Manoj Meena’s family hails from a village about 30 km from Jaipur. The family is into agriculture, with no business background. The pinnacle of career success for the Meena clan was getting a government job. By that humble yardstick, Manoj’s dad became a huge success when he landed up a government job and left the village.
The family shifted to Jaipur, and that is where our friend Manoj did his schooling. As a child, Manoj was an introvert. Was good with his hands and used to make toys out of wood. After finishing 12th in 2005, Manoj was packed off to Kota, to join the JEE prep brigade. Did well, thanks to good teachers and peers. Manoj joined the integrated B.Tech/M.Tech in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay in 2006.
The shift to Powai enabled Manoj to explore his creative side. He also worked on his physique: became a runner and started playing hockey. Unlike most sportspeople, he credits learning the value of teamwork and a go-for-win attitude, not to his hockey. Thanks to this toy tinkering, Manoj had developed an interest in robotics. His team won quite a few RoboCons. And were always in the top 2-3, even in competitions where there were hundreds of teams. Their frugal robots were built for functionality, and not to demonstrate tech sophistication. The team was always looking for loopholes in the rules that could be exploited to beat the competition.
Manoj’s parents did not have any road maps for their kids. IIT is good, go there, we will see what happens later. Manoj started getting serious about his career when he got into his fifth year. He felt that he had a better probability of success in business than the UPSC exams that the Meena family would have aspired for. https://sineiitb.org/, the entrepreneurship cell at IIT Bombay, was a place where Manoj met with IIT Bombay alumni who had taken the entrepreneurship route. What helped was an internship with a SINE incubated startup, Ideaforge, which manufactures drones for defence applications. Manoj got placed at ISRO as a scientist, but he disappointed his family by deferring joining by one year. He reasoned to himself that If things don’t go well in a year, he would take the sarkari naukri route.
https://atomberg.com/ was founded in 2012. It took one month for Manoj to come up with the name. He used a simple prefix and suffix combination technique to come up with the brand. In hindsight, he feels that the firm has achieved its big dreams (Berg is mountain), by paying attention to details (the atoms.) In those days not too many IITB graduates would take the entrepreneurship route, so getting into the SINE incubation centre was relatively easy. Hostel life over, Manoj shifted to a chawl near IIT Bombay. Borrowed money from his IITB friends who had started earning by then. Manoj reached out to his professors and got some projects for data acquisition and measurement systems. This kept a little bit of the moolah coming in.
The problem was that, like in Manoj’s career, Atomberg still had no road map. After two years, he pivoted the data acquisition model. He felt he was not doing something right. Every lab had very specific requirements, so scaling up would be difficult. The next Idea was again data acquisition for labs, but this time managing it remotely. Manoj again discovered that even this work also involved too much customisation.
In 2013, yet another data acquisition pivot was done – vehicle fleet tracking systems. Manoj had sold the concept of tracking live temperature of the logistics cold chain to companies like Amul, Mother Dairy, Mongini’s and Domino’s. When Manoj saw a huge number of hardware failures, he personally started tracking vehicles. Almost all the truck drivers were tampering with the device. He discovered that wires had been cut. Drivers were not happy when their unauthorised stopping started to be noticed by the owners / clients. This experiment was also scrapped after 1.5 years.
By 2014, well wishers started advising Manoj to take up a job. SINE normally supports new startups for up to 3 years. Manoj was slow on the start but was happy that he was given an extra year after his 3 years were up. An optimistic mindset helped. He was not too worried. Help would come. Something will click in the future. His biggest learning was that it is okay to fail. Every failure led to good learning. His only regret – he should have failed faster. The second biggest learning was that to succeed, you have to add value in a customer’s life. The small team at Atomberg had developed expertise in electronics, motor design and software. What was needed was the right problem to solve.
So yet another pivot happened. Manoj realised that his biggest problem had been scaling up. And this time he thought that he would go in for something more mass market. With his penchant for joining prefixes and suffixes – Manoj combined the BLDC motor to the humble ceiling fan. The only innovation that had happened in the ceiling fan industry in the last 100 years had been a move from resistance based speed controllers to thyristor fired ones. Everyone continued to use single phase induction motors. To cut air, a fan only requires about 28 W of power. But induction motors would draw 60 to 70 W, most of the extra power being used to heat up the motor and the coils.
The number of people touched is a good metric for entrepreneurship. 20% of the electricity consumed in a city is fans. Fans are there in all buildings. (AC penetration is just 5%.) A BLDC motor, with its higher efficiency, saw the energy usage come down from 70 Watts to 28 watts. That was the Aha moment that Atomberg had been waiting for. This was the one problem that Manoj had to solve. You could now operate three fans in the same energy used by a single conventional one.
