Cycled to Anup Jain’s place and walked over to the airport from there, about 1.6 km away. The shortest walking route is through Sanjay Park and opens onto the Viman Nagar road. Took 26 minutes to reach and check in. Managed to lose my phone charging cable in the security check. The Air India flight does not serve complimentary snacks any more – but thankfully Mitali had ordered a sandwich. Though it had some butter in it, I gulped it down developing a selective amnesia to my veganism. We reached Ahmedabad 20 minutes before time, so had to wait 10 minutes for Dinesh ji to come in. One of the most educated drivers I have encountered till date, Dinesh is a commerce graduate and also an LLB. He has never practiced though – he does not like the ethics of the legal profession. He has been driving in Dubai before he shifted back home to Ahmedabad. He is separated from his wife, who continues to work in Dubai. They have a son, who was till recently working in Ahmedabad. He has recently shifted back to Dubai. The son has finished his BBA with a specialisation in HR. Unfortunately, the son suffers from motion sickness, so he had to quit his earlier job.
We had a great lunch of dal roti and bhindi on the way, as Dinesh stocked up on CNG. We reached the iCreate campus at Dev Dholera around 1600 hrs. It is 15 km off the Ahmedabad Rajkot road. Ahmedabad has a humongous spread – and for most of the 2 hour journey we were in civilisation. The last part was an industrial belt dominated by pharma sector. The campus architecture reminded me a bit of IIM Bangalore. It is a 40 acre campus, co-funded by Goverrnment of Gujarat and Government of India. Was started by Narendra Modi, when he was CM of Gujarat – and still continues to get his attention. What worries me are the more than 10 acres of lawns that cover the campus. Must be taking in millions of liters of water to keep them green in summer. My guess is water comes in from borewells.
There is a basketball court just behind the residential block. Walked over to the court – and did the morning surya namaskars there. Walked around and joined two Icreate team members who were going out for a cuppa chai. Most of the 25 people who work at Icreate stay on campus. About 5-6 of them stay in Ahmedabad. There is an AC bus that the institute owns which transports these people to and fro. Met with Anupam Jalote at Galabhai’s tapir and joined him for the chai session. Anupam was the second CEO of Icreate.
He had a very interesting startup in the days when it used to be called plain ole entrepreneurship. He had raised money from some Swiss investors and had started a ‘green’ project to create energy out of waste. He had installed three 1 MW equivalent plants for converting waste bio-mass to energy. He talked of one of the three projects, which was a bio-digester that converted the distillery waste to methane. This methane was used as supplementary feedstock to the coal fired boiler in the distillery. Anupam faced the same hiccups that I had during my first entrepreneurial days – customer delinquency. The distillery folks only ended up paying for 1/8th of the work done – and Anupam’s company went belly up. The company still had some surplus cash left and that was promptly returned to the investors.
He then went on to make a career in corporate sales, rising to become the chief process officer at Airtel. He joined Icreate because he wanted to relive his entrepreneurial days. A large part of the progress made by Icreate in attracting good startup talent and nurturing it has been thanks to the good work done by Anupam and his team during the initial days. Having a board that is unofficially chaired by the PM is not an easy task. So after 5 years at ICreate, Anupam has decided to move on – and is still figuring out what he wants to do next. He is based out of Gurgaon / Lucknow now.
He recommended that I also meet with Thyagarajan, fondly known as Thyagi ji, who is one of the seven founders of Icreate. I managed to catch up with him post lunch to hear about the genesis of Icreate. One of Thyagi ji’s friend was Prof NV Vasani, a Vice Chancellor of Gujarat University. And wanted to do a lot to change the face of education – but was constrained by the inertia that is the hallmark of any government run educational setup. Prof Vasani received an offer to become the first VC of Nirma University. And now having the flexibility to innovate, decided to start India’s first private university incubation center at Nirma. Thyagi ji was part of it from day 1. They took small cohorts of a dozen start-ups – and helped them with mentors, networks and training. The seven founders ran the center for almost 5 years before they ran into funding shortfalls.
Narendra Modi’s hallmark of governance is a focus on the economy. As CM, he had heard about the good work at the incubation center and invited Thyagi ji for a chat. Modi’s idea was that incubation centers are something that should get infrastructure support from the government. But should not be run by them. If the founders agreed wanted to restart their incubation activities, he would ensure that the infrastructure would be provided by the government. Thygagi ji and team took up the gauntlet and with the help of funds from the GMDC, built up the center from scratch. GMDC, incidentally, makes most of its money from operating lignite mines.
