Gridbots: Bringing robots to life
Pulkit Gaur is living every man’s fantasy – one where he is the master-creator bringing to life robots, that will reshape the way various industries function. After completing his bachelors in industrial engineering from Jodhpur University, Gaur joined Ahmedabad-based Meditab Software. In a short span of two months, he was promoted to the title of Technical Manager and was given the responsibility of heading a 150 member team.
Despite this acknowledgement of his professional performance, Gaur felt the need to do something on his own. Gaur borrowed an initial capital of Rs. 1 crore, some of which came from his parents, to establish Gridbots Technologies (Gridbots) in August, 2007. He and his team of four individuals laid out the platform for the company which currently operates in the field of consumer, industrial and military robotics. The seed for this venture was sown in Gaur’s mind during his years at college. During the final year of his bachelors’ programme, he developed a hybrid vehicle and drove it five kilometres into the University lab to justify his design. His efforts earned him a gold medal from the University.
Today, Gaur’s dream venture, Gridbots, has more than 30 products as part of their commercial product range. And none of this would have been possible without help from CIIE, its incubator. As Gaur puts it, “They convert their dreams and ideas into reality.” Gaur is indebted to his mentors at CIIE for helping him foresee challenges while going to markets and enabling him to prepare accordingly.
Post incubation, Gridbots has worked towards building its own identity in this niche space. The company’s biggest achievement in the past year has been setting up more than 15 flagship ‘RoboStores’ in the metopolitian cities of India. The year ahead looks promising with the company receiving orders from big names such as the Indian Navy, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and members of the Indian hospitality industry.
Seclore: Prioritising information security
Vishal Gupta has donned many hats prior to founding Seclore Technology (Seclore). Even while completing his bachelors’ in electrical engineering from IIT-Bombay, Gupta worked on projects for production company, Nimbus Televisions and was involved in an outsourced project of the U.S. based Federal Bureau of Investigation. As part of the latter, he successfully built a ‘wavelet based fingerprint image compression and matching’ system which reduced fingerprint image storage and processing requirements to less than 10 per cent of the present technology.
In 2000, he used the money he earned from the aforementioned projects to establish Herald Logic, which specialises in providing channel management systems for the retail financial industry. This was the first time Gupta approached SINE, the incubator at IIT-B. In the period that Gupta was chief executive of Herald Logic, the company reported an annual growth rate of close to 220 per cent. Four years past its inception, Gupta helped incorporate the company’s current management team while making a personal transition to another venture. Till date, he remains an active member of the company’s board. In the meanwhile, Gupta approached SINE for the second time, to help incubate his next venture, Seclore.
In the two odd years that followed, Gupta did all the spade work to get Seclore up and running, from setting up a technology team to create a product prototype to approaching investors. Post its establishment in 2007, Gupta has his able team have grown Seclore to its current position. Amongst its premiere products are Seclore FileSecure which allows enterprises to achieve the conflicting goals of security and collaboration and Seclore Infosource that enables protection of sensitive data.
Today, Seclore is being recognised by several industry award panels (Marico Innovation for India Awards, TiE, Delhi & Lumis Partners Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards etc.) as an emerging super-company. Gupta generously shares this credit with his mentors at SINE for without their help, the company would have never scaled success in such a quick time period. Apart from the invaluable advise on running a business, Gupta is thankful for all the inputs he received from the faculty at IIT-B when it came to testing technology. Perhaps, this benchmark that was set early is what helps Seclore to date, with creating newer technology.