Atomberg’s first fan fans were off grid rooftop solar setups. They had limitations of energy generation and efficiency was important. For the ceramic industry, fans were a primary driver of their electricity bill. B2B clients in the ceramic industries started using Atomberg fans for drying sanitary ware. From a manufacturing perspective, the timing could not have been any better. The BLDC motor driver circuit required semiconductors, whose prices were much more reasonable and had been a few years ago. In 2015, Atomberg shipped out 4000 fans.
Next was a baby step to get into the B2C market. Circa 2015, e-commerce players like Amazon and Flipkart had started moving beyond book selling. Electronics was the first non- books category to be established. E-commerce was a good platform for continuing the learning. Atomberg learnt that the B2C customer is value sensitive, not price sensitive. Atomberg fans retailed at prices which were 1.5 times the conventional fan prices. And surprisingly, the customer was not buying the fan for its efficiency. She was buying it for its cute LED light at the base of the fan. She was buying it for the remote which made it possible for her to switch on the fan even after she had got into her bed. Atomberg fans started getting great reviews. This was a big validation for the product. Right in the first year on Amazon, Atomberg became the number 1 seller of fans.
Because of the high temperatures associated with induction motor fans, conventional fan manufacturers had to stick to sheet metal and castings. Since BLDC fans ran at lower temperatures, they could be designed using a larger variety of materials. This resulted in better aesthetics – and better margins. Innovations continued on the motor front. As of Mar 24, Atomberg is already on its fifth generation super compact motor.
The 2 year product feedback from eCommerce customers was used to further fine tune the product. Validation is important, but product perfection is the goal. Finding the right customer-product fit is critical. Throughout the product development process, Atomberg has never let the customer suffer. They have invested in after sales service and delighted customers by getting their appliances back in action within 24 hours of a complaint being received. After all every service call is an opportunity to improve the product.
It was now time to go offline. Atomberg started with the Pune-Mumbai retailers, and is now present in 30,000 counters across the country. It is a market leader already in literate stakes like Kerala. In the overall fan market, it commands a 10% share, The share of the all India BLDC fan market is 70%. It is selling 500,000 fans a month. And is on its way to achieve Rs. 1000 cr revenue in FY 24-25. And that too, profitably.
The journey to attract capital has also been an arduous one for Atomberg. Raising money increases responsibility and pressure. Funding for hardware is more difficult to come by – even as investors line up to invest in relatively safe service businesses. Atomberg was choosy about investors. Manoj likens it to a marriage. Manoj’s first investor knew him from his college days. In 2015, Atomberg received 1 cr from the angel – and invested that in a 3,000 sq ft R and D and manufacturing facility in Mumbai.
Manoj could understand the importance of margins and return on investments of the investor. You have to be super honest with investors. Honesty in sharing problems is important, because the founder and the investor have to sit down and solve problems together. Another cardinal rule that Manoj follows is to never over-commit. And always plan for the downside. This way you invest in building relationships with your investors.
In FY 23-24, Manoj raised 90 m USD for another pivot. This time he has decided to become a global supplier of motors. The role model is https://www.nidec.com/. (Wonder, what his thoughts on competing technologies like Switch Reluctance Motors are.) Manoj has now shifted base to Pune. Atomberg operates out of a factory in Hinjewadi and has about 200 people working. The way Atomberg differentiates itself is by not worrying about revenues, but by focussing on solving customer problems. An Atomberg engineer, used to the culture of curiosity, innovation, ownership and customer-centrism, will be unlikely to be seen in a Crompton or Havell’s factory.
At some point of time an IPO will happen, but there are some internal targets that Manoj needs to meet before the IPO happens. Work on a larger motor factory at Chakan has already started. Apart from fans, Atomberg also makes mixer-grinders and locks. The mixers are more compact, more powerful and most importantly operate at lower dB levels. The mixers I can understand, but why locks, Manoj? More products are in the pipeline. In a small way, exports have started. As of 2024, Atomberg fans are being sold in Bangladesh. And thanks to a tie-up with old friend, Amazon, Atomberg fans will be soon listed on the US Amazon website. And a new learning journey to understand the US consumer will start soon.
Success is a lousy teacher. At the end, I asked Manoj if Atomberg is still failing and learning. For every product that makes it to the market, there are 4 to 5 that don’t. And each of these aborted products have had a team of 40-50 engineers who would have worked for one year to develop it. Atomberg has a culture that celebrates failure. There is a Biggest Failure award given away every year!!