We had a long chat about education – and curiosity. He gave some splendid advice for our school – start cooking class every week. This should later on encompass a food growing class. We need to ensure that students are involved in all aspects of cooking, which includes washing vessels. He extended the cleanliness exercise to include keeping the school clean by floor mopping etc to be done by students. One more fun exercise would be that each student has to teach another his or her mother tongue. He went on to discuss an exercise that he has tried in other schools – theatre. The teacher gives a simple story line – and a group of 5 students (3 girls are a must in this group) helps develop that story They write a script. Then they list out the characters. The rest of the class then writes the dialogues for the characters. Voting decides which person in the class plays the role of what character. The play happens at the end of three weeks.
There are 4 building complexes on the campus. The main building houses the auditorium, the admin offices. Next to it are the project rooms and the manufacturing labs. One lab is a tool room with a lathe, milling machine and laser cutting. It has a very interesting PCB milling machine too. Also present is a battery testing machine from Ador – and a dynamometer for motor testing. The other lab is an electronics and iOT one. Could not see too much of equipment in that area – but it has been sponsored by Cisco. So I guess there were some routers etc in the lab. They were all stocked inside cupboards.
There is a Center for Mining. I went across to that building, but folks had already left for the day. The security person informed me that there are a total of 3 people who work in the whole of the building. It has yet to start functioning. There is a student residential block and a faculty residential block. We were booked in a golf course resort opposite the campus, but we got the location changed to faculty residential block, as it allows us to spend more time with the incubatees.
There were a total of 1160 applications received for Evagelize 22, a bootcamp for EV innovation. Till date ICreate has nurtured 529 companies who have gone onto file 44 patents. They have a tie-up with Israel Start-up Nation Central and the Sona Comstar IRP JV was initiated at the Icreate campus. They have consciously stayed away from training programs for entrepreneurship. The belief is that this will be an unnecessary diversion from the mentoring process. (Btw, about half of the people who join an entrepreneurship development program leave as soon as the program ends. Entrepreneurship is a not mass market education. Also, it cannot be directly viewed as a substitute to employment. What governments and society can hope to benefit is the spinoff effects of employment creation. Maybe we need to also evaluate business ideas from that perspective, so that our politicians have something to canvass for justify their investments in such centers. ICreate has a capacity to incubate 100 entrepreneurs at a time.
The morning was spent listening in to presentations by the 20 teams present on the campus. Had interacted with about half of them in the earlier evening, but came across a few more that seemed to have interesting products up their sleeves. There were 23 more companies that made online pitches to the industry folks who had come in. But I decided to skip that part. Have been promised by the Icreate team, that we would get access to the spiels via a Google Drive link.
The most market ready company on the campus were a local Ahmedabad company, Shree Marut, who had a tractor prototype on display. The specs are matched to the 15 HP tractor, which sells for Rs. 2-2.5 lakh. They are looking at pricing it at Rs. 5.5 lakh. The selling point is lower total cost of ownership. This will reduce even further if a customer can install a 2 kW solar panel and charge the tractor during day time at the solar shed. Like Celestial, they have sourced most of the equipment from existing tractor component suppliers. They have a 51 V 200 Ah, 11 kWh battery which they buy from Trontek. They wanted to go in for a 15 kWh battery, but were looking out specifically for a battery that is AIS 156 approved. Trontek only had this 11 kWh which had got an approval. (I guess the primary application is for three wheelers.)
Marut follows the same sourcing strategy for motors too. Their 3 kW BLDC motor also does primary duty in three wheelers. The tractor weighs 650 kg. They have received some enquiries from folks who want to use the tractor for hauling construction material etc in cities. What helps is that the Marut tractor can pull 2 t of load, unlike a similarly endowed three wheeler, which maxes out at 600 kg payload. They are looking at raising 5 cr to be able to put in the first production lot of 50 tractors. If I had the money, would have lent it to them. One idea is to sell equity to dealers and get them involved as part owners in fine tuning the product. Have asked them to raise 50 cr, as the effort required for 50 is the same as for 5. Insha Allah, they will end up evoking some interest in the industry folks who visit today.
