What gave you the idea of standardising buildings for ambience, air quality, temperature and energy efficiencies while working at OYO (and then start Enlite Research)?
I was one of the first few employees of OYO in Mumbai, and the first task assigned there to me was the standardisation of hotels/rooms as per OYO standards. Interestingly, most of our hotel acquisitions were the ones in the small- and mid-segment, which earlier had lacked the standardisation. This made me realise that what was lacking in this segment was a building level standardisation, where the standard meant the temperature & air quality for the occupant, the ambience maintained, the security & surveillance integrations, the hygiene maintenance and all this while curbing the wastage of natural and manpower resources. This is what ideated the thought of standardisation in the industry that always lacked it.
Can you tell us more about BIOS? How does it work?
Building Intelligence Operating System (BIOS) uses deep tech (AI & IoT) to go beyond the traditional building management systems in the areas of real-time monitoring and controlling hard & soft services in a building, like HVAC, lights, AQI and safety & surveillance, access, asset and visitor management. We do this by spreading our wireless mesh-enabled hardware for sensing various parameters & controlling equipment with our devices, like smart thermostats, wireless access controls, etc, which send data to our AI-driven analytics platform.
At present, you are selling your BIOS solution only in India. By when and how do you plan to expand in the APAC market?
We got the larger part of the year to develop safe & innovative solutions for the workspaces of the future. As products started hitting the market, we started receiving an unprecedented number of inbound queries globally, as the problem that we are solving is agnostic of any location. Since the first two months, we have garnered multiple interests from the APAC & MENA region, and we have now even identified potential partners there.
Your start-up is looking to clock an additional revenue of ₹50 lakh by March 2021. Could you tell us your action plan to achieve this?
COVID helped us reprioritise our product & company strategy. The idea was to ‘how to do more by touch-less’, which included a touchless product line of access control solution, a switchless HVAC automation system and contact-free visitor management. By the portfolio of the contactless solutions of building automation, we are close to achieving our targets, and with the companies now aggressively scouting for the solutions that enable a safe and healthy environment for their employees, our solution of BIOS becomes more relevant.
How have you redefined the company’s priorities through the lockdown period?
It was a good cooling-off period to redefine our organisation’s priorities so as to how to sail through these times. We took some time to think about what next, post which the entire team had a brainstorming session and what followed was a plan to launch some products that would help people make their workspaces safer once they get back to their offices. So, we did months of R&D, used our houses as testbeds for products, collaborated online and once life started restoring to some normalcy, we had products ready to be manufactured & commercially sold.
