On 15
th January 2015, I met one of my batchmates and a friend – Amiya Kumar Samantaray – who was working on Robotics Workshops and PCB designing. I liked the concept, and after a thought, we started working together on Ambient Air Quality Monitoring System (AAQMS), which could sense the environmental parameters in real-time and send it to the cloud server for further analytics and information. That was the start of my journey on the Internet of Things (IoT) manufacturing and solutions, and for the next three crucial years of my life, before I joined IIM Nagpur for my MBA, this start-up was my oxygen.
And we named this trip as Phoenix Robotix Pvt. Ltd., incorporated on 15
th May 2015 and I embraced this risky love as the Cofounder, Director and Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO).
Under the able guidance of the former director of NIT Rourkela, we got an incubation centre in the campus - Technical Innovation and Industrial Research (TIIR). In the event called Innovate for Digital India Challenge (IFDIC) hostel by Intel India and CIIE IIM Ahmedabad and conducted by DIC, Government of India,
we stood 4th among 1960+ teams in India.
It was an obliging moment to stand in the premises of Rashtrapati Bhawan and present our product and a functioning start-up idea to Dr Pranab Mukherjee. We received INR 7 Lakhs grant from the event, and it was the biggest award during those initial days of a new venture. We started with the development of Online Data Transmitters to connect the industrial pollution data of the MSMEs to the State Pollution Control Board (SPCB) and Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). We became the authorised dealer of the SPCB Odisha (OSPCB) and created a niche for ourselves by being the leader in providing cost-effective data transmitting service to the MSMEs in the Odisha and Jharkhand industrial belt.
We started the AAQMS again and named it Aurassure. We started the promotion, patenting and propagating of Aurassure through governmental and non-governmental channels. The iterative development under an agile method finally took off, and we bagged a government tender for different smart cities in collaboration with Larson & Toubro Ltd. (L&T). The next project was on Water-level monitoring, and we named it Aquassure. With constant promotion and product development, we bagged the Karnataka Water-level Monitoring project under the Karnataka Government. The level of innovation was given another push when we developed the first version of Energy Monitoring system for the MSMEs to help the decision-makers understand the energy consumption in their plants and make informed decisions to reduce their operational costs by reducing their energy consumption. Development of new projects and offerings continued, and the next project that we started working on was the Diesel Generator (DG) monitoring system. Further innovations will continue to be developed, expanding the horizon of our offerings. I believe, it is not long before we receive international recognition among the IoT and WSN technology companies.
But in this small journey of 3 years, I realised across several instances that at times, concrete knowledge of certain business domains such as handling company’s finances and managing human resources is very critical for the co-founders. I chose to write CAT 2017 and other major examinations to get into a premier B-School.
I had final admission offers from NMIMS Mumbai, SIBM Pune and IIFT Kolkata but the aspiration to get into one of the IIMs brought me to IIM Nagpur. Today after eight months at IIM Nagpur when I look back at risk taken in the summers of 2015 and a decision for CAT, IIM Nagpur’s curriculum and exposure towards an entrepreneurial bent bring a smile of content on my face. And the smile validates how strongly an MBA from a premier B-School such as IIMs can help one realign with the start-up challenges that lie ahead if you have worked on one or plan to start one.
About the Author:
Agniva Das is a PGP 1 candidate at IIM Nagpur. He completed his B.Tech from NIT Rourkela and co-founded a start-up Phoenix Robotix Pvt. Ltd.