Anand Sri Ganesh is the CEO of NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL), IIM Bangalore’s flagship business incubator.
With nearly 1,347 ventures incubated in the last financial year through its 13 concurrent programme tracks, NSRCEL has a wide range of startups focussing on deep tech, impact, sustainability, mobility. These startups come from all over India, with 25 states in the cohort.
Their sustainability incubation programme fosters ventures that spearhead innovative solutions to combat climate change and address various sustainability challenges. They work with startups in green manufacturing, mobility infrastructure, renewable energy, climate tech and alternative fuels.
In an interview with indianexpress.com, Anand talks about NSRCEL’s journey, the challenges of being a business incubator for tech entrepreneurs, the potential for impact startups, and how impact needs to be fused with financially sustainable ventures. Edited excerpts:
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us how you define impact and a few of your startups which are on the road to create substantial impact?
Anand Sri Ganesh: Our definition of impact is broader and we like to look at it from a different lens. Around 15 percent of our startups are those which work on social impact either directly or indirectly. For us the founders could be looking at tackling the social problems head on, focus on the bottom of the pyramid customers or look at resolving these social issues through a purely commercial venture.
Go DESi, one of our startups, is a packaged food brand inspired by regional flavours, tastes and formats. It has the native flavour Imli chocolates, and provides livelihood to around 400 women in Davanagere in Karnataka. Its impact is on families in tier 2 and tier 3 towns. Their idea of impact is providing respectable livelihoods to women in rural areas. However, Go DESi wants to be known as a quality consumer brand, competing with global toffee giants. There is no compromise on that score.
You might also be knowing of Mitti Cafe, a startup promoted by Alina Alam. The cafe is completely managed by people with physical, intellectual, and psychiatric disabilities and is present in more than 40 locations across India, including the Supreme Court of India. It is run as a nonprofit, but it competes in the marketplace with Starbucks and other coffee chains of the world. The idea is that you need to compete with the best, and yet be sustainable and create impact.
We also look at social impact from different perspectives. One of them is the use of technology as we understand that it is the key to scale. Another one is the quality of the founders, the kind of crossover talent, wherein founders with wide international exposure come back to India and start a venture focussed on impact.
There is VigyanShaala, one of our edtech startups where both the founders are doctorates with exposure in the US, and are back to India focussing on STEM education for girl students in low income clusters. They have built both a digital and physical platform focussing on STEM education for girl students in classes 6-8.
Another of our startups, Farmers for Forests, works in ecological clusters affected by deforestation and climate change. It looks at such large-scale degraded zones and uses drone tech to restore the ecosystem, works with farmers for various mixed cropping initiatives, afforesting the land, sequestering carbon and trading it in global carbon markets. It has increased farm productivity and farmer incomes in areas like Vidarbha and Gadchiroli where they operate. It started off as a nonprofit, and now they are looking at a hybrid model.
Another of our startups is Baeru, which works on extracting ocean plastics and recycling them near Mangalore in Karnataka. It recycles ocean plastics, and is a circular economy startup. Its founder, Divya Hegde, a graduate of Northwestern University, is a social entrepreneur who combines design, technology and social impact with this startup.
We look at different business models, different kinds of promoters and startups which focus on agri and farm productivity, apart from increasing livelihood of rural artisanal communities but all of them with sustainable business models.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about your sustainability incubation programme and some interesting startups in that space.
Anand Sri Ganesh: You must understand that classical climate tech is commercially focussed, but there are some broader areas in climate tech which potentially have a large impact. The boundaries are certainly fluid and when we look at social impact, we look at the societal problems it could potentially solve. We look at decarbonisation, sustainability, sustainable mobility, climate financing, green manufacturing, and such areas.
Of late, in climate tech, the EV space has exploded and new startups are coming up all through the spectrum, ranging from battery cell chemistry and battery management systems to powertrains and motors. There is also the fascinating intersection of sustainability from a consumer brand perspective with fashion brands, and one of last mile connectivity with mass transportation and green logistics.
Among some of the interesting startups we mentored in this space is ValetEZ, a smart parking management system that lets you park at a mall, a hospital, or an airport. Now the startup is becoming the fastest growing urban charging infrastructure company in the country. With their penetration already in malls and IT parks, it is well set to move into EV charging in a big way.
Epick Bikes, based out of Hyderabad, is into short distance mobility with an electric cycle. It could alter the hyperlocal delivery systems, and is being used extensively in university and tech campuses where a sustainable lifestyle product could connect with a certain demographic.
ReVx Energy is a holistic platform for electric mobility. They have an advanced battery management system and a holistic system for electric fleet management. It can fit into two- and three-wheelers and works on optimising battery utilisation, provides a lot of data on various parameters including warranty, swap and upgrade. It is a completely indigenous product and has a huge market.