Another interesting person was Meet Kalola. Meet is a BITS Plilani pass out and did his MS from U Mich, Ann Arbor. He worked for 6 years in the VCU area at Nikola Motors, US, manufacturers of EV pickups. At Vijigi Energy, he wants to build simulation software. He can simulate sensor and other faults and then check how the vehicle software reacts to it. My advice to him was to make a standard modular VCU software, and pitch it to the smaller players. The testing should be rigorous and we expect a robust product from him. Should be interesting to see if he can attract funding. But again, looking at the person, I would be ready to give him 10-20 lakhs to get started. There was another company in the VCU space, Udayan EvTech, which is being incubated at the Bhau Innovation center in COEP. They are still at the early stages of product development.
In the motor space, there were quite a few interesting companies. One of them was Pune based Gyrodrive. The name reveals their original idea – which was rotating inertia energy storage. They would spin a 300 kg flywheel at 25,000 rpm using a motor driven by a solar panel. And then could use it to power 1 kW device over 10 hours. But that project did not really do too well. So they pivoted. Today they make ventilators. And switch reluctance motors. The SRM does not require magnets, its working principle is similar to what we see in 3 phase AC induction squirrel cage motors. There are some issues which need to be sorted out, with a torque ripple during start. Need to research this variety of motors more.
Gyrodrive already had found an application for work tables which require vertical movement. Their first customer is Archtron Mobility, which makes these tables. Their motors are bi-directional and synchronous. This helps in correlating time with motion. They use gas bearings to achieve precision. Applications can also be for machine tools where speeds of up to 50,000 rpm are required, which an SRM can deliver. Another application area is in wheelchairs. They have a confirmed order from an Amazon supplier, as their motors at 11 K, are cheaper than Chinese ones at 15 K. The motor comes coupled to a planetary reduction gearbox. Would want to fund them because they are a rare commodity in their startup cohort. They actually have revenues. They closed last fiscal with 56 lakhs of customer money coming into the bank. Hoorah!
The second axial flux motor company was Abhilash Maurya’s Naxatra Labs. They told me that their 2.5 kW bike motor weighs just 7 kg. An equivalent BLDC motor would weigh twice as much. They claim a range increase of 10% with use of their motor. They have started in 2020. . The initial idea was to make motors for drones. But they are more grounded now. They work with a customer/ investor – Gujarat based Wardwizard aka Joy E bikes. Hope to see their motor on a motorcycle soon. Would love to ride their bike to check out if performance changes as a result of change in motor. One thing that should definitely help is lower unsprung mass, if it is hub mounted. The Joy design calls for a mid drive though.
Another start-up, Abhishek Gupta’s MotoRama, has made a motor using simple ferrite magnets. They took a great route to get into motor manufacturing – they started by servicing them. Till date they have repaired more than 700 EV motors. Most of the problems come in windings failure when motor temperature goes up. The manufacture of 1 g of Neodynium creates 2 kg of hyper toxic waste. The motor is bulkier compared to standard BLDC motors, weight and size is 25% more, but costs are 20% less. He is looking at selling the motor for low end electric cycle application. My feeling is that he may have a large market in the agriculture appliance space. What he probably needs to do is to redesign the motor so that the weaker magnetic flux is utilised the most. Also, they need to add gearing inside the motor. The current one is a direct drive one, so there are issues with starting torque. I would probably be happy to put some money in MotoRama too. This is a bottom of the pyramid kind of product – and the country would benefit tremendously from having entrepreneurs in this space.
There was Jaipur based Cancrie that was working in nano materials. Team is from NUS/NTU. Akshay Jain has done his PhD in nano materials and has worked for more than 9 years in this space. They had come up with a porous carbon which they claim can improve the life of lead acid batteries, if it is used as a cathode. This is obtained by a controlled pyrolysis of the biomass. The claim is that the product is better than that btained using carbon black. There is application in the lithium battery space also for this material. It can also be used for making super capacitors. My advice to this group was to actually focus on super capacitors. Not too many players in India in that space. Also there will be enough applications if prices come down. Super capacitors are great for handling surge currents – and can be good for vehicles with smaller battery packs who want help for short bursts in overtaking etc. Investors would be ready to fund them, if they come up with prototypes.
