Why we invested in Detect Technologies?

By Rohan Choukkar

Based out of Chennai, Detect Technologies is an asset integrity monitoring platform covering pipelines and plant equipment, catering to the energy, infrastructure and process industry sectors. The company is the result of a long-running research effort at the Centre for Non-Destructive Evaluation (CNDE) at IIT-Madras, one of the foremost NDT labs in Asia.

Investment Rationale

Corrosion is one of the most intractable problems faced in industry, and those with a penchant for gallows humour refer to it as being as inevitable as death and taxes. The cost of corrosion is far beyond financial (the lowest estimates put this at hundreds of billions of dollars globally) — accidents caused by corrosion can lead to huge safety concerns, costs and hazard to life and property. Just one failed pipeline or bridge collapse is enough to spark massive public outcry, and rightly so.

Specifically, within process industries, corrosion monitoring is still done by employing plant shutdowns and manual inspections. This predictive maintenance alone can cost a plant between 6% to 15% of its rated capacity, and unplanned or emergency shutdowns can make this figure far worse. Present-day methods of inspection are discrete, covering small localized sections, and frequently require scaffolding to be constructed, which means that the cost of accessing a potential defect is often higher than the actual cost of inspection.

Why Detect?

Detect’s offerings offer a full solution to the problems of visibility and access. The pipeline monitoring solution, is among the world’s first to be able to provide continuous monitoring for vulnerable sections of piping, capable of operating at elevated temperatures and without the need to remove cladding or insulation. On the other hand, their drone-based inspection platform solves the problem of access by allowing for close-range inspection of hard-to-reach industrial assets like towers, columns, or stacks. Detect’s drones can be equipped with a wide variety of imaging and sensing payloads and are optimized for working in the extremely constrained spaces they would encounter when flying around or within industrial equipment.

Globally, Detect’s primary competitors remain large NDT service companies, who provide inspectors to manually check sections of plant and equipment. For such a young company, they have quickly managed to turn fruitful pilots into a marquee customer base, in one of the most difficult set of industries for a startup to work with. Detect today is a global technology leader in the pipeline monitoring space, being the only company able to monitor high-temperature pipeline sections with operating temperatures of up to 350 °C, and boasts of a strong IP pipeline, including existing international patents around their technology.

Detect’s relationship with us goes back to 2017, when CIIE participated in their seed round. We have been consistently impressed by the youthful energy and dynamism of the founding team. In line with our mission to back breakthrough innovations from India, we have chosen to deepen our engagement with the company by participating in their Series A round. The Bharat Innovation Fund is excited to be a part of the journey of one of India’s foremost examples of deep-technology innovation.

About the Author:

Rohan Choukkar is an Associate at Bharat Innovation Fund.

About Bharat Innovation Fund:

Set-up in affiliation with CIIE, Bharat Innovation Fund backs fearless entrepreneurs building deep-tech innovation led companies of consequence from India. We believe India’s talent, data and cost advantage makes India uniquely poised to produce globally-competitive tech innovations which will be global game-changers. We invest at early stages of ventures — typically writing our first check during pre-Series-A to Series-B rounds of start-ups.