12-20T11:59:00.000-08:00

What is India’s favorite payment method? Cash, of course. In fact 80% of Indian e-commerce is driven by the cash-on-delivery (COD) model. A big proportion of the country’s consuming population has the money and a wishlist to buy products through the internet but do not have the means to strike the transaction. Hyderabad-based start-up Gharpay handles CoD for retailers (mostly online but also some offline). It essentially offers a cash payment collection network from the customer’s doorstep to retailers.

Users buying, say, a mobile handset from an e-commerce site, choose the CoD option. Once the transaction is confirmed, a Gharpay executive arrives to collect the cash. He has the invoice printed out and collects the amount. The mobile arrives later, either by the delivery employees of the e-commerce site or courier executives. The typical amount collected by a Gharpay agent is Rs 1,800. Gharpay is not a logistics provider and hence does not bring you the handset before collecting cash.

“The reactions to our start-up range from astonishment to surprise to delight in the fact that finally somebody is doing what we do. Online companies are delighted we are addressing their problem with offline payments,” says Arpit Mohan, co-founder and CTO, Gharpay.

In October 2010, ex-BITS Pilani students Arpit Mohan and Abhishek Nayak (now CEO) were discussing the sudden growth of e-commerce in India when they came across the issues in payments. Considering that there are just 200 million plastic cards in India today, they wondered what happens to those customers who don’t have credit cards. Mohan and Nayak hired a payment executive and set up Gharpay in Hyderabad in January 2011. “The company literally started on a motorbike,” says Mohan.

Three months later, more batch mates from BITS-Pilani, joined the firm. Gharpay began by delivering tickets and collecting cash for Redbus.in, a fast rising online bus ticketing provider. In March, Gharpay started exploring offline retail market for CoD and soon bagged Chennai-based Nathella Jewelry as a client.

Gharpay today collects cash from customers at their doorstep in 550 postal codes across 7 cities in India and they’re practically the only organized player in the fray servicing cash payments, in a Rs.50000 crore e-commerce market that’s struggling to get people to pay online. The offline market includes attractive segments like cash payments for classifieds (QuackQuack, a matrimonial classifieds player, is a Gharpay customer), insurance, magazine subscriptions, educational material, etc.

The main issue for an e-commerce company is keeping track of the package. Until it is shipped, you have visibility but after that, there is no information coming forth. But the quality of courier companies is improving day by day as they address the challenges facing e-commerce in India. With there being no legal limit on how much cash can be collected, Gharpay’s cash collectors often find themselves ferrying large amounts of money. “We once had an NRI buying a tour package for Rs.1.8 lakhs and preferring to pay by cash. For sums larger than Rs.25000, we ensure that we collect a copy of the person’s PAN card. We handle at least one such transaction every day”, says Arpit.

Broach the topic of ambition and their self-assuredness wafts like a breath of fresh air. “We want to be the largest player in the payments market and today, cash is the biggest thing. Tomorrow, if cards become larger, we’ll probably go after that in some way. But right now, cash it is”, says Abhishek. “China has over 2.2 billion plastic cards for payment while India has about 100 million which work online. But even in China, 50-60% of them are still paying offline.”

In a market where the confidence that goods bought online will be delivered is increasing rapidly, cash transactions are seen as the bridge to the next level of trust. Under such circumstances, Gharpay is a startup to watch out for. The opportunity is large, the team is strong, the problem is interesting and the execution seems to have taken off.

HelpAge India: Bringing a smile to aged and homeless

2011-10-15T13:48:00.000-07:00

HelpAge is a registered, secular, apolitical, non-profit and a non-governmental national organization working for the cause and care of Older Persons, with the aim to improve the quality of their lives and empowering them.
Over the years HelpAge India has changed its orientation from implementing welfare projects to those that focus on development. It now lays stress on income-generation and micro-credit projects that enable the participation of Older Persons in the mainstream of society.

Born in the hilly town of Kozhenchery in the sylvan surroundings of the Western Ghats in central Kerala, Mathew Cherian, the CEO of HelpAge India, started his career as consultant engineer in an oil drilling company in Mumbai and then stepped into the noble terrain of social work. Initially, he spent his free time working with a group that helped poor street children in Mumbai. Cherian has a civil engineering degree from BITS Pilani in 1980 and a diploma in rural management from the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, Gujarat.