Intakt EV Hybrids. Dhansekhar, the founder of the company, has 25 years of experience. He has created a wheel mounted retrofit kit for cars using BLDC hub motors. Two cars have been converted so far. The car can be operated in engine, engine + electric and pure electric modes. They have observed a 60% increase in mileage using engine plus electric. The battery size is not too big – can do a 60 km range on pure electric mode. There was another company in a similar space – Inwheel SRM. Dr Nikunj Patel is the founder. You can take the rotor out easily, making it easy to maintain. Both these companies are still in very early stages of product development.
Did a short ride on Pune based Govidyouth’s generator backed up electric scooter. I had confused their starup with Pulkit’s Emotion, because they are part of the same incubation center in Electronic Sadan. Did not really like the racket created by the genset. What is uncanny about it is that the speed of the genset remains the same even when you press the accelerator. Your body expects a change in engine vibration frequency – and so is surprised when it does not happen. I asked Saurabh what would be the kmpl if the scooter were to run on generator mode alone. He mentioned 80 kmpl, which is really cool. Someone must take up this idea of retrofitting an existing Honda Activa and running the engine as a genset for increased efficiency and adding a small battery pack to make it a hybrid.
The current 100 cc genset is being sourced from China. It weighs about 8 kg. The plan is to have a smaller sub 5 kg 50 cc genset sourced from an Indian company. I don’t think the application on two wheeler will work out too well. What might work is supplying this small genset as an accessory to existing three wheeler manufacturers. Come to think of it – one more idea could be that they make an auxiliary low Ah battery pack, which can be used as an accessory to solve the same purpose. It should be able to get you home or to a charging point, with a range of about 20 km. This will be an excellent range anxiety reduction tool. The company has a tie-up with Bhosari based Pragati press parts for manufacturing.
There were two start-ups in the battery pack space. One of them had an interesting name, Adiabatic Batteries. It is incubated at IIT Hyderabad – and I wonder whether they have Prof Nishant as an advisor. Pure EV could do with some help in their battery thermal management. Adiatatic claims a 15 C reduction in peak temperature because of their tech. They also claim that their batteries can be fast charged in 20 minutes. They are working with 2 OEMs currently. I find most of Darshan Meher’s work mirroring what Nishant has already done – phase change material etc. There was one more team – Navstream innovations – which had built its own BMS – and had got an AIS 004 certification. They can handle upto 200 cells in series and upto 800 V. They have active cell balancing. Once they get the 156 certification, they will have a line of customers waiting for them. This could be one more fundable company, only for that reason alone. But would want to see field performance data of the BMS before investing.
Ernakulam based C Electric was incubated in Maker Village, Kochi in 2018. They make powertrains for two and three wheelers. Have got more than 10 K vehicles running on the roads. SEG Motors, Mahindra Electric and Sona Comstar are customers. They are starting work on motor controllers for hig sheed scooters and L5 category three wheelers. There is Farshmo Energy run by Abdul Azeez Khan. They are making BMS and have 8 OEMs as customers. They are working on fast charging solutions now. They have tested their boards in extreme situations like 80 C ambient temperature and 95% RH.
Syam Sundar Nair is working on a SRM motor. He is a PhD candidate at IISc. They transfer power from the stator to rotor electromagnetically using HF resonance converter. The weight of the motor increases to some extent because of this arrangement. Current consumption also goes up by 10%. They have tested motors of upto 5 kW. The plus point is an increase of 15% in torque density.
Coimbatore based Peramyte was making motors without using a Hall-effect sensor. They were using a back EMF measurement and timing their field sequencing on that. They have a prorotype of a 25 V, 0.25 kW motor ready. Honestly, did not find the work by Veeramanikandan and team too exciting. Though there are quite a few field failures of the motors when sensors fail, the rate of failure is not too high. But it is interesting to see how they are able to sense position of the rotor by measuring the strength of the electric field. Must spend more time with these folks to understand.
Another startup was Ganesh Shelke’s Dopar Energy. This is based out of Aurangabad and is working on BLDC motor controller for motors ranging from 250 to 1500 W. They are priced at a premium of 20% over Chinese controllers. The product looked very much like a Chinese one. They are talking of reducing PCB size and investing in their own extrusion. Would also like to see better connectors being used in the design. Currently the clutter of wires coming out does not appeal to my aesthetic senses.
Pranav Patel from Visnagar who is making a tyre friction transfer based electric cycle. I think that there would be a lot of wear on the driven tyre, making operations unsafe. Would be interesting to see what is the realtime tyre life in his case. The big plus point is that hardly any modification is required in the cycle structure to convert. And we can make a nice modular unit. In the seventies, folks had tried making what was called a goped. It would be an electric motor battery trailer that you attach to your cycle, which would push the cycle. Maybe time for that idea to return?
