The thought behind his IoT and hardware venture—SenseGiz Technologies—first came to Abhishek Latthe when as a student of Mechatronics in Southhampton, UK, he left behind his bag in a train. While the ‘Lost and Found’ department later found it, that incident inspired him to develop a device that could track lost belongings. In 2013, Latthe launched SenseGiz Technologies in Belgaum, Karnataka. During the initial years, the startup came up with two products based on IoT – FIND, a device tracker that alerts the owner about the location of his belongings, and the second, a wearable device to focus on health safety monitoring.
However, in 2018, the company pivoted from a B2C to a B2B model and built on its earlier products to come up with COIN, a sensor based versatile product that could help provide varied solutions for large enterprises.
SenseGiz has offices in Pune and Bangalore and offshore offices in Japan and the US, with 45 employees spread across engineering, sales, and marketing and administration roles. “SenseGiz creates enterprise and industrial IoT products for sensor-based condition monitoring, security, and real-time asset/people tracking applications using a combination of proprietary mesh connected hardware, cloud, analytics, and apps,” informs the founder & CEO. “SenseGiz products are patented and built in India with a robust R&D team while operations are in India, Spain, South Africa, Japan, and the US.”
In the current Covid-19 pandemic landscape, the company tweaked the previous technology to help prevent further business shutdowns. Now, FIND and COIN aims to enforce social distancing and contact tracing, which can help companies keep their employees safe. Currently, the key focus of the product is to enable companies to implement social distancing and detailed historical contact tracing at workplaces to minimise interruption and promptly isolate only the distressed people and areas.
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“In a coin-sized form factor, we get motion sensing, temperature and humidity sensors inbuilt that will help customers by improving their efficiencies, productivity, security and reducing costs,” says Latthe.
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COIN thus is an end-to-end solution for predictive maintenance, environment condition monitoring, perimeter security, and real-time indoor asset and people management, which uses a combination of proprietary mesh connected hardware, cloud, analytics, and machine learning. So far, SenseGiz has sold over 30,000 devices worldwide and is currently deployed in the US, Japan, South Africa, India, Spain, Singapore, Brazil and the Middle East.
According to Latthe, SenseGiz has recently won the Samadhan Covid Challenge run by the education ministry where the goal was to find the best digital solutions against Covid-19. In 2015, the company raised Rs 3 crore in funding from Karnataka Semiconductor Venture Capital Fund and again in March 2019, it raised $335,000 from Keiretsu. It is now looking to raise funds in a Series A funding round later this year.
“SenseGiz has posted 100% growth in terms of numbers for FY19-20, and is looking to triple that in FY20-21 despite the pandemic. The company’s revenue is growing at 52% year-on-year,” he says, adding, “We aim to be a Rs 100 crore revenue company in the next two years.”