His journey as a social worker began when he stayed with Baba Amte and worked in rural areas. He was soon approached by Oxfam, a UK charity fighting global poverty, to take charge as its director of central India. Mathew worked in tribal areas and became the international director of Oxfam. It was then that the president of HelpAge India wanted Mathew to head the non-profit organisation for the aged. He joined as the CEO of the organisation in 2004.

It was at Oxfam that he met Amita Joseph, who was programme manager for East India in the same organisation. Amita, who is also a Supreme Court lawyer, has since been a great support, says Cherian. They have two teenage daughters. Cherian also serves on the boards of HelpAge International and Guide Star international. His inspiration is the selfless work done by people like Mother Teresa. Cherian is also associated with the NGO task force of the Government of India

When asked What is the secret of your success? "I have good listening skills and am blessed with the ability to connect with people. I am able to understand sadness and joy. My deep sense of gratitude has helped me immensely and I am thankful to my parents, teachers and well-wishers who have instilled all the good values in me" he said.

According to a report by HelpAge India, India is home to over 80 million elderly. The figure is expected to increase to 177 million by 2025. Around 89 per cent of the people over the age of 60 are not covered under any post-retirement economic security schemes, according to "old age social and income security", a project commissioned by the Indian government in 2000.

"We are demanding the implementation of the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Bill, 2007, which makes it obligatory for children and heirs to provide maintenance to senior citizens. We are also asking for the set up of a technological assistance law for the elders. They should treated as par with others which would definitely help them in addressing the financial and emotional security in the country." says Mathew Cherian.

National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN)

2011-09-28T12:05:00.000-07:00

National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) is undoubtedly India's leader in entrepreneurship education. Today, NEN works with over 380 top tier academic institutes, has created a pool of over 700 entrepreneurship faculty, and reaches over 300,000 young people across 30 cities in India.
Along with TiE and Nasscom, NEN is a really great catalyst point for the Indian entrepreneur.
Thanks to companies like Tata, Wipro and Infosys – there has been a real change regarding the way the Indian entrepreneur is viewed at the professional level.

What the introduction NEN does is bring that startup component and the high-growth entrepreneur another catalyst so that India isn’t simply perceived as an outsourcing nation at the global level but a nation that is not only embracing but should be defining what it means to have 21st Century mindset.

NEN's support for new and future entrepreneurs includes:
Practical, contemporary advice and information on company-building from experts
Access to funds, incubation, mentoring and other startup assistance
Networking and community, through activities and events nationwide and NEN Online.
Bringing together academia, industry, and international experts to deliver knowledge, advice, and resources, NEN creates a powerful support system for new entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leaders.

NEN is a non-profit organisation co-founded by the Wadhwani Foundation, IIT-Mumbai, IIM-Ahmedabad, BITS Pilani, SP Jain and Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (Ibab), to support and groom young entrepreneur wannabes.

NEN has benefited greatly from its group of eminent Advisors, all of whom are active in NEN activities. The NEN Advisors are Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Biocon; Naina Lal Kidwai, HSBC; Prof. Howard Stevenson, Harvard University; Randy Komisar, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; George Gendron, Founder, Inc. magazine, Arun Seth, British Telecom, Prof. Sadgopan, IIIT Bangalore and Romesh Wadhwani, Symphony Technology Group.

New entrepreneurs face diverse challenges. When the questions pile up- How do I get started? How do I raise money? Where do I meet the right people? NEN is here to help.
www.nenonline.org is India's best resource for entrepreneurs. Through NEN Online, you can access a world of beneficial information, including: expert advice, practical knowledge for venture creation, updates on networking events, skill-building activities, and how to get in touch with people from the entrepreneurial community.

Startup Track :

Apply for incubation at top business incubators and understand the support criteria
Gain access to India's largest network of Angel investors and apply for funding online
Ask the Expert: amateur questions met with Expert advice
Peer advice: share your thoughts and see the thoughts of others in the Q&A forum
Recruit freshers from top-tier NEN institutes through Startup Jobs

Knowledge Bank :

Articles, analyses, and straight talk on venture capital, angel investing, opportunity evaluation, getting started, and so much more
Contact lists of VCs, Angels, Incubators, and recruiters available to help budding startups
The largest number of Indian startups: The Weekly Startup profiles entrepreneurs of your generation
Download over 100 peer-reviewed materials, including courses/syllabi, exercises, cases, audio/video clips, slide presentations, and more

NEN’s model for advancing entrepreneurship rests firmly on its partnership approach, making it both scalable and effective. Rather than deliver support directly, NEN partners with academic institutes to help them build an effective and a vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem on campus to develop and support entrepreneurs. Institutes that NEN partners with are those that are already motivated to provide entrepreneurship programmes to their students, and appreciate the investment NEN makes to enhance their ability to do so.
In addition, NEN uses a group-purchasing model to aggregate support for institutes, members and entrepreneurs. Support includes a bank of volunteers for speaking and mentoring opportunities; corporations eager to support innovation; fast-track access to funding and incubation; learning tools and materials.

IBM recently announced a tie up with the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) for a series of IBM-NEN Mentor Melas to provide growing entrepreneurs in India the knowledge, support and connections to achieve their greatest impact. This is the first community initiative in a series that IBM will be engaging in as it gears to celebrate its Centennial on June 16.
To be held across six cities in the country - Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and NCR - the IBM-NEN Mentor Melas will comprise 12 mentoring sessions, in which nearly 400 volunteer IBM experts will mentor over 300 innovation-driven young entrepreneurs from a range of sectors, helping them overcome critical challenges.
Tata Group also teamed up with NEN recently to groom young wannabe entrepreneur. Christened as ‘Tata First Dot- powered by NEN’, the new initiative will kick off with intense grooming workshop in Kolkata on Saturday and then it will move to other cities like Pune, Chennai, Delhi, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Indore and Mumbai. These workshops are designed to help students refine their business models, connect with peers and interact with experts.
Over the past two years, a rapidly increasing number of NEN graduates have been starting their own ventures; gratifyingly, many of them have been addressing India’s core challenges in healthcare, sanitation, education, and power. It’s for anyone to find out. NEN has responded by establishing new programmes to support these young entrepreneurs, including NEN E Club and a National Mentor Platform. At present, NEN has more than 540 top academic institutional members, over 400 student and alumni entrepreneurship clubs, and more than 80,000 individual members across India. NEN therefore represents Asia’s largest and most dynamic community of young and future entrepreneurs.

redBus.in : A truly simple online bus ticket booking service

2011-09-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

Bus tickets? Really? It sounds less niche/weird when you know that buses are Indians' preferred mode of mass transit. No matter which way you slice it, making bus travel easy for over a billion people is a huge market, and Redbus.in is grabbing it.

Gone are the days when starting a business needed religious planning, enormous capital and large infrastructure. In the present “knowledge economy”, all you need is your brain and fertile ideas, especially in the IT industry. Entry barriers are at an all-time low and starting a business has never been as simple as now. Only your core functions have to be your own. Everything else, starting from your front desk to your backend IT system, can be outsourced. You don’t need large capital investment; sustained operational expenditure will take care of your near future.

"redBus is founded by 3 of us. Sudhakar, Charan and me.
Sudhakar – 26, B.E (Hons) EEE from BITS-Pilani, 4 yrs exp. at IBM, Bangalore.
Charan – 27, B.E(Hons.) EEE, M.Sc (Hons) Physics from BITS-Pilani, 3 yrs exp. at Honeywell, Bangalore.
Phani – 27, B.E(Hons) EEE from BITS-Pilani, 4 yrs at Texas Instruments, Bangalore.

The only guiding light was a compelling idea and enthusiasm,” says Phanindra Sama, chief executive officer of Pilani Soft Labs, the promoter of redBus.in. “ When the idea had sprung and we decided to move on. We bought books and learnt how to code,” he quips.

Started modestly in August 2006 with a few seats from one bus operator, redBus today is one of the most successful online bus ticket booking agencies. Today, it has 700 bus operators, 10,000 buses listed on it, works in 15 states and sells around 5,000 tickets every day. They started with Rs 500,000 which was the savings of the three of them. One room of the house where they stayed was their office. In the morning they would keep the other parts closed so that the room looked like an office.

redBus is India’s first organized bus ticket booking service. With services in 15 states, sales offices in 6 locations and daily departures in 2800 routes, They are India’s largest aggregator of bus tickets.
Below are their USPs :

Customers can choose their seat – facility which is unique: none of airliners / railways offer this facility.
Customers can book return tickets – facility not available at the traditional brick and mortar agents.
Multiple bus operators.
Standard fares.

The company is often cited as the most successful startups to have leveraged latest technologies and newer business models to the fullest extent. It started by developing applications on the cloud, created the prototype for its backend application, showcased them to prospective customers and eventually scaled and moved all of its applications to the cloud. Right now, almost all of redBus’ IT infrastructure including its customer-facing portal is handled by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Bangalore-based Pilani Soft Labs, makers of redBus has raised $6 million in Series C funding from existing investors Helion Venture Partners, Inventus Capital and Seedfund. This takes the total venture capital raised by the company to $9.5 million. Seedfund, which seed funded the company in 2008, remains the largest shareholder, said executive director Anand Lunia, confirming the deal.

From BITS Pilani, a robot with a mind : Shaurya

2011-09-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

Shaurya, BITS Pilani, is an effort to develop a self-sufficient unmanned small All-Terrain Fully Autonomous Ground Vehicle (AGV) with multiple advanced functionalities and to establish a platform for extending the reach of technology to be applied in diverse fields. Shaurya is being developed at the Centre for Robotics & Intelligent Systems (CRIS) at BITS Pilani.

Robot Shaurya

Autonomous robots, like Shaurya, perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. A high degree of autonomy is particularly desirable in fields such as space exploration, where communication delays and interruptions are unavoidable.
A fully autonomous robot has the ability to

Gain information about the environment.
Work for an extended period without human intervention.
Move either all or part of itself throughout its operating environment without human assistance.
Avoid situations that are harmful to people, property, or itself.

Shaurya will be the first of its kind autonomous ground vehicle in India. The team envisions the application of the technology used in Shaurya in diverse fields of human endeavor. Through the development of Shaurya, the team aspires to establish a platform for far reaching, multi-dimensional applications in the following arenas:

Military – It will provide crucial information in life threatening situations, Minimizing Human intervention and Extending Reach to inaccessible areas.
Social – Its inherent technology will be used make Smarter and Safer Vehicles to Reduce Traffic Accidents, Save Lives and Money, and Make People more productive.
Industry – It will contribute to Increasing productivity, Improve work environment conditions and Minimize loss of life in industries like mining.
Scientific – It will have Widespread Applications for Space Exploration.

The above is a small perspective of the vast horizon that awaits the technology being developed for autonomous ground vehicles like Shaurya.

BITSian Team Shaurya comprises of three final year students pursuing Electrical & Electronics,and Mechanical Engineering. Akash Mohan Singhal (Software Programmer, Electronics Design), Aditya S. Raghuwanshi (Mechanical design), Lokesh Jindal (Software Programmer) and Prof. B.K.Rout (Team Advisor).
Steel Authority of India Ltd. (SAIL) is the Main Team Sponsor and NMDC Ltd. and MOIL Ltd. are Associate Team Sponsors for this project.

Robot Shaurya has won several accolades. In the RoboCup 2011, the world's largest competition in robotics held in Istanbul on July 5-11 this year, Shaurya was the only Indian team to qualify for the finals in the Rescue Robot League category.

Conceptual Design

In the Intel India Embedded Challenges 2011 held in Bangalore, Shaurya was shortlisted for the finals over 2,000 teams across India.In the DRDO Student Robot Competition-2010 held from October 25 to 31 last year in Chennai, Shaurya was shortlisted among 14 finalists out of 240 teams from different parts of the country, winning a prize money of Rs. 1 lakh.