Ashwin Nair of Mumbai based Mobotronix has a partner who is based out of Assam. Still a two person company. They have developed a motor controller for drones and robotics use. He seemed a little out of place in the event. Another odd man out was Shobhojit. He is working in the hydro-ponic agricuture space for the last three years. The guy is a lovely speaker with a great sense of humor and timing. Could only catch up with him for 2 minutes – but could not find any answers to energy efficiency from him during that time.
Interacted with three of the industry participants. In a tea break, met with a team from Ahmedabad based Ruby, which has spent the last 50 years building bus bodies. They are planning to make a foray into EVs and were looking at entering the three wheeler space. My suggestion to them was to build a small LCV like the Tata Ace – it will fit their DNA better. Also met with the B Gauss team – and took some sound bites from them.
Another interesting industry catch-up was with the Nasik based Revamp Motors. They have a cute looking modular bike, which makes a lot of sense for E commerce. They are going to be launching a low speed and high speed version at 60-70 and 80-90 K price points, respectively. We discussed the positioning that they need to adopt. My thinking was that they should work more on the software and UI/UX of a vehicle to design a vehicle which behaves like a smart phone on wheels. My small wish-list for his product: keyless and password less locking and unlocking; a rain proof stowage area for a laptop. The company is based out of Nasik – and is planning to start a research center in Pune. Should get my hands on their vehicle when I visit Nasik next. They are based out of Satpur. And the good news is that they already have orders for their vehicles from a Hyderabad based E commerce player.
Ended the day meeting up a gentleman from Kanpur, who is doing work mostly with the government. He has worked mostly on projects for the Indian army – one interesting one was a smokeless warmer for winter use. He is also setting up solar off grid for the Government of Meghalaya. One thing that most governments have realised is that freebies don’t work. Subsidies work only when part of the payment is made by the consumer. This price paid signals the utility that this equipment has for the user. I remember the stories of solar lamps being junked the moment the lead acid batteries went kaput, because the owners did not want to spend any extra money on equipment that arrived free of cost, thanks to the government’s largesse. He has come up with an interesting low cost electric cycle, with a mid drive DC brush motor. He plans to sell these cycles in bulk to government agencies for a price of between 20 to 22 K. Had seen the cycle, but mea culpa – did not take it out for a chukkar. My advice was that he should also look at CSR and Rotary. One idea would be to have 500 cycles used for sampling across the country. The donors can check the value associated with it – by asking the beneficiaries to first use the product – and check if they are ready to make part payment for the same. Incidentally, Tata Cycles is going to be buying kits. It would be a good idea to also work with other affordable cycle manufacturers and sell kits to them. Our Kanpur based friend keeps on visiting Pune regularly – and has promised to catch up during one of his Pune trips. Will introduce him to Felidae and Abhay for BMS.
One of the sponsors of Evangelize is Inevitable Electronics, a company involved in embedded space. They help with both hardware and software so that customers can focus on the basics of designing and spec-ing their products. They have developed an indigeneous Raspberry Pi / Ardinho card that they use as a base for their hardware. Inevitable has helped develop Dash Cams, TPMS, motion sensors and neonatal monitoring systems for its client start-ups. Icreate is working closely with Inevitable to convert their hardware to an integrated VCU cum BMS cum Motor controller for electric two wheelers. My input for the VCU would be that it should have voice based outputs in diagnostics. It is much easier to hear about the problems in your mother tongue than to look at a fault code and hunt Wikipedia to find out what it really means. Every vehicle comes with a USB port – we can add a small headphone jack next to it, which can function as the audio output device. (We can look at fitting a speaker in the vehicle too, aka Ola, but it can have ambient sound problems in traffic.) The driver who dropped me back to the airport was the antithesis of Dinesh. He drove at only two speeds, 0 and 80. The 80 was because there was a speed lock – else we would have been touching 120 easily. He loved fast cars – and had driven a Mustang too. Hated EVs. And enjoyed the driving so much, that he refused to stop for buying fruits in spite of two reminders for the same. Treated him and myself to an Udipi breakfast outside the airport – and asked him to return back from the main gate so that he could save Rs. 90 that the airport charges as entry fee in the international terminal.