Chara Technologies is another IIT Madras and NSRCEL startup which works on replacing the presence of rare-earths in micro motors. It has huge national security implications and the market is global for this tech. It is a new approach to motor design and control algorithms that helps us build sustainable and efficient motors and controllers.
Volar Alta is in green manufacturing, uses drone tech to analyse high carbon deposits in furnaces, chimneys and the walls of large chimneys which cannot be manually checked. The company also leverages drone technology for precise ultrasonic thickness measurements for metal structures. This is a great solution for industries where asset health is paramount.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about a few of your mobility startups which are solving interesting problems.
Anand Sri Ganesh: Last mile connectivity is a huge problem in India. The solution would naturally be a trust based mobile app, digitally connected. It is a highly scalable market. A sustainable climate sensitive product which solves the last mile conundrum in India could be the solution. The more such a solution is seen as an identity product and an alternative lifestyle solution, it will take off. The tipping point for adoption would come with higher population density in urban areas. Over the last 2-3 years, certain policy incentives have helped, the tech per se has improved, customer acceptance has increased, and changing lifestyles are making it all ripe for a change for last mile, micromobility initiatives and startups.
We have a startup EngineCAL, which is an AI-based deep vehicle analytics technology for a plethora of applications. By providing early insights of powertrain health deterioration, genuine drive assessment and enabling real-time vehicle energy demand optimisation, EngineCAL has been able to improve real-world vehicle tailpipe performance and testing processes holistically.
Vecros is in the business of preventive surveillance through aerial tracking and also provides an optimisation platform using autonomous drones. It is in the field of robotics-based infrastructure management and dark warehousing where the warehouses are managed with drones and automatic driving vehicles; in short a fully automated warehousing facility.
PupilMesh is a deep tech startup to develop and deploy indigenously designed augmented reality wearables. This is of great use in finding defects at the end of the assembly line. The hassle of multiple inspections at various levels is reduced, reducing costs, saving time and eliminating manual errors.
True Assistive Technology, another of our startups, develops assistive tech products of international standards that enable disability inclusion. This is one of our startups with what we call crossover talent. A PhD and social scientist, both from the US, come to create products for disabled people in India to use passenger cars with swivel seats and extended seating mechanisms. They are deploying it across the country, with large car companies. It is a fascinating social impact story.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us about a few impact startups which you think were far ahead of their time but had to be discontinued or shut down?
Anand Sri Ganesh: We do not celebrate failures enough. There is a lot of stigma around failures, and if we want to build an international startup ecosystem in India, we need to take failures in our stride and learn to live with them.
Karrynow started as a kind of Swiggy for villages in Andhra and Telangana with a focus on supplying medicines and essential supplies to towns and villages with a population of 5,000-10,000 . The idea was that the normal FMCG model would sit on top of this chain and provide the revenue but the focus was on supply of medicines and essential supplies. It was a model which was tough to scale and faced a lot of challenges. I admire that the founder is resilient enough and is looking at new opportunities.
Resham Dor is a startup trying to revive dying crafts or depleted crafts communities and finding markets to help revive them. The focus was to nurture these artisanal clusters, establish market linkages and enable equitable benefit sharing for the artisan community. There were many unique products they were trying to revive. There was a kind of carpet weaving from Rajasthan called Kharad which was only being spun by eight families in India, and there were efforts to revive such crafts finding overseas markets for the same. It could not unfortunately scale up as a business.
There were some startups like Dlearners,with a focus on early identification of learning disabilities and putting the students on the correct education path. Before Covid, it was a tech-enabled physical model and product and later, when schools were shut due to Covid, the revenue disappeared for 18 months. Now they have pivoted to a fully digital model, created algorithms and visual digital models where with a mere video call, they can identify potential learning disabilities using computer vision, body language and vocalisation to detect learning disabilities. It is a story of resilience when the founders bounce back.
Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us about one or two startups which, if they scale and succeed, will be a game changer in terms of social impact.
Anand Sri Ganesh: The hockey stick impact might come from patents, IP, innovations but also from startups taking upon themselves to solve simple social problems, which have not been resolved due to a variety of reasons.
Openwater was a startup which was co-incubated with Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and which is used to purify brown and black water to potable water. It is into advanced and compact wastewater treatment. It is a plug and play effluent treatment unit with remote monitoring, preassembled, installed in a day with no synthesised chemicals,and no microbial activity.
Ossus is another startup which designs intelligent electroactive microbial communities for selectively targeting and breaking down the organic content of effluents for biohydrogen production. They use non-electrolytic methods, and use industrial waste to produce industry grade hydrogen for commercial use. This tech might really be a game changer in the future.
At another level, there are startups which are trying to solve problems, which traditional companies are not getting to solve either because it is a small market or there are other hurdles. One such startup is Ally Heart which is trying to create a network of clinicians and medical practitioners to serve the basic medical needs of transgenders and LGBTQ